Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

Okay, so there's a certain kind of game that pops up in IF from time to time. It's a kind of game that's part poetic and part heartfelt exposition. The words are abstract, the situation obfuscated or abstracted to a level where the core narrative is hard to discern and the game becomes a kind of blank slate or Rorschach test, where scenes and phrases give deeper meaning but not always what the author's original meaning was.

B-minus makes a lot of games like that, which are usually short. Longer examples are a lot of Porpentine's work, the work of Phantom Williams, and the games Spy Intrigue and Dr. Sourpuss Is Not A Choice-Based Game.

This game has that kind of style, but it also has 'really good animations and music' style, too. The music in this game perfectly complements the writing.

This is a long and complicated game. I played it over two periods of time, as I had to take a 3 hour break. When I first played it, it all seemed a mystery, but when I came back later, somehow it all clicked in my head and I understood exactly what was going on in the story and exactly who everyone was (not the deeper meaning, just the outer meaning).

The game has 21 chapters with some surprises in the middle. Here is a general outline of the complex, non-linear plot as I understand it:

(Spoiler - click to show)The player is (or more precisely, was) a young man named Hank, born in the 23rd century, who had a traumatic incident where they were held up at gunpoint by a black man, and then called the police. The event haunts them, and is one of a giant group of negative events that pile on the protagonist. The hero is also addicted strongly to drugs (one called metafentanyl in my playthrough).

(Spoiler - click to show)To get their fix, they go to the TAV institute, a pre-war group that somehow survived the worldwide conflict (giving them the name antediluvians). A Scientology-like group, they read your body with a strange meter device, and prescribe you your drugs.

(Spoiler - click to show)The leaders, Mother and Father, give you surgery and a new name to make you a woman, Hannah. Mother uses you to further her goals, having you assassinate, steal, and kidnap. Your ultimate goal is to end the bitter cycle of reincarnation and repeated horrible experiences by murdering fate, represented by an Archon. And that's exactly what you do.

There are references everywhere in the game, so many that I can't even be sure if they're references. Is it a Galatea reference when you awake as an art exhibit on a pedestal in a gallery with the name Galene (or is Galene an exhibit near you)? Are some of the Institutes beliefs and practices reminiscent of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint's beliefs and rituals? When the author refers to living in a holographic reality re-experiencing traumatic moments, is it referring to Howling Dogs? Is the end of Chapter 20 a visual representation of the scripture that says 'No man shall see the face of God and live'? Some maybe yes, some maybe no.

Other references are far more direct, like when you take on a role directly imitating the hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93 during 9/11. Timothy Mcveigh is referenced, Trayvon Martin is referenced, and absolutely everything ties in with trans identity (one reading is of Mother and Father as representing dual natures of Man and Woman inside each of us, with the protagonist's transition corresponding to their love of Mother, and Archon representing the idea of fixed gender identity). But that's only one interpretation.

I frequently compared it to musical albums as I listened. It reminded me of Joni Mitchell's Blue, where she used all of her most tender and/or heartfelt memories and thoughts to make a very public album. After my second session, I thought it was like the Who's Rock Opera Tommy with it's semi-religious overtones and a central narrative mixed up with symbolism. Or The Wall.

A game like this isn't really a game to be 'enjoyed'. This seems like the game you write when you have so many thoughts and feelings in your head you have to put them somewhere. You can either do that directly (I wrote a game called In the Service of Mrs. Claus which is 100% about my divorce, and in a fairly direct way) or you can do it indirectly and jumbledy-complex like this game. When you put out a game like this, probably the worst possible result is that a few people say "wow I loved it" and no one else comments. If you push this hard, you want someone to push back, and so I think it would be 'successful' if many people reacted to it strongly in both positive and negative ways. So 'enjoy' is definitely not the word here.

Despite that, the ending sequence with its visuals and music all came together and it was actually pretty epic, just as a story. Chapters 20 and 21 are just plain awesome, and like I said, I don't know if the author wanted to be awesome. I think a more appropriate response I had is early on in Chapter 6 or 7 where I said, "Well, that's disturbing" out loud.

The credits bring things back to a more somber tone. It's a vast list, including me (!), Sonic Youth, and 'the haters', without which the game would not be possible.

I'll have to revisit this game some time.

Rating this game defeats the purpose, but I'll do it anyway.
+Polish: Very polished. Extremely so.
+Descriptiveness: Equally so.
+Emotional Impact: High for me.
+Would I play again? Plan on it.
+Interactivity: I liked my choices.

This unity game is more of a reimagining of a tarot deck than anything else, like the text describes.

It’s a 3d game with responsive physics. You can pick up a card, place it in the correct spot (or just slop it around), flip it over, flip it over part way.

Cards can be placed in four different positions, and then the game will register the full reading for you.

It’s an impressive use of the 3d engine and the art is great. As a purely narrative game, I didn’t feel a strong emotional connection to the cards or the readings. But this will almost certainly be the most technically impressive game I play in this comp

+Polish: Immensely polished.
-Descriptive: I found the card meanings and descriptions fairly vague.
+Interactivity: Smooth and nice 3d interactions.
-Emotional Impact: I felt distanced from the messages of the cards.
-Would I play again? I'm not sure what I could find in it more than I have. Although to be fair I was always leery of Tarot, which this resembles.

