Reviews by MathBrush

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.

It's nice to see Chandler Groover experimenting with the Fallen London format. He is known for his Exceptional Stories, and has a very loyal fan base on the Discord, with people saying things like this:

"I'd go as far as to say that groover is the only writer who consistently captures the mystery and beauty of the setting"

"I’m trying to find what I’m thinking of, but my suggestion is really based on the quality of groover’ s writing and also the focus on the everyday person that reveals some deeper truth about the universe"

"Chandler Groover, author of several fan favourite Exceptional Stories, typically agreed to Never Miss"

With that kind of praise, there's a lot of pressure, and it would be easy to fall into repetitive patterns. But I found this story to be pretty different than his others, so much so that I had no idea it was him until the end.

In this story, a magician's assistant is missing, a crocodile is loose in the sewers of London and you must stop it! This includes a sizable segment that is a complex maze, something I never thought I'd see in any Groover story ever, and especially not in Fallen London, a text-based narrative that tends to gloss over movement. This story also has puzzles involving large machines with moving parts.

During your journey, your goals shift, and you end up acquiring a large amount of materials (through the sewers) for a big project. This was a fun excursion, because it lets you see many of the more mundane or boring parts of Fallen London (like the shops in the Bazaar tab) through a fresh perspective as you tunnel into them from below, often finding bizarre leftovers from previous times or hidden-away secrets. The scenes in Mahogany Hall were really effective for me.

The story gets even more strange in the end, becoming almost mythological and filled with guts and animals. It all feels large and epic, but I didn't quite grasp it all. I think that's good, though; I wouldn't want to grasp all of it.

To be honest, the maze didn't really work for me completely, but I enjoy the innovation and would rather see further experimentation like this than a retread of old things. Definitely a memorable story.

As a side note, parts of this gave me flashbacks to All Dogs Go to Heaven, where the sewer crocodile horrified me as a child.

This story, an Exceptional story for Fallen London (a bonus chunk of content for paid suscribers), takes place on the Zee, and in part feels like an exploration of that part of the game's content (which was recently expanded).

You are in search of the heir of a rich family. She was last seen with the Circumcelion Brotherhood, a group of brawling monks who hope to get murdered and have after-death experiences before being brought back by Fallen London's general resurrection mechanics.

The main character in this has a lot of personality, and is the main attraction of this story, but otherwise there's not a lot here to distinguish it from other tales of the Zee. If you're interested in brawling monks and tough women then it's worth checking out.

This is an exceptional story, a sizable 'bonus' story provided for those who pay for Fallen London.

This one deals with the devils, a faction in Fallen London that is quite distinct from devils as typically portrayed. This group is a little out of sync with the rest of the world (generally having fashions from twenty years in the future), and are very interested in people's souls but also in creating and altering the laws of reality in bizarre ways.

Some Londoners reacted negatively to the presence of the devils and fought a disastrous war with them. The game has frequently referenced this war and its horrifying outcomes (through different stories involving Bishops and more recently with the Great Hellbound Railway, especially Moulin), but hasn't dedicated many stories to detailed events of the war.

In this story, you meet a manservant of a prince, a servant who fought in the war and is now afflicted by having some body parts replaced with plants (thus, the cover picture of the story). This manservant works with the Bellicose Prince, a child of Queen Victoria who, like most the other children, was (strong spoilers for those who haven't seen royal family stories) (Spoiler - click to show)altered by the use of tainted red honey into a gross monster.(Spoiler - click to show)

This story takes a lot of twists and turns and really is an exploration of war, survivor's guilt, PTSD, and trauma. Like most great fantasy or horror, it uses an extraordinary situation to examine ordinary feelings in a new light.