Reviews by MathBrush

Instead of giving a review, I'd like to give a description of my experience playing.

I start the game. I try 'X ME', and get the standard response ('As good looking as ever.'). I'm on an airplane with amnesia, no other flyers and the bathrooms blocked by doors. I find a few items and look around. I get stuck and look more, and find an object that only appears when you examine something twice.

I then get stuck, because I know I need to (Spoiler - click to show)break a keypad but I don't know how. I even try hitting it with (Spoiler - click to show)a pencil. I turn to the walkthrough: apparently I'm supposed to (Spoiler - click to show)hit the number 6 key, specifically, to break the keypad.

At this point, I realize I would never have figured this out. I turn to the walkthrough and start following it blindly. I go to a school with no connection to the last location, and apparently need to figure out that I need to (Spoiler - click to show)put a book from the airplane on a random lectern and then walk into it. I'm grateful for the walkthrough but after I escape the (Spoiler - click to show)complex plane the walkthrough breaks down, so it seems the author didn't test the walkthrough for this version of the game. I try exploring on my own but get nowhere. No testers are credited.

I would play this game again, but it needs a lot more polish, a lot of the descriptions are generic ('The barren hallway continues from north to south, and it turns to the east'), and the interactivity didn't work for me, leading to less of an emotional impact. This means I'm giving 1 star, although this game works reasonably well and probably took a lot more work than some other shorter games in the comp. It's just that according to my usual criteria it would only receive 1 star, and I'd like to be consistent.

I think the author could make an incredible game if they had a longer testing period with many testers, including some familiar with what's possible in parser games.

This is a long parser game in the form of a Java .jar file (a very recent version of Java is used and older versions are incompatible).

The result is pretty smooth looking and working. The responses come quickly, the save system works well. There's no undo, and death is frequent in this game, so be prepared!

You play as person wearing the clothes of a Japanese Buddhist monk. You travel through various realities, all of which have a recurring menacing figure and panels with different colored bulbs.

I played around for a while before turning to the walkthrough (as I do for most games!). I discovered that the bulk of the game is one big puzzle, with another big puzzle at the end. For puzzle fans, I'd recommend sticking out the first big puzzle. This is the puzzle having to do with (mild spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)the bulbs and panels.

The atmosphere of this game is great; I loved it. Very nice. The puzzles were, to me, a bit tedious. I went off the walkthrough at one point and had to try to figure out how to go back and complete an earlier part and found it very hard to execute the solution even once I knew what it was.

I had a good time, but I'm not sure I'd play again. This is much better than most windows executable IFComp games I played in past years, probably in the top 2 or 3 of such games, so I'd consider this to be a rousing success for the author.

This is a pretty long download-only unity game that is choice-based with an interactive map, quicktime events and a specialized inventory. It is described as a Metroidvania, and that is true, as you collect multiple powers of your own choice and in a non-deterministic order as you play the game.

You live in a city that has a real-life side and a cyber side, and you can gain bionic or psionic modifications that make you stronger. There are a ton of mini games, including a fantasy MMORPG, gambling games, and arcade games.

There is a big cast of characters and many locations. While each one individually didn't seem super fleshed out to me in motivation and personality, as a whole the plot structure and relationships were interesting and satisfying.

Your goal is to rob a casino, but as the game progresses you find yourself more and more often coming up against God, a powerful AI that is in charge of your city.

The game doesn't have any easy way to save that I could see, but if you 'die' you go back to the last major decision point (I think; I only died once, at the very end). There are 9 branches but I only played through once, so I'm not sure what the others are like.

My number one gripe is that the main interaction was fussy. You read text and then choices appear, but how to get them to appear is confusing. I thought it was when you used the mouse scroll wheel down, but sometimes it appeared when I scrolled up, and sometimes I just had to wait. Choices always appeared whenever I equipped or unequipped an ability, so I eventually used that. Even the opening screen took me a while to figure out what to do. It might just all be timed and the mouse wheel thing was just in my head.

(And, just now, looking back, there is an option in the settings to let you see the choices immediately, so this is totally my fault!)

While the game isn't perfect, it was descriptive, polished (I think I only saw one typo in 2 hours), interactivity had a lot of highlights, I was emotionally invested and I'd like to see the other branches once I have some free time in the comp.

This game is written in a custom parser-like engine (similar to Robin Johnson's Gruescript and also to Texture) where you can click on items to reveal more options with them and/or to drag them to other objects. Each new description results in the whole text box flipping over in a 3D animation. This is cool, but slows the game down a bit when running through already-seen areas.

