Reviews by MathBrush

This game is, I believe, a late entry to the recent parser competition that was for 2-word introductory games for kids. It's a simple Adrift game that is generally very polished, with a tutorial available, music, a few pictures, and some text effects.

Here's my rating:
+Polished: The game is very smooth and well-done.
+Descriptive: The game is sparse and, as part of the competition, can only put a couple of lines in each description, but the author manages to make each room interesting and to serve many purposes. It could have been easy to throw in a bunch of empty rooms to fill up space, but every is nice and compact.
+Interactivity: The puzzles were generally fair and interesting. I set the game down for about an hour in the middle, and forgot an important clue and had to look at the pdf, but if I hadn't wandered off I would have remembered.
-Emotional impact: While the game is generally charming, it never garnered a strong emotional response from me.
+Would I play again? Maybe I'd show it to my son.

This is an unpolished but complex and amusing parser game made by a kid.

It's strongly based on different Nickolodeon series, starting with the Loud House.

Here's my rating:

-Polish: For a kid making a parser game, it's great. Otherwise, it has numerous problems, most of which could be solved by time and practice.
-Descriptiveness: Most of the details are left out, relying on your knowledge of the shows or of classic tropes to fill in the details.
+Emotional impact: I thought it was fun and funny, especially the slime's riddle solutions
+Interactivity: It was straightforward but manage to cook up a lot of surprises. Some bugs but intfiction hints helped me out.
+Would I play again? With my kid, yeah

This game has you stuck at the side of the road with a dead battery in the middle of some deadly acid rain. You'll end up searching a mansion with a timed light puzzle and inventory limits to assemble a door opener.

The game is polished, but descriptions are fairly sparse.

The timed light puzzle, many empty rooms and inventory limits, as well as frequent responses where the game knows what you are asking but wants you to do it in more steps (like turning on the car) reminded me of different advice I've seen over the last few decades.

I'll share some of that here:

From a list of rules for games in IFComp by Jessica Knoch, with additional commentary by Andrew Plotkin from 2003:
"> Rule Three: Do not impose an inventory limit for its own sake.
> Rule Four: Do not include hunger or sleep puzzles.
> Rule Five: Check your spelling. Check it again.

All just as true outside the IFComp.

> Rule Nine: Do not include lots of empty locations.

Important for everybody."

Jan Thorsby's list of 'things that cause automatic playing' from 2005:

"List of things that causes automatic playing
By automatic playing I mean when a player types in commands more or less
automatically without thinking much. None of the things listed is necessary
always bad, and there are probably instances when they don't really lead to
automatic playing.
[...]

2. Many rooms

Traveling between rooms doesn't take much thinking, and the more rooms the
more traveling.

[...]


7. Time limits/eating puzzle

If a game has a time limit and the player is unable to keep it, the player
is likely to play the game again and just type in all the commands over
again minus the useless ones. A time limit that last through a large part of
the game is more likely to be annoying than a time limit for just for one
scene of the game. An eating puzzle is when the player dies if he does not
eat after a certain amount of turns. It is in effect a time limit.

[...]

11. Limited carrying capacity

Some games have a limit on how mange objects a player can carry. This often
leads to the player going back and forth a lot to pick up things he had
previously left behind. In many games it also leads to the game potentially
being made unwinnable, because the player may not have a vital object when
needed.

12. Having to type more commands than should be required to show ones
intention

For instance say there is a closed door to the north. If the player types
"north" it is fairly clear that he intends to open the door and go north.
But the game may not let him go north until he has first typed "open door".
Machinery is often needlessly complicated to operate.

[...]

14. Very easy puzzles

A very easy puzzle can be things like: unlock a locked door, buy something
in a store or give an object to a person who has asked for such an object.
These easy puzzles can be important to a story but are arguably useless from
a gaming point of view. If they are not important to the story one might
consider eliminating them.
[...]"

