Reviews by MathBrush

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, a piece of paid content available to subscribers when it came out but now only available through individual purchase.

In this exceptional story, you are invited to the most popular gala of the season! Well, invited is a strong term. More like being compelled to be there. As a servant. In a hotel built of literal nightmares.

Unlike many other exceptional stories, this one is very long and also location-based: you work on a hotel with 5 or 6 floors, each with their own rooms and tenants, and their own deck (fallen london features a randomized deck of encounters). There is also inventory management: as a servant, you must carry laundry to the basement to be washed, and then return it; go to the kitchen to order food, pick it up, and deliver it; and fetch items.

This provides for a sense of mundane drudgery, but that's contrasted by both the setting (all the tenants are horrific cosmic horror entities, vicious powerbrokers, or hapless victims, and reality and your mind warp around you) and by the text (Chandler Groover explained in a blog post how every bit of text that might seem repeated is actually written fresh, so while the actions are repetitive the text never is).

It also plays around with Fallen London mechanics, using up way more actions than a usual Exceptional Story but 'paying' you in a variety of objects you can pick up around the place, and using unusual 0-cost actions for the finale. Your Nightmares score, something you usually try very hard to get less than 8 (because it usually sends you to this very hotel) rockets to 14, 18, and much much higher. The 'unaccountably peckish' attribute, something that usually must be deeply avoided (it spawns black cards in your deck that are unavoidable and set you on a quest to permanently delete your character) is played with here in a way that felt cool.

It has extensive lore connections, primarily to anything involving dreams.

Many people rank this as the best Exceptional Story. I think there is no clear superior to it; other Chandler Groover stories and the ever-popular orphan story HOJOTOHO have their own positive features that make them competitive.

Edit: I like this comment from Fallen London discord:
"I know so many folks have praised Bloody Wallpaper's themes and setting, but the thing that stuck out to me most about it on top of those hideous joys is the way it plays like an old school parser IF. I thought it really managed to capture the tone and playstyle of a totally different format, and that was such a pleasure"

This game was part of Iron ChIF, and it is a good showing for a game written in a short time period. I particularly loved the setting, characters, and the voice of the narrator.

You play as a fairy attached by a string to a mysterious stranger who has a device that labels things in an unfamiliar language. You are accompanied by an elf and a human who are fighting off gobling while you, the fairy, guide the human to different objects in an attempt to reassemble ancient machinery.

Hilariously, you don't know the names of anything, so your inventory in the game can have a gizmo, a whozit, a doodad, etc.

I had trouble getting started since the game requires leaps of intuition, but without hints I was soon seeing patterns, taking notes, and having some good successes.

One thing this game does really well is reward you for right actions. I remember reading an Adam Cadre interview where he said that every piece of text the player sees should be rewarding, and that happens here. Never do you pass a milestone without getting more lore, more characterization, or a funny moment or some kind of action.

While I didn't vote in the competition, I believe both games were great. The other game did a better job, I think, with the theme, but this game did better, I think, with the core IF elements.

This is one of the more recent Choice of Games titles. In it, you play as a contestant in a series of games to become the Monarch's Eye, a title that is like being a bodyguard or right-hand man.

The contests are extensive and important, with each one occupying its own chapter as well as having establishing chapters, preparations, and fallout. They include physical and mental contests.

Along the way, you try to balance the two main factions in the country, merchants (rich) and artisans (laborers). You can favor one side or another and date representatives from different groups.

Gender is a major theme in the game, with the Monarch switching favored gender every chapter or so and a whole system of titles invented for the game.

Some people have expressed frustration with the game forcing you to honor the Monarch in most choices. You do occasionally have a chance to oppose them. Other criticisms include the game not signalling the effects of choices very well, making it unclear why you fail when something goes wrong.

Overall, I enjoyed some of the romances and I liked the actual contest parts quite a bit. I was glad I purchased this.

This game was written in a short time as part of a competition for using the Dialog language.

It reminded me of both Hadean Lands in its setting and Heaven's Vault in its handling of translation.

You find an alien ship crashed on a moon next to your own crashed ship. In it, you discover a device that tells you the names of things in the alien language.

Using this, you can begin to decipher the alien words and piece the puzzle together of how to survive.

I played this without hints until the final puzzle, where I got stuck. My main issue that I had was (Spoiler - click to show)I thought the red sphere and blue sphere just needed to 'charge' and so you had to point them at the same thing for 3 seconds, then it worked. That got me the message I needed from the blue sphere but made the red one usually repeat itself, except when I pointed the red one at a whole sentence when it would do one word of that sentence at a time. So I thought then that it was just a thing that repeated three words of a sentence and would take shorter phrases and just repeat them to fill up those three slots.

Overall, it was satisfying and is one of the better language puzzles I've seen.

I had a couple very minor issues with implementation. One was that the 'shiny label' in the first ship room seemed important, but X LABEL didn't work. I think that occasionally other parts of objects weren't implemented by themselves, but I can't quite remember the rest. The important command (Spoiler - click to show)TOUCH WITH often resulted in the slightly confusing message (Spoiler - click to show)You can't put anything on __. The other thing was that clicking on a word brought up a prompt to rename it but didn't add cursor focus to that prompt, so you had to click manually. That might need tinkering with the javascript to fix but it isn't a serious impediment in any case.

Overall, it's impressive a game this complex was made in such a short time.

This is the only Grand Guignol game that I tested.

This is a large and complex choice-based game with a strong emphasis on place and inventory. It has stylized text and background images, and uses a variety of fonts to indicate different character voices or special events. It has an inventory sidebar and uses graphics and animations to track your 'panic'.

You play as someone visiting an old abandoned asylum in an attempt to recover treasure from within. Once you get there, you discover that things are much worse than you could have ever guessed: this aslyum is haunted!

