Reviews by MathBrush

This is a wild game. It's written in the thinBasic Adventure Builder system. It uses multiple colors of texts and has a ton of sounds.

To help prospective players understand the vibe of this game, one of the first puzzles involves a skeleton in a wheelchair holding a buzzsaw coming straight at you. If you fail to defeat it it tears you apart while a loud chainsaw sound effect plays and red text announces your death.

I found the only way to progress was to open up the source file, and even then it was hard to figure out. I did make it to the end of the preview, however.

The idea is that your father summoned a horrifying demon and was kidnapped into another realm. In that realm is a crossroads. Each of the four paths consists largely of empty hallways with two exits each. However, there are special things in each area, like machines, talkative NPCs, enemies, and special rooms.

This was a fun game, but not very easy to play and could use a lot more testing to smooth out bugs. But since this was released so long ago, it's unlikely it will get finished soon.

This was a really, really long quest game, and one of the longer linear parser games I've played. It is also unfortunately kind of buggy.

It's a sword and sorcery quest game which is better downloaded than played online. You are a young boy who is imprisoned and who learns magic. Throughout the game, you gain the ability fight and have randomized combat. There are also timed events, including some of the hardest real-time events I've had in text games.

It's divided into 5 parts.

In the first part, you sneak around a castle at night.

Then, there is a long romantic and money-filled section where you either romance a rich woman or help a smith romance a poor woman (if you try to do both, you may lock yourself in an unwinnable state and have to edit your save file). You earn money from tasks including guessing the punchline to jokes.

In the third part, you must explore a ruined castle, fighting goblins and assembling items to explore with.

In the fourth part, you must learn more magic and assault a guard tower with timed events where you must hide from guards.

In the fifth part, you have a final battle against a necromancer and assemble a potion.

The game has a combat system with varying attacks and defences. It's a major part of the game.

Overall, the writing had some good plot points but weaker 'local' descriptiveness and line by line writing, and a tendency to include all important info in text dumps. There were severe bugs, like the final guards at the end of the tower just disappearing so the fight options were there but no responses (I edited the save file to include 'Gust' and used it to win). A fun adventure but the bugs were just killing me.

This game seems to be designed to be as mundane as possible while subtly poking fun at it. Here's a typical line:

"My job is to analyse how authorities can meet the challenge of sustainable development by putting people at the centre and turning current examples of good practice into established common practice, to achieve a better quality of life for all."

"I see... What does that mean?" Yasmin looks doubtful.

You work in The Unit in The Department at The Agency for a government. The game just has you talk to people, open doors, get new keys, get new cards, go to meetings, etc. It's just a depiction of average office life, complete with mergers and coffee rooms, etc.

As a concept it's pretty funny; I definitely think the writer did this all intentionally. There are some occasional flaws in the implementation (mostly the game saying 'Try something else' in situations where that's probably not best). I beat it without hints.

This is the highest-rated Spring Thing game that I had never played. Jim Aikin is the author of Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina, which was one of my favorite games when I started playing IF.

The idea is that you're a farmhand working with your mean old grandma and you've finally saved up enough money to buy a ring for the girl you love. Unfortunately, your grandma's favorite duck swallows it! You have to head to town, deal with some supernatural encounters, and find a way to get that ring back!

This puzzle game is really complex. Almost every puzzle in it has multiple layers. I'd find a goal, progress towards it, be really close, then look at a hint, get past that, and realize there were two more things left to do.

It's like if you wanted to get a drink out a frosted-over freezer, so you find an ice-pick, but the ice pick is held by a goblin who wants peanut butter, and you find peanuts but they're expired, and you find a a grinding machine but it has no power source. Once you fix the peanuts and the machine (their own series of quests) you get the ice pick and pull out the drink but then you realize you have to thaw the drink.

That exact sequence isn't in the game but that's the kind of game it is. This is a great game for people who love charting out maps and examining every object and talking to every NPC.

I did find that frequently the answer was something that was hard to pick out of hundreds of possibilities. For instance, the surfboard. I thought that (Spoiler - click to show)TURN SURFBOARD N or (Spoiler - click to show)PUSH SURFBOARD could work but you have to specifically (Spoiler - click to show)get on it and LEAN RIGHT or LEAN LEFT. Similarly, many puzzles require asking one or two specific people about something you saw, but the vast majority of interactions with NPCS are '____ doesn't seem interested' or equivalent, so you have to really endure a lot of blank responses to get the good ones.

I used the hints heavily. The game itself was extremely polished and had no bugs or typos that I saw, and there were many amusing or interesting parts.

This parser game was meant as Episode 1 of a longer story, but this is the only entry listed on IFDB. The author had several later games that I played and enjoyed, though.

