Reviews by MathBrush

This game is a polished Choicescript cat breeding simulator.

You have $10,000 and a small monthly income, and have the opportunity to buy several different varieties of pedigree cats while buying different supplies and living areas for the cats.

Simultaneously, you have to deal with a new disability, which costs money and takes up your time.

I had remembered hearing before that buying pedigree cats was unethical, and you should get them from pounds. But looking it up, it seems like the main reason people say that its bad is because they have puppy mills or cat mills where animals are stored in unhealthy conditions. Even 'backyard sellers' can be problematic, with one website offering these red flags:
(Spoiler - click to show)
-The seller has many types of purebreds or “designer” hybrid breeds being sold at less than six weeks old.
-Breeders who are reluctant to show potential customers the entire premises on which animals are being bred and kept.
-Breeders who don’t ask a lot of questions of potential buyers.
-No guarantees-responsible breeders make a commitment to take back the pet at anytime during the animal’s life, no matter the reason.

Anyway, the point of the long digression is that my character did none of these things; quite the opposite in fact! So I was happy to do some ethical cat breeding.

The biggest strength of the game is, absolutely, its cute cat pictures. I like cats, but I spend very little time looking up pet pics online and don't really feel interested in such pictures in general. But the cats in this game are very cute, especially since you follow their story.

There are also several romantic options. It was actually a bit too easy to romance people; I thought I was picking a 'be nice' option but my character ended up asking the person out.

Overall:
+Polish: The game was smooth and looked good.
+Descriptiveness: The game had plenty of detail.
+Interactivity: It was clear what different options I had and how it could affect my strategy, without being too easy
+Emotional impact: It was pretty cute
+Would I play again? Sure

This game is, as far as I can tell, written in a custom javascript engine, since you can see how its constructed in the JS and I don't think Dialog does that (but it feels like Inform or Dialog).

This is a pirate racing game with a multitude of different puzzles, some optional, including a maze, a crossword puzzle, traditional parser puzzles, directing people, shopping and economy, logic puzzles, etc.

The idea is that you are entering a racing competition with pirate ships and have 1 day to get and spend money and time to prepare your ship for the race. Then you enter a choice-based segment where you race, encountering various threats and making choices you don't know the consequences of ahead of time, like classic CYOA books.

I found the game overall enjoyable, but I felt like it was missing some key direction at various points. In the beginning, it wasn't clear what was desired or what was possible. Similarly, during the parser interlude in the race, it was unclear what form commands should take, and it was somewhat fussy overall.

That's my only real complaint with the game. Otherwise, it has excellent polish and a fun setting.

This is a choice game with some images and sound. In it, you play as a poor young thief whose father was the architect for Nero's palace. With the insight that gives to you, you decide to rob the place.

It seems that your choices matter quite a bit in this game. You can choose three different companions. My companion had a major effect on the story, so I can only imagine the other paths were very different. Also, the game referenced how I treated my companion and several other choices.

So there's a lot of replay value here, quality writing, good interactivity. There was some strong profanity and a few filthy-minded romans I met that put me off, so I don't plan on checking the other paths. I also learned some history from looking up things related to the game.

This game is meant to emulate an older teenager or young adult hopping on Discord and hanging out with friends by talking about a Japanese virtual idol group and making a wiki together.

The friendships in the game are uncomplicated and straightforwardly positive. All drama and tension come from the (Spoiler - click to show)abusive situation that the author finds themself in.

I feel like the representation of discord is accurate, and overall the writing was authentic.

The display was a bit puzzling; it's flat white text on a flat white background with no special styling or extra polish. The puzzling part is that one of the major focuses of the game is the protagonist's growth in the use of CSS, with the code listed in-game. Why not use CSS to make the game itself look fancier?

Finally, I feel a bit spoiled here, as one of my favorite games from last year (Lore Distance Relationship, which I voted for in several XYZZY awards) was also about fandoms and also treated the same real-life scenario (the authors are siblings). This game, while having emotional authenticity, doesn't have the same depth and polish of last year's game. But I am glad that both seem to be in a better situation.

This is a long Twine game that uses distorted sounds and AI-generated art to tell a story about a being in a world where astral projection is real. You discover in the first half of the game that (Spoiler - click to show)you are in a simulation of a universe that is roughly 9 simulations deep.

Much of the game is about gaining different versions of ascended consciousness, mixed with what I'd call 'stoner-dude' conversations with a lot of profanity and 'woah man!' type of interjections.

I liked the storyline, but didn't really care for our character, who had a lot of jerky options.

Overall, there was a high level of polish and descriptiveness and the interactivity worked for me. However, due to the dialog style I didn't really connect with the protagonist and don't think I'd replay.

This is a Twine game with multiple worlds that all seem to represent the same allegory. Each world contains 4 women, who travel with you, and the worlds have symbolic meaning.

Simultaneously, you're searching for a woman, with an inventory of items and a mental retreat called 'the void'. Your character's name is He, and her name is She.

The game is not too long, but it is quite dense allegorically. One gets the sense that everything has deep inner meaning. However, I had difficulty teasing it out. Given the names and the quotations, the game seems to have originally been in Italian, and while the translation is generally good, it can be difficult to get 'vague but powerful prose' to work right across language barriers, and in this game I wasn't drawn in emotionally by the prose.

Overall:
+Polish: It had a few cool systems. I was able to create a bug early on that I think exists in some of my own Twine games where clicking on the inventory when you're already in a sub-routine with its own 'return' link will trap you in a loop forever, but besides that it seemed generally smooth.
+Descriptiveness: While the characters are vague, the description of the strange smog and the computers was vivid.
-Interactivity: It was hard to grasp what to do or what mattered. I went to the void a lot, but did it matter? I bought three pills and took one, but did it change anything?
-Emotional impact: Like I said earlier, I wasn't really drawn into this game.
+Would I play again? There are a few key points I'd like to revisit and understand better.

