Reviews by MathBrush

This is a genuinely funny game; it’s the kind of game I wish I would have written.

The title means ‘Lucky Spinelli Must Die’. Unfortunately, Lucky Spinelli, a mafia hitman, is very, very lucky.

One of the main attractions of the game is the humorous gangster dialogue, which includes references to a recent ifcomp game as well as a series of improbable coincidences, kind of like Pink Panther movies in terms of humor.

The game also has an overall conceit which is very funny that messes with some of the parser conventions for meta commands. By the end I was grinning at how absurd it got.

According to the blurb, this is another game that was meant for Petite Morte but got expanded. Because of this, the game suffers in terms of implementation of objects. The ‘main path’ is pretty smooth, but there are multiple areas I had to decompile the game for because I had to make a leap of intuition in German and couldn’t do it (especially guessing the noun I needed to interact with in the cabin of the truck and the verb to use with the worker).

Very amusing. Unfortunately I am strongly biased towards games of other languages because translation and guessing words and google translate adds another layer of interaction, so I can’t tell if this would still be very fun for native German speakers or not.

This is a lovely little game with themes that I like. It is a bit rough in execution sometimes, but that could easily be fixed in a future update.

It's a surreal game where you are being hunted inexorably by a monster through a surreal world. Gameplay consists of passing various obstacles which slow down the monster, and which for most of the gameplay consists of doors.

Most of the rooms, in particular, have 3 doors, each with their own way of opening, and with different symbolic elements. It quickly becomes clear that the whole game is symbolic or meaning-filled. I played through twice, opening an entirely different set of doors the second time and having a final choice.

I haven't been able to determine yet if there are 'good options' or 'bad options' for the doors, as the two doors I got in each room were similar to each other, so either they're all the same or the 'hardest door' in each room is special.

The execution had some issues, mostly things that come from a complicated game, like having extra lines or extra full stops. I think that having more synonyms for actions could be useful.

The overall story of the game is one told with a heavy hand at the end, but the vivid language used throughout balances that, I think. Great job by the authors, and I think that adding more testers and polishing the game for an after-competition release would make this a great long-standing game. In the meantime, though, the missing synonyms and typos could cause trouble for players.

As a small side note, this game has a nice navigation system that made me think, 'That reminds me of a game I liked a few years back.' Then I remembered that that game was 'we, the remainder' by this same author.

Anyway, this game is melancholy and gradually disturbing, reminding me a bit of The Yellow Wallpaper but also a few other stories (which I won't mention as they are spoilers).

You play as a woman wandering around a mostly-empty house, with clear indicators that you've experience many things in life (an old wedding photo, a dress that is now threadbare, etc.). The background sounds and animated color changes contribute to a mild sense of unease. One of the things that felt most off-putting to me is the matter-of-fact way the game lets you turn on all the water in the house and describes it just running and running.

Much of the game centers around alienation and also the search for your dog. More happens later on, and new NPCs mix it up a bit.

I found the writing evocative, and several sequences did a great job at 'bewildering' horror, like The Spiral entity from The Magnus archives.

Not enjoyable (intentionally so! it would be bad in a way to call this game enjoyable) but a game that I am glad I played and would recommend to others.

This game (I think it was made for Shufflecomp?) really touched me. You play as a person in a kind of melancholy town at evening, watching grass blow and seeing things like power lines swaying in the wind and an old radio. When downloaded, the game plays peaceful, ambient piano music that strongly affects my rating.

Gameplay is about wandering around, at first, and then learning to interact with the world in a new way.

There are some whitespace issues and the interactivity took me a bit to figure out, but the music was polished and I loved discovering the mechanics. Very emotional, very powerful, I can't remember the last time an IF game made me feel this way (but I don't expect all readers to feel this, as it just happened to fit my mood and time of day, and things always feel better when you discover them organically rather than when someone tells you they're cool).

This is a troll game in multiple ways. First of all, there is a troll. The point of the game is to cross the bridge that he is guarding.

Second, it's designed to have a ton of red herrings, like an overly-complicated calculator and a recurring noise.

Third, the whole point of the game is to prove a point in an argument.

The main argument is whether a logical solution is a solvable solution (and the point here is that the answer is 'no').

This remains a big sticking point in parser design three decades later. Many authors are surprised to find players getting stuck in parts of the game that should be logically clear or blindingly obvious; a lot of this is because for most parser games there are many logical things that we politely ignore, like realistic carrying capacities or getting tired or using the restroom. Those things are ignored because, when implemented, they are generally dull and boring. The experience of playing is, to me, more important than realism, and that ties back into this game's themes; while the game is logical, it not an enjoyable experience.

This game is Chandler Groover's earliest game. In it, a feathered serpent devours you while you are standing on a Mesoamerican pyramid, and you can only move up and down within the body for most of the game. While flesh and organic parts abound, there is also a lot of symbolic imagery providing for some vivid descriptions.

