Reviews by MathBrush

I've been exploring the ChooseYourStory catalogue a bit and taking the advice of previous commenters to check the content warnings so I don't complain about things I should have known about ahead of time.

This game was really interesting and really hard. I don't usually review games without finishing them, but I think it might be a long time before I beat this one (unless I just use the walkthrough).

You play as someone who wanders into a Walmart right when it's taken over by terrorists. You have to explore the various departments and collect items to help you and others escape.

I've probably only reached 1/3-1/2 of the game after a few hours and checking the beginning of the walkthrough. There are tons of items that you can pick up and manipulate, and the game is defiitely 'cruel' on the Zarfian scale, meaning you can irrevocably mess yourself up without knowing.

It reminds me of some of the Infocom games like Deadline or the one where you're a scuba diver, where you have to hit things in just the right sequence or you'll miss out on something important.

There's some grammatical and writing inconsistencies, which is why I'm doing 4 stars instead of 5, but I would definitely recommend this to fans of games that require careful note taking, experimentation, logic, and a lot of replay.

This game reminds me of nothing more than picking up some epic fantasy series like Wheel of Time or Thomas Covenant, one of those books that has a huge scope, intricate backstory, and tons of characters. It's a different feel than standalone fiction, and I haven't found a new series like that in a while.

Seeing it in Choicescript is great. This is a very large game. I remember thinking "Wow, this game is gigantic, took me a long time to play," and then realizing that I was just near the end of Chapter 2 (out of 4).

It's split into four chapters:

In Chapter 1, you establish your backstory and much of the worldbuilding and start your rebellion.

Chapter 2 is a long chapter spread out over weeks where you try to survive over a difficult winter. I had a very hard time with this, as I wanted to not steal, but it meant letting people die. Really good tradeoff in goals here, love to see this kind of interactivity.

Chapter 3 involves meeting a diverse group of people and discovering problems in your midst.

And Chapter 4 is the climactic battle, from planning to execution to aftermath.

This game has many ways to fail, but mercifully has a 'redo this chapter button', which I was glad for when I died on my first run through Chapter 4.

Playing the first chapter will let you know right away if this is your kind of game or not. What I love about this game is how the stats are completely just there to show the game remembers you, and passing or failing stat checks is less about solving a puzzle or getting rewarded/punished and more about building a story based on your choices.

Relationships occupy a lot of the game. There are characters with great depth who can never be seen if you just kill them off bat. All of the main characters show up enough that they get meaningful development and you know exactly what kind of things might offend them or please them, and they frequently are in conflict so you can't get everything you want but still feel good about your choices.

I liked this game, but fair warning it does take a long time to play. The author intends on writing 4 more books but it stands well on its own, especially when compared with other good Choicescript games that are essentially '1-shot' TTRPG adventures. I liked those too, but this is more like a whole campaign with solid backstory.

I've long heard rumours about the quality of this Exceptional Story, and that made me hesitant to play it, as I didn't want to be disappointed.

I shouldn't have worried. This exceptional story is of high enough quality that I thought at one point 'this is the first time I've seen a real story in a Fallen London game'.

Now, that's not quite true, as there are great stories throughout Fallen London and Sunless Skies. But the format usually favors a series of vague allusions that come together in the end to give you an overall impression, although very little is said in each bit.

Cricket, Anyone? is different. It's very large, for one thing. I swear I spent over 80 actions on it, and anxiously waited to refresh my actions throughout the day.

The structure is intriguing as well. Once you get through a couple brief opening storylets, you enter a long cricket match where you make strategic options and, in between inning, investigating the bizarre machinations of the different teams and the trainer.

The story unfolded beautifully; the structure and writing rival a lot of the great sci-fi, fantasy, or modern lit short stories I've read before. There are a series of reveals that individually feel small until you realize what it's building up to and you see that it should have been clear all along. This happens several ways, with the stakes being upped over and over until it's some of the weightiest lore material in the Fallen London canon.

I came in with everybody saying this is the best Exceptional Story ever and was both skeptical and nervous about being disappointed, and I can only say that they were right.

This is an unusual parser game in that a lot of its development went into making it accessible on a variety of platforms, including Apple II, Atari, Gameboy, TI-84 and Dreamcast.

This puts some pretty extreme constraints on a game, which explains a bit why this is in a .z3 format. It would also suggest that this game would have to be under-implemented or small.

But Labrande has fit quite a lot of game into this small package, and that's what took this from a 4-star game for me to a 5-star game.

You land on an island after a plane crash and have to both survive and investigate the mystery of the island.

Gameplay takes place in several portions, each of which involves increasingly sophisticated objects and devices.

The first, survival-focused, portion was fairly linear, which was odd to me, and then once it opened up more I realized that this was just a very large game so its opening, linear segment was larger than most.

This game is at its best when it presents mysteries. When the game first mentioned Tristam Island by name I was instantly intrigued. That was my driving force in playing.

