Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

In this game, you crash-land near an abandoned arctic station and have to find your way to civilization.

I was worried at first, as playing a commodore 64 game in a foreign language seemed daunting. But the game actually has a great layout emphasizing important items and directions, and had many simple shortcuts to make the game easier.

There could be some improvements overall; the game is fairly short, not a lot is explained, and there's at least one typo I noticed. But I definitely appreciate the simplicity and it had a cute animal NPC.

This is an Exceptional Story, a bonus piece of content for subscribers which can also be purchased by itself at a premium.

This story centers on spiders. There are a variety of spiders in Fallen London, from the sorrow-spiders that hatch in eyeballs to their larger cousins like spider councils or senates, huge beings formed from conglomerates of smaller ones.

This features the spiders of Vesture, a kingdom on the Elder Continent. Fallen London takes place in a giant cavern called the Neath, which has a variety of locales (such as Hell). The Elder Continent often seems to intentionally evoke North Africa as well as Eden, and is connected with immortality and life.

Vesture is a kingdom made of an alliance between spiders and humans. This story examines that connection, entangling you in a royal family's dispute about how to handle the death of a great, vast spider and the fallout that will bring. Family loyalty and tradition vs progress are the main themes.

I enjoyed the story, but felt a little constrained. There are some very meaningful choices (including a permanent companion and very different endings), but I didn't feel like I really shaped the story, mostly witnessing someone else's story and stepping in at the last moment. I prefer the exceptional stories where you take a more prominent role, even if it's all still scripted.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, a kind of content that comes out once a month to people with a subscription, or can be purchased later for a significantly heavier cost.

This story has a quite charming premise. The city of Fallen London is ruled by Masters, hooded, alien figures that each have a different 'domain'. Much of the progress in Fallen London's main storylines centers on the Masters and how much you know about them, so info on them is generally considered rare and precious.

This story focuses on Mr Stones, whose domain is all things beautiful, especially diamonds.

A smuggler needs help with a diamond and Mr Stones. But instead of robbing him of a diamond, he wants you to 'plant' a diamond from the surface. Why? Because (Spoiler - click to show)it's a cursed diamond, one that brought empires to downfall. Specifically, it's the Hope Diamond. Things go wrong, though, and you end up trapped with the smuggler, a furious Mr Stones, and a clay golem-turned-Quaker, kind of like a bottle episode of a sitcom.

You can end up learning quite a bit about Mr Stones himself, probably the biggest backstory reveal we've ever had on him and just about the deepest possible level of lore.

Mechanically, there were options to try to save certain people and whether to trust or betray. It was generally satisfying, and I think this one is worth playing, but overall it didn't exceptionally stick out. This may be due to the overall high quality recently.

This game is custom-written in C++, and has you wake up on a ship that is malfunctioning. You have to figure out what's wrong with the ship and repair it.

Pros: The game has lush and vivid descriptions, and has an interesting environment with generally logical and often physics-based puzzles.

Drawbacks: The implementation of some synonyms and nouns is lacking somewhat. As a non-native speaker, I often just put the wrong words in, but I frequently found commands that worked in other German games didn't work here (like 'hinab'). Furthermore, when I was super lost, I discovered the code was public, including some test walkthroughs, and in those test playthroughs the testers tried the exact same things I did, which means the author was aware of the problems and either could not or chose to fix them, leaving the implementation a bit choppy.

A problem for non-native speakers like me (not factored into the score) is that there are a ton of non-useful items cluttering up each room, with a single useful item in most rooms. So you might have an exercise room with a cardio machine, stationary bike, weights, etc. each with a long paragraph worth of description, but only one of them has anything useful on it. So I found this quite difficult to play, whereas a native speaker would have a much easier time. It made me think about how my English games could be improved for non-native speakers.

This game takes place in a small apartment after you have moved in with your wife Laura. Most of the house is filled with packed boxes.

This game is remarkable for what it doesn't tell you, kind of like 9:05 in several ways. I've played several games by this author before that I felt like were rich and vivid. In contrast, this game is stark and minimalistic.

Essentially, you're trying to fall asleep but you feel a bit agitated. You need to find ways to calm yourself. There's a timer before you have to wake up at 7.

In the middle of the night, things change. You're awoken by a disturbance and need to investigate it.

I imagined that this would open up new areas to explore, but it didn't, really. Instead, careful exploration is required and you need to think about what kind of things would work logically for you in this situation.

In the end, the game was very polished, purposely non-descriptive, had interesting interactivity but didn't really connect with me emotionally. I could see myself playing again.

Note: I had to decompile to figure out some actions.

This German game has an English version, Wry, which was entered into Spring Thing and which was well-received.

