Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is a story about cleaning out your mother's house after she died. As you explore the house, you discover little secrets and memories here and there, piecing together a larger puzzle.

It's a melancholy game, and has some nice voice acting. The pacing of the voice acting is interesting; only the text in quotes is read out loud, but if there is narrative text between quotes then there is a space in the audio, which I can only presume is to give people a time to catch up. So it kind of presupposes the reader's reading speed, but it worked generally well for me.

The story is sad, overall, but in some ways bittersweet. One of the scenes hints at the MC being trans, but I don't believe that's related to the overall sadness.

I don't use headphones and play IF around others, usually, so I had to schedule special times to play this, but I do feel the audio effects were positive and contributed to the story.

It includes a puzzly element at the end that provided some good interaction, and exploring worked well earlier on.

I helped beta-test this game.

This game uses a custom parser first developed in Kidney Kwest, but with a twist: it's intended to be played entirely vocally.

The parser encourages you to use full sentences (so 'open door' might throw a warning that it's better to say 'open the door'). It also is designed from the ground up and seems to involve a lot of built-in systems. So, for instance, asking about the location of a thing will usually tell you what room it's in, what region it's in, etc. Due to this systematic nature, sometimes the game will omit capitalization or punctuation, but this usually not detectable in the voice version. A final issue is saying 'put Time on [anything]' (a phrase I said a lot because in my accent Time sounds like Tom to the computer), the parser says 'a bottom is not on a time'.

The game itself is simple, and gives you a lovely tutorial that shows you how the whole system works. The tutorial is, itself, a small game. The larger game is mostly interacting with things: doors, keys, containers.

When I beta tested, I completed the game, although it seems to have been expanded since then. This time I believe I got locked in an unwinnable state since I (Spoiler - click to show)left the baby in the car and went inside, and the car took off without me. Overall, I think this technology is interesting and must have been very complex to program.

This is a mid-length Twine game where you play as a visitor to some standing stones who is sucked into the ground and deposited in a strange room.

Gameplay is mostly based on exploration, inventory and examination. There is a bizarre, alien world to explore.

Overall, the concept was interesting, but I had friction in random places. There was a ton of profanity for no real reason (the game starts with a few screens of just the F-word over and over again), each page had an animation before the next page which was cool at first but slowly wore out its welcome, and a lot of choices were hard to strategize with (like choosing left or right in a featureless corridor, or only having one option)).

I definitely felt some atmosphere from the writing, and that was to me the biggest success in this story. It gave me Brian David Gilbert vibes so I start listening to some of his songs while playing.

P.B. Parjeter is an author best known for complex twine works, usually long and intricate. This seems to be the first parser game by this author.

You play as Bigfoot's kid, a sasquatch on a mission to expose your father to the world by photographing him and other cryptids. You explore a park while working on your master plan.

It's quite a bit more solid than most first parser games by authors who already know twine. I didn't see many, if any, capitalization or punctuation errors. There were a couple of things I think could be polished (like using custom appearance text for items and a smoother introduction of some items in the initial scene).

What goes write is the creative and inventive puzzles, and the forgiving point system where you only have to get 60 points to win. That means that if you're beating your head against a particularly tricky puzzle or having trouble getting the parser to listen in one section, you can just skip it. So I skipped all the light puzzles and the ants.

The game lists several parser authors as beta testers, which may help explain why the game is so well put together for a first author. I can only expect that the remaining rough edges would be fixed up in a subsequent game as the author gained more experience. Overall, I had fun with this game.

I beta tested this game.

The Box is written in a new parser engine designed by Winters, which includes a hybrid form (like Dialog or Gruescript) allowing most of the game to be played by clicking links.

This is a literal puzzlebox. After a brief intro, you wake up in a cell with a mysterious box in front of you with 5 different puzzles or sets of puzzles belonging to each of the visible sides. Clues and aides are hidden throughout the rest of the room.