The feel is more like Infocom in that you have large maps with a few useful items in each area. This map reminded me a bit of Planetfall, which had several empty rooms to serve for realism's sake.

The biggest divergences from Infocom are in NPCs and in 'pizazz'. There are few opportunities to interact with others in this game, lending it a quiter feel. And Infocom games tended to be over-the-top, with wild circuses or exciting spy thrillers or time travel. This game is completely grounded in reality, and in fact seems to have entailed a great deal of research.

There are some troubles here and there in terms of responses or synonyms, which is why I would have given 4 stars. But much or all of that is explained by the oppressive constraints one has to deal with to fit a game this complex into a small package.

If you are a fan of retro gaming, I can't think of anything better than to play this on your platform of choice. For fans of parser games in general, I can give this a positive recommendation as something longer than any game in this year's IFComp, and polished.

(Note: I used the provided hints, messaging the author and even decompiling to complete this game. With all those aids, it still took me several hours).

I’m always happy to see another Andrew Schultz game in the comp. His games have ranged from large open worlds with large amount of traditional puzzles (like The Problems Compound) and compact, laser-focused games like Threediopolis or The Cube in the Cavern.

This one has open-world elements mixed with a lot of wordplay. There is a specific gimmick/rule for items and things in this game that has surprisingly large amounts of play.

I beta tested this game, and was pretty overwhelmed while testing. The state of all possible solutions is so large (especially when using slang words or words I’d never heard pronounced). Fortunately, since then, Andrew Schultz has both increased the number of available help systems (including a very useful passage to a ‘cheater’ helper) and turned on most of the older hint systems by default.

My most recent playthrough was a lot easier due to these helps, but still difficult. I especially enjoyed the boat-based sequence. Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the game is when you get on a good string of guesses in a row. One possible weakness is the lack of uniformity in puzzle solutions; each puzzle might be solved by a song you’re thinking of, a book you’ve read, typing in the solution to a wordplay puzzle, or USE-ing an item. While this theoretically increases freedom, the state space becomes a little too large for me to handle successfully. Available hint items definitely aid this though!

One thing I’d love to see in a future Andrew Schultz game is one where you have to find nouns hidden inside other words (like a ‘shovel’ that produces a ‘hovel’ you can enter).

+Polish: Given the enormous state space, I think this is very polished.
+Descriptiveness: There's a lot of creative uses of the main wordplay mechanic here.
+Interactivity: Despite my frustrations, I had fun. I like wordplay.
-Emotional impact: I didn't get absorbed into the story.
+Would I play again? Yeah, it feels like there's more to discover.

Man, I stayed up a couple of hours later than I ought to have because I wanted the best ending to this game.

I beta tested this game, but I didn’t see it all at the time. This is a very unusual parser game with limited actions. Instead of moving around and manipulating things, you have a fixed set of verbs and a fixed set of nouns, and they interact with each other in weird ways.

The verbs have normal things like EXAMINE and TALK but also things like WRECK and PROMOTE. The nouns include SELF, people, STORE, MIND, etc. Yes, you can WRECK mind to make yourself go a little less sane and in fact that’s a great way to find more endings.

You have a set amount of cash and it goes down each week. This is a hard game, unless you hit some random luck. Once you get going, things build up: promoting rare objects brings in customers who become regular customers who give you cash. I also recommend TALK CATALOGUE early on to get a free item.

Because this is a horror game, things go wrong. Your employees may be possessed. Once, to satisfy an ancient relic’s thirst for blood, I murdered a customer. But another customer came in before I could discard the body, so I had to murder her, too, and then more customers came in. Fortunately, no one escaped and I cleaned everything up before the police became involved. But it was touch and go.

I decided to try to reach all endings. I’ll say right now that the final ending, Ascension, is different from the others and may not satisfy you (although if you played this far it very well may; I felt content with it). As for the second to last one, it can get a little weird depending on your choices (Spoiler - click to show)(for instance, mine involved ritualistic bathing in chocolate).

But overall, I think this game is great. It’s heavily RNG based, so it will be either too hard or too easy on most playthroughs, but the depth of the interactivity is what I love here.

+++++Polish, Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional Impact, Would I play again? This is exactly the kind of thing I like to see.

I beta tested this game.

This is another custom parser game, but this one is web-enabled, and features a complex realtime murder investigation in the vein of Deadline (which is cited as a direct inspiration).

Just like in Deadline, you have a large building full of independently moving people, time events that change everything, and the ability to analyse (although here we carry our own fingerprinting machine and chemical analyzer).

The parser is not bad for a custom parser; in fact, people's custom parser writing skills in general seem to be improving a lot from year to year. There are some niceties that need some improvement, though. For instance, the game tells you to sample things in the format 'SAMPLE __________', but if you try to sample the wrong things (like SAMPLE PANEL) it throws an error message as if SAMPLE wasn't recognized. Of course, I beta tested it so I should have found and reported that myself.