An intfiction thread including this quote from Michael Roberts from 2010:

"A word of caution on these is in order. Many authors worry that it’s unrealistic if the player character can carry too much at one time, so they’ll fiddle with these properties to impose a carrying limit that seems realistic. Be advised that authors love this sort of “realism” a whole lot more than players do. […] Don’t fool yourself about this -the thoughts in the mind of a player who’s tediously carting objects back and forth three at a time will not include admiration of your prowess at simulational realism. In contrast, if you set the carrying limit to infinity, it’s a rare player who will even notice, and a much rarer player who’ll complain about it."

This game is very, very long, certainly the longest adventuron game I've seen. It's split up into 6 or so parts, and the first part alone is already one of the longest games in Parsercomp.

I'm going to go over my 5 point scale with it.

+Descriptiveness: The author does an excellent job of painting a rich and vibrant world. Everyone knows each other, and events in one location affect events far away. Rather than a Zork-like grab-bag of random magic and sci fi (like a lot of big puzzlers), everything is tightly inter-connected, like Anchorhead.
+Emotional impact: Unlike Anchorhead, and most horror IF games, this is based on Faerie magic. While you may or may not classify this game is horror, it certainly presents scenarios which would be strongly horrifying to those in them. I enjoyed the story, which is the main reason I persisted.
+-Interactivity and Polish: These two categories go hand in hand, and I kind of want to give half a star in each. More details below.
+-Polish: The author intentionally chose Adventuron as an engine to show what it could do in a long-form game. Through a great deal of effort, I think he was completely successful in what he wanted to achieve. However, one difficulty is with not always having useful parser responses when having the correct verb and wrong noun or correct noun and wrong verb. One frequent occurrence for me was using the right verb and the wrong noun (like saying 'mirror' instead of 'fragment') and having the game imply it knew what I was doing but that it wasn't helpful. I didn't even know the game couldn't recognize the noun until I looked at the hints or other people's discussion. This happened multiple times. Outside of that, the game is remarkably well-constructed for such a long game.
+-Interactivity: The puzzles are a mixed bag. Some are mundane (find and light candle), some are complex (operate a camera and develop the photos), some are very obscure (the game is filled with many details in every room, and four or five puzzles depend on examining such a detail, while all the others are red herrings). I enjoyed the complex procedures, the gathering ensembles. Perhaps the most fun was just grabbing everything along the way, wondering what it would all lead to. Also related to interactivity, there were numerous timed events to add flavor. These were well-written and interesting, but when repeated multiple times and in various settings with the same text, became surreal and blurred.
The game is ponderous, which a huge number of locations. To preserve realism, the game frequently has you 'wake up' with a few key items removed from your inventory and placed around you. This contributed to mimesis but also contributed to me wondering where on earth I set things.
+Would I play it again? Yes. This is a marvelous achievement of a game. I'd like to one day write something like it.

This game is an interesting mix of skill and rough edges. I'm going to review it on my five-criteria scale:

-Polish: The game could use a bit more polish, especially in the area of synonyms and responses. A lot of art is in error responses, to guide you towards the correct phrasing. I was told repeatedly I couldn't (Spoiler - click to show)tie a vine to different things, only later to find that I had to call it (Spoiler - click to show)a creeper, not a vine. That's not so odd, but the error messages all implied that the problem was the action, not the noun. There are similar issues later on, with a lot of people having trouble with the final actions of the game.
+Descriptiveness: The game is lushly descriptive. I could quite clearly picture everything in the game outside of the mazes.
-Interactivity: The frustrations of the parser took this one down for me. Otherwise it's honestly not bad. There are mazes and combinations but they're all solved easily for you. The better parts of the interactivity are all the little hidden details that reward your actions. The worse parts are instant deaths with no undo :(
+Emotional impact: Despite the many frustrations, I'm a fan of Lovecraftian horror, and I thought the core of this was well done.
-Would I play again? Not until it's souped up a bit more.

The author has said elsewhere that this is just a small game that will be more polished later on.

