Reviews by MathBrush

This is a pdf that gives the rules for a collaborative storytelling game.

The basic idea is that you need an antagonist who ultimately loses and a protagonist who ultimately wins. People can add details at any time to the game but important details like character names have to be nominated and approved.

The game also includes some base ideas you can work with, including a list of character names. I thought "Johnald Pregnant" was the most amusing antagonist game.

This whole game is thoroughly described, but there's not really a lot to it. I'd imagine that someone focused on storytelling wouldn't need all the rules, and someone really into rules would want more meat. The people I see benefitting from this the most are a mid-sized group of people on a vacation trip where there's not much to do and they want to do storytelling but have a couple of obnoxious people in the group so they lay some rules down on how to proceed.

This is a puzzle-centered choice-based game about an operative at a water treatment plant who receives a haunting visit on Halloween.

Your goal is to take care of the plant and to deal with your unwanted (or wanted?) guest. At your disposal is the plant itself, which is modelled in surprising detail: multiple spaces to represent one room, multiple levels, machinery that can connect and disconnect, several short sub-games.

Story-wise, I found the overall concept of ‘the legend about an old employee’ neat and well-done. The antagonist felt a bit one-dimensional, so it could have been fun to find out more lore or learn more about them (although maybe I missed some areas).

This was a neat game overall.

I had a few different revelations while playing this game. First thoughts: interesting mix of hyperlinks and parser. Second: is this vorple? No, Dialog. Third: a joke about Peano arithmetic? This is someone who's really familiar with parser games and math, I have to know this person. But I didn't recognize the itch name until I went to their page and saw it was Draconis!

This game is very polished. I had no idea it was meant for Petite Morte, as it would fit in just fine in IFComp. I'd say I had a 10/10 experience in the beginning, 7/10 in the middle, and 8/10 in the end.

It's a limited-verb game where you, a kind of homonculus or familiar, gain new verbs by absorbing other homunculi or familiars. These can give powers ranging from eyesight to motion to strange alchemical powers.

The game is educational as well as fun, with references to chemistry, tuning, literature, math, etc.

I was proud of not needing hints until I got stuck on a certain puzzle. I eventually realized I wasn't closely reading the results of all my actions, but only after hints. "Nudge" was useful, but for a large chunk of the game my nudge was 'gong', so I kept assuming I had to do something *to* it. That lost period was my 7/10 section.

Two things that could have been clued a bit more were what can be 'cached' and the rules surrounding the security familiar in all its uses.

Overall, very good, exactly the kind of stuff I hope for when I play interactive fiction.

The Little Match Girl series consists of games where a time-travelling assassin girl adopted by Ebenezer Scrooge enters various worlds through the means of looking at flames.

This game is creepier than most the others, in good ways. I enjoyed the thematic unity of this one.

I originally forgot about the flame thing and so I wandered the opening area for a while before finding anything. Then once I examined a flame, things took off.

I enjoyed the diversity of the worlds this time. The main story here is that an evil werewolf is travelling through time, attacking others, and each time period and place you visit has also been visited by the werewolf. Despite the variety of worlds, the after effects of fear and strange sickness are common. I found it especially creepy that in one world the characters slowly became stricken as I left and visited again later.

Overall, the game is very polished. I ran into the same couple of issues others did (hints assumed I had grabbed something from a room when I hadn't, since the thing I needed to examine in that room didn't stick out to me; and 'percipient' was spelled as 'perpicient', unless that was intentional) but I didn't have the vorple-breaking bugs some reported.

I think I liked the atmosphere and single-mindedness of this game over some of the more elaborate other Match Girl games. It reminds me of Marvel's Werewolf By Night, as both are smaller, darker, werewolf-themed entries in a series filled with grand spectacles, and both are uniquely charming in their overall series.

As a math teacher, I had to try this game first.

'Mathphobia?' I said, my nostrils flaring in mingled rage and excitement. 'Is this an ANTI-MATH game????'

Fortunately, it's not. Well, kind of...

You play as a kid who is forced to do 500 math problems on Halloween since you didn't go trick or treating to get candy for your teacher.

But you soon are transported to a magical land like phantom tollbooth where monsters such as the Specter of Subtraction try to attack you.

All challenges are defeated by use of math, starting with extremely easy problems (like 8 plus 4) and moving to harder problems like sequence finding, number factoring, fraction simplification and trick problems.

