Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

There is a long tradition of big Lovecraftian games in IF (Theatre, Anchorhead, The King of Shreds and Patches, Lydia's Heart, Ecdysis, etc.) This is one of the most recent such entries, and one I beta tested.

The setting is that you are moving to a new city for a scholarship at a foreign university. You move into an old, isolated house and all sorts of strange occurrences start to happen.

This is a sprawling game, including big locations (including a town and a village), and includes complicated set-piece puzzles like big machines and run-ins with cultists.

Overall, there's a rich background and detailed writing. To me, the thing I struggled with the most was the pacing. Some major events take place as almost-instantaneous cutscenes, especially early on, while more mundane things get dragged out unnecessarily at times. Still, this is a solid and enjoyable game, and I can recommend it to people looking for more good Lovecraftian games.

I beta tested this game.

This is a pretty long choice-based game with an expansive map. Each room has about 1 puzzle on average. The majority of the puzzles are the same: The screen is divided into 4 invisible stripes. Moving your mouse up and down will cue an animation filling that stripe (generally a sound wave) and play a sound. One sound will be different from the others; you must click that one.

There are other puzzles from time to time.

In addition, there are save terminals and other points that play scenes from the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc while a synthetic voice reads text in a heavy french accent.

The idea is that an AI company cloned/re-made Joan of Arc to use for commercial benefit, but things went wrong. You learn more as the game progresses, of course.

There are enemies, and defeating them drops 'bits' that you can use to buy shortcuts.

It's really clever and polished, and very descriptive. But the interactivity is a bit tedious, especially when re-crossing an area over and over again. For that reason, I've never fully replayed it after testing, but played the first few rooms again before writing this review.

This series of games starts with a simple puzzle in the first entry (just a locked door) but adds puzzles every time.

This entry is quite complex compared to earlier entries, with a broad map, numerous tools and items, an NPC, easter eggs, etc.

However, some bugs and typos have crept in, like 'bathroom' being lower case and some synonyms not being set (like for the (Spoiler - click to show)safe, where 'set' and 'turn' don't work but 'turn' does).

So the game isn't polished, but it is more descriptive and compelling than the others.

This version of the Locked Door series (which adds more and more puzzles to the original) introduces the first real puzzle, although its fairly simple.

Rather than the original two rooms, there are now 5, with one room included in another.

There was a bug in this one, where trying to (Spoiler - click to show)open the crate without (Spoiler - click to show)the crowbar will (Spoiler - click to show)increase the score and partially act like you have the crowbar but not open. Given the smallness of the game, I think it could have been error-free.

This game is part of an iterative series, where every new episode builds on the last.

This one adds an NPC and requires a single somewhat complex interaction, as well as making the final room one step longer. It's reasonably well polished, and I was amused/intrigued by the iterative concept, making it more emotionally impactful than the first.

This game is essentially one of the coding examples from the Inform manual. It consists of two rooms, one with a locked door and a key. There are no real surprises; decompiling shows no hidden content.

The game is polished, but is not descriptive, has little interactivity, low emotional impact, and I wouldn't really play again. According to my rating system, it's 1 star.

This is a fairly abstract Ink game (and one that I helped beta test).

In it, you play as a college student roped into a demonstration about Smart Theory. The speaker goes off for quite a while about smart theory, and you can choose between making snarky comments, playing along or being passive.

The Smart Theory is a parody of political theories. As presented, it could apply to both American political parties. Some digs seem aimed at one specific side (for instance, the huckster is selling a book called Dumb Fragility, which from the in-game explanation seems like a riff on liberals talking about white fragility), but it could apply to just about any political theory.

Overall, it has several humorous moments and works smoothly. However, I thought the random nonsense words didnt' work as well (like Bathcunk) and would have preferred more chances to act.

This is an ink game in six chapters, each around 4 or 5 choices long. Each choice gives a page full of material.

You are an artist filled with self-doubt. You won a competition, earning you prize money and using that to get to Rome, but once there you have no inspiration for your painting.

Every where you go, two creatures follow you: one light, one dark. You have to choose who to feed.

There are 5 endings. One ending is the 'true path', containing almost 50% more material than the others; one is the worst path, containing much less content than any other. I reached all endings except for 'balanced'.

I enjoyed the vivid descriptions of art in Rome, and looked up a bunch of them (I especially enjoyed the garden of monsters). The self-doubt in a creative artist was familiar to me as a writer.

At times I found the long pages and rich text a bit wearying, so I took a couple of weeks to play the game, doing a couple of screens at a time. Once I played through once, though, playing again only took 30 minutes or so.

Lovely musings on art. For anyone seeking the 'best' ending, what worked for me was (Spoiler - click to show)feeding the dark creature on odd chapters and light creature on even chapters

This is a recent game from Choice of Games set at a magical university. You are an adopted scion of a powerful mafia figure, and you have been sent to a college that offers majors in both mundane and magical areas. You are encouraged to join a group of 3 magical fraternities while you go to class, meet friends and work at a magical coffee shop.

There's a lot going on here. The writing itself flows well, with some standout characters and intricate worldbuilding.

One steam review mentioned like it felt like too many storylines were going on at once, and I agree with that. While the college, fraternity, and coffee storylines meshed well, the mafia felt more or less tacked-on. It provided some useful worldbuilding backstory, but it gave the effect of the author mashing two games into one, at least to me.

The game had compelling goals that I wanted to achieve, but I found making my way there muddy. I was frequently told I did bad at things but still managed to get in the frat and get a 4.0 my first semester. I was told I bombed every final next semester but still got a 3.0.

I focused on 2 skills exclusively (with a 73 in spirit stuff and 53 in thaumaturgy), but failed every test involving thaumaturgy. My game ended completely abruptly at the end where I had a single choice with no buildup and clicked what I thought was a spirit option but was apparently the wrong thing, instantly negating every success I had more before by just killing me with a 1 page epilogue that didn't wrap up anything.

Part of the difficulty was overlapping stats; I could never distinguish between Spontaneity and Adaptability, or between Honesty, Determination and Principled. I never even noticed the 'skills' section (communications, creativity, insight, and scholarship), and am not sure how those could be adjusted or checked.

Overall, though, the worldbuilding and writing quality pulled this one through for me. But I kept putting it down when frustrated and took a couple of weeks to play.

Recommended only for fans of magical academia and mob stories.

This game has you try to encounter 13 different phobias as you explore a small area with some woods and a bar.

The range of possible phobias is pretty big and I learned some new ones (like halophobia and ailuriphobia).

This game is written with PunyInform, a version of Inform shrunk down so that compiled files can run on smaller/retro devices.

However, it doesn't take full advantage of the platform, and is weak in many areas. For instance, there are shelves that have several items on them, as seen from decompiling the code. However, X SHELVES, SEARCH SHELVES, and LOOK ON SHELVES all show them as empty. As another example, the barman tells you to 'try buying <a certain item in the game>'. But BUY <the item> doesn't work. There were many such frustrations with the code. There is one person listed in credits who might have been a tester, but this could have used more testing.

-Polish: There is some rough implementation and some bugs.
+Descriptiveness: The setting is mundane, but the phobias were interesting.
-Interactivity: I felt frustrated by the responsiveness.
-Emotional impact: The storyline and fears didn't really draw me in.
+Would I play again? It's an interesting concept, and I never found 4 of the fears.