I found the puzzles generally fair and engaging. It includes a cryptogram which I generally find less engaging in IF, since they have standard solution algorithms that aren't directly integrated into game play, but I appreciated the smoothness of this one. I enjoyed the light-based puzzles and the numeric one the most, and perhaps the final puzzle.

The framing story is brief but well done. As a demonstration of language capabilities, it certainly seems like a strong parser engine, which is very difficult to do. It didn't capture my emotional fancy, but other than that it is a solid and well-done game.

I have a bit of trouble writing a review for this game, as the first couple of times I started it I realized I hadn't retained any information after several screens worth of material. I kept retrying it to help it sink in but it was like water in a sieve.

Eventually, though, the game began to have a pseudo-computer interface in an older style (the year 1999 is mentioned). You have been assigned a computer therapist called 'Computerfriend' whose job is to analyse your mental state and help you make better choices.

I tended to go along with what the computer said, and ended up with ending 2/6.

This game is one for which trigger warnings are especially beneficial. It contains (Spoiler - click to show)messages urging you to suicide.

Overall, the game was polished and effective in communicating emotion. However, like I said, I had difficulty retaining anything I read; having played it is more like trying to remember a dream after waking up.

This is a story intended for beginners, and I believe may be the author's first published game.

It's a brief parser game with a dog protagonist. You have been hurried away from your regular home and, in the tussle lost the ball.

There is a larger overarching plot, where (very early spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)the reason you are shuttered away is because bombs are dropping in Ukraine. This makes for a dramatic storyline, and what started as a personal search for a ball becomes something more selfless, urgent and important.

The game uses a fun mechanic where 'smell' is as important as 'look'.

There are some errors, mostly things that are difficult to deal with in Inform (like extra punctuation and capitalization). Other than that, this is a surprisingly smooth game with a story that ended up feeling nice.

This is a visually very nice game, and funny, too.

It's a short twine game where you play as a crow with an attitude and intentionally bad spelling (basically 'no u' times 100). Your attitude, is, in fact, measured, and you 'win' by getting the highest attitude.

We played this in the Seattle If Meetup and I played it after, as well.

It's fairly brief, and amusing. It seems to have some kind of randomization or procedural generation, as you can get different events on different playthroughs.

There's some mild profanity. Overall, it's not too long so if the above sounds appealing, try it out.

This is a game written in Squiffy, which is based on the engine that Quest uses but is choice-based.

You play as someone who walked away from a relationship and is going cross country on late-night/early-morning busses.

It does a good feel of evoking that wistful travel feeling when you've left something behind and are passing by other people's lives, people you'll never see again but feel important in the moment.

Unfortunately, there is one passage that contains no links to any other passages (in a section on a movie), and this makes the game no longer possible to play. It's possible to fix this by opening the game up in a text editor and adding a link to the next passage. I didn't do so, but read ahead.

Overall, thoughtful and musing. I wish there were a way to tell which links were exploratory and which links moved the story forward.

This is an interesting experiment, reminicscent of Heaven's Vault or Short's First Draft of the Revolution, but I think it falls a bit short from both.

You plays as a translator, given glyphs in the ancient language of Asemia. Clicking on glyphs gives you other glyphs. After you go to the next page or two, a translation appears.

Asemia was a place of hard things, where people died and soldiers destroyed. The music and the extra-translatory dialogue also deals with this.

To me, the biggest difficulty I had was in the obfuscatory interactivity. What does clicking do? The same glyphs and stories came up multiple times, sometimes with different translations, and sometimes with the same. Do my actions, cycling through glyphs, change the output, or do you automatically get different results each time?

And it just doesn't make sense from a translation viewpoint. The glyphs you cycle through are very distinct from each other, so it's not like you are trying to guess what different words are in the language. It would make more sense to cycle through the translation of a fixed glyph, like Heaven's Vault does.

I'm sure there could be a deeper meaning to everything, but I didn't find it. Lovely visuals and graphics, though, and the writing is solid.