Reviews by MathBrush

This is a recent game from Choice of Games set at a magical university. You are an adopted scion of a powerful mafia figure, and you have been sent to a college that offers majors in both mundane and magical areas. You are encouraged to join a group of 3 magical fraternities while you go to class, meet friends and work at a magical coffee shop.

There's a lot going on here. The writing itself flows well, with some standout characters and intricate worldbuilding.

One steam review mentioned like it felt like too many storylines were going on at once, and I agree with that. While the college, fraternity, and coffee storylines meshed well, the mafia felt more or less tacked-on. It provided some useful worldbuilding backstory, but it gave the effect of the author mashing two games into one, at least to me.

The game had compelling goals that I wanted to achieve, but I found making my way there muddy. I was frequently told I did bad at things but still managed to get in the frat and get a 4.0 my first semester. I was told I bombed every final next semester but still got a 3.0.

I focused on 2 skills exclusively (with a 73 in spirit stuff and 53 in thaumaturgy), but failed every test involving thaumaturgy. My game ended completely abruptly at the end where I had a single choice with no buildup and clicked what I thought was a spirit option but was apparently the wrong thing, instantly negating every success I had more before by just killing me with a 1 page epilogue that didn't wrap up anything.

Part of the difficulty was overlapping stats; I could never distinguish between Spontaneity and Adaptability, or between Honesty, Determination and Principled. I never even noticed the 'skills' section (communications, creativity, insight, and scholarship), and am not sure how those could be adjusted or checked.

Overall, though, the worldbuilding and writing quality pulled this one through for me. But I kept putting it down when frustrated and took a couple of weeks to play.

Recommended only for fans of magical academia and mob stories.

It's nice to see Chandler Groover experimenting with the Fallen London format. He is known for his Exceptional Stories, and has a very loyal fan base on the Discord, with people saying things like this:

"I'd go as far as to say that groover is the only writer who consistently captures the mystery and beauty of the setting"

"I’m trying to find what I’m thinking of, but my suggestion is really based on the quality of groover’ s writing and also the focus on the everyday person that reveals some deeper truth about the universe"

"Chandler Groover, author of several fan favourite Exceptional Stories, typically agreed to Never Miss"

With that kind of praise, there's a lot of pressure, and it would be easy to fall into repetitive patterns. But I found this story to be pretty different than his others, so much so that I had no idea it was him until the end.

In this story, a magician's assistant is missing, a crocodile is loose in the sewers of London and you must stop it! This includes a sizable segment that is a complex maze, something I never thought I'd see in any Groover story ever, and especially not in Fallen London, a text-based narrative that tends to gloss over movement. This story also has puzzles involving large machines with moving parts.

During your journey, your goals shift, and you end up acquiring a large amount of materials (through the sewers) for a big project. This was a fun excursion, because it lets you see many of the more mundane or boring parts of Fallen London (like the shops in the Bazaar tab) through a fresh perspective as you tunnel into them from below, often finding bizarre leftovers from previous times or hidden-away secrets. The scenes in Mahogany Hall were really effective for me.

The story gets even more strange in the end, becoming almost mythological and filled with guts and animals. It all feels large and epic, but I didn't quite grasp it all. I think that's good, though; I wouldn't want to grasp all of it.

To be honest, the maze didn't really work for me completely, but I enjoy the innovation and would rather see further experimentation like this than a retread of old things. Definitely a memorable story.

As a side note, parts of this gave me flashbacks to All Dogs Go to Heaven, where the sewer crocodile horrified me as a child.

This is an exceptional story, a sizable 'bonus' story provided for those who pay for Fallen London.

This one deals with the devils, a faction in Fallen London that is quite distinct from devils as typically portrayed. This group is a little out of sync with the rest of the world (generally having fashions from twenty years in the future), and are very interested in people's souls but also in creating and altering the laws of reality in bizarre ways.

Some Londoners reacted negatively to the presence of the devils and fought a disastrous war with them. The game has frequently referenced this war and its horrifying outcomes (through different stories involving Bishops and more recently with the Great Hellbound Railway, especially Moulin), but hasn't dedicated many stories to detailed events of the war.

In this story, you meet a manservant of a prince, a servant who fought in the war and is now afflicted by having some body parts replaced with plants (thus, the cover picture of the story). This manservant works with the Bellicose Prince, a child of Queen Victoria who, like most the other children, was (strong spoilers for those who haven't seen royal family stories) (Spoiler - click to show)altered by the use of tainted red honey into a gross monster.(Spoiler - click to show)

This story takes a lot of twists and turns and really is an exploration of war, survivor's guilt, PTSD, and trauma. Like most great fantasy or horror, it uses an extraordinary situation to examine ordinary feelings in a new light.

