Reviews by MathBrush

I was interested upon seeing this game, as I had heard of the author a lot before due to his frequent participation in discussions on the CoG forums and for the name of one of his WIPs (Mass Mother Murderer) and his saga of going to another company at one point.

So I really wondered what to expect here.

What I got was a tale that at its core is about belonging. You play as a young person in a crappy dead-end job with no money and no future. Following a fallen meteor, you stumble upon a demonic-looking microphone that promises you riches and fame in exchange for an unknown price.

Following the microphone's prophetic urgings, you audition for a death metal band, winning the lead spot over a serial-killer obsessed would-be singer named Larry, who instantly becomes your nemesis.

The word that came to mind the most as I played the game was 'alienated', and later when Larry was explicitly described as alienated, I felt validated. I also thought of 'disaffected'. Our main character suffers from many fallacies that I learned as part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Their biggest fallacy is 'the fallacy of control', where either they have a complete lack of control in their own life and suffer the whims of others, or they have total control and everything is their fault.

We see this in the way our character mentally divides people into 'good' and 'bad'. 'Bad' people are like the cop and the manager or Larry. They inflict bad things onto our protagonist which we are unable to resist. All bad things in our lives are the fault of 'bad people', who have no redeeming features.

In contrast, our band members are 'good people', the kind of people we always dreamed would find us. 'Good people' never get mad at you for anything, are completely understanding, nurture you, find you strong but also help out at all times. If we can only find 'good people' and keep them from finding out how bad we are, we will be happy; but in this fantasy, even if they find out our problems, they won't care. (Wayhaven has similar fantasies)

Our character really reminded me of an alienated youth I worked with once. He was handsome but thought himself ugly, and had good male friends but said that women hated him. I had quietly asked some of the girls his age what they thought of him and they said positive things, so I decided to observe him. He came into a class and the first thing he did was tell a joke about how much he hates women! I couldn't believe it. Step 1 of getting people to like you is 'don't say you hate them'. That reminds me of this character; both don't think that they have control over their lives, so if people don't like them, it's not because of their own actions, but because they're 'bad people', and all you can do is wait for a 'good person' to come along.

Anyway, I think a lot of people will find this character relatable. The story has an actual really positive overall arc, almost wholesome. Our character finds community and fulfillment.

The writing is intensely physical and sensory-based. Dripping blood, cold mists, trembling knees. The prose isn't purple, as it uses simple sentences, but is focused on these physical feelings to the extreme. That made it more compelling to me; I liked the writing quite a bit.

The choice-structure is unusual. I was annoyed at first that I found it hard to tell what choices had what effect, but I slowly realized that the first option always increases Toughness, the second one always increases Charisma, third Intelligence, and fourth something I don't remember. This makes replays a lot easier. It's not completely trivial, though, as each action also has an effect on which band member likes you, and that's not always fixed in the pattern.

Stats could use some tuning. Relationships start at 50 and end at 60, so the numbers 61-100 are essentially useless. That could be fixed by just adjusting all the numbers to be bigger (both for boosts and checks) or switching to additive stats the way that the main stats are.

I did encounter a few minor bugs, which I'll pass on to the author.

I think this game was less popular for a few reasons, the main being the low wordcount size (I've seen that in my own games of the same size!) and the way that the blurb and art don't quite match the game itself (I didn't know it was a rockstar game until I started, I thought at first it was a superhero game). I could recommend it to several people though, especially on reddit where people often ask for games with found family, or where you have imposter syndrome, or where you can be a jerk or have someone be a jerk to you.

This parser game takes you to a mountain town in Europe where you have to foil an evil villain. You'll explore a casino, tunnels, hotel and lair, have a car chase, use gadgets, and commit sabotage.

I started this a few times and stopped each time. The game is really open early on and the parser isn't 100% responsive so it was hard to know if I was on a wild goose chase or if I was close to figuring out the right thing.

I ended up trying a third time and followed the hints file pretty much exclusively. There were a lot of clever things in there that I probably wouldn't have thought of on my own.

The game leans heavy into genre stereotypes but it feels like it comes from a place of love, making for a generally enjoyable parody.

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.