Deadline was the hardest of all the Infocom games for me to play, and I ran to the hints quickly. This game is also hard, but plays by the same rules as Deadline. Without any hints, I expect this game to take several hours. The mystery is quite elaborate; I only ever found the most obvious suspect, but I'm interested in still looking for the truth.

If you liked Infocom's mysteries, you'll definitely like this, and it's a worthy successor to them.

-Polish: As indicated above, the custom parser could use a little tuning up.
-Descriptivenss: The descriptions are generally small and bare.
+Interactivity: The mechanics are ingenious and the puzzle is clever.
+Emotional impact: I found this game intriguing.
+Would I play again? One day I plan on revisiting this game.

I beta tested this game.

What can I say? I love this game. DiBianca is well known for making themed games with constrained commands and one type of puzzle.

This is the first one not to include movement (at least since Grandma Bethlinda’s Variety Box), and instead we have a series of dozens of word puzzles.

This is a big game, and, as many many reviewers have found, it sucks up hours of your life if you’re into wordplay puzzles. I spent easily more than 4 hours as well as thinking about the puzzles quite a bit, and this is with emailing the author for hints.

I haven’t played all the way through the newest version (just the first few puzzles again, and I already see some improvements). I’d love to wait a few years to forget most of this and do it over again, maybe with my son when he’s older.

There is an overall story that, for me, became more coherent as the game went on, but it’s still very abstract. But I definitely think this game ranks up there with Counterfeit Monkey, Ad Verbum and the Andrew Schultz canon as one of the great wordplay games out there.

+++++Polish, Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional Impact, Would I play again? This is exactly the kind of think I like. Love it!

Larry Horsfield has a long-running and fairly successful series of ADRIFT games with the hero Alaric Blackmoon.

I always have a bit of trouble finishing the games. These games are definitely in the older school fashion, which Adrift is suited for. Adrift only encodes specific verb-noun combinations, although you can set up a few synonyms. So in particular, if an action works in one room, it might provoke an error message in another. To climb down a rope, you must type ‘CLIMB DOWN ROPE’ but not ‘DOWN’. This isn’t necessarily a drawback…it ends requiring careful analysis. These games are the perfect games to slowly pick at over a month or so.

During the comp, though, I rushed with the walkthrough, until I messed up a part with a bucket and got stuck. In the part I saw (about 2/3 of the game), I found some really fun dynamics (like growing and shrinking), intervened in a goblin war and navigated through some crazy caverns. Definitely one to come back to later!

+Polish: It has a lot of effort put into nice color changes and complex mechanics.
+Descriptiveness: I could imagine a lot of the scenarios vividly.
-Interactivity: I frequently had trouble doing what I'd like to with things, and commands frequently had to be very specific.
+Would I play again? I plan on looking at this again.
+Emotional impact: A lot of parts of it were just fun, like crossing the ravine and changing shape.

So, Hanon Ondricek has a long history of making very unusual and experimental games. I first came into contact with his work in the 2015 IFComp, which we both entered. He had a game called the Baker of Shireton, an unusual game which was a baking simulator with some MMORPG-style elements. One especially odd feature was that it modeled abstract objects as inventory items, like your name, job, and quest. It later turned out (spoilers for this game) (Spoiler - click to show)that you were an NPC in an MMORPG and could hack the game to get out and go on a short quest.

I found that idea fascinating, and I ended up using it in several of my games. So that made the Baker of Shireton get stuck in my brain.

This game is a successor to that one. In this game, you get to play an upgraded version of the fake MMO that the first game was set in. This is a choice-based system instead of parser, and it has great art by Marco Innocenti and music from a variety of sources. The music was catchy; I left it on for much of the day as I played, and my son liked it too.

The bulk of this game is getting and fulfilling quests from different NPCs. There is a complex combat system (I especially enjoyed the 'magic' mechanics which require you to quickly spell some words during combat. There is also an option to slow down combat significantly for people who have trouble with quick time events). While rich and actually pretty fun, combat isn't completely necessary. In a way, it reminds me quite a bit of Porpentine's various comabt systems, and various bee-related events in the game also bear some resemblance to her.

Speaking of bearing resemblance, there are references to a lot of games in here, including many of Hanon's older games as well as Cragne Manor, the SCP foundation and others.

Solving this game was challenging. I frequently had to think outside of the box. Hanon is one of the pioneers (along with people like Agniezska Trzaska) in choice-based puzzle mechanics and boy does this game have a lot of them. I definitely wouldn't feel bad asking for hints (and, in fact, I didn't feel bad; I asked for quite a few).

This is also a very large game. I spent around 5-6 hours beating it.

My overall evaluation:
+Polish: Absolutely polished. About the most polished a game can get. I don't mean bug-free, I mean that every aspect of the user experience has been accounted for and acted on.
+Interactivity: Loved the RPG events, the weird shortcuts you get later on, and the ease of use of the AXMA system.
+Descriptiveness: I especially appreciated the details in Luneybin.
+Emotional impact: The horror-lite sections near the end worked well for me.
+Would I play again?: Definitely plan to revisit this just for fun in the future.