I hadn't really put it together that the Mary Goodden of these exceptional stories is the Mary Goodden of Ifcomp 2021's game 'Funicular Simulator 2021'. Nice!

This was a really memorable exceptional story (a supplement to Fallen London's main story). While writing reviews for these, I had to look back in my fame history to remind myself what they were about, but this one was firmly lodged in my memory.

One of the main factions in Fallen London is the Urchins, a large number of lost youth who form gangs and steal things. They tend to represent innocence in Fallen London (like in the story Hojotoho, where they pretend to be valkyries and go on 'adventures'). They also have a connection to rain and storm, as they are generally the source of the category of items termed 'Wild Words', which includes things like Primordial Shrieks, Aeolian Screams and Storm-Threnodies. In fact, in the deeper lore they are associated with (Spoiler - click to show)the somewhat-dead god Storm, a vast dragon that has power over the sea, which is what this story deals with and what most spoilers later down contain.

A young girl is marked by (Spoiler - click to show)the God Storm, but you interrupt, entangling you in her life. You are tasked with taking her around and helping her make a decision whether to embrace her new life as (Spoiler - click to show)a vessel of innocent rage or not. Your journey exposes much of the difficulties of life in a foster care system and of a poor life, as you explore the palace, an orphanage, and a former foster home she was ejected from, discovering the sources of her rage.

I found this one poignant and memorable.

This is an exceptional story for Fallen London, which is a special 'extra' story for people who pay a monthly fee or purchase the story itself later on.

In this story, you rescue three young kids who have decided to find buried treasure on the Zee but get stuck when their boat crashes on a small island. Rescuing them, you learn about their fascination with Captain Redbeard, a mythical pirate, as well as the story of their mother, a woman who died at sea and who may or may not now be a 'drownie' (in Fallen London, people who die come back, except those who die at sea, who become a kind of fish/zombie/person).

The kids are cute, and help you pick out a suitable pirate name (mine was Blood Killer). Their dynamics and their interactions with the larger world paint a really lovely picture of family and growing up.

This is a pretty hefty Choicescript game that consists of two parts: a young person browsing Tumblr that's part of a fandom for a fictional series of novels (a science fiction analogue of Harry Potter with its own house-type system), and a story-within-the-story consisting of your character's fan fiction.

Fanfiction gameplay includes things like customizing your character and reacting emotionally to things, as well as choosing ships (as in relationships).

Tumblr gameplay consists of choosing from 8 or so different blogs to look at. Choosing a blog to look at brings up a post you can like, reblog, sometimes comment on, or skip to go to the next one (or back). Each blog has about 4 posts in each section of gameplay.

There are several chapters, each one giving more fanfiction and more events in the blogosphere.

Midgame spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)The author of the series makes posts in the middle of the game calling out one of your friends and saying that transgender people are degenerates. Most of the people you follow are trans, and so it puts a big damper on things and chaos ensues.

The game has a main story thread, but it also has a 'score' aspect in terms of your followers. Reblogging gets you more followers.

I had a ton of emotions reading this. I like to put myself in the headspace of the people I play as but doing so made me really uncomfortable this time, and I made choices in-game that I thought the protagonist would do that are things I really wouldn't do in real life.

The discomfort I experience playing this game is because it encourages you to have empathy for people and then puts them in hard situations that there aren't easy answers for. It also reminds me of real life confusions and conversations I've had.

So I definitely had a stronger reaction emotionally to this game than to others.

Mechanically, a lot of content is dumped at once in each of the tumblr sections. That's the way real social media is, but I've been trying to clear my head of social media 'noise' recently (who isn't?) and playing this reminded me why.

With its world-within-the-world and focus on the nature of human experience, art, and their interactions, and with the Choicescript format, I was strongly reminded of Creatures Such as We, a game by Lynnea Glasser in my top 10 games of all time. That game leaves me thoughtful and hopeful, while this one left me thoughtful and distressed. Both are useful. Of the two, though, this game had an interaction mechanic that didn't work quite as well for me, with the nonlinear asynchronous tumblr text dumps. But that isn't to say it didn't work at all; I think it's one of the better games of the competition and a masterpiece of technical work, doing things I didn't know were capable in Choicescript. And the characterization is excellent, with a lot of the characters coming alive for me personalitywise (although I lost track of some of the handles).

This is one of two Adventuron games in this comp, and its a great use of the system. The author has used a large number of properly licensed photos from various sources (including a number of cosplayers) to create a large fantasy world.

You play as an orc who is essentially an NPC in the Dream Factory, a place where humans (?) dream themselves as adventurers to fight against monsters (like you).

Gameplay consists of exploration, combat, leveling, etc. but with a whimsical tone. You can enter a dream world and learn about the history of anti-orc racism.

