Reviews by MathBrush

This game uses a seed where you have to stand on trial before four famous poets.

It’s written in Dendry, one of the first Dendry games I’ve seen not written by Autumn Chen, making this pretty unique.

The game presents each of the four poets (Sappho, Tagore, Milton, and Khayyam) as characters each having themes, virtues, and vices.

The concept is that you are on trial for plagiarizing their work. Each one accuses you of having plagiarized certain themes of theirs. Your own identity is kept secret.

At first, I thought the game would have very little interaction, since clicking on each poet gave me three pages of non-interactive text.

But then, I found out that that was just the intro! You then reveal your own identity which was a powerful moment for me (I got mild chills on my arm hair).

Then there follows a combinatorial puzzle. I found it tricky; I just randomly clicked for a long time and didn’t understand the mechanics. After about 10 minutes I started thinking more about it, and finally came up with a solution. It was pretty complex; it reminded me a bit of an Andrew Schultz puzzle.

The game inspired me to look up more about the poets. Due to my inexperience, it was hard at times to see the differences in their themes and their values, so I had trouble distinguishing between them. I look forward to learning more about them and am glad for Onno and Rovarsson (the seed author) for bringing them to my attention.

This Adventuron game was pleasant to play. I was able to grasp what was going on, make a plan, carry it out with some exploration, and get a satisfying conclusion. It relies on the central core of parser games: take, drop, examine, open, close, etc.

You’ve had a bad breakup with a woman and she’s taken a lot of things, and you need to break out of your depressed languor and feed your very hungry stomach. Unfortunately, some of the food you have left is a bit weird.

I ended up making the tuna and tangerine pizza, which is pretty weird but not too weird (my favorite food when I was a missionary was green beans, tuna, shredded cheese and noodles).

Overall, short and satisfying. I did have some parser struggles, which I’ll DM the author as the particulars don’t matter for the review, but they were pretty similar to ones I’ve gotten reports for for my own game (little synonyms and such). It didn’t really detract from the enjoyment, and fortunately the game offers several layers of help to ease any friction with the parser, up to a full walkthrough, which thankfully I didn’t have to consult.

This game consumed a lot of my attention and thought process.

You are a dungeon master/game master having a night with a classicallly-sized 4 person party, complete with fighter, rogue, cleric and mage.

All of the participants, though, are magical (well, mostly), including a fox spirit and a golem. Also, many of them are neurodivergent in different ways (including you).

The gameplay loop is that you advance the campaign a bit (which seems like its own fun story), and then an issue arises either in-game between characters or in-person. You have options to resolve it, which vary but often include taking gentle action, taking firm action, or doing nothing.

There are three ‘negative’ things that can pile up (or, occasionally, go down) that I found: you can get more and more distracted; the individual people can feel hurt or disconnected from the game; and time can progress.

I wasn’t sure what each of my actions would do or what the consequences, if any, of the above would be, but I had some idea and formed a strategy. It was very similar to a real-life stressful situation; it reminds me of my day-job as a high school math teacher (do I continue the lecture when everyone’s bored and the only topic left is really obscure but has a 5% chance of appearing on the end of year exam and ruining their life? Do I focus on the engaged students and let people talking in the back keep going? etc.)

I ended with time running out in the climactic fight, and that seemed just fine to me. I didn’t feel a need to replay, as there aren’t any perfect TTRPG sessions in real life, and ending without any major meltdowns seemed a big plus.

The characters were very distinct and their individual personalities mattered, making this work well as a character piece.

This game starts off very strongly with a nice animation of tv static, good styling choices and a creepy intro. I was ready to be scared and felt a bit nervous/excited going in.

Four friends are going to watch a famously bad movie that has previously been edited, but now they find the original director’s cut.

Unfortunately, one of them is killed. Even worse, it’s the friend that was keeping the whole group together, the leader.

The game then takes a quick turn and opens up to the main gameplay, where each friend must confront the death of their friend and what that means for the future. This was a unique and fun part of the game.

There are a ton of different endings, and I played through to see 8 of them, but after the first two you have to re-see a lot of the game so it petered out eventually. But the endings I got were very strong.

The beginning was a bit hard to follow; I thought they were going to a theatre, then to pick up something, then a concert, then they were at a gas station. I eventually realized it was all one story, but the jumps were a bit confusing. That’s my little nitpick for an otherwise very solid game. I like surrealish horror with two worlds/realities, so this was fun.

This is a prologue to a humor sci fi game written in Moiki.

