Reviews by MathBrush

This is, I believe, an adaptation of an award-winning screenplay by the author, and I think it shows in the quality of the writing.

In this game, you are invited to a reality show the season after someone got stabbed by a Barbie-masked attempted murderer. This season, everyone is back, so the would-be killer is among your group.

Gameplay is split between some classic-style romance gameplay (who do you talk with? who do you ask on a date? etc.) and running from or fighting with the killer.

The tone isn't always realistic, but it feels like a stylistic choice, making it more like a slasher flick. People get injuries that would be deadly in real life but continue to run or talk for a long time after; tv producers seem not worried about liability, etc. It makes for a slightly surreal game that puts you at a level removed from the experience, better able to contemplate bigger questions like gender roles in film and why audiences like terrible things.

Overall, I felt like the writing and agency worked well. I played a ton of Choicescript games last year and I would say this one is above-average in its use of the system.

This is a more mature game, with some profanity, a large amount of violence/blood and some mild/network-friendly sexuality.

While each individual part of this game is excellent, it didn't completely gel for me; a part of that was that I chose to be a cis het male and the game seemed to anticipate I'd be a woman, including people staring at my heaving chest and so on. That's probably intentional, given that the game is questioning these very assumptions, but making intelligent and thoughtful statements doesn't always translate to compelling gameplay. By and large though this is an excellent effort and one I believe most people would enjoy if they are not turned off by slasher flicks.

This game is a fusion of a couple of concepts/story threads. The first is a futuristic story where you are part of a VR museum curation team. This is a really interesting story that feels well-researched and describes things like how to crowdsource tagging videos with metadata and how perception of culture changes over time.

The other thread is where you are a burnt-out member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and mother and wife, and your older but handsome coworker Sean starts looking really attractive to you as a way to escape.

A lot of the game deals with the outlook of unhappy wife who somewhat believes in the Church but feels oppressed and dislikes several aspects. A lot of this part was hard to read as I was divorced primarily because my wife felt much of the same things that this protagonist feels with regards to the our church, and just like the protagonist, she wanted a way out.

I appreciated a fact I didn't discover until the end notes, which is that (Spoiler - click to show)there is no way to actually have an affair. It made me feel like the game really did a good job of representing player agency, since (Spoiler - click to show)just because you do everything can to make someone like you or want you, doesn't mean it will work.

Besides dredging up a lot of uncomfortable personal feelings (which I think is a sign of good writing), the one thing that didn't entirely click for me was the pacing; it was never clear just how close we were, or just what actions would have what results, if that makes any sense. Stylistically, it's a reasonable choice, since relationships are messy and confusing. But I felt like the gameplay was obfuscated (if that's the right word here).

Overall, I think this one will do well. Great research and touches on a lot of pertinent points in modern society.

This game is very much a story, not in the sense that it's not a game, but that it has a strong central narrative, creative setting, and interesting characters.

It's an Ink game, with two main kinds of choices: role-playing ones that have temporary effects but let you get into character, and branching ones that affect big chunks of the storyline.

You play as a courier running around the rooftops of a desert city. There is a lot of worldbuilding here, between enemies, friends, and strange creatures.

The branching storylines are very different. In one, I spent a ton of time with two academics, eventually becoming one. In another, I spent much more time with my friend Karae and robots.

Overall, I found it polished and descriptive, and had some emotionally touching moments. It was interesting interactivity, but I feel satisfied with my playthroughs and don't plan on revisiting.

This game has a fairly unusual format. Like parser games, you type in text and get a text response. Unlike parser games, it's not necessarily deterministic; instead, with a chatbot structure, it reacts to keywords. I tried to see if it was using GPT-3 or something similar, but it was hard to tell; it knew a bit about Harry Potter but not so much about Chemistry. Overall, it felt somewhat more like a hand-rolled chatbot and less like a standard AI bot.

There are several things to discover in this game, but it can be hard to know what to do first. Just messing around will eventually lead the game to guide you towards a solution. I was able to finish without hints, and it took me about an hour.

For content warnings, the game does contain a fairly gruesome realistic image later on (a (Spoiler - click to show)blue-lipped overdose victim).

Overall, the chatbot system was a bit hard to use but I felt like it guided me to where I wanted to go. The text has a fairly descript 'voice' and nice little details, although necessarily due to the technology it didn't respond directly to my questions, leading to some bland messages.

I like 'dream games' and surreal stuff. Overall, I think this worked fairly well, but I don't really see a ton of replay value and I think the chatbot structure could be refined over time (although I imagine that it's a real challenge to work on something like this).

This game has you explore a forest and a small house to rob an alchemist of his gold.

The motivations and storyline are lightly sketched, as is much of the scenery. The focus is on the core parser experience: taking items, using them, a maze (with a map), keys and doors. There's no real surprises here: the goal is to recreate the feeling of games past, not to innovate.

Overall, it succeeds at its intended goal, and is polished and functionally descriptive. I enjoyed the time I spent with it.

