Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This game is a lovely metaphor for many things in life. In this game, you die every single day, and it's very inconvenient. You have to find ways of arranging your life around this fact. No one else really seems to notice, or if they do notice, it gets downplayed. Giving into it completely can ruin your income and friendships, but overdoing it can kill you faster or make you feel hopeless.

This metaphor seems a lot like the 'spoons' metaphor, where someone who has low energy (such as from chronic illness or depression) uses spoons to measure how many activities they can partake in during a day.

So you could see this game as being about chemotherapy, depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, losing your faith, etc.

I played through to two bad endings first. I wondered if the game would show that there really is no good solution, or if it offered the hope of their being a solution of some kind. If you want to know which type of ending it has, I guess you'll have to play it.

I definitely think there's a lot of value in its overall messages. I have mild to moderate depression and am a single dad, so there are some things I struggled with for years that now I take shortcuts on, like using paper plates to cut down on dishes. Overall, I think this game will resonate with many people and I expect it to place highly in the Petite Mort competition.

(I also liked the self-referential part of the game about making a game. Is this the long version or the short version, or is it mostly ficitional and not self-referential at all?)

This was a clever game. I was nervous at first at how much text per page there was, so I clicked random links without reading to see how long the game was. I was surprised to see it end after one choice and two linear links.

But I was wrong.

This is a gauntlet-style game, where you have to make the right choice to proceed, or the wrong choice and fail. There are three choices.

The overall concept is one from old folklore (the kind recently popularized by SCP-4000) [actually, that was 6 years ago. So not that recent]: faery creatures must be spoken to very carefully to avoid shenanigans.

In this case, you have made a deal with a supernatural being for money. And to receive it, you have to be exceptionally careful in what you say; the exact kind of care you need to take is revealed as you play.

Overall, this was lots of fun, with a cool ending transition.