The reaction it received and his postmortem almost serve as an origin story for his later games. He mentions (mild spoilers for the types of puzzles in the game but not their solutions):

(Spoiler - click to show)Other people do not play parser games like I do. I like to examine everything, so I wrote descriptions for almost everything in my game, with the idea that people would examine things to uncover clues. However, many people didn’t seem to do that, so they missed clues for the puzzles if the clues weren’t placed in the general room descriptions. In the future, I cannot expect other players to share my devotion to examining the scenery, unless I give explicit instructions that this should be done (which I’ll most likely do, because I love the mechanic of examining things within things within things).

and about puzzles in general:

"Don’t add puzzles just to add puzzles. This probably means, for me, don’t add puzzles. I’m not nearly as interested in the puzzle-solving aspect of interactive fiction as I am with its potential for creating atmosphere, or for warping a narrative’s meaning with dynamic text. Those are what I ought to focus more on."

Groover's later emphasis on light-puzzle and limited parser games with easy-to-understand mechanics does seem like a direct result of these early design decisions.

I love the vivid imagery in the game. I do agree it takes close attention. I thought I remembered how to beat it, from years ago, but even knowing part of the puzzle I had to go to the walkthrough after going up and down the serpent several times in order to find the starting place of the first puzzle.

I liked this game enough to base a significant chunk of my game Grooverland in it, and I'm surprised I had never reviewed it. Definitely worth checking out! One of the smoothest-implemented 'first games' I've seen.

I've been trying to go back and review games I remember playing but somehow forgot to review.

This game is one of Astrid Dalmady's earliest games. Her twine games were the first twine games I every enjoyed playing, back in 2015, and got me started playing more.

This game is fairly brief but branches a lot, with 10 endings. Most endings can be found by falling on the wayside.

You play as someone about to enter the faerie realm through a mushroom ring, hoping to find something you lost (which you can select at the beginning). You remind yourself that, whatever else you do, you must not eat the food the faeries bring.

The UI and styling are great here, and the game pulls out some neat tricks. I played to two endings, but there's enough sameness in replays that I didn't look for the other endings.

This game is a twine game that was designed to mock a genre of misogynistic ‘girls games’ that were once prevalent where you are presented with an ugly girl with stubble, pimples, bad haircut, etc. and must apply the correct makeup or brush to each object to fix them. So, this game has multiple beauty products, of which you can apply any three you want (repeats allowed). A magical fairy and magic mirror provide commentary. The products are magical and not very safe. Once you make the choices, you are sorted into one of six or seven stories, each of which is quite long, making this a very verbose Twine game. The stories are generally modern takes on fairy tales that feature friendship over romance and magic and drama over bliss. This game features heavy reading and a self-critical look at self worth in a magical world.

This game is very unusual. It changes based on the calendar day.

The idea is that you are helping out at a shop in a fantasy setting and are paid in acorns. Each calendar day you can earn acorns by completing a task (usually selecting between two pictures based on a description), solve some cryptic crossword clues, and talk to the shop owner. Then there is nothing else you are allowed to do, so you can just wait until the next day.

I had struggled before with completing Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing, a game with similar mechanics. Before, I couldn't put a finger on why.

Now I think I know. The issue is that every day I choose for myself the most important things I need to get done. During IFComp, playing a new game is one of those tasks. Finishing a game I'm in the middle of is important, too. But doing a small amount of work in an ongoing task somehow feels less important than starting or finishing, so I shelve it.

Then, days later, I come back to it, not remembering anything. When I play a game all at once or over several days, I immerse myself in it and focus on it, holding all the plot in my head as well as I can. Then I mentally summarize it to myself and let all the rest leak out of my brain, leaving only the summary, and whenever I think of the game, that's what I think of.

With this game and Fly Fishing, I never had a chance to digest the whole game. Because I played out of context each day, I didn't know what was important to remember. So I honestly have no clue how the game started or what the setting exactly is. I think we're in a magical fairy forest and the shopkeeper is a kind of animal, and there was a page given us at one point. But I couldn't say more than that.

Of course I could have looked it up for this review, but I wanted the author to get a glimpse into my deranged mind to see what one player's experience was like.

The cryptic crossword clues were fun, albeit hard (like most such to me). Upon my request, the author made a very helpful visual crossword that made it a bit easier. I also used some online crossword dictionaries, but didn't look at others' hints. The thing that got me most stuck early on was that I was convinced that the clue (Spoiler - click to show)small demon would certainly have (Spoiler - click to show)a different solution each time, and was shocked as I realized today (after two weeks of thinking about it) that that wasn't so.

Overall, the game is creative and polished, and provides interactivity that's engaging. Due to its format, I struggled to hold onto a summary of the plot in my mind.

The game also had a charity donation segment, but I'm not including that in my score, as I wouldn't want it to become a trend for games to get upvoted based on financial donations the author makes (or to get downvoted for not doing so). I don't think it's bad, I just think it should be separate from the scoring system.

This game is odd. It’s a fairly short Twine game that boldly announces its lack of interactivity. And yet it has a lot of type-in messages in the game, offering you more freedom in input than most games. You end up at the same place in the end, true, but that’s true of almost all parser games, which tend to have very static plots despite the non-static puzzles.

The inputs require specific formats. At one point, I was asked to give an ordinal number (like ‘5th’) but instead typed 1, a cardinal number, and the game threw an error message.

It all seemed like a blank slate input-wise but with strangely specific messages in-game that offset the benefits of the blank slate without providing its own characterization. An interesting experiment, but not one that I felt a connection with.