This game was entered in the 2022 Parsercomp, and I helped beta test it. It came in second, but only by a fraction of some points, and is an excellent game.

This is a metaphorical story which, as told in the authors notes, is somewhat autobiographical, and touches on dementia. You are exploring some woods and a ravine to try to get firewood for your home while also recovering your mother's lost words. The writing and tone feels a lot like the 1800s gothic novels, like The Mystery of Udolpho.

The lost words take the form of riddle-poems. When solved (and playing in a graphics-compatible mode), they take the form of the solution to the puzzle.

The riddles are less of a purposely-frustrating-and-obfuscated description of something, and more of a description of something using highly figurative language. That doesn't necessarily make it easier, as I struggled with a couple of the notes for a few minutes, but in a good kind of struggle that made the game more engaging.

The writing is descriptive and evocative, similar to this author's other works. The real-life connection shines through, making it clear that the author cares about this subject and about the people in her life.

Overall, a satisfying game and one not to miss.

This was an interesting game, with a mix of features that I'm not really used to seeing.

It's an inform game, and it's written fairly matter-of-factly, spitting out objective descriptions without commenting on them, which serves as an intentionally amusing contrast when things start to go weird.

You play as a young woman at a storage facility all alone, and you have to find and fetch three boxes. Your boss is kind of weird and has a lot of psychic stuff laying around.

It has three main puzzles, one of which is very easy, one of which took me a few days to solve, and one which has multiple solutions (I found one, club floyd found another, decompiling shows maybe 1 or 2 more).

The middle puzzle I almost gave up on. It involves the elevator, and the main issue I had was that its special feature (Spoiler - click to show)having all items fall out when the elevator goes up felt like a bug, since there are a lot of buggy games in parsercomp and elevator implementation is rough. I was especially inclined to think it a bug since riding in the elevator makes you permanently stuck (something I think may get fixed in a later version, as the author has mentioned doing so after the comp). But once I was reassured it was solvable, it was actually a lot of fun to wrestle with, and was, for me, the main highlight of the game.

The ending was interesting, and overall I think the concept worked well. The author used special inline images for the checklist, which looked nice.

This is a detailed Adrift game set in a haunted house.

You encounter many classic monsters (werewolf, ghost, vampire, mummy, etc.) and have to find ways to defeat them all.

The game is really quite detailed, with changing room descriptions and independent NPCS.

Playing it made me think a lot about Graham Nelson's Bill of Player Rights and how most of the games I play follow it while this one does not. And it provides a different feel that's fun but also one I struggle with. This one includes a lot of randomness (I never actually finished because one of the wandering monsters I just couldn't run into), some required guesswork, some learning by death. But that also provides a different kind of challenge.

So, overall, it was fun, not what I'm used to but overall enjoyable. I did have trouble with one puzzle since it requires you to (Spoiler - click to show)look at a door's hinge, but the door is visible from two rooms and the hinge is only implemented in one and I looked from the wrong side initially.

This game is custom-written in C++, and has you wake up on a ship that is malfunctioning. You have to figure out what's wrong with the ship and repair it.

Pros: The game has lush and vivid descriptions, and has an interesting environment with generally logical and often physics-based puzzles.

Drawbacks: The implementation of some synonyms and nouns is lacking somewhat. As a non-native speaker, I often just put the wrong words in, but I frequently found commands that worked in other German games didn't work here (like 'hinab'). Furthermore, when I was super lost, I discovered the code was public, including some test walkthroughs, and in those test playthroughs the testers tried the exact same things I did, which means the author was aware of the problems and either could not or chose to fix them, leaving the implementation a bit choppy.

A problem for non-native speakers like me (not factored into the score) is that there are a ton of non-useful items cluttering up each room, with a single useful item in most rooms. So you might have an exercise room with a cardio machine, stationary bike, weights, etc. each with a long paragraph worth of description, but only one of them has anything useful on it. So I found this quite difficult to play, whereas a native speaker would have a much easier time. It made me think about how my English games could be improved for non-native speakers.

This game has the same storyline shown from multiple points of view. As you complete an easy one, a harder one unlocks. In an amusing twist, the 'help' system for each difficulty level is the PC of the next difficulty level. It's an adventuron game, and comes with a built-in map.

Each difficulty level is linear, solving one room at a time before unlocking the next room.

I found the puzzles pretty hard as the game went on. The first difficulty level wasn't too hard, but I couldn't figure out the wordplay puzzle in the second difficulty without the walkthrough (I had tried (Spoiler - click to show)GLASS and 4-letter words without success). I also had deep trouble with the wire problem, especially since the solution relied on a word not in the verb list, and the cake puzzle, well, I'm not sure how it worked even after the solution. This isn't bad, necessarily, since being stuck is a feature of puzzles, but I definitely did get stuck; other reviews say they had no problems in this game so it's probably just me.

Overall, the game was entertaining. I would have preferred some simultaneous puzzles so I could work on one while being stuck on another. I found the writing was clear and set the scene well in most problems.