Reviews by MathBrush

This game seems to be set in the universe of Grandpa's Ranch, another game by this author, but with a very different execution. In this game, you go to space!

Your grandma is not dead, as you thought, but rather was captured by interstellar smugglers. She just got free, and needs you to retrieve a diamond. This contrasts with the first game, which was mostly about exploring a small house and doing mundane tasks.

The city in this game is actually pretty sizable, enough that I was glad to have a directions-giving alien hologram (which came in useful in many ways). There's even an economy on the planet, with several steps for gaining money from getting a bank card all the way to buying an enormous treasure.

The biggest place I got stuck was with delivering packages. I kept trying ENTER BUILDING and DELIVER PACKAGE and KNOCK DOOR and OPEN DOOR before discovering what to really do (Spoiler - click to show)(which was touching the sign). Other than that, the game is generous and helpful in guiding the player towards verbs that work.

I played on the web runner, and sometimes you had to TALK TO someone repeatedly. I tried hitting the 'up' key to repeat the last verb, and tried typing G, but neither of those worked. If anyone knows a nice way to repeat the last command in adrift, let me know in the comments!

This is a brief adventuron game entered into the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

In it, you play as a little kobold thrown off a cart in a medieval town, and have to go find your way home.

It is a 'gauntlet'-style game, meaning that you face one challenge at a time and either pass it or die. The game has an instant-rewind feature, but there are numerous ways to die and some are better-signaled than others.

Some of the puzzles require a bit of cleverness to solve, while others require finding the right combination of words. Emily Short once said that once you know mentally how to solve a puzzle, a game should make it easy to get that to happen (without struggling with the right wording). As a converse to that, I'd like to say that a good game should also make it clear when you're on the right track. A lot of puzzles in this game ignore alternate solutions or don't provide helpful feedback (I'm looking at the door puzzle here the most).

Overall, I would have preferred less learning-by-dying and more simultaneous puzzles and more striking text descriptions. The best part for me was the sense of being stealthy.

This is an interesting game. It seems to mix 8-bit sci-fi with spiritual overtones and possibly a trans metaphor.

You are a robot about to be decommissioned. You were created female but pose as male. You have to escape a large building.

It feels a bit like a Scott Adams adventure, and its minimalism itself is not a detriment. However, some of the puzzles were kind of obscure to me, even with the hints (which require praying to access, actually a neat trick). So a lot of the time I felt like I was fumbling around.

The graphics added to the game, and when I struggled with verbs a little examination or exploration quickly resolved it, which was nice. I think Adventuron was a good choice of engine here, since the graphics added more than in-depth implementation would have to this minimalistic game.

This game is, I believe, written in a custom parser that the author has used in other games. It works well here, with elegant javascript integration.

You play as an adventurer/junior magician gathering spell ingredients for you boss. The spell ingredients are all food items.

The map is laid out visually, making navigation simple. Areas vary in complexity from mostly-empty to containing multi-level structures with puzzles in each level.

The primary puzzle-solving technique is inspired by The Wand by Arthur DiBianca. You say a magic spell in your grimoire, and point your wand at something for that spell to take effect. The spell language follows patterns that you have to discover.

I haven't completely finished the game, finding only a little more than half of the ingredients on my own and 4 more with hints, but the game lets you stop at any point, and I've gotten up to an E for Exceeds Expectations.

The puzzles are rich and interesting and systematic, and vary from trivial to complex. I didn't connect on an emotional level, more just skimming the surface, but that's more due to personal taste. Overall, well-done and enjoyable.

This is a game that's essentially a demo for a longer visual novel. It takes pieces of stories of that game and mixes them into one.

This game has quite a lot of visuals, with the snow animations and wintery background being especially gorgeous, and the overall portraits being fairly high quality.

You play as a bartender who gains a mysterious ability: when someone talks to you, you gain the ability to 'replay' their story and make different choices, which can have an effect in the real world afterwards.

These stories involve dark and frightening creatures in the woods, which have become more dangerous ever since the sun disappeared.

Overall, the dark vibe here is good, the stories are detailed, there's more interactivity than most VN-type games. I did have trouble getting a feel for the 'flow' of the game, as there wasn't so much an overarching story arc with rise and fall of action. Since the full game will have an entirely different storyline, that problem may fix itself.

This is a short anthology of 7 poems.

Each poem consists of a few lines, each of which has cycling text.

You can either read the poem straight through and then cycle each line, or cycle through one line at a time. Or anything else you like! So it essentially is a collection of two-dimensional poems, which I like.

