Reviews by MathBrush

This is a Texture game, involving dragging commands onto nouns, one of several written in a writing group and entered into IFComp.

This one deals with grief; a loved one is gone, and a letter from her appears and follows you.

I played through twice, one being peaceful and accepting, one being hateful and destructive. I felt like it made a lot more sense the second way. This game has poetic and abstract style, and I didn't connect with it. By that, I mean I would often read a page and feel like I couldn't remember anything I read or anything I felt. The words felt slippery in brain.

Overall I liked the branching paths, but I didn't like how the text often lacked paragraph breaks and sometimes changed font size dramatically from one page to the next; I know that can be a stylistic effect but I couldn't the connection between the text and the font size.

Overall, I like surreal games and enjoyed the 'dark' ending of this. But the formatting and phrasing threw me for a loop.

This is a Twine game with a significant world model. In it, you explore a ship you've crashlanded on which is empty except for an AI named SOLIS.

There are a lot of areas to explore, and you have both an inventory and notes of all important information.

It has puzzles that are honestly complex and can be fairly difficult. The inventory allows for quadratic complexity: you have to be in the right room, and use the right item.

I enjoyed the AI, and felt an attachment to them. The nice thing about IF containing AIs is that the AIs exist in reality, in a sense; the organic characters are just described in words, nothing like their 'true' selves, but the AIs are supposed to be code masquerading as a person and that's what they actually are: code in Twine or Ink or Inform that takes your inputs and reacts to you. It's weird to think about.

Anyway, the game is fairly non-linear and has multiple endings and paths to victory. I think a large chunk of content is the same in each walkthrough, especially conversation, but you can replay those parts with different attitudes.

Navigating back and forth got a bit tedious by the end, but fortunately a new mechanic gets introduced that lets you 'warp' around ((Spoiler - click to show)following the robot).

Overall, I really enjoyed this polished game.

There's a long tradition of games about completing a magical education, including early games like Enchanter and more recent games like Winter at Hogwarts and Junior Arithmancer.

This game is a pretty standard example of the genre, where you have 5 tasks to perform and must search for spell books and ingredients to complete the 5 tasks.

This game uses a custom web parser. It's actually not too bad, being able to handle things like hitting the up arrow to repeat earlier commands and getting a lot of commands I typed right. It does have weaknesses, though, like not understanding pronouns like 'it'.

The nice things about this game include multiple paths to solutions for many puzzles. It has a built-in hint system, but I often found the hints were only available for things I already knew about. I had to check the walkthrough for about 30-40% of the game, and finished at 2 hrs 7 minutes (according to the game's handy timer).

I found several typos in the game, and it wasn't very descriptive. But I had fun with this game, and appreciate how the engine seems to be coming along nicely.

This game is a fairly hefty parser game where a spaceship is sent spiraling off into space with only one person, you, in it.

You have a to-do list that expands and contracts as the game demands. There are a lot of little devices: cabinets, panels, fuses, etc. and a very intricate-seeming fuel injection system.

The puzzles are generally clever. Some of them are moon-logic type puzzles.
As a case in point, very near the end of the game (heavy endgame spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)you find the captain's journal and need to unlock it. The captain has two pictures: one of a dog named Pluto and one of the moon. The idea is that the password is Pluto's moon, Charon. But why would someone, in their own room, make their only personal objects just happen to be an obscure hint for their own password?. But most of the puzzles are fair.

Implementation is sometimes missing but when it's not it's very solid. So a lot of cool objects are implemented (including a large rope) but a lot of scenery objects are just not there or are missing reasonable actions. (For instance, (mild lategame spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)if you unlock the starboard chest, it has wires, but you can't refer to them or interact with them in any way. Similarly, there is an operations console on the bridge which isn't implemented.

I think this is already a good game, but I think with a few tweaks it could become a great game. Maybe there could be a post-comp release with a bit more things written in? Either way, I enjoyed playing this. It was a little unpolished, but had nice puzzles, pretty descriptive, and was enjoyable, and I would replay it if it was tweaked.

So I have to shout out this author for being the first person to release a Gruescript game in a competition outside of Robin Johnson (that I know of). It's a cool language and looks neat.

