Reviews by MathBrush

This is the second 'stateful narration' game I've played.

These games have an engine where you type something in a box (the game requires it to be in its internal dictionary) and then it parsers that output.

I learned how it worked when I decided to just give in and type clear words like 'happy' and 'sad'. The game seemed to understand those, as well as 'despondent'. Given a couple of similar projects I've seen recently, I suspect that what's underneath the hood is 'sentiment analysis', where there is a database of dictionary words with a score associated to them about how positive and negative they are. Or not; I could be completely wrong. But that's what it feels like.

Like the other games, this has a classic short story inserted uncut and unchanged with a framing story around it.

The framing story has some interesting elements, but I found it hard to find a narrative thread or two outside of mimicking the lottery element of the Chekhov story. It's possible the main purpose of the sauce story is just to provide several opportunities for the stateful interaction that is mostly about reacting positively or negatively to something.

Fun fact: the image used in the cover art is from a picture of a baby lottery held in early 1900's Paris and featured in Popular Mechanics. Pretty wild!

For my rubric, I find this game both polished and descriptive, but the interactivity could use a little more pushback on words with neutral sentiment; my main emotional impact was from the Chekhov story rather than the surrounding material; and there's not a lot of replayability here.

Edit: Now that I've learned more about how the analysis works, I've increased my score from what it was before.

This is a game intended for kids about a magic cup that comes to life, written with the Strand system, which is the system used for the Magnetic Scrolls memorial and several IFComp and ParserComp games since then.

A lot of stories intended for kids end up being too inspid for either kids or parents to enjoy. This game was 'corny', but it was a kind of corny I liked and an imaginative one as well, with its own internal logic and, to me, compelling arcs, even in its short playtime. I found the writing detailed and vivid.

You play as a tin mug that has the ability to affect the world around it, especially on today, its birthday.

Choices were usually binary, often with one clearly better choice, which would make sense when teaching a young child about how choice-based games work. I guess my only thought about possible drawbacks would be that the breaks between choices are fairly large and it would be difficult to hold a child's attention that long if they're excited about choices.

I really enjoyed Charm Cochrans previous game, and I was surprised at how different this was compared to that. That one was a religious-themed Twine game with good graphics and lush descriptions. This is a stripped-down parser maze.

It's well-implemented and runs smoothly. You are met at the beginning by a man who introduces himself to you and explains the maze. You then go through it.

While it seems hideously complex at first, the vast majority of the maze rooms have only one entrance and one exit. If mapping, it's only really necessary to write down the rooms with three exits, which are rare.

There are several layers of meaning in the game, from the base Inform implementation level (with little meaning in itself), to the maze itself, to the objects in the maze (like the lizard you can follow or string you can leave behind you), to the messages from Everyman and the LED tickers, to clear political statements that are plain and not symbolic (especially (Spoiler - click to show)the gravestones describing people who died from being denied an abortion for a non-viable pregnancy or who died without anyone using their real chosen name).

Overall, I enjoy surreal games and well-implemented games. I thought that a lot of the messages were delivered well, and if it is designed as a way to feel the frustration of being a marginalized person in a white male cishet-dominated world, I think it demonstrates it very well (also the frustration of caring about the climate or similar issues and getting a lot of promises that don't get acted on). But the main gameplay loop was not one that I enjoyed; a frustration simulator is still frustrating; a frustration parody is still frustrating; a metaphor for imprisonment through frustration is still frustrating.

But given that the game seems designed to incur those feelings, I can only conclude that the author has succeeded. Given that they've so far made an excellent Twine game and an very well-coded parser game, I can only expect that his next game will be brilliant.

This is a lavish Twine game that has you visit a town as an apprentice baker, set on making a cake for the town's Savings Day.

The real appeal of this game is the characters. You meet a variety of well-illustrated characters, each in a unique style that reminded me of Tim Burton or Ruby Gloom or the Haunted Mansion or even HxH's Palm. Each one has their own dark secrets to hide.

The game simultaneously has a lot of variety and very little. Every time, you must visit the same people to get the same things. But you do have a chance in how you treat them and what you discover. You even can choose from many endings, but all of the good endings have a lot of overlap.

There were some minor inconsistencies here and there (like the credits page softlocking the game by not offering a way out of it) that damped enjoyment, but this is one of my favorite games so far in terms of content, characters and art.

My dad use to run a video game company, and one idea he always had was to make an incredibly bloody and vicious fighting game with entrails and gore, etc. but with all characters made of chocolate, so that it would technically pass Nintendo rules.

He never got around to making it, but this game reminds me of that concept. It's a hardboiled detective story with candy version of murder, gore, hardcore pornography (alluded to only), a strip club, etc. All of it is bowdlerized through the candy medium.

The author of this game has made quite a few interesting and/or bizarre experimental Twine pieces (and one using an RPG making software, I think), so I associate him with creativity and innovation in a choice medium.

In this move to the parser medium, he's brought the creativity and the amusement. One thing I think is lacking though is dealing with 'bad' parser responses. Due to the parser medium allowing theoretically infinite possibilities, a large part of parser craft is nudging players gently (or not) towards commands that actually do something. So more custom parser responses, implementation of basically every noun in every description (or turning them into synonyms of other nouns), etc. This can often take up a huge part of programming time, but it also represents a huge part of player time, since often half or more of a player's commands will result in an error, as they try out whatever they think of in the moment.