In it, you play as a radio repairman in a futuristic world. A transgender celebrity comes to visit you, and more importantly, a strike is going on and the radio station that supports it is in trouble!

The text comes in very short bursts, just a sentence or two per page in many cases. There are several character portraits designed with, I assume, AI art (many games in this comp have used it and it has that kind of style, although I could be wrong!).

The game has a kind of animated feel/vibe, like the Jetsons mixed with characters from the Spiderman newspaper comic.

The story's not complete, which makes sense, as I felt like it kind of jumped around and was a bit confusing at times.

In this game, you fall asleep, and wake up trapped in a strange dream world.

The game is choice-based, using Moiki, but it has a strong world model, with most interactions based on finding and using items, movement, and working with NPCs.

It's pretty short, but took me a while to work through, as there are many options. The writing was a highlight, with humorous quips, strong metaphors, and some just straight-up weirdness (like licking the horizon and discovering it is yogurt).

Overall, it was nice to have a short, kind of goofy break. There are almost certainly parts that went over my head; I bet if I were a native French speaker I'd appreciate it even more.

I did find a portion that resembled a parser game pretty funny, especially since it was a 'prairie informe', where inform can either mean the language or, in this situation, 'shapeless'.

This game took me a while to figure out. There's a text box to enter stuff, but hitting enter just goes to a new line.

Eventually I realized it was a search feature with a bit of a delay; you type in a word and it brings up all elements in its database that match that word. I think the game Her Story might be similar (?)

The stuff that comes up includes text message conversations, journal notes, images, schematics, interviews, etc.

It was written in four hours, but there's some impressive stuff here. The idea is that two women who live together have been arrested after police suspected them of dangerous revolutionary activity, and you have to determine on a scale of 0-2 how dangerous they are.

Pretty neat stuff! I wish I learned just a bit more about them and what was going on, since the worldbuilding was so fun.

This Ink game was fun. You play as someone who received a note to come and investigate a town on behalf of a countess who has had to make herself scarce.

Most links involve either moving to a new location or performing an action in a location, most commonly talking to someone.

There are a diverse cast of characters. To me, the most evocative parts were the location descriptions; it's really nice to think of the bar with a back patio that is set on stilts overlooking a river. Sounds really beautiful!

The investigation was slightly tricky for me, being in French, but the game keeps things simple and it's not too hard to solve just by clicking around, although you may get stuck if you don't stop and think things through just a little.

Definitely enjoyed this one, and easy enough for a foreigner like me. I wondered about the motivations of the characters, though; I feel like they were as detailed as the settings were. Except for the priest, who I felt was very well characterized. Overall I like this, though; this is just some little nitpicks.

This is a fun game with a little bit of recursiveness in it.

You are a youth and are trying to get into a youth hostel. Unfortunately, the person in charge is on break, so you're stuck hanging out with a bulletin board, three wild young men, and an intriguing girl reading a book.

The main part of the game is discussion with the girl, who wants to play a role-playing game with you where you challenge concepts about the real world, creating a fantasy world that is different.

The contrast between the wild fantasies of the game and the grungy, mundane but exciting (for a travelling youth) details of the youth hostel was fun. I imagined an antiseptic-smelling cold room with tile floors and a green color scheme.

The character you play as seems a bit hesitant, someone not used to the world (at one point they speculate on the ethnicities of someone's parents, and you can choose whether you find it odd or not that they might have parents of different races). Overall, I felt like I was exploring an urban world that was new to me.

This has good writing overall, more like what I'd expect from a published short story author.

I had some trouble figuring out how to progress, and at one point was worried I'd have to lawnmower everything, but thankfully I didn't, and I managed to have some fun. I still don't know exactly what triggers the ending, but it came at a good time.

In Rome there's a video game museum called Vigamus that's been around for a while. This game, which is an illustrated and translated version of the English game I originally played in the 2016 IFComp, is set in that museum and includes photographs of the actual museum.

The gameplay is intentionally simplistic. You start off in a room of the museum where zombies have poured out of an arcade machine. The game offers you items one at a time, each one solving a problem at hand. There is some non-linearity in that you find things before you need them and you have some choices in what order to use them. You use many items from video games, like the hammer from Donkey Kong, to win the day.

I had a little trouble figuring out what to do at times in French, so I had to play the English version to figure out how to get through some parts before coming back to French.

The game has a few small errors here and there (like not capitalizing 'salle' in one of the room names). Some of the parts that felt objectionable in the English version felt a little less so in the French, as the language barrier gave me some distance from the material. There is a lot of silly things here, but it makes sense as a game intended for visitors to Vigamus to play.