This is a surreal game where you explore various dreamscapes after having failed at a musical career.

In a contrast to Robin Johnson's puzzle-filled games, this is more of a thoughtful introspection game where you wander around and follow directions given in-text.

I love surreal games in general, and Gruescript is cool, so I have a lot of good feelings in general. The execution needs a lot of work, though. The author says they want to learn, so here are my thoughts on things that could be improved:
-I feel like there could be a little space between the output window and the room description window; it felt a little crowded (I don't know if this is adjustable?)
-Some buttons had underscores (Who_Am_I) and some had spaces; I think it would look better if they were standardized.
-Some options seem like they unintentionally lock the player out of an action; like going south in the very last area and finding the envelope. Even if you don't open it, you can't go back north.
-The writing is descriptive, but it often feels like something's off with punctuation. I had similar problems and always check my games with Grammarly (I promise this isn't an ad lol), may be useful here. by playing through and copying and pasting the output

Overall, I think the game could be substantially improved, so I'm giving a lower score for now, but I definitely think this is promising and would like to see more from this engine and from this author.

This brief Ink game follows two teens, May and Jason, who are graduating soon and preparing to head off to college. They stroll through the woods and discuss their future.

Things start just slightly surreal and go further, but it never seems to shake the protagonists, just like how it is in a dream.

There might be some plot branching, but most of the choices feel like character determination to me, like role-playing, not even necessarily saved as game states.

There was some beautiful imagery in the game, young adults trying to find their place in the world literally represented as a journey through an allegorical world.

It felt a bit disjointed and brief, though. I worried I had skipped a whole chapter when I reached the end of the first act and clicked on a tiny, almost missable 'right arrow' and ended up in a very different place than the last chapter ended. But the table of contents seems to indicate I saw all 3 sections, so I guess the game itself is just a bit smaller than its story could allow.

Overall, a pleasant game to spend time with. According to my rubric, it's polished, descriptive, has good interactivity, and reminded me of pleasant times, but I wouldn't play it again.

This is the third game by Eric Zinda with the Perplexity engine. The first two games were intended to be played with voice, I believe, while this game didn't seem to have the voice option.

The Perplexity engine is still really rough, but each game has been better than the last one. I imagine there's a ton of backend work going on between games, but I think the front-facing part could use a tune-up.

In this game, you explore a bunch of surreal areas, usually involving nature, a deer, and traffic-related imagery.

While the game is a significant improvement over previous entries, it's still pretty rough.

Polish-wise, the game tends to form uncapitalized sentences when using automated descriptions. It is smart enough to answer the question WHERE IS THE _____? but not smart enough to make the output easily understandable. This version seems to understand most traditional IF commands and abbreviations (like X for LOOK AT and I for INVENTORY, which is a big relief.

Descriptiveness-wise, the game has many rooms with a cursory description followed by a list of visual objects, sometimes kind of confusing (like 'A bush, a bush, and a tree').

When it comes to interactivity, the game is mostly fair, but at least one point in the walkthrough asks you to interact with an object that is not visible and doesn't show up in the description of other objects (specifically the (Spoiler - click to show)branch in the mossy log area).

Emotionally, I liked the surreal theme and thought it was cool. The little clues were nice. The other issues made it harder to stay invested but I like the concept.

There's not a ton of replayability, but overall I wasn't sad I played.

This is a very large IFComp parser game where you in a sort of simulation trying to find a 'kernel' of some sorts.

The main area is a giant tree, from which you can eventually find 8 sub-areas. Each sub-area is a simulation of a different part of the world, including the Amazon rainforest, Missouri, Elizabethean England, etc.

Gameplay consists of finding objects in one world and generally using them in another. It can be fun to try and think where one can be used.

Content-wise, everyone has things they like and don't like; while I enjoyed the mini worlds idea quite a bit and some of the sections like the Viking ones, I felt uncomfortable with some of the others. There's some sexual wish-fulfillment in play (like a dominatrix pirate and a harem of succubi), though nothing explicit seems to occur, and there are some cultural moments where I thought it wasn't an entirely respectful depiction or relied on surface-level depictions. At times I feel it reaches too hard (at one point, an extreme not repeated, it even says "they wander off[...]together to figure out what to do with the rest of the wreckage of their miserable lives (this is called "pathos", by the way)."