The main part of the game is a large library (inspired by Borges' classic tale) that is organized in a very confusing way, accessible by selecting 'left', 'right', or 'back'. If there is a pattern, I didn't see it, so it's either random or a maze or I'm just dumb or all 3.

Each room has a book by a famous author, which you can enter. Each book world has a single room with one or more interesting items and a mini-puzzle. Solving the mini-puzzle allows you to take items to other rooms.

I found the idea clever, but the need for tons of clicking between rooms, slowness of the transition, and the tricky logic of the puzzles sent me to the walkthrough early on. If you want a real headscratcher it would be good to go through more slowly.

+Polish: Very polished.
+Descriptiveness: Some of the rooms are very vivid.
-Emotional impact: Nothing seems real, and I saw it more as a logic puzzle than emotional story.
+Interactivity: While the slow transition and maze were less fun to me, the idea of taking items from one book to another is fun.
+Would I play again? Maybe, this time without a walkthrough (and doing the other path).

This is a very long Twine game from early on in the history of the medium.

Anya DeNiro has a long history of making games exploring non-human or surreal viewpoints and the interface between reality and virtual reality.

This game uses features like text that shifts and disappears on a timer and other, normal twine features like cycling text and text-replaces.

The story is hard to grasp, especially as I play it late at night. In my first playthrough, I thought there was no story, just a mishmash of words and metaphors. But as I played through all 12 branches and found the ending, I realized that there were several stories, including human trafficking, artifical intelligences, a bloody edutainment math game whose players were a victim in a cyber terrorist attack.

I felt as if I grasped less than half the overall story, but it was an interesting and thoughtful combination. There is a long history of very long, surreal twine games by trans authors that straddle the boundary between reality and virtual reality (Porpentine, Phantom Williams, Furkle, etc.) If you like this genre, this will be a good addition.

This game was directly inspired by the Hard Puzzle games in its difficulty level and clarity and by Junior Arithmancer in its actual puzzles.

Hard Puzzle was mainly known for being intentionally poorly-clued, with numerous red herrings and puzzles that aren't quite fair. The idea was to have a kind of game you can beat your head against for a long time before finding a solution.

This game is similar. You find yourself in 4 rooms with a helpful fairy. Each room has a number on the floor and some other object of interest in the room (either a door or a clue). There is a recess that is common to all the rooms (essentially in the center of the circle) with a book.

Puzzles involve the book and the numbers and the clues (which makes sense, since that's all there is) and is similar to Junior Arithmancer a bit.

I found the game very unfair and very confusing, but that is the intent. I got a lot of help from the fairy (enough to solve one of the clues) but looked on the adrift forums for the other 2.

I wish I were able to type and execute a list of commands on one line, separated by punctuation. Once you know the answers to the puzzle, it can be pretty tedious to enter.

Overall:

+Descriptiveness: It's effective for the style it's going for
+Interactivity: I didn't like the tediousness, but the game was trying to be frustrating and hard, and it was
-Emotional impact: I saw this entirely as a puzzler, removed from emotional ties
+Polish: I encountered no bugs.
-Would I play again?: The value's all in the surprise, and there's not much replay value.

Arthur DiBianca has explored the creative space available for limited parsers for many years now. The sheer number of puzzles he has come up with for things like directional commands (Inside the Facility), wordplay (Sage Sanctum Scramble) and just poking a box (Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box) is impressive.

Here, we play as an adventurer in a small town where you can buy equipment, hang out at the tavern, or head down to the dungeon where you have a limited amount of time to battle and find loot. Dungeon verbs are limited to skipping the current battle, fighting, and searching, with extra fighting commands added later. It's really interesting contrasting this with the games of Paul Panks, exemplified by Westfront PC and lampooned in Endless, Nameless, where he always had a cookie-cutter village with a 3 or 4-room tavern, church, etc. and forest full of monsters. Those games were filled with a lot of cruft, while this game cuts all of that out to its bare minimum functionality.

This game is more or less an RPG or roguelike, and it has a 'grind' and RNG that sets it apart from his other games. Is this successful?