I actually enjoyed this version a bit more, which I guess, for me, lends credence to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. I really appreciated how the game led you on on what to do, and how responsive it was, in general. In addition, I saw less of the ribald fantasies in this version, as I knew less commands to try out lol.

There were a couple of minor issues; looking at the wall gave a response in English ("On the wall above the sofa hang several pictures"), and X BILDER still lists a young lady being among the pictures even when the canvas has slipped out. But overall, I found this enjoyable and fresh.

I played this game for quite a long time. This is a German Grand Prix competition game from 2022.

It's a downloadable executable that requires an up-to-date version of .NET. It's written in German, and is a custom parser game that contains 6 different windows, each with clickable links (one is the main story, one is constant links and directions, another is all objects in the room, another is inventory, another is a static room description).

The idea is that the whole game can be done either through typing or through link choices. Each object has its own set of links. Overall, it made play simpler, but frequently this led to an overabundance of links. For instance, most rooms had 7 or more furniture objects that did not matter in the gameplay. And many links were redundant. For instance, 'climb on top of' and 'get down' and 'go to' links were always there but never seemed to be used.

The story is that you are hunting Phoney, a 'hamberder' loving man who leaves behind bankruptcy claims and red hats to go through a portal where he rules an island through 'Phoneyvision'. Phoneyvision makes everything seem better than it really is. For instance, his wife is reality is a sticky blow-up doll, but in Phoneyvision she's a model.

Unfortunately, Phoneyvision only seems to work in two locations for most of the game. I had to restart once because I used phoneyvision in the wrong place and entered a void containing nothing but a rotten hamburger. I feel like it's a bit of a missed opportunity.

Gameplay mostly revolves around surviving a grim and darkly humorous world populated by parodies of Trump's associates, such as the cannibal ghoul that is also Trump's lawyer, or the poisoner/tax-collector named Middlefinger (not sure who this one's a reference to). Rotten food, mean-spirited pranks, and general filth and decay abound.

The UI has a replay option to allow you to go back to any time in your story, but every time I used it it got stuck in the first room of the replay. I tried saving, but when I closed the program and re-opened it my save wasn't there.

Overall, I think the engine is impressive but could be improved. This is part 1 of a four part story. I don't really enjoy mean-spirited humor, and felt frustrated with both my bad German and trying to understand the game's puzzles, but this game stuck in my brain so I played it for several days, getting help from the author. I'm rating it as '2-10 hours long' in my classification system, but a native speaker might finish it sooner.

This Adventuron game takes full advantage of the system's graphical capabilities. It has excellent pixel art for a multitude of characters and mini-games.

You play as a young sentient animal on a spaceship. You want to be a star, so you go around the ship talking to others and getting advice.

Most interactivity is in the form of riddles or puzzles. There is a language-to-language duolingo-like game for learning languages, a graph theory problem, a logic puzzle, a cryptogram, math problems, etc.

An immense effort has been put into this game. Unfortunately for me, most of it was put into the areas that I am not quite as interested in. As for the main play, there are some frustrations. For instance, typing LOOK won't bring up the room description again, so you have to leave and come back to find out who's there. There is a chicken wing tree, but after you pluck one off and try to eat it it acts like you don't have it. There are occasional typos that distract. Overall, I had fun, but I think the very high production quality of the rest of the game gave me higher expectations for the text-based part.

The art is the best part of the game, with good shading and 3d perspectives.

This game was entered into the 2022 Text Adventure Literacy Jam. It has some lovely illustrations and uses the Adventuron engine.

You've lost your pet dog and have to explore a spooky mansion. A tutorial helps you out to get started. Most puzzles revolve around EXAMINing things and TALKing to people. There are a lot of cute characters, like philosophical skeletons and silly pumpkins.

It's not too long, but some of the puzzles were moderately challenging. One lasted a little bit longer than I would have wished, but overall this is one of the strongest games in the competition.

Garry Francis is a prolific author, specializing in text adventures with a focus on puzzles and core parser gameplay (like GET/DROP/etc.). This game and the other one he released in the same competition (The Carpathian Vampire) show a lot of growth in implementation and puzzle design.

This is one of the smoothest games of the comp. You play as a koala who is also a bushfire warden for the surrounding wildlife. You have to provide for yourself and all those around you.

The main charm in this game is the vivid descriptions of australian wildlife and plants, with background action happening (like skinks crossing your path), a garden area with tons of plants, and puzzles revolving around Australian wildlife.

I think this is pretty great, and was glad to play it. My one desire might be for a couple of additional things to implement for consistency. One puzzle, for instance, was only solved by (Spoiler - click to show)the verb ASK [person] ABOUT [something], while a later puzzle had a character (the owl) who didn't respond to ASK OWL ABOUT [topic] for most topics that mattered; instead, this was a TALK TO puzzle, which was somewhat inconsistent with the earlier puzzles.