Overall, the level of polish is high; there were a few sticky situations (like how (Spoiler - click to show)ENTER BAOBAB works but (Spoiler - click to show)ENTER CRACK doesn't in the first room of the Savannah).

I messed around for about an hour on my own, accruing 11 points, then followed the walkthrough. Some of the later puzzles seem to require a great deal of mind-reading, but I suppose there may be more in-game hints if I had reached those points naturally.

Overall, it has a lot of satisfying parser elements. While the tone and characters didn't always reach me emotionally, there is a lot of craftmanship evident. I don't plan on revisiting it, but it is polished, descriptive, and has much good interactivity.

This seems exactly like the kind of game that would be made by a talented and energetic individual who had never played a text adventure made in the last three decades if they woke up one day and said "I'm going to make the coolest text adventure on earth" but didn't have many people test it.

It's a python game with a bunch of actually really good ascii art. It has a maze, randomized combat, some tricky puzzles, art that sometimes changes according to your actions. Seems like everything a text adventure would need.

Except it has very few of the quality-of-life expectations most parser games have, and many of the solutions are poorly hinted.

For instance, on the very first screen, you are around some trees. Commands like N, NORTH, I, INVENTORY, X ME, LOOK ME don't work at all, but that's okay, this is a custom parser so it has no need to follow conventions from other games. Rereading the help text shows that STATUS gives inventory (although I didn't notice this till later). X TREE and EXAMINE TREE don't work, but LOOK TREE does. It turns out you're supposed to (Spoiler - click to show)CLIMB TREE. Once you make it to the next screen, it's not a big jump to (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK PLANE, but now what? After several fruitless minutes, I turn to the guide to discover I should (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK IN POCKET. But why? If the author had had several people try this game out, they would have found quickly that few people would guess this. You can access a HINT that generally helps you, but most people seem to like games to be solvable without HINTS, using them only when stuck.

The randomized maze combat was hard. I was determined to finish this game, although I kept randomly dying (and there is no UNDO and typing the wrong command after dying exits out of the game entirely, and the command for loading a game during the game is different than the command for loading the game after dying and typing the wrong one will also exit the game as will hitting enter just one too many time). Combat is just pressing enter over and over after picking your weapon, and looking at the code the strongest-looking weapons are incredibly weak while the weakest-sounding weapon is the strongest. There are several insta-deaths in the labyrinth as well.

Overall, it looks like it was magnificently fun to code and make the art, but it doesn't seem like a game that was created with a lot of player-side input, and I ended up frustrated. My 1-star rating is not indicative of the effort put into the game or the total amount of fun that can be derived from it, but merely results from the fact that my usual grading rubric (polish, descriptiveness, interactivity, emotional impact, and replayability) evolved from a different style of text adventure than this one.

(Note: for a much more positive review by a different reviewer, see this link: https://intfiction.org/t/b-j-bests-ifcomp-2022-reviews/57995/3?u=mathbrush)

I helped beta test this game.

The idea of this game is that you are part of an alchemical society that possesses the ability to travel back in time. It is your job to go to the very beginning and discover the truth about Cain and his Mark.

The alchemical system in this game is rich. It consists of the four humours (blood, phlegm, etc.), their 'poisons' (substances that counteract them), and a host of other substances. It is accompanied by a gargantuan book with many pages, dozens of them. It's too big to just read straight through, so I strongly recommend NOT taking the book as soon as you get it and looking up every topic you see; the game will guide you in using the book later on.

The main gameplay is unlocking memories of Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel through alchemical means, gathering more ingredients, and learning the mystery of this early world. Often you will told a formula you need, but for which you lack an ingredient or two and must find them.

There are some tricky puzzles I struggled with as a tester, including mechanical puzzles and flashes of intuition.

The game has a darker tone to it; this is an unhappy and grim retelling of Cain and Abel's already grim story. It doesn't conform to my personal beliefs, but it's clear this is a work of fiction and a well-written one at that.