Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game is intended to run in a DOS emulator such as DOSBOX. It has a nice aesthetic; there was a guy a few years ago who would constantly crank out BASIC games that ran in DOS and their best feature was the cool ascii art and overall look and style, and this game has that.

The parser may be a heavily modified Inform, but is more likely some kind of custom parser, since it doesn't understand standard Inform verbs like VERBOSE or PULL ME.

Gameplay is procedurally generated. You are in a maze of a house with NESW directions and one item or less per room. One of the items is a 'goal' (in my 11 playthroughs, I saw a wet elf, hungry goblin, pedestal with inscription, chest, etc.) and one of the other items is meant to be picked up and put in the goal.

I had always wanted to write a game like this as a meta-commentary on generic adventures, a game that would have random aesthetics and map but always be about gathering 'something' to put in a trophy-case analogue. But I never got around to it, and this game is a better implementation of my vision, so I'm glad to play this and see a better version of my own dreams.

In the end, of course, the game is very slight. It itches my 'play an adventure' desire, just like Nick Montfort's Amazing Quest last year, but that's it.

Mild spoiler if you haven't looked through other comp games: (Spoiler - click to show)This game seems to be part of a pair, since BJ Best has a game called "And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One" that appears to have you play a pair of kids who are playing this very game, with the same text and same credits.

(Spoiler - click to show)There may be something hidden in the game, perhaps a secret that must be communicated between BJ Bests games, of which there are three (I saw on adventuron discord that he entered an adventuron game as well). I'll change my rating if I see anything new from those games.

I'll be frank and say that I don't enjoy playing games about pedophilia in any way; I don't find them fun, and I have yet to play one I find enlightening. I think that games can and should treat difficult and heavy topics, but for me playing game about pedophilia is like reading a coffee-table book full of high-quality illustrations of feces. My apologies to authors who have attempted to treat this topic in a sincere and thoughtful way.

Anyway, this is a custom parser game where you explore a house and try to recover your memories. You wake up weak and bleeding, with a health counter that slowly decreases until you die.

The storyline centers around pedophilia, with texts by de Sade and inappropriate photos (described in vague text terms only) to be found. There are also several weapons to find.

The game isn't too big. I wandered around for a while before trying the walkthrough, and found that I had seen about 50% of the game already. The walkthrough itself contains many unnecessary but interesting commands, such as looking at every wall in every room and trying to go in wrong directions in most rooms. These commands are in the walkthrough because the author has implemented custom text for much of them.

The parser is pretty good, but I miss being able to use pronouns, since you must take an object before looking at it and it would be easier to type "take paper; x it" instead of "take paper; x paper". Some synonyms would be appreciated, like 'turn on car' instead of 'turn on engine'.

Overall, this game is solidly in the simulated realism camp of parser implementation, with a wound/hunger timer, lots of red herrings and random scenery, randomized combat, etc. There are multiple endings, of which I found 3 (although 1 of them just ended the game immediately, so I don't think it was a real ending. This was (Spoiler - click to show)driving away before discovering the truth.).

My overall rating:
-Polish: more synonyms would work well, I think. There are very few typos, but some of them are noticeable.
+Descriptiveness: The game is very vividly described.
-Interactivity: Finding the objects of importance often meant looking at things that are not described, such as walls or floor.
+Emotional impact: The impact was negative, but it did provoke strong emotion.
-Would I play again? I tried a couple of endings, but I don't plan on looking again.

I would have given 3/5 if the subject had been different.

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 game is an educational game about kidneys made for kids using a custom engine that reads full sentences.

The game itself has multiple endings; I finished after only examining 3 rooms out of 5 in the main hub.

A magical fairy is helping you get a Halloween costume by transforming whatever you pick up into costume parts. Meanwhile, you get hungry, and eating requires you to take phosphate binders due to your kidney problems. This opens up a minigame where you have to hunt for phosphate crystals.

Throughout IF history there have been at least two different threads: one using text to provide a realistic simulation of the world (including Emily Short and her physics games), and those pushing for abstraction and ease of use (including Ryan Veeder who provides a lot of subtle affordances to make gameplay smoother). Most people authors use a mix of the two.

Abstraction and ease pushed to its extreme leads to dynamic fiction, where there are few choices besides 'next page'. And realistic simulation pushed too far leads to hunger timers, inventory limits, and an insistence on proper grammar, all of which this game has. It's a stylistic choice that some are fond of, but I don't really enjoy my character getting more and more hungry as I go back and forth between rooms because my character can only hold two objects. The engine is also slow between responses, so it can be a bit frustrating.

I found the educational part fascinating and didn't know the kidneys had anything to do with phosphate. Also, this game is specifically designed for kids unfamiliar with IF tropes, so I'm specifically not the target audience. And a lot of the things I found off putting could be fun for kids; discovering the game character actually responds like a real person with needs and limited capacity is something fun about text adventures when you're new (at least it was for me).

Overall:
+Polish: It worked smoothly.
-Descriptiveness: The game felt kind of bare at times.
-Interactivity: The game felt a bit too fiddly for me at time.
+Emotional impact: I love the idea of making a game for kids and the phosphate thing was cool.
+Would I play again? I don't really feel like it, but I only found one costume and there were many rooms I missed, and I'd like to support this idea of making games for health purpose (kind of like Gavin Inglis's game about self-abuse).

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 game is played on Facebook messenger, and requires you to be logged into Facebook to play it.

This is a choice-based comedy spy thriller. Most choices are out of three options.

The story is set in a future where everyone is controlled by a PLUS chip, especially you, an Enhanced cyborg, the first of your kind and the number one assassin for the United States government. You are asked to assassinate a man and his 2 young children to preserve the current regime.

This heavy story contrasts with the goofy and often mean-spirited writing. Your choices are often reactions like 'OMG?' or 'This is nuts', etc. Your character frequently insults each other and seems to have problems with women. There are several errors (such as a character whose name changes from Roosk to Roost and back), and characters often seem to change motivation or personality without warning.

Overall:
-Polish: The new system is very impressive, but the game itself could use some more editing.
+Descriptiveness: The author is good at vivid descriptions.
+Interactivity: At first I felt like almost all choices were meaningless, but some later on seemed definitely to matter. Whether or not it's true it was good at making me feel like it was true.
-Emotional impact: I tried to get invested in the story but the stakes and goals frequently change. Our character is a jerk, and I've realized that, while many people like playing as a villain, few like jerks, and the difference is that well-written villains have strong motivations for their evil actions, while jerks go out of their way to cause harm for no benefit to themselves.
-Would I play again? The somewhat slow performance of facebook messenger and the difficulty with backtracking or saving, combined with the length of the game means that I don't plan on replaying.

This game uses only the letter A in all of its descriptions. It retains inform's original error messages though.

Like SCP-5251, the puzzle here is figuring out what words would fit into the given spaces. Fortunately, it's based on (Spoiler - click to show)a classic type of adventure puzzle. I only figured that out by looking at the comments of other reviews.

-Polish: The game could certainly have commited harder by implementing more error messages and nouns.
+Descriptiveness: The whole puzzle depends on the way the descriptions are written.
-Interactivity: There could have been a lot more meat here.
+Emotional impact: I found the idea fun.
-Would I play again? No.

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 is a lovely little game by Caleb Wilson, one of many games of his involving magical plants.

In this one, you are at the bottom of a well with a piece of nearby sunlight. You want to grow but you just aren't strong enough.

This game is brief but with excellent characterization and strong writing, reminding me a bit of Out by Sobol, although less metaphorical. There are nice bits of world-building as well.