Reviews by MathBrush

P.B. Parjeter is an author best known for complex twine works, usually long and intricate. This seems to be the first parser game by this author.

You play as Bigfoot's kid, a sasquatch on a mission to expose your father to the world by photographing him and other cryptids. You explore a park while working on your master plan.

It's quite a bit more solid than most first parser games by authors who already know twine. I didn't see many, if any, capitalization or punctuation errors. There were a couple of things I think could be polished (like using custom appearance text for items and a smoother introduction of some items in the initial scene).

What goes write is the creative and inventive puzzles, and the forgiving point system where you only have to get 60 points to win. That means that if you're beating your head against a particularly tricky puzzle or having trouble getting the parser to listen in one section, you can just skip it. So I skipped all the light puzzles and the ants.

The game lists several parser authors as beta testers, which may help explain why the game is so well put together for a first author. I can only expect that the remaining rough edges would be fixed up in a subsequent game as the author gained more experience. Overall, I had fun with this game.

I beta tested this game.

The Box is written in a new parser engine designed by Winters, which includes a hybrid form (like Dialog or Gruescript) allowing most of the game to be played by clicking links.

This is a literal puzzlebox. After a brief intro, you wake up in a cell with a mysterious box in front of you with 5 different puzzles or sets of puzzles belonging to each of the visible sides. Clues and aides are hidden throughout the rest of the room.

I found the puzzles generally fair and engaging. It includes a cryptogram which I generally find less engaging in IF, since they have standard solution algorithms that aren't directly integrated into game play, but I appreciated the smoothness of this one. I enjoyed the light-based puzzles and the numeric one the most, and perhaps the final puzzle.

The framing story is brief but well done. As a demonstration of language capabilities, it certainly seems like a strong parser engine, which is very difficult to do. It didn't capture my emotional fancy, but other than that it is a solid and well-done game.

I have a bit of trouble writing a review for this game, as the first couple of times I started it I realized I hadn't retained any information after several screens worth of material. I kept retrying it to help it sink in but it was like water in a sieve.

Eventually, though, the game began to have a pseudo-computer interface in an older style (the year 1999 is mentioned). You have been assigned a computer therapist called 'Computerfriend' whose job is to analyse your mental state and help you make better choices.

I tended to go along with what the computer said, and ended up with ending 2/6.

This game is one for which trigger warnings are especially beneficial. It contains (Spoiler - click to show)messages urging you to suicide.

Overall, the game was polished and effective in communicating emotion. However, like I said, I had difficulty retaining anything I read; having played it is more like trying to remember a dream after waking up.

This is a quite long Twine game about preparing for and fighting in a cyborg boxing tournament.

It comes with custom images, styling and animations, mostly health bars moving up and down and some neater tricks near the end. It has music as well by a person called gigakoops which is pretty good.

The story is about a down-and-out boxer with a loved one needing medical attention. You, the boxer, get some aid from an old man in a run-down gym. Together you train for the big day when the tournament will begin.

Writing-wise, it's a competent and engaging blend of inspiration boxing movie and cyberpunk.

Choice-wise, I was a bit frustrated at first because so many choices were like 'yes', 'yes, but phrased differently', and 'yes, but even another way', with no 'no' in sight. I felt railroaded quite a bit at different times.

There is one major choice, which is which of three stats to focus on. This primarily comes into play late in the game, where high stats unlocking different paths.

The game has some nice narrative swerves, although one of the biggest ones was a double-swerve I didn't see coming. Also, norse mythology ties into the game more and more as the game continues.

Overall, here's what I think:

+Polish: The game is smooth and polished. There were a couple of bugs (my mom was referred to as 'he', and I almost clicked the 'restart' button because the menu moves up and down) but otherwise quite good for such a complex game.
+Descriptiveness: The descriptions were vivid.
-Interactivity: It pulled together at the end, but I felt confined for too much of the game.
+Emotional impact: I was into the story.
+Would I play again? Yeah, I'd like to see other paths.

This game manages to strike a fine balance between puzzle and story, giving fairly easy puzzles with a lot of 'oh, I know where this goes but I can't use it yet' moments. It reminds me of Ryan Veeder's work in that way.

This game is a mashup of many fairytales, including the 'three brothers' theme, three challenges, and stories like Snow White, Rapunzel, the musicians of Bremen, and many of the lesser-known Grimm's Fairytales.

It decides to show the darker side of many of these, with the darkest presented as exactly in the books. One lean I felt uncomfortable with was (Spoiler - click to show)the option to marry a prepubescent girl, but after reading the notes and remembering the original tales there's a good chance that was in the original stories.

The game has an interesting relationship between the player, narrator and player character, with a lot of dramatic irony (in the original sense of the audience knowing what's going on without the character doing so). This thing has been done before, but rarely in such a polished and enjoyable game.

Overall, the game feels effortlessly fun, but a great deal of work must have happened underneath to make this happen. Puzzles give you increasingly strong hints if you are stuck, a feature found in games like Coloratura and part of my own philosophy.

Large text dumps are fairly common, but read easily and are mostly based on the fairy tales.