The author mentions in a note that this story, which was started 25 years ago, evolved to be one where the patients are victims of mistreatment by a cruel facility.

The panic meter is the key factor in this story. Getting a scare can raise it by 1 or 2. But confronting a ghost can fill up almost half the meter, which can lead to instant death in some cases. Fortunately, you get one 'free life' to keep going if you do, but it can be useful to keep a lot of saves and only push past warnings when you're sure your panic can handle it.

I found the panic meter engaging, keeping me more on my toes and more engaged in the gameplay, rather than just trying every option one by one. At times I found myself lost in the maze of links, but I eventually constructed a mental image of what the asylum looks like.

This is a big, polished game and was a pleasure to test and play. There are a few bugs here in there in the current version but the author has already described plans on fixing them after the competition.

This game by the Stelzers follows in the footsteps of A Familiar Problem last year (maybe it’s in the same universe?). You play as a homonculus with a strictly limited set of available actions (just 1!). That 1 action, though, has the effect of gaining more actions, including navigation and interfering with others.

Story-wise, is kind of a pastiche of mainly Phantom of the Opera along with Shakespeare, other plays, and fantasy elements.

Gameplay-wise, it feels like a growing power-fantasy. You start out with so many limitations that it feels like the world will just always be mostly inaccessible, but it ends up growing until you can do quite a few amazing feats.

I had a great time with this fun game. My only regret is that one part near the end is written in iambic meter, but some lines have 8 syllables and some have 10 and I couldn’t see any pattern or reason why. Even still, that part was fun, it was just something minor that stuck out to me.

I think most people will like this, and the intro flows well; I think it was the best intro for my tastes out of all Stelzer-made games.

This game is from the same 2008 One-room game competition as Escapade!, a game I enjoyed in the past.

The Moon Watch is an Inform game with plenty of background images and sound, having a lot better multimedia experience than most games from that time.

You play as a cosmonaut sent to a tiny, restrictive base on the moon. There is a red button you were told to never touch, but a call from leadership comes and you are told to press the red button. Then the game starts.

As others have noted, it can be pretty hard to get started in this game. I found some reading material, a phone, a drawer with interesting things in it, and I was able to open a door to the outside (looking back, I shouldn't have been surprised (Spoiler - click to show)I couldn't go through it, as this is a one-room game.) But I couldn't figure out to progress.

It turns out that a huge part of the game's programming and puzzles is based on (Spoiler - click to show)keyword-style text, where you type whatever you want and it searches your text for keywords. Even the very first puzzles are based on this.

There were just so many possibilities in the space of all commands that I had too much difficulty and had to run to a walkthrough. But the writing was interesting, although the ending took me by surprise.

I beta tested this game so I saved it for last.

This is a puzzle-filled comedic parser game about recovering your car keys from a bunch of monkeys in the jungle.

Notably, this is one of many games in this competition that involve translating a language. In this case, the language is: monkey language!

By searching around the compact starting area, you can find ways to understand that language better. Once you do, you can get involved with some shenanigans in order to get back your stuff.

I'd say this is one of the harder games in the competition. Even having tested it a couple of times I couldn't remember how to solve one especially complex puzzle. Examining everything and exploring everywhere are important, and it's good to save if you think you're near the end, as the endgame has a few 'bad' endings.

This game uses the Decker system, which has a nice integration of graphics and interaction, similar to bitsy or binksy but with more complexity (I think it came first).

In it, you order a cartridge for essentially lost media online and wait for it to get delivered, which takes an hour of real-life time.

Once you get it running, it turns out to be bland and harmless, a simple game in a playground. The game breaks down as you play, forcing you to hurry to finish it on a timer. Opening the cartridge up afterwards reveals a physical limiter that hides part of the game. By breaking the plastic, we can remove that limiter, but each time we do it takes a minute or two in real life to be able to play again, then we have another fast session where a timer counts down, then charge up again.

Each time we do this, it opens a new level of the game we can go 'down' to, in a symbolic quest like Dante's Inferno or My Father's Long Long Legs. The further we go, the more strange or upsetting things we see (or rather, read about in text), including bizarre birthing videos, characters that blame us for our actions, horrible violence, etc.

The ending was unanticipated and surprising. We're left to contemplate what happened.

I had a visceral reaction to this game and wrote down my thoughts on it, but I'll keep this IFDB review to the game itself for future generations. The three stars reflects a combination of my personal enjoyment, personal reaction, and my belief of how others would feel about this game in the future. I'd give it a 5 but the timed nature is a severe deterrent to many IF players, like busy parents or those with limited sight.

This was a fun game that took a (to me) unexpected turn or two early on.

In the vein of the earlier Galaxy Jones game, I had expected a classic action/secret agent scenario. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by a mathematical combinations and language translation game.

Cyborgs are going to blow up Mars using its moon, Phobos. You, Galaxy Jones, have infiltrated the base and need to stop them.

This entails two main puzzles and several smaller ones: First, you have to hack doors by discovering the patterns in their codes, and second: you have to find more of the language and translate it.

The language puzzle is, for the most part, not actual translation. Instead, we find text, scan it, and learn more of the language, which lets us automatically understand more and more words. Doing so encourages us to revisit earlier texts to see what new secrets we've unlocked.

The other puzzles are mostly math related. Hacking the doors is an exercise in number theory, a lot of the time. To me the puzzles seemed to be a much higher level of math than is usual in text adventures (outside of things like base 5 arithmetic in Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina).

The game is highly polished, with the signature Galaxy Jones logo every time you score a point and several intentional stylistic choices like no room headings.

The game has a lot of paths, unusual for a parser game, and I can think of at least three possible endings (there might be more). I thought that was pretty neat.

Overall, when I think of this game, I'm going to think of the advanced math in it, which is something I like.