Here's my 5-point rating scale:

+Polish: The game is very smooth. Arthur's limited vocabulary allows for intense polishing on what remains, and the game feels completely smooth and operational.
+Descriptiveness: There's a clever mechanic where monsters came in 2 (and later, three) variants that differ from each other by just a small word or two. Only by careful experimentation can you distinguish which monsters are 'safe'. I feel like these constraints led to vivid descriptions since there had to be a lot of detail for the differences to be lost in.
+Interactivity: So this could go either way for most people. I grew up playing games like FFV (on an emulator with a fan translation) with my head down on a desk reading a book while I moved the arrow keys left and right, grinding encounters. To me, that was the quintessential RPG experience. This game also has a lot of grinds that can become tedious. For me, I was interested enough in seeing a little number on the screen go up; others may not be. More seriously, I had to battle the RNG on several occasions, especially the final boss, where I ended up manipulating UNDO to try and get a favorable combination. In the end, it turned out I had a misconception about the boss, and so my UNDO was unnecessary, but I did use UNDO for some of the final achievements which, unlike past DiBianca games, were less about showing extra skill and more about extreme patience with RNG.
+Emotional impact: For me, this game hit a spot of nostalgia. Otherwise, I probably would have felt distanced a bit by the 'where's Waldo' system, treating words as puzzles themselves rather than
descriptors.
-Would I play again? For me, the big draw in replaying an RPG is trying it with a different character class or setup or seeing what different random drops you can get. You can't really get that here, because you can only get to the final boss after thoroughly plumbing everything the game contains; there's no remaining mystery and only 1 'anointed path'.

Overall, though, I feel confident recommending this to others and consider it one of the best games in a year that's already had some great competitions.

This is one of Fallen London's Exceptional Stories that gets recommended a lot.

Exceptional Stories are IAP's for the main Fallen London game. Each is its own self-contained story and usually comes with a reward worth 62.50 in in-game money, which is a lot for new players and a moderate amount for endgame players.

In this setting, Hell is next to Fallen London (although it's not quite the Hell of classic Christianity and the devils are not more evil than others in this setting). The Church of England still exists but has adapted to deal with these changes.

This story concerns a new Saint which is appearing in different texts. You have to help an eager deacon to hunt down where this info on the saint is appearing from and deal with his leaning between the Church and Hell.

The highlight of this is probably taking a train down to the Marigold station (the last stop before Hell, and something you can reach on your own very late in the game by becoming a railroad baron) to see about this Saint for yourself.

The very good exceptional stories coming out recently mean that this one doesn't quite live up to their standard, but it was still very polished descriptive, and with some great payoff moments. I would consider it to be one of the better exceptional stories.

I beta tested this game.

This game is written using the author's own Versificator system, an excellent system built up over many years.

In it, you play as a Grue in a classic adventure. However, you have no interest in murdering adventurers. But you do want to get them out!

The game reverses several parts of classic adventures. Instead of mazes, you move through orderly access tunnels. Instead of finding light sources, you find ways to dim light.

This is a clever reversal and a fun way to play.

The only thing I had trouble with was the overall main mechanic of rescuing adventurers. The puzzle structure is organized in a way where it's hard to know you're making progress until you've figured the whole thing out. But that's mostly a personal reaction and may not apply to others.

I also played this as part of the Seattle IF Meetup and think it's appropriate for group play. We all had a lot of fun!

I'm a big fan of the detective genre, and it's always nice to see a long-form game come out.

This is a big game, spread over a dozen or so locations and three days. It's ambitious, with many scripted events, NPCs, and action scenes.

These kinds of things are hard to pull off. The game handles pretty well during the first day, and I spent a long time with this game up on my desktop trying to work through without hints. As time progressed and I went through the days, there were more and more holes in the system until I ended up relying entirely on the hints, although those had a gap ((Spoiler - click to show)escaping the rope).

The game has a lot of good parts, and credits several testers. The kind of problems that are left seem like ones that are typical for this type of story: one where the author seems to know exactly how each scene should play out and what the player's logic is. The problem is that 'the player will get it wrong', like Stephen Granade once wrote. It's very difficult to guess what people will try unless you have many many testers or constrain the player somehow (by reducing the number of items or by using a choice-based system, or by giving leading hints that increase the more you do the wrong thing).

My overall rating:
-Polish: There are several remaining bugs.
+Descriptiveness: For me, I enjoyed the writing and setting generally.
+Interactivity: The bugs or missing hints threw me off, but I liked the conversation and map movement. Some parts didn't work for me, but overall it was good.
-Emotional impact: Great at first, but kind of petered out at the end. I can't explain why.
+Would I play it again? If it was updated, I probably would!