I proudly conquered each problem by hand except one where I suspected a trick, plugged it into calculator to check, then confirmed the trick (so I failed at doing it all myself!).

This game is much longer than it first appeared, with 5 main antagonists and sections between antagonists with 4 or more puzzles.

Outside of the math puzzles, the game seems completely linear. Going back and entering some answers incorrectly, it looks like it gives you another chance.

This was fun. I sent it to another math teacher to try out.

I thought I had played and reviewed this game long ago, but it turns out that I was thinking of Universal Hologram from 2021 by the same author, with some overlap in concepts (I swear I remember the pyramids).

This game is centered around the concept of living in a simulation. Several people have theorized that a sufficiently advanced civilization would simulate other civilizations, which could simulate more, etc. so that the chance that we are living in a simulation is very high, close to 100%.

There are many variants of this, including Rothko's basilisk, the idea that future AI will simulate post opponents of AI and torment them in hell forever. This game takes the stance that it's likely that future civilizations will simulate those in the past.

You play as someone (or a simulation of someone) living in Mars in a world where all needs can be eliminated. The game deals with themes of whether happiness can exist when decoupled from suffering and whether suffering is necessary for happiness, and the idea of the existence of a thing vs the experience of the existence of a thing.

It uses lampshading and occasional crude language to contrast with the elaborate language of the more philosophical parts, a combination common in a certain subset of early Twine games (especially Spy Intrigue and its immediate predecessors and successors).

Overall, I think it communicates a desperate search for meaning in life and a desire for human connection.

This is a windows executable game in a custom system. It runs in the command line but also has pop-up windows with html-style formatting for things like hints and pictures.

It describes itself as an old-school 80’s type game with minimal story and mostly puzzles, several of them timed.

The idea is that you are on a mission to help rescue a kidnapped girl but your plane crashes near a pyramid and you find out the kidnapper, a shaman, died and the girl has disappeared.

The game is ultra-minimalistic in text. For instance, the description of the first room is:

You are in the desert.
So from here I can go north south or east.

I see the plane.

Wandering around, there are several interesting things, like a foggy area called 'Perdition" and a strange altar.

I had some trouble with the parser. Early on, I was trying to answer the phone, and I had the following exchange:

I see the plane
Incoming video call…
What now Me?
> answer call
Ok.
Incoming video call…
What now Me?
> i
You Own:
a mobile phone
Incoming video call…
What now Me?
> x phone
Let’s see…
Incoming call 0331785692
What now Me?
> push answer
But… the cell phone isn’t ringing
What now Me?

My character’s name was Me because the way the game asked for my name was:

Are you the chosen one?
Who knocks at this door?

and I answered ‘Me’.

Sometimes when I got an error in the game, no matter what my next move was, the error would repeat. For instance:

> x mantle
MANTLE ? It’s not relevant now.
What now Brian?
> go in house
MANTLE ? It’s not relevant now.
What now Brian?
>

There is a help system, that first gives your a kind of riddle hint and then an explicit action. In many places, the only hint is a picture of a mummified hand and the phrase “Do you want a hand? Not now…;-)”. In others it’s more explicit. The hints often refer to things that aren’t in the room description, like walls.

I was able to get into a house with drawings in it, and the hints include a picture with a reversed message, but at that point I got stuck. I’d be happy to try again with a full walkthrough, or if anyone else can get past that point.

The best parts of this game were the cool audio messages and the very nice drawings; very nice additions for a custom command line parser!

While I am giving a 1-star vote at this time, I don't think the game is horrible. It's just that my criteria are:
polish (where the game could use some more commands it understands),
interactivity (where I was lost on what to do a lot),
descriptiveness (the game uses a minimalist style),
emotional impact (which I do think is good and is worth a star with the cool pictures), and
would I play again? (and right now I do not feel that way).

I'd be happy to bump it up one star if the author requests it, but right now those are my feelings.

In this game, Kronos has imprisoned the Gods, and you must rescue them two by two.

This game acknowledges it was written with ChatGPT, so I won't spend much time (if any) discussing that, as it seems the purpose was to make sure descriptions were descriptive, and they generally were. I knew that it would hallucinate, so I ignored most of what the text said except for objects that were easily interactable with (and a command INVESTIGATE let me know what those were, most of the time).