I can strongly recommend this game, and enjoyed it quite a bit, perhaps the most I've enjoyed an IF this year.

I always enjoy a good story about a strange house that changes over time; I haven't read House of Leaves, but I've seen many games and stories cite it as an inspiration. Others I've seen include Map by Ade McTavish, Aaron Reed's novel Subcutaneous and the Backrooms urban legend.

This novel focuses on the 'house grows larger' largely as a metaphor for relationships, shown in individual vignettes (I'm sorry for making constant comparisons, but the vignette system reminds me of Spoon River Anthology, a story told entirely through gravestones).

People come into the house and find themselves changed, some losing friends, some losing each other, some arguing, some finding friendship, but the house always grows.

Overall, I found it polished and satisfying. The only thing I had trouble with was occasionally not really knowing what to do next (especially around the orange juice), and not knowing when the game would end. The narrative arc kind of meanders around, like the house itself. Otherwise, I found this to be a solid and thoughtful story.

This game is part of the Running out of Ink: Limited Spaces anthology recently released on itch.

The story is about you, a youth who discovers a mysterious door in the forest. You are barred from entering, but when you return as an adult, no one can hold you back.

Gameplay is centered on finding journal entries and tapes. The tapes have very nice voice acting, although I was playing around my kid and the first tape started with some loud profanity, so I ended up just reading the thoughtfully-provided transcripts instead lol.

The feel of the game is simultaneously full of terror but also calm. All of the damage is in or from the past. There are lots of spiders, claustrophobic situations, darkness, hints of obsession, etc.

There are some puzzles in play. The first puzzle completely stumped me. I was flabbergasted, not knowing if I had enough info. Then I realized (moderate-to-strong hint)(Spoiler - click to show)certain parts of the documents are highlighted.

Overall, I found the storytelling high-quality, professional tier; this reads like a sci-fi story in an anthology you'd see displayed at a Barnes and Noble table. The design and layout are custom Twine that look very nice, especially the tapes.

Overall, it's a strong game. I don't know if I'd replay it; while every piece was strong, games also some times need a je ne sais quoi that ties it all together, and for me I didn't get that overarching sense of completion that would make a game perfect. But it is a game I can recommend and praise.

This 2022 French IFComp game really reminded me of 60s and 70s science fiction books of my dad's, which often had hard-hitting social issues not as an allegory but as the main feature of the story, with the science fiction only serving to shed light on the bigger issue.

This game is about androids but also about young white men, incel culture, etc.

In 5 short vignettes (and an epilogue), we encounter a growing number of young men who are convinced that they are not human, but are, in fact, androids.

But strangely it is only androids, and not gynoids. No minorities think they are androids either.

It's worth reading. For a non-native speaker, it felt long, but it was around 7K words total in my playthrough, so definitely doable. Gave me a lot of thoughts and taught me a lot about French slang and 'cuisine bretonne'.
Your choices in each story generally are about choosing between making a situation more volatile or making things more calm. The interactivity felt a little weak; occasionally it seemed clear my choices were doing something to the story but often it didn't feel that way. The excellent writing did a lot to mitigate that.

This is a well-coded TADS game about coming to grab your things from an empty house after a divorce.

Play primarily revolves around exploration and discovery of key items that advance the story in some way.

The theme is about divorce, loss, and 'what might have been?' I took these themes seriously, as I am recently divorced and could understand some of what the narrator was going through.

This is a pretty messy divorce, though. Unhealthy events and actions abound. The narrator is regretful, of course, but regret can only take you so far, and I think that's one of the main themes here.

Overall, the mechanics and story work for me, but there are a few sticking points here and there. I had a lot of difficulty getting started. The game provides no hints, and takes the position that players should take careful notes and that some info won't be repeated. I figured things out in the end but I was frustrated (spoiler for main mechanic: (Spoiler - click to show)more specifically, I noticed that some objects wouldn't go through the shadow, so I thought none could, and didn't try taking the soil through. I thought I had left the shards behind and the pot appeared, so it too me a while to realize what was going on).

For the story, I felt like things were perhaps spelled out a bit too much for my personal taste. This is a real, visceral story, but I feel like a lot of art that I find 'magnificent' has a sort of ambiguity to it that allows you to draw many interpretations from it. Having our feelings and reactions to everything and the 'meaning' of it all spelled out at the end felt somewhat restrictive.

Overall, I think people who play this will be pleased, especially for those looking for mild but non-trivial puzzles mixed with emotional storytelling.

I think this will end my journey through the iterative puzzle games in this series. I hesitated last game due to some graphic material (a dwarf that was (Spoiler - click to show)hanging by a noose), and this game includes some drug-related activity; put together, it feels like a kind of humor I'm not into, kind of like the Unnkulia series from the early 90's.

This iteration is much more reserved than the last. It adds a few simple items to a previously empty area in the midgame. Again, it can be difficult to figure out which commands to use. I feel like the previous episode may be better overall.

Edit: I see the next one's tagline is 'can you polish a turd' so I feel justified in assuming this vein of humor will continue.