Reviews by MathBrush

Now that Adrift games play online through parchment, I've been enjoying them a lot more than before.

This is an old Spring Thing game that is really very long, spread out over many years with significant puzzles and challenges in each time segment.

You are a superhero sidekick. Your boss can change shape into anything, while you can only change the shape of your hand. You also have a friend named Waterfall, a kind of overly-sexualized woman whose body is made of water.

Your main enemy is named Potter, a villain who can make sentient clay creatures.

The plotline has a lot of good elements. The paragraph-by-paragraph writing and the coding could use the help of a good editor. Near the end I was hit with a weird bug where events and conversations were printed before the room descriptions. Overall, though, this was a pretty solid story.

This was a Spring Thing game in the year I started participating in IF (2015), but I never played it originally.

It's a poem that seems to have a lot of autobiographical parts (although of course it could just be written that way). Lines of the poem can change if hovered over or clicked, and icons can appear, or words change into icons or images.

The poem (and some prose elements) is about Doggerland, a place in Northern Europe that is now submerged under water. The game also mentions things like IVF, body dysphoria (briefly), global warming, etc.

I thought it was really well done. There is one choice, as far as I saw, but a lot of interactivity.

In this Ren'py game, you play as an author who is trying to write a story about a human child and a dragon whelp.

You make choices on how to write the story, but eventually you get stuck, so you go back and write something different.

This ends up mostly being a binary tree, which you can view on a map, although there are some convergences. It turns out though that you can get ideas in one branch that unlock new options in another.

There is a lot of sameness in trying to lawnmower every branch, and having both story text and commentary on the bottom meant I often forgot to read the commentary. But the main story was cute and I liked the overall concept.

This game looked familiar to me, so I know I've seen it, but for some reason I never played it. I think I assumed it had explicit content (which it doesn't, although it does have intense events and adult situations intermingled with romance, so maybe I made assumptions).

It's really well-written, as any fan of Harris Powell-Smith might expect. You play as a cob in a kind of cyber future who has to go to a nightclub to see their informant. Their is an emphasis on emotions, sensory descriptions, and music.

It's a texture game and pretty short, but there are a lot of options and it felt like I had real agency, whether that was an illusion or not. A lot of effort went into customizing the 'hover' message when dragging actions over objects.

A nice, short game.

This is an exceptional story for Fallen London, which fits into the overall storyline and mechanics but has its own mini storyline, and is available to subscribers or for individual purchase.

I had mixed feelings going into this. Gavin Inglis has written some very good stuff, but I saw that this story had slipped low in the overall 'best exceptional stories' poll on reddit.

The idea is that Mr Pages (the master in charge of books) is upset about a new book of poetry that has been written about a mythical city called Ys. Some think that Ys is a standin for the bazaar!

My hopes dimmed for this story as I hit a very long segment that was a kind of repetitive chase. It took a big chunk of actions and didn't have much variation (although I did like a part involving trenches).

But the part after the chase where you have a chance to peruse the books was honestly very funny, I got a good chuckle out of it, and it made me feel better about the story overall.

If anyone reading this hasn't tried this author's game Hana Feels, I can recommend it! It's a nice heartfelt story about self-harm written as a government project.

The games by this author have been heavily advertised across Reddit for a few weeks now, so I decided to check them out.

This game, when I downloaded it, had text that seemed to be somewhat repetitive. There were tons of extraneous details to it as well. It mentions things like a vital journal or an important clue, but if you type X Item or TAKE item like the HELP menu suggests, nothing happens. The only way I can find to interact with the world is to move with compass directions. But things mentioned in the text like a hut can't be entered, all you can do is move around.

There is a timer at the top as well. The combination of the timer, the downloadable exe, and the barebones mazes remind me a lot of the group DBT, who released 53 different similar BASIC adventures before. I don't think it's the same people (and I didn't have any problem with their work), I just wonder if there's some sort of template for BASIC adventures that includes a timer.

I'm going to put 2 stars for now, as the interactivity and polish are low due to not being able to interact with objects. It's possible I missed something really big and you can actually do more than just move around, so I'm happy to bump up the score if that's the case.

This is a game in the vein of the Arcade Pack spoof that went around a few decades ago. It's a procedurally generated version of Dragon's Lair where your options are U/D/L/R and S (up, down, left, right, and sword).

It seems to go on forever. I used cheats and undo eventually and still never found the end, but the scenarios eventually looped (but not the same order). Looking at the Club Floyd transcript, they eventually just gave up, so I don't think it ends.

I love this concept and this kind of spoof. As a game itself it wears thin really quickly, but spoofing arcade games is funny.

This is an Exceptional Story from Failbetter Games, part of Fallen London. It ties into the larger overall experience but has its own storyline.

This is a love story between an ardent man and a scientist who is also loving but reluctant and cuts ties.

The opening of this was unremarkable enough that I lost interest in it and never finished it by the time I stopped playing Fallen London 2 years ago. I've restarted now and have picked up this story again, and the ending was quite a bit better than before.

This story features Mr. Apples, a master I don't remember seeing much about. More interestingly, it includes bits of all of the Fallen Cities' lore, including a big chunk of First City material, which is rare. Also has some Neathbow content. Pretty nice!

This is a Fallen London exceptional story, which is something accessible only to members or those who pay extra money. It follows the mechanics of Fallen London but is completable in a few hours of time (or less if you pay for more actions).

This story deals with the Presbyterate, an underground empire that lives near the Mountain of life. They had a colony founded by separatists who had a mythical chalice that seems like a parallel to the Holy Grail. You encounter an archaeologist who leads you to the sea in search of this chalice.

This story gives you some pretty good agency as there are multiple directions you can influence the outcome. It has some rich and vivid imagery in the archaeological digs that does a good job of both being cool and showing the differences between the archaeologist's idealism and the more grey reality.

This one was pretty good. It didn't stand out as one I'll always remember but it was interesting enough that I used some action refreshes on it.

This was a fun game in a style different than that which I usually play. It's an ADRIFT game that is pretty long, with more than 8 'acts' and 43 rooms, but with puzzles that are locally self-contained and generally well-clued (with a couple of exceptions).

You show up to Sherlock Holmes' apartment determined to prove he is a fraud, only to discover it full of bullet holes and menacing notes. You have to track down Shakespeare and foil a plot by the evil Moriarty!

Much of the game can be completed by examining everything and showing things to people. The game is fortunately almost completely devoid of having to 'look behind' and 'under' everything (although looking under is useful in obvious cases).

I did use the hints a couple of times, and every time was for a window or door. The second to last puzzle (a grill) wasn't hinted and I struggled for a long time. I eventually opened up the game in the ADRIFT 4 coding app and found out that I had the right idea but the wrong direction (full spoiler: (Spoiler - click to show)I was trying to LOCK it but had to CLOSE it.).

Overall, I didn't encounter many bugs (a couple of times the screen just printed a single letter when I doubt that was what was desired; most likely because I was playing online). I had a good time with this game.