It uses the AdvSys language, which is capable of making very powerful games but requires a lot of work to get going. Unfortunately, this game doesn't have all that work.

It is very small, with only one real puzzle, all of whose steps are clear, but it's hard to type them in. Here are my attempts at one of the most important steps:

(Spoiler - click to show)
>pour water
I don't understand.
>water flower
I don't understand.
>empty bottle
I don't know the word 'empty'.
>put water on flower
I don't know the word 'put'.
>pour bottle
Nothing happens.
>give water
I don't understand.
>give bottle
Nothing happens.
>open bottle
I don't know the word 'open'.
>put water
I don't know the word 'put'.


The real answer was (Spoiler - click to show)'pour flower'.

My score of a 1 reflects the games lack of polish and verbs and general unfinished state. I 100% believe that with more time the author could make something marvelous.

This game is a large treasure hunt that, like very early parser games, is a mishmash of fantasy and modern concepts put together for a treasure hunt.

There is a central hub with different 'mini-worlds' you can access. They are interconnected, in that the solution for one world is often found in another.

I played straight through with the walkthrough, as:
-the game is in QBasic, and no scrollback seems to be available, making it harder to keep track of things
-the author stated it may take weeks to accomplish
-I wasn't sure if the game was 'cruel' or not in the Zarfian sense (i.e. can you lock yourself out of victory without knowing it?)

After I won, I went back and tried to explore on my own and look for different paths. I found it 'parcelled out' fairly well.

The parser is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the author describes it (in a forum post) as being the product of 40 years of work, and that it is a 'very powerful parser'. It can understand pronouns and complex commands like 'drop everything except blah and blih and..'

However, it has some issues. Sometimes you can refer to a noun by its first name (like EYE for EYE of NEWT) but not its second (like NEWT); sometimes, it's the opposite (so SCRAP doesn't work for SCRAP of PAPER but PAPER does). Perhaps most oddly, it, as many people have pointed out, can't take items out of container without using the phrase TAKE X FROM Y. Given the 40 years of development and the otherwise complexity of the parser, I can only imagine this is a conscious stylistic choice.

The world is sprawling, with many rooms having multiple exits and the ordinal directions like NW, SW etc. being used extensively. Rooms are almost ideally generic, with most rooms being empty and having names like 'MIDDLE OF CORRIDOR', with most descriptions being 'The room is vaguely lit and hard to make out. There are bare walls and floor and ceiling and several exits, including one going down.'

There is at least one NPC, who is fairly responsive. Puzzles include codes, riddles, leaps of intuition, musical puzzles, etc. with many hint sources in-game as well as built-in hints and a walkthrough.

Every game is written for a purpose. Some purposes are to share your feelings with others, to emulate something you find worthy, to try to become famous, to make money, to fufill a request for others, etc.

Due to the author's desire to keep in the oddities of the parser, the general vagueness of the game and its Zork-like setting, the QBAsic64 environment, etc. my guess is that the game's purposes are to evoke nostalgia and to demonstrate the author's system. Evaluated for those purposes, I'd have to call it a success.

For my own liking, the game is very polished and has some clever puzzles, but I didn't enjoy the interactivity as much as I could have and felt emotionally distanced from the game.

This game is part of the list of great twine/ink games on itch that I found here.

This game has a setup that is partly a personality test and partly an intro to a supernatural-themed version of the SCP foundation (complete with the motto 'Observe, Learn, Protect'). You are handled a big sheaf of background world-building and given a test to see 'what kind of agent are you?'

Then there is a narrative section about you returning to your hometown, which the player quickly realizes is very anomalous.

The game cuts out quickly after that. Everything up to this point is great; the trouble is that the 'core gameplay' hasn't really been shown yet, which means that we haven't really seen how romance, combat, or investigation will work. In my experience, this makes such games more difficult to complete, so I wish the author all the best. Either way, I'd definitely play more games by this author.

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.