The map is several different cities, each of which can be moved between fairly easily. Sometimes the exits list were incorrect (like S vs SW) and one, the Necromanteion, isn't listed (you have to ENTER when you're north of the city that is near it).

Puzzles are generally complex code-type puzzles. I used decompiling to figure out rules for some of them. Players will need to know they can ROTATE something COUNTERCLOCKWISE or the game is impossible to beat. Player's should a know that you might be able to put things on a statue's head when you can't put things on the statue itself or the shelf that is on the head. A certain YES/NO question glitches if you type YES, but you can just type YES then NO and it treats it like a YES.

The HELP command here is useful, because if players don't know they can WAIT 11 HOURS, they might have to type Z dozens of times.

Overall, some of the puzzles were fun. I liked the one with flowers. What this game needs, in my opinion, is more careful puzzle testing and more bug-fixing in general. Having one dedicated gametester or several less dedicated testers who report bugs and an author who has time to fix those bugs could make this game a lot of fun. The puzzles are the main draw here, and the overall story idea, with everything else as set dressing, so I'd love to see them shine even more.

(I do have a better impression of this game because the author was open about using ChatGPT rather than hiding it. It is often clear that an author used ChatGPT, and if they do that and don't disclose it, it gives me a much more negative view of the game).

Alas, upon starting this game and solving the starting puzzle, I saw the following room description:

> A small room with nothing but your Cryotube in it. You see the release mainframe to your right and the Port door to the west. The mainframe's tacky lights and fixtures blink erratically. Captain Kirk would be proud. The Port Door has a red light above it indicating it is locked.
>
> The vastness of space can be seen from this room. Thousands of stars surround you, planets streaming slowly across the sky go in all different directions.
>
> You can see Port door, Cryotube (empty), Hunting Knife and Bloody Note here.

This says a few things to me. One, that this game has Star Trek references and an enthusiastic author who loves space (good); two, that I'm in a class science fiction spaceship game (could be good or bad); and three, that the author is fairly new to Inform and its rules about capitalization and initial appearance rules (not something that I look forward to).

The rest of the game bears these ideas out. You are awoken from cryosleep to find most of your crew slaughtered. Your goal is to search through the ship to find out what happened and to make sure you live.

The game is pretty grim, lots of blood and bodies. Gameplay isn't too bad, with SEARCH and EXAMINE being pretty useful on multiple occassions. Make sure to type ABOUT to get instructions on one key puzzle!

Overall, I think the game had a neat idea that was hampered a bit by inexperience with Inform 7, and the writing could have had a little more description and detail. For instance an early room says: "Nothing of
interest is here. It looks like any old ship hallway that you’ve seen
millions of times." If that's the case, why include the room at all? Why have a room that even you, the author, don't like writing about?

The nice thing is the game had several fun moments and the author will only get better with Inform over time if they continue to learn, so I would definitely play more games by this author in the future.

This is a parser game set entirely in real life. You are an Italian man on a weekend vacation with a beautiful young woman. Your goal is to check into a hotel and eat breakfast. And that's the game!

The game is both polished and unpolished. On one hand, many things are implemented smoothly, and there is quite a large number of background objects in different containers and so on that work right. The screen has some color to it, and special characters are used to show good and bad reactions to things.

On the other hand, I had a runtime error (moving 'nothing' into a bin). Several important objects were not in the descriptions and had to be guessed that they are present. So it's a mixed bag.

The girlfriend is highly interactive. She will constantly comment on what you do, and will suggest what you should do next. If you are not fast enough to please her or do behavior that she dislikes, she will chastise you and you will receive a negative symbol (represented by a spade). If you do what she wishes she will praise you and give you a heart symbol.

Just as in real life relationships, I find myself constantly on the hook for many faults, such as leaving a bathroom door open or not sitting while eating. My day was a series of never-ending criticisms, which only multiplied as I fumbled around trying to satisfy her unending list of demands. Perhaps the genre of the game should be 'social horror'!

In any case, the game is good at several things that many other games are not good at, like providing a realistic and detailed hotel setting. On the other hand, I found myself at odds with both the parser and my girlfriend. So some good, some bad. Overall it wasn't long and not too difficult; I used the walkthrough once in order to find the newsletter.