Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is an entry in the 2022 French IFComp written in Ink. It starts off in an intense situation in a haunted house before flashing back to 'how it all started'.

It includes several possible relationships, the possibility of death for you and others, and a lot of state tracking. A typical portion of gameplay is reaching a room or series of rooms with the option of looking at several different sub areas. In each sub area, you can grab an object to use or attempt some kind of action. Keys are common.

The storyline and puzzles are satisfyingly good; I think both could stand to be improved and rely too heavily on tropes. However, I found the characters interesting and the puzzles much more fun than most Ink games.

There are few bugs (I think I found one about a drawer being stuck but it tells you what's in it anyway?). Overall, I found it mostly polished, pretty descriptive, interesting interactivity, emotional impact from exciting scenes, but probably won't play again.

This is a French IFComp game.

I think a lot of the interesting parts of this game come from the first few moments, so I'll put most of the review in spoilers in case you want to try it out real quick. I can say that it should be apparent fast what is going on, and that the first few seconds are interesting, and that the comma in the game title is not a typo.

(Spoiler - click to show)This is a game where you have to type out journal entries over several 'days'. The twist is that the entries are pre-determined: you have to guess what someone would type in a journal and hope that you're typing what they want you to. Every character you get wrong (including punctuation!) deducts a point. Every correct word adds a point up to 50. When you lost all 50 points, you have to restart that day.

The game doesn't last too long, so it can be completed in one sitting. This was intimidating, though, as a non-native speaker, but there are mechanics that help with that over time. The game did pull a couple of tricks on m though.

+Polish: The game is very polished.
+Interactivity: It was weird and I don't think it would work for other games, but I liked it in this one.
-Descriptiveness: The actual text was quite vague.
+Emotional impact: I was impressed by the cleverness.
-Would I play again? Not much replay value.

This French IF Comp game has you sent as a spy to an alchemists lair to search for evidence of misdeeds.

You are equipped with a camera of sorts to take images of suspicious things. There are several secrets to find and a few hints of world-building.

This is written in the Donjon language, a native French language alternative to Inform 7 but also done in natural language. The file can be read in plain text, which I had to resort to to solve it.

My experience with the implementation was mixed. Playing IF in a language I'm not completely fluent in is always a challenge. It was hard to tell if something was implemented weird or if I was the one who was being weird.

But here are a few things that I think are definitely the game's issue:
-Several nouns are mentioned but not implemented. For instance, a desk has notes on it, but the game doesn't recognize 'notes'. In the end game, there are (Spoiler - click to show)chains but trying to 'regarder' them or 'prendre' them makes the game confused.
-There's a big issue with the 'taking' code: (Spoiler - click to show)the source code has special results if you 'deplacer' the rug or the alembic, but the game also lets you just 'prendre' those things without triggering the special event.
-Many objects have an adjective+noun name, but you have to type both. I became deeply frustrated with a 'livre verte' because I couldn't P Livre or P Verte.

So, overall, I thought the worldbuilding was cool and the camera device. But the frustration prevented a totally enjoyable experience.

Edit: as a side note, I had a little trouble due to my silly american keyboard not having any accent symbols. I got around it by copying and pasting words from the text, though.

This is a well-coded TADS game about coming to grab your things from an empty house after a divorce.

Play primarily revolves around exploration and discovery of key items that advance the story in some way.

The theme is about divorce, loss, and 'what might have been?' I took these themes seriously, as I am recently divorced and could understand some of what the narrator was going through.

This is a pretty messy divorce, though. Unhealthy events and actions abound. The narrator is regretful, of course, but regret can only take you so far, and I think that's one of the main themes here.

Overall, the mechanics and story work for me, but there are a few sticking points here and there. I had a lot of difficulty getting started. The game provides no hints, and takes the position that players should take careful notes and that some info won't be repeated. I figured things out in the end but I was frustrated (spoiler for main mechanic: (Spoiler - click to show)more specifically, I noticed that some objects wouldn't go through the shadow, so I thought none could, and didn't try taking the soil through. I thought I had left the shards behind and the pot appeared, so it too me a while to realize what was going on).

For the story, I felt like things were perhaps spelled out a bit too much for my personal taste. This is a real, visceral story, but I feel like a lot of art that I find 'magnificent' has a sort of ambiguity to it that allows you to draw many interpretations from it. Having our feelings and reactions to everything and the 'meaning' of it all spelled out at the end felt somewhat restrictive.