That, coupled with some capitalization problems in room names, makes me feel like what this needs more than anything is some more time in the oven. I've found that the best way to get this part of the game nailed down is to have a bunch of testers send transcripts and then implement a response for everything they try (or redirect it to a pre-existing response).

Overall, a clever concept.

I played this game during the testing period.

In this game, you run into an old, abandoned spacecraft. It's a large and confusing ship, but fortunately a clear map is provided. Your goal is to grab as much of the loot on the ship as you can before it is pulled into the black hole.

This game is similar to other optimization games like Captain Verdeterre's Plunder and Sugarlawn. The main differences are that this one has an adversary, and that there is much less 'easy money' in this game than those. You can wander for quite a while before getting anything really worth something; the good stuff is all locked behind puzzles.

The adversary is interesting, strategically. You both have to prepare weapons and also deal with the effects its acid has on the terrain; it can both destroy useful items and open areas or containers that were locked.

In my best run, I made 1,755 dollars, including (Spoiler - click to show)taking the ship AI and a gold drone.

As others have noticed, the game is heavily influenced by the hit movie (Spoiler - click to show)Alien, featuring characters and the same setting as that movie.

This is a parser game where the characters are all four-legged hooved creatures. It of course reminded me of My Little Pony, similar to the Daring Do episodes.

This game is unusual in that instead of focusing on traditional puzzles, it consists of primarily action sequences, outside of an initial investigation sequence.

The author says in the notes that the only way they could think of to make the fights interesting was to have multiple opponents. I have to say, I think it does help. I've played a lot of parser games with combat in them, and some of them are pretty great (like Gun Mute) but others suffer. I think the multiple opponents here help since it allows for strategy, like taking out the strongest one first or the one attacking your ally.

The implementation was actually pretty good. Something about the game as whole, though, felt just a tad thin, and I can't put my finger on it. Maybe it feels like there just could have been more, like using your powers more, more detail about you and your backstory, etc.

Edit: Since I wrote this, the game was updated with a cool little backstory if you are doing well after the first fight. It uses a technique that's very rare in parser games, and which would be annoying if overused, but is actually really cool here and helps fill in some of the gaps.

This is a well-written texture game about a young woman who is desperate because her sister is missing.

Starting with a true crime-like opening, the game soon pivots in another direction.

This is written using Texture, which is an engine where actions are dragged onto nouns. As far as was apparent to me, this story is mostly linear, with choices either expanding some dialogue or moving the story along. It is possible there is some branching but I didn't find evidence of it.

I enjoyed the story and the characters. I felt it ended a bit abruptly (I had a successful ending), and would have liked to see more variety in interaction.

Abigail Corfman has made many high-quality games in the past, so I was excited to play this one.

This is a richly-illustrated Twine game, with black-and-white chiaroscuro images on one side and options on another. The game has background music and sound effects. The screen was too low-positioned for me to click on at first, but going to full-screen made it work better.

This is a combination story-focused and puzzle game. The idea is that a man, Anthony Lane, suspects that he has a wife but can't find her. You have to investigate the house to find out what's missing. Like another game in this comp, A Long Way to the Nearest Star, you have an inventory of thoughts and items that you can select from in each room, providing two-factor puzzles that make for a richer game.

The first half of the game had a lot of narrative momentum for me, with the puzzles being fairly light and forgiving. It bogged down a lot in the second half as it is possible to make irreversibly bad decisions.

But that made me have to think a lot. I had to really stop and imagine this person, what their life might be like. I continued to do poorly, even restarting. But I worked at it more and more. It was compelling to try to really thing about what their life was like, instead of what I wanted it to be like or assumed it would be like. It was like an exercise in empathy.

Overall, I think this is really well done. Love the art, too.

This is an IFComp entry that is entirely focused on story, understanding and self-thought rather than gameplay or mechanics.

The idea is that there were once elves who one day left. You meet (or met) a woman who was one of the last to live among the elves. She teaches you about their language, and about their 497 words for goodbye.

That description doesn't really do justice, though, because the real content of this game is its style rather than its story. More than anything else this story reminded me Borges and Calvino, both of whom I've read less than perhaps I ought to have. I looked up those authors after reading this game and enjoyed learning about them and their literary techniques.

One thing this game does that those writers do is to purposely jar the reader from their pleasant immersion in the story. Frequently the game will lead you to what seems like understanding only for the author to say 'but it wasn't like that at all'. Kind of like, for imaginary example, if you were telling a story about people lining up for miles in NYC to get cheesecake, and then the PoV character asking 'It must have been good then,' and then getting the response, 'Of course not, it was terrible. It was all tourists lining up.' I'd like to say this technique is an example of Verfremdung, but I just learned that word 10 minutes ago and am almost certainly misapplying it.

The language is lovely and complex, requiring a slower reading for understanding, similar to Chandler Groover's work. One runs a risk telling stories about storytellers like this; if you're writing about a group who is known for great poetry and expressiveness, you yourself must be expressive and poetic. But this game sidesteps this a bit neatly by having the main character him or herself be impressed by the secondary narrator.

There were a few minor typos (I found four, two of which were in this phrase: (Spoiler - click to show)the the City when I first arrived here; I lost myself within its imensity . Overall, it's fairly polished.

I first heard part of this game read by the author after the comp started in the Seattle IF group, and I could still hear his voice while playing it. I enjoyed it. I suppose the only negative to me was that I felt a bit at a distance from the narrative, both mechanically and narratively; it felt like someone else's story. But it was a beautiful one.