Reviews by MathBrush

This game was directly inspired by the Hard Puzzle games in its difficulty level and clarity and by Junior Arithmancer in its actual puzzles.

Hard Puzzle was mainly known for being intentionally poorly-clued, with numerous red herrings and puzzles that aren't quite fair. The idea was to have a kind of game you can beat your head against for a long time before finding a solution.

This game is similar. You find yourself in 4 rooms with a helpful fairy. Each room has a number on the floor and some other object of interest in the room (either a door or a clue). There is a recess that is common to all the rooms (essentially in the center of the circle) with a book.

Puzzles involve the book and the numbers and the clues (which makes sense, since that's all there is) and is similar to Junior Arithmancer a bit.

I found the game very unfair and very confusing, but that is the intent. I got a lot of help from the fairy (enough to solve one of the clues) but looked on the adrift forums for the other 2.

I wish I were able to type and execute a list of commands on one line, separated by punctuation. Once you know the answers to the puzzle, it can be pretty tedious to enter.

Overall:

+Descriptiveness: It's effective for the style it's going for
+Interactivity: I didn't like the tediousness, but the game was trying to be frustrating and hard, and it was
-Emotional impact: I saw this entirely as a puzzler, removed from emotional ties
+Polish: I encountered no bugs.
-Would I play again?: The value's all in the surprise, and there's not much replay value.

Arthur DiBianca has explored the creative space available for limited parsers for many years now. The sheer number of puzzles he has come up with for things like directional commands (Inside the Facility), wordplay (Sage Sanctum Scramble) and just poking a box (Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box) is impressive.

Here, we play as an adventurer in a small town where you can buy equipment, hang out at the tavern, or head down to the dungeon where you have a limited amount of time to battle and find loot. Dungeon verbs are limited to skipping the current battle, fighting, and searching, with extra fighting commands added later. It's really interesting contrasting this with the games of Paul Panks, exemplified by Westfront PC and lampooned in Endless, Nameless, where he always had a cookie-cutter village with a 3 or 4-room tavern, church, etc. and forest full of monsters. Those games were filled with a lot of cruft, while this game cuts all of that out to its bare minimum functionality.

This game is more or less an RPG or roguelike, and it has a 'grind' and RNG that sets it apart from his other games. Is this successful?

Here's my 5-point rating scale:

+Polish: The game is very smooth. Arthur's limited vocabulary allows for intense polishing on what remains, and the game feels completely smooth and operational.
+Descriptiveness: There's a clever mechanic where monsters came in 2 (and later, three) variants that differ from each other by just a small word or two. Only by careful experimentation can you distinguish which monsters are 'safe'. I feel like these constraints led to vivid descriptions since there had to be a lot of detail for the differences to be lost in.
+Interactivity: So this could go either way for most people. I grew up playing games like FFV (on an emulator with a fan translation) with my head down on a desk reading a book while I moved the arrow keys left and right, grinding encounters. To me, that was the quintessential RPG experience. This game also has a lot of grinds that can become tedious. For me, I was interested enough in seeing a little number on the screen go up; others may not be. More seriously, I had to battle the RNG on several occasions, especially the final boss, where I ended up manipulating UNDO to try and get a favorable combination. In the end, it turned out I had a misconception about the boss, and so my UNDO was unnecessary, but I did use UNDO for some of the final achievements which, unlike past DiBianca games, were less about showing extra skill and more about extreme patience with RNG.
+Emotional impact: For me, this game hit a spot of nostalgia. Otherwise, I probably would have felt distanced a bit by the 'where's Waldo' system, treating words as puzzles themselves rather than
descriptors.
-Would I play again? For me, the big draw in replaying an RPG is trying it with a different character class or setup or seeing what different random drops you can get. You can't really get that here, because you can only get to the final boss after thoroughly plumbing everything the game contains; there's no remaining mystery and only 1 'anointed path'.

Overall, though, I feel confident recommending this to others and consider it one of the best games in a year that's already had some great competitions.