Overall, I think people who play this will be pleased, especially for those looking for mild but non-trivial puzzles mixed with emotional storytelling.

This game takes the classic, depressing/sacrifical tale of the little matchgirl and uses it as a setting for a larger story.

In the original story, each match a girl lit gave her another vision of brighter things. In this game, each match is used to teleport to the user to...whatever location Ryan was interested in talking about that day?

The overall puzzle structure is fairly lenient; it is generally a fetch quest, and each task can almost always be solved by brute force, but has internal logic.

+Polish: The game is smooth. I had a couple of issues with synonyms here and there (literally can't remember what, but it was me typing dumb stuff), but the vast majority of possible actions I tried worked great.
+Descriptiveness: Very clear and easily envisioned settings and characters.
+Interactivity: The quest structure is simple, but I felt allowed to go off the rails at times.
+Emotional impact: It didn't have quite the gut punch of the original, but was more fun.
+Would I play again? Sure!

I think this will end my journey through the iterative puzzle games in this series. I hesitated last game due to some graphic material (a dwarf that was (Spoiler - click to show)hanging by a noose), and this game includes some drug-related activity; put together, it feels like a kind of humor I'm not into, kind of like the Unnkulia series from the early 90's.

This iteration is much more reserved than the last. It adds a few simple items to a previously empty area in the midgame. Again, it can be difficult to figure out which commands to use. I feel like the previous episode may be better overall.

Edit: I see the next one's tagline is 'can you polish a turd' so I feel justified in assuming this vein of humor will continue.

I suppose I should say that this game might need a warning for either suicide or lynching, depending on how you interpret it (there is a (Spoiler - click to show)dwarf hanging from a noose), which honestly felt unnecessary.

This update adds a very large area with interesting mechanics including scoopable items, an NPC with several requirements, timed actions, and flame. However, very precise commands are required. I had to decompile the game to discover that the necessary command for an important action was (Spoiler - click to show)BURN something WITH FLAME and not just BURN SOMETHING).

However, that whole dwarven area can be skipped. I didn't even know what the purpose of it was till I decompiled; apparently its final item (the (Spoiler - click to show)axe) is meant to solve the puzzle of the (Spoiler - click to show)nest with a doorknob in it, which you have to cut down, but you can just take that object directly.

That said, this is a pretty significantly large game now. It's pretty rough with implementation and needs polishing (several beta testers would have helped) but has come a long way from the original game, which was just two rooms with a locked door and a key.

This iterative game series (each building on the one before it) has gotten to some pretty clever puzzles. I especially enjoy the puzzle that leads to (mild spoilers (Spoiler - click to show)the axe).

Implementation issues are rife, though. To complete it, I had to use the follow non-standard verbs (moderate spoilers): (Spoiler - click to show)SNIP, use BLANK with BLANK, and POUR.

While the increasing puzzle size has made the game quite a bit more enjoyable, I almost with we were seeing multiple levels of polish and implementation instead, with less and less bugs and more fanciness. But the problem with that is that minimalist content is easy to add; its complexity is linear, with a small change in size requiring a small change in coding. But smooth programming is quadratic; making a very polished game requires coding in tons of interactions between different items and things, adding responses to everything players try, getting a lot of testers, etc. So I'm not sure it would work in practice to show that through a series of games.

This edition of the iterative series (each adding new material to the previous game) adds quite a few new rooms and makes previous interactions require more direct input.

However, most of the new rooms are quite sparse, and the new syntax for things isn't always clear (for instance, it took me a while to figure out how to use the (Spoiler - click to show)grabber). Also, it includes exits that are indicated in the status bar but not the text, which I find annoying in most games. Overall, though, I'm still interested in seeing what's next.

This edition of the iterative game series (each one building on the code of the last) improves on the premise by including a new reactive NPC (Rex, a dog who follows you) and incorporating light and a dark subterranean area.

There are still unfixed bugs or quality of life issues from the past that likely won't get fixed in future updates (like 'bathroom' being lower case or disambiguation issues with keys), but it's pretty fun seeing all the things you can do.

As an individual game, 2 stars. As part of the series, 3 stars.