+Polish: This game is very smooth. I rarely tried a command that didn't have a smart response for it.
+Descriptiveness: Enemies and locations are lushly described.
+Interactivity: The main gameplay loop was satisfying.
-Emotional impact: The game was overall enjoyable, but I wasn't drawn into the world and its characters.
+Would I play again? I think it's a lovely game.

In this game, you are a sentient program in a computer circa 2000. Your goal is to deal with an influx of emails, ZAPping or APPROVing them as you determine.

It cites DIGITAL: A LOVE STORY as an influence, but I've never played that game. It has a feel kind of like Wreck-it-Ralph/Emoji movie/Digimon in the sense that applications 'behind the scenes' are thinking, feeling creatures.

It turns out that one of your human's email friends is in despair because their father is taking away their computer. You have to work together with a crew of other applications to save her.

Here's my breakdown:
+Polish: The game is certainly very polished, with use of changing background images, pop-up boxes, text input, an inbox-managing system, text animations, etc. Could easily be nominated for an XYZZY award of some type for this alone.
+Descriptiveness: The game was very vivid in its writing, and the different email voices were very enjoyable.
+Interactivity: I'll admit, some of the spam emails were kind of long and boring. The simulation of an unpleasant event is still an unpleasant event. But I never felt like things were 'on rails', while simultaneously rarely feeling 'lost'.
+Emotional impact: I found the game funny and the story interesting. Like I said, some parts were boring, but many were not.
+Would I play again? I could see myself revisiting it.

This game has a lot of good things going for it, but the end product feels like the author ran out of time or energy with creating the game and decided to focus on polishing what's there (which is much better than making a game with too much scope and not testing it).

Mechanically, this is a Twine game that is built to be like a parser. Most nouns are clickable to get a description, and you have an inventory. Depending on what you are carrying, some items around you have other links. Most interestingly, you can combine any number of items, although I only saw that used once in gameplay.

This game has many similarities with Anchorhead. In both games, you play as a young woman accompanying her husband/partner to a strange and decaying city in order to get work at the city's university. Both have a city of surly inhabitants and a strange house with many secrets, as well as a wood-related mill outside of town.

The unusual feature of this game storywise is that there is a cheerful and warming house you stay at with two talkative inhabitants. The house gains greater importance as the game deepens.

The entire game is lovely. The only issue is that there isn't enough game, I think. The ending itself isn't bad, it's just that it leaves hanging many of the important questions from earlier on. Great games have a narrative arc that builds to a climax and then has a shorter, but definite, denouement; this game essentially falls off a cliff.

Things I can think of that are unresolved (major spoilers!) (Spoiler - click to show)the dog's origin and/or fate, anything with the sawmill, anything with the university, the chain and the slapping in the back room, the ability to combine items, the wicket in the town hall you say you can't go up yet, the pedestal in the town square.

I think it's not really helpful in general to tinker with games, but I think an 'expanded' version of this game that fleshes it out more would be great, maybe entered into the back garden of Spring Thing one year. Of course, just writing another game would be fun, too; the author is good at writing and codig, so I'd look forward to that.

This is a complex game where you play computer games on a computer inside the computer that you're now viewing. While you do that, someone in real life (inside the game) comments on what you're doing inside the game (inside the game).

There are multiple games and multiple things in real life, and elements transfer from one to another (kind of like IFDB spelunking).

You are a teenage boy whose best friend (a girl named Riley) is moving away, and in a partially-packed house you are spending your last few hours together playing old adventure games on a computer.

Meta verbs are disabled; I opened up the game one day and then came back to it a week later and was shocked I couldn't RESTART. Then I tried it on a different device and the first thing I saw was a mention to use EXIT to 'truly' restart. UNDO is disabled, as well.

This game reminds me of several games of Adam Cadre. The meta-nature of playing a game and a game within a game with self-aware NPCs reminds me of Endless, Nameless. The piecing together of a story and focus on simple puzzles with 'aha' moments and emotional interactions reminds me of Photopia. And the inclusion of strip poker (not my favorite element) reminds me of many of Adam Cadre's works.

Overall, this is a great game. It's fresh, easy to pick up, sophisticated, and ties in elements of narrative IF and classic parser IF.

It has a companion game, Infinite Adventure, playable only using a DOS emulator. That is just an endless series of simple fetch quests. Interestingly, this game is also essentially a long series of fetch quests, making them mechanically very similar and story-wise very dissimilar.

I think the game worked for me on an emotional level. I like almost everything about this game, actually, but I don't think I'll replay it because the strip poker level on an old DOS computer brings back bad childhood memories. However, I'll probably replay it for some 'best games of the last ten years' article, so I'll still give it 5 stars.