I recently mentioned in another review how I'm a big fan of genre fiction. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about: a classic haunting story set in a hospital.

It's in standard Twine format (blue on black) and generally simple Twine branch-and-bottleneck, with some state tracking.

You play as a new CNA working at a nursing home where a dark secret stalks th halls.

I found the game genuinely frightening, playing late at night. The author makes good use of tropes; there's nothing really new here, it's just down well.

There is some use of text animation (including some flashing text). I feel like there were typos strewn throughout the text, mainly with quotation mark errors.

I'm giving this game 4 stars, due to its lack of polish but overall enjoyability. This is due to my personal enjoyment of this style of horror; for the general public, I'd say it's likely a 3-star game.

Seth Paxton first entered IFComp last year as part of the writing team behind "Big Trouble in Little Dino Park", a fun dinosaur game that unfortunately suffered from bugs and a gauntlet-style structure that frustrated players, ending up in 82nd place.

This game is a significant improvement, incorporating numerous fixes requested in last year's game. It has far fewer bugs, excellent visuals and sounds, and a more free-form structure that encourages exploration and multiple playthroughs.

I think there is still room for improvement, but that's the best way to improve IFComp reception: try something out, tinker with it, see what people think, and adjust accordingly.

In this game, you play as a team of scientific researchers who crash on Ganymede and discover a mysterious underwater world.

It takes place in 5 different chapters, each with several variables saved that significantly changes later chapters. I can only describe my playthrough, though.

Each chapter has a different mechanic, from conversation to fetch quests to what felt a bit like a game of 'battleship'.

(commentary on chapters 2 and 4):(Spoiler - click to show)I felt like the Chapter 2 quest was hard to get started. I got started at the university but had trouble after that because no one else was interested in talking. I would have liked maybe one or 2 smaller successes along the way to keep me going until I got the big series of quests working. I felt like I saw variations of 'you can't go here yet' over and over. And in Chapter 4, it was similarly a bit hard to understand the mechanics without death, especially since I was told to find and return shark DNA, but every encounter with them ended in instant death! And that quest never came up again.

Overall:
+Polish: There were a few rough edges (like one uncapitalized sentence in the 4th chapter that stuck out), but overall I loved the smooth design and music and images.
+Descriptiveness: Lots of nice little details.
-Interactivity: I was frustrated on occasion, although this was definitely an improvement over last time. I considered making this a +.
-Emotional impact: Again, I went back and forth on this one. I liked the big reveal at the end, I enjoyed the dramatic dangers in chapter 4, but all of them felt like they could use a little more breathing room, a little time to contemplate and unpack what was going on.
+Would I play again? It'd be interesting to see other paths.

I think I'd give this a 3.5, but I'll round it up to 4 for IFDB.

In this interactive fiction piece (which I played as part of a group and then again on my own), you play as the author, going through all the times in his life when he was (early spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)stung by a bee. It also deals with his evolving relationship with his sister and others, and experiences in the 90s.

A lot of the nostalgia references hit home for me; I was about 4 years younger than the author, and remembered being fascinated with Dragonlance, and both entranced and off-put by the weird card-based Saga system (which got retconned pretty quickly!). I didn't play MM VI but I would have been playing Diablo or Chrono Trigger right around then.

The game bills itself as puzzleless, which is true, but it's puzzleless like Photopia, not puzzleless like Rameses. The difference is that in this game you have to actively investigate and think what would actually happen at that point. You can get through much of the game by hitting Z by you'll miss out on a lot.

I had mixed emotions while playing the game, and for me I'd describe it most as being about the literary quality of this game.

I devour fiction for its escapism. I like to see different views on what and how the world could be. I love it for its potential. Because of that, I love genre fiction. I prefer Poe over Hawthorne, Christie over de Maurier, Sanderson over Wallace.

This game has the same raw detail and undifferentiated take on life that great literary work has. This game shows the world as it is, through a certain perspective (that of the author). But the world it shows is an uncomfortable one, filled with many of the things I personally seek to escape through fiction. I prefer the ideal worlds that could be to the lonely and often dreary world we live in.

Quality-wise, there is a lot of polish. I think on the boat there were a few sentences with a double period at the end, but that's the extent of bugs I saw. There is occasional strong profanity and some sexual references from the perspective of a teen boy's thoughts.

Every IFComp brings with it some unusual coincidences. I find it fun that this comp has 2 different games (both enjoyable) where you have to assemble a rock band to stop another group from mind controlling people, and you have to use the power of music (the other game being Codex Sadistica).

This game uses a menu-based conversation system and allows you to switch freely between 3 main characters for much of the game.

You play as 4 kids who have a rock band at a school. The school and the whole town have been consumed by Hype, a new drink that turns you into a zombie!

You have to go on a series of wacky escapades to get all the stuff you need to defeat the monsters. Quests can be done in any order story-wise, but there is a definite chronology of which one happens first (which can be used to give yourself hints).

I found the game funny and well-conceived, but it had several parser hiccups I usually associate with games that haven't been tested well. My only assumption is that the game is so complex that some things slipped through. Examples include the (Spoiler - click to show)hype can in the second quests, which can get stuck in a state where most actions with it return no text at all; an uncapitalized standard response; the game telling you to look at (Spoiler - click to show)the shelf but there is no in-game object called that, etc. Besides that, I enjoyed this game a lot.