This is one of Fallen London's Exceptional Stories that gets recommended a lot.

Exceptional Stories are IAP's for the main Fallen London game. Each is its own self-contained story and usually comes with a reward worth 62.50 in in-game money, which is a lot for new players and a moderate amount for endgame players.

In this setting, Hell is next to Fallen London (although it's not quite the Hell of classic Christianity and the devils are not more evil than others in this setting). The Church of England still exists but has adapted to deal with these changes.

This story concerns a new Saint which is appearing in different texts. You have to help an eager deacon to hunt down where this info on the saint is appearing from and deal with his leaning between the Church and Hell.

The highlight of this is probably taking a train down to the Marigold station (the last stop before Hell, and something you can reach on your own very late in the game by becoming a railroad baron) to see about this Saint for yourself.

The very good exceptional stories coming out recently mean that this one doesn't quite live up to their standard, but it was still very polished descriptive, and with some great payoff moments. I would consider it to be one of the better exceptional stories.

I beta tested this game.

This game is written using the author's own Versificator system, an excellent system built up over many years.

In it, you play as a Grue in a classic adventure. However, you have no interest in murdering adventurers. But you do want to get them out!

The game reverses several parts of classic adventures. Instead of mazes, you move through orderly access tunnels. Instead of finding light sources, you find ways to dim light.

This is a clever reversal and a fun way to play.

The only thing I had trouble with was the overall main mechanic of rescuing adventurers. The puzzle structure is organized in a way where it's hard to know you're making progress until you've figured the whole thing out. But that's mostly a personal reaction and may not apply to others.

I also played this as part of the Seattle IF Meetup and think it's appropriate for group play. We all had a lot of fun!

I'm a big fan of the detective genre, and it's always nice to see a long-form game come out.

This is a big game, spread over a dozen or so locations and three days. It's ambitious, with many scripted events, NPCs, and action scenes.

These kinds of things are hard to pull off. The game handles pretty well during the first day, and I spent a long time with this game up on my desktop trying to work through without hints. As time progressed and I went through the days, there were more and more holes in the system until I ended up relying entirely on the hints, although those had a gap ((Spoiler - click to show)escaping the rope).

The game has a lot of good parts, and credits several testers. The kind of problems that are left seem like ones that are typical for this type of story: one where the author seems to know exactly how each scene should play out and what the player's logic is. The problem is that 'the player will get it wrong', like Stephen Granade once wrote. It's very difficult to guess what people will try unless you have many many testers or constrain the player somehow (by reducing the number of items or by using a choice-based system, or by giving leading hints that increase the more you do the wrong thing).

My overall rating:
-Polish: There are several remaining bugs.
+Descriptiveness: For me, I enjoyed the writing and setting generally.
+Interactivity: The bugs or missing hints threw me off, but I liked the conversation and map movement. Some parts didn't work for me, but overall it was good.
-Emotional impact: Great at first, but kind of petered out at the end. I can't explain why.
+Would I play it again? If it was updated, I probably would!

I saw this game on a list of 'Best Twine/Ink games on itch.io' I've been working through: https://itch.io/c/1424718/twineinky-if

This one felt like a good fantasy visual novel without the visuals. It's a longer game with a bunch of mini-quests inside one big quest, a mini-game involving making a potion, and two young and attractively-described characters (one male, one female) who are both interested in you. There's a lot of world-building: you are an alchemist in a fantasy city with a complex hierarchy of Gods and an entire world history.

It's not perfect; the interaction was too often 'click to see what happens next' or 'click to do the clear right thing or not' for my taste, but it should feel right at home for most fans of visual novels. Also, so much gets unused, including most spells and recipes and most of the money system. I enjoyed it overall, though, and the romantic options were fun.

I generally enjoyed the first time I played through this game. It seemed like a twine game with a visual novel-type structure, with a few major choices (mostly what to study and who to romance), a lot of time skipping, and, for some reason, a lot of 'keep doing this or stop now' options. I thought it was okay.

