Reviews by MathBrush

I played Lost Pig five years ago when I started playing interactive fiction. I remember thinking that it was a wonderful, wonderful game. I loved the humor of the PC, the silly idea of chasing the pig, the contrast of me with the gnome, and the interesting color puzzles.

However, whenever I go to revisit it, I quickly lose interest. The puzzles were fun the first time, but I find little replay value in the game. If you strip away the narrative voice, the puzzles are only slightly above average.

I recommend this game for everyone to play through once, though. The gnome NPC is brilliant. The color puzzle is fun.

Overall, I found To Hell in a Hamper funnier, and the Rogue of the Multiverse. I think this is a great game, but I wouldn't call it the best of all time, as some have.

This enjoyable game is more story than puzzle, although it uses a parser. You play a teenager with access to an online community. Actions are strongly limited, mostly TAKE, LOOK, and SHOW. You investigate an abandoned house, and have to entice others to come with you.

What made this game work for me was the contrast between your friends online personas and their real-life selves, including yourself. Chris and Maximus gave especially funny contrasts.

The game in the end works as a slice-of-life story. There is one significant choice, and unfortunately it comes at the very end of the game, with no opportunity to save, which prevents lawn-mowering (i.e. trying every branch).

Taco Fiction is fun. It is a bit shorter than I would like; I paused the game partway through, expecting that half of the game was left, and when I came back, there was only about 30 turns left in the game.

You play a petty criminal who needs cash. The game gives you explicit directions on what to do at first. I love ignoring directions in parser games; in some games, like Bronze, the game just doesn't move forward at all if you ignore the directions. In this game, ignoring the directions gives you a lot of different, fun results.

I admit, I enjoyed the first part of the game, before the reveal, because it wasn't like anything else I had seen before. In this sense, it was a lot like Afflicted, although the actual reveal was wildly different in the two games.

The conversation system seemed at first incredible, and then very annoying, especially with the main favorable NPC. You have a lot to say, but 95% of it is completely irrelevant.

A good, short game. Is it one of the best games of all time? It certainly has one of the best openings of all time. So play it for ten minutes, and then decide if you want to keep going or not.

John's Fire Witch is a short, fun collect-the-item and solve-the-puzzle game. The feel reminded me a lot of Enchanter, but without the magic.

I've been more interested in story than puzzles recently, so I used a walkthrough at a couple of points (which made me realize I had forgotten that I dropped some items).

Two big puzzles were very fun; the (Spoiler - click to show)crystal card and the devil's bag. The last puzzle was a bit unfair, I thought.

There are no mind-bending surprises or big innovations here; just well-thought out puzzles. If you like this, you would enjoy Uncle Zebulon's Will.

If crazy time-travel puzzles and avoiding paradoxes are your cup of tea, then this is the game for you. You must use a time machine to do your homework, but this requires 8 or more copies of yourself.

The initial part of the game is very fun. Trying to figure out how the machine works is great; trying to figure out how to avoid a paradox is fun, in fact the whole first half is fun!

But by the time you get to the last two or three copies, it just gets very overwhelming. It's so hard to keep track of everything, and the very last 'you' is hard to figure out.

Some people may find the idea of such a complicated game very enticing; so for puzzle fiends out there, this is the game for you. For everyone else, you should at least try it until you've time traveled once or twice.

This is a game kind of like the stories Ethan Frome or the Yellow Wallpaper, where you have a kind of growing sick feeling in your gut, not from gore or sex or anything like that, but from a disturbing psychological predicament.

This game is set in medieval times, and deals with faeries and the fey. Or does it? It's hard to tell. You are outside gathering eggshells, and soon you discover what purpose they are for.

This game has stuck with me for a very long time. It creeped me out. I don't want to give away too much, so suffice to say that you can make strong moral choices.

This short, linear game is a supernatural thriller that is a bit spotty and unfinished but raw and interesting.

The next step at each moment is relatively clear, so there are only minor puzzles. You play a fisherman or beach bum with memory problems on a cold, dark shore.

This game is a horror game, so there are some gross moments, including one that made my stomach turn. In its mood, it reminds me of The Warbler's Nest.

This is a mid-to-long game that follows long after the events in Spellbreaker, an Infocom game.

Graham Nelson is my favorite author, because of Curses! and Jigsaw, and for inventing Inform 7. However, I never really liked this game, partially because it takes so long to set it up. The first scene is totally linear, and the next takes a while to get going.

This is a fantasy game, and includes many Infocom themes, such as spell scrolls, complicated devices, etc. Most if not all the spells are spells mentioned in Infocom games.

The game is intricate and has well-developed puzzles, but it doesn't feel like a cohesive whole.

I haven't played this game for a few years, and I hadn't played any Infocom games when I did. If I replay it and enjoy it more with the references, I'll come back and revise my review.

The majority of this game consists of delivering newspapers. Over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.

That said, the game is enjoyable. There are somewhere around 8 or 9 NPC's of wildly different personalities, some of which don't pop up until later. You converse with everyone while delivering the newspapers.

There is a villain, but it's hard to know their plan. In fact, it's hard to know anything in the game, until the end.

I had trouble reading the newspapers when I played on Frotz on the iPad. The formatting was off. But most people shouldn't have that issue.

Note that the game lasts about a week in-game.

I don't strongly recommend the game, but it's interesting enough that you should check it out.

I loved Infidel. You play a jerk adventurer who has alienated everyone he knows as he searches for a hidden pyramid. The game has a long intro sequence in your camp before reaching the actual pyramid.

The game is very Indiana-Jonesish, although there are no NPC's. Every few rooms, there is a death trap waiting to destroy you. Hieroglyphics on the wall tell you how to avoid some traps, but they sometimes describe things far away, and you have to puzzle out the meaning of the hieroglyphics yourself.

This game is advanced, but I got much further between hints than I usually do in an Infocom game (although Emily Short mentioned two guess-the-verb problems in her review that I found helpful before I even played the game).

This game has a great flavor and style, similar to Ballyhoo's dark circus theme. I strongly recommend this game.