The poems are all about aliens, and saucers, and changes, and doubt. With its combination of obscure meanings and occasional goofy lines it reminded me a bit of Subterranean Homesick Alien or Decks Dark by Radiohead.

I appreciated this anthology intellectually, especially its polish and design, but didn't feel emotionally engaged for some reason or another.

This is a short parser game set in space. It has neat little pixelart graphics at the top.

Like another reviewer, I had a bit of trouble realizing I had to hit enter to start the game (might be worth adding a 'hit enter to continue' text on the title screen).

The game has you floating in space. There's not much to do besides cry, it seems at first, but fortunately the game has implemented a lot of little actions to add character. But then the real puzzles start (for me, I started by (Spoiler - click to show)examining my suit, if anyone's stuck).

Besides being longer, the best thing the game could do is get more transcripts from players and responding to even more actions than are in the game (for instance, I think TURN ME should give a different response).

It also might be worth splitting up some of the complex actions into more parts; I typed in one command and the game had a big, complex scenario where I tried things over and over again until I figured it out. It might have been more fun to do that myself instead of having it described to me.

This game has plenty of potential but is still in the early stages.

Right now, it's a completely linear intro with some nice music and some placeholder images with a charming feel. You are a young witch ready to profess your love, but when you arrive at your sweetheart's door, she's gone, and only a fragment of a spell is left to give evidence.

And that's it. Would play the full thing, when it comes out.

There is a genre of game in Twine which is massive, sprawling, and focuses on stream-of-consciousness style text. Furkle's early games were the trendsetter, especially SPY INTRIGUE, and other games like Charlie the Robot and Dr Sourpuss have branched the genre out into many areas.

This game is unusual in that it employs the fever-dream word-flood format but is also an epic fantasy story.

It is difficult to piece together storyline in this genre of writing. In this specific story, sentences can sound like this:

"Azalea ersatz lunars crackled glowing over semitranslucent ambient films this headache brutally pounds out in stechschritt to a buzzing id blockage"

One sentence I measured was almost 600 words long.

Attempted plot summary:
(Spoiler - click to show)Other sentences have more coherence. As far as I can tell, the main thrust of the storyline (told over 27 chapters, some much shorter than others) is that you are a person in a water world who has made a theft or bad business deal, and ends up killing someone over it. You enlist at sea on a quest to visit the submergence. On the way, you fight a sea monster. Then you must ascend a type of tower, which wasn't an original stop. As you do so, you seek out the Vedas, who are either Gods or nobles or something else. You request to become a Veda, or something else more than you are, which comes with a name change. Your mother was a Veda. As part of the transformation you cut off your finger? Then you visit the submergence, and someone activates a world-breaking device.

At times it seems you are someone else, or maybe it just focuses on two members of the crew, but there are two people or gods or something with very similar names (like imimnemo and emimnemo), but this is also confusing because the main character of the main story has two names (like Leinur Emimnu) and different characters use different names.

Overall, there is an emphasis on pain or emptiness of life or the quest to escape existence. It ties into Eastern traditions with statements like:

"There is one question to which I do know the answer: who we are when they wish we were not:"

but also Western ideas like sin.

Overall, it's wearying to get through; the game says so itself and describes itself like a migraine. I had to rest several times while reading it, even though I was speedreading after the first 4-5 chapters. But I'm trying to build up tolerance for Finnegan's Wake some day (I made it through 30 pages once before giving up), so I felt like this was a good practice run.

Edit: At some point, characters are making up monsters and fights like a D&D game, narrating them to each other. It's possible this is the entire story, and it's possible it was just a side diversion among the crew.

I've seen a few interactive fiction adaptations of RPG systems before (such as the Choicescript Vampire: the Masquerade games). The ones I usually see let you use your stats but generally have pre-written scenes and a constrained set of options to choose from.

This game, instead, provides you a framework to guide you while you set everything up on your own character-wise. For instance, in combat, you are provided with a little map to move your character around, and a way to take turns, and a monster manual entry for the monsters, but instead of rolling dice for you or giving you a set of options, it just asks you to keep track of your actions and the enemies and just let it know when someone is incapacitated, ending the fight.

So this is less a self-contained game than a tool for someone who wishes to try out the DnD experience and is willing to invest the time into making a character. Due to this framework nature, it fits with any kind of expansion or adaptation to the game, any character class.

In a way, it makes it like a virus, not that it's bad or infectious, but in that it can't live on its own and needs other substance to help it grow. Because of that, while I thought it was cool, it felt lacking in the criteria I generally use on this website. The next time I get on a D&D kick, though, and can't find a group, I could definitely see myself pulling this out.