But then it looped for the first time, and I was hooked. This is a game about living many, many lives. The author has a great trick for nudging the player forward while making them think it was their cleverness that got them that far all along.

I played through 7 or more times until I got an ending I really liked, but there's a lot more out there to discover. This is a game offering what feels like real agency (even if a lot of it is smoke and mirrors, where the game puts you into the 'best' options after time) and memorable characters.

I saw this game on several 'best of' lists, both on here and on itch.io, and it definitely lives up to it.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London. In this exceptional story, you are drawn into the story of a scientist experimenting with the rubbery form. This draws unwanted attention for them, and you have to track them down.

There's plenty of new background material for rubbery men here. Rubbery men in general have always served as a sort of allegory for different types of discrimination, although they are also used just as an example of 'cool weird being'. This story stands in stark contrast to their more recent 'advances' in Fallen London society, where a rubbery man ran for mayor, several have nice stalls at the bone market, and options to be violent towards rubbery men have been reduced, all seemingly stepping away from the 'rubbery men represent oppressed minorities'.

This story emphasizes the 'otherness' of rubbery men. They stink, they gurgle horribly, you feel uneasy around them. It felt weird to me, to be honest.

The main story has some surprises I won't go into, but much of your time is spent in a kind of homeless rubbery camp under a railway bridge. The mechanics here are unusual but work once you experiment for a while with passing time. You learn more about the rubberies and their ancient ancestry, and have a difficult choice to make at the end.

Overall, the writing and mechanics here are interesting, but a few things took me out of the story, such as the more grim depiction of rubbery men.

This game is primarily about the romantic relationship between two men, a superhero and the doctor boyfriend that patches him up all night. It focuses on feelings, passion, includes photographic images of the main characters kissing.

It's quite long, and has a recurring mechanic where you have to select the correct option for treating your boyfriend out of a dropdown menu, using a medical guide you wrote yourself for guidance.

The interactivity is pretty great in this game. The main mechanic mostly worked for me; if you get it wrong, it just sends you back.

The writing was pretty lush (I don't know if that's the right phrase), almost over-the-top. In general, with the plot and writing, it felt like a light romance novel in a dark and gritty setting. Your boyfriend is tormented by the fact that he violently attacks criminals and puts them in the hospital, but feels morally obligated to do so.

There were enough typos that it was a noticeable problem, although many pages had no errors and most that did only had one.

This is one of the longer games in the comp. Interestingly enough, the longest game in the comp is also a gritty doctor-themed romance. Here's my rating:

-Polished: Looks great visually but needs another pass with editing.
+Descriptiveness: Very descriptive, grounded, uses various sense.
+Interactivity: I liked the doctor mechanic.
+Emotional impact: It didn't completely grip me, but I was invested in the characters.
+Would I play again? I might check to see if there's another ending.

This was a great Exceptional Story by Fallen London.

When I first wrote reviews, I wrote a lot of dumb things (a habit I have kept to this day). When I first reviewed Bee, I think I wrote that 'Short doesn't write choice games as well as those like Porpentine who exclusively write choice-based games'. (I've since removed it).

The thing is, by now Emily Short is one of the most experienced people out there in Choice-based narratives, and quality-based narratives. This exceptional story, written a few years after Bee, shows complete control and artistry with the medium.

Your character is asked to investigate the disappearance of a governess who had been killed three times already (death being a relatively minor inconvenience in the setting of Fallen London). To learn more about her, you go an a quest across all the main areas of Fallen London, learning more about how servants in every area live and providing insight into a class of people often overlooked in these games.

In addition, the story has very nuanced characters with individual narrative arcs, like the children and the governess herself.

There was a Flash Lay (a randomized pursuit) in the middle of the story which is a mechanic that I think is independent of the main story in terms of content; I found that a little slow and not as interesting as the rest, but I don't think it was developed directly as part of this story.

A fascinating character study and a satisfying mystery.