It starts with a big setup of backstory. The author paints his vision of a utopia, where highly educated people don't have kids, the Rothschilds have been rejected in favor of a bank run by Tesla (not the Elon Musk company, but the original Tesla) who has a corporation that employs 80% of Americans and supplies free power. There is teleportation and probability/parallel world adjustments, including rival worlds. This is an alternate world different than most others I had read of, and reminds me of Atlas Shrugged a bit.

The idea of the gameplay is that you are a chicken farmer. You harvest eggs, teleport them back to base for money, then buy new chickens, new food, new water, and new chickenwire. The latter is needed because ghost foxes randomly rip into your fences and eat chickens. The game ends when you make $1000.

I played around for a while, but was unable to find the key that lets you unlock the room that has a basket and the money maker, so I ended up reading a winning transcript.

Overall, it's an interesting idea and very unusual. I didn't feel deeply compelled by the mechanics and story, but if the storyline had been continued it would have been interesting.

This was a Spring Thing 2012 game written in Quest.

The idea is that you have a spacious mansion with guests placed randomly in it at random locations, together with random items scattered around.

Your goal is to find the magnifying glass, then look at each item till you find the murder weapon. You also ASK people ABOUT their alibis until you know who killed someone and where. You then GATHER the suspects and ACCUSE the killer.

The game is, alas, largely unfinished, with the author describing several possible future improvements. There are lots of bugs that crash the game, such as when I accused the murderer.

People don't have descriptions and are often referred to as the incorrect gender; while you are meant to ASK them ABOUT ALIBI, clicking on them only gives the TALK TO option, which none of them respond to.

Overall, if the author ever came back to this and fleshed it out, I think it would be a fun game, and I would give it a much higher star rating. But for now, it's undercooked, although ambitious.

This is an unusual game from a long-ago Spring Thing. It's a choice-based game where you play as a hexagon that lived inside the pages of a geometry textbook at a school. Now that school's out, you can wander around.

You basically get three choices (where to go, who to talk to, approach them or turn back) and the vast majority of the twenty or more paths is "they kill you because you're not like them". There are 2 paths I found where you win.

It might be a metaphor for discrimination, but I get the feel it was just more fun for the author to come up with new polygon-based deaths. Overall, I chuckled at some of the geometry but found the game design unsatisfying.

This is a pdf that gives the rules for a collaborative storytelling game.

The basic idea is that you need an antagonist who ultimately loses and a protagonist who ultimately wins. People can add details at any time to the game but important details like character names have to be nominated and approved.

The game also includes some base ideas you can work with, including a list of character names. I thought "Johnald Pregnant" was the most amusing antagonist game.

This whole game is thoroughly described, but there's not really a lot to it. I'd imagine that someone focused on storytelling wouldn't need all the rules, and someone really into rules would want more meat. The people I see benefitting from this the most are a mid-sized group of people on a vacation trip where there's not much to do and they want to do storytelling but have a couple of obnoxious people in the group so they lay some rules down on how to proceed.

I like this game, and I've played it more than any other Ectocomp game, but it's designed in a way that fully exploring it is very difficult.

It's a timed game, where you have to get 30 different trinkets in a constrained amount of moves. You can still end the game without all 30, 30 is just the max. While playing, you discover a large number of amulets and eyestones. Each combination of amulets and eyestones results in different powers, ranging from faster movement to power over plants to time travel.

The map is large, as well. Without the time constraint, it would be a substantially hard game; with the time constraint, it throws optimization into the mix, especially since some amulets affect the time it takes to perform actions.

So, this game seems to me to be in the vein of Ryan Veeder's Fly Fishing, a game where you chip away at it over a long period of time rather than rushing to a conclusion. I never wrote a review for Fly Fishing because I never finished it (because I have difficulty sustaining focus if I move to other hobbies between play sessions), and I almost did the same thing for this game. But I think I've seen enough of it to say that it's enjoyable and well-written. I know at least one person has gotten 28/30 trinkets in a single go, which is very impressive.

I helped test this game. This is a brief one-room parser game with a well-written atmosphere. You are in a carriage with your father who has come to a grim decision regarding your future.

The game lets you talk and look around as well as several other actions. The issue with parser games with puzzles in ectocomp is that it can be hard to correctly clue things in a way that people can naturally follow the puzzles; fortunately, while the main game isn't too hard, the author managed to fit in Story Mode, which you can activate by typing STORY and which basically types in a walkthrough for you. I found it to be useful even after completing the story itself since it helped me key in on important things.

I definitely like the setting and the nuances here, the focus on the details of the wood and cloth and expressions.