**Tombs and Mummies by Matthew Warner**

People named Matt W have been doing good work in the math world for a while, including Matt Weiner (mod for this website) and Matt Wigdahl (author of IFComp-winning Aotearoa); so I was looking forward to this game.

This is a quest game and is online-only (you might be able to download an offline copy from textadventures.co.uk, but the download button on the ifcomp page just links to the website). It does not allow undo, has timed events, and if you leave it alone for 5 minutes, it will kick you out and lose your progress.

Fortunately, the game map is compact and the actual solution requires about 20 moves (mostly directions), so if you lose everything you're not set too far behind.

About half of the things you see in the games are traps, and unhelpful, and the rest are useful. Some are both (like the hint machine that hurts you while hinting).

The images, taken from ancient Egyptian art, were lovely, and the puzzles weren't unfairly difficult. I'm glad I'm played it.

+Polish: Nice images, well-thought out design and item placement and responses
+Descriptiveness: The game was very vivid to me.
-Interactivity: The above mentioned troubles with timing out and active events weren't too bad but enough that it impacted my enjoyablity
+Emotional impact: I felt a sense of adventure
+Would I play again: Maybe I would.

When I clicked on Neil Aitken’s website, I saw that he is an accomplished poet, with testimonials by other poets including some state Poet Laureates.

So I was interested to see how the game panned out. Games by static fiction authors are often different from games by programmers-turned authors. (Edit: apparently he was also a programmer before too, which explains the smoothness of the game!)

So this game is a cyclical kind of twine game where you wander around a maze of rooms (different on both of my playthroughs, with about half the rooms the same and the other half different). It’s a cave and it’s influenced by standard fatnasy tropes (treasure, magic runes, lizard people, magic pools, etc.) and you can gather various items and use them as well as gathering things like ‘incomprehensible wisdom’ which I thought was a nice touch.

Visually, the game uses neon-style text for important nouns, kind of like the neon in Cactus Blue Motel. I found it visually appealing.

This game was polished: no bugs, no typos that I found. Usually first-time game creators tend to have a few unfinished ends here and there (blank passages, macros typed incorrectly), so that was pleasing.

Overall, I would say that the line by line writing was excellent. I’ve found over time in the comp that a lot of people who try to create poetry in IF fail to inspire me, but I was genuinely into the writing here. As an overall story and as a series of interactions, it didn’t excel to me; it was competent, but I feel it could have been more ambitious. The same could absolutely be said about my own game in this competition. I would definitely consider this a game for the author to be proud of.

+Polish: The color highlighting around important words is nice, and this game had no bugs or typos that I found.
+Descriptiveness: Lovely writing, very nice.
+Interactivity: The overall structure didn't stand out to me, but the variation and the many ways the inventory can be used was fun.
+Would I play again? Definitely.
+Emotional impact: Yes, a kind of meditative, chill emotion.

This is a Windows executable game that I gave two attempts for. The first one I died against the brother, but on reloading (through 2 different saves) the lever puzzle stopped working, so I suppose I should start from the beginning, but I might have to save that for later.

This game reminds me a lot of Eye of the Beholder but without graphics. It’s menu based; in each room, you can look at each of the four directions. When you look at a direction, you might see something like a mural, or you might find items, which you equip. Items can be upgraded through prayer, which gives them special abilities. Combat is turn-based.

Most of the puzzles involve decoding passwords through hints scattered around the map. It’s a fairly compact game, so replay won’t take too long.

The goals of this game seem different from most parser games. Instead of focusing on mimesis or smooth gameplay flow, it focuses on combat and inventory. Worth checking out if you are into TTRPGs with miniatures.

-Polish: I had one crash and a weird bug with the levers. The system had words wrap around lines, being split in the middle instead of moved in discrete chunks.
+Descriptiveness: The scratchings on the walls and the knights you fight were interesting.
-Interactivity: Looking at each room separately and having to use different commands for each menu was kind of a pain.
-Emotional impact: I didn't really get a strong feeling from this game. It seemed more of a system than a compelling story, and that's okay; it just didn't move me.
+Would I play again? I'd like to see the ending sometime!

I beta tested this game a while before the competition.

I found this game charming. Time travel and dual worlds always fascinated me, and in this game you explore a town before being sent 40 years into the past.

The goals in this game are simple, and I found the parser responding smoothly to pretty much everything I tried. There are many solutions to the puzzles (I ended up with about 30 points out of 50, happy with my result).

There is a timer in the game, and your watch tracks what happens. Events happen naturally in the city. People respond logically to actions you take, and everybody has a few conversation topics.

I feel like the very first puzzle with Tom can be a bit unintuitive (what exactly are we looking for?) but the state space is so small that it's solvable just by trying everything available.

+Polish: Felt smooth.
+Descriptive: The language of the game is simple, but the town was memorable.
+Emotional impact: the game felt homey. For me, this game had the je ne sais quoi that ties everything together. YMMV.
+Would I play again? Yeah, I think I might revisit this in the future.

This was an odd game for me to play. Jim Aikin was an early favorite for me, as Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina was one of the first IF games I ever played, and I thoroughly enjoyed. I later tried other games like Lydia's Heart and found them complex and polished.

This game has a lot of excellent coding and and overall clever design, but I feel it didn't quite rise to the level of the earlier games (which makes sense, as they were designed for a grander experience than can fit into the comp).

You play as a young woman who is captured in a tower, and where your kidnapper is planning on raping you. The game heavily emphasizes this in the opening scene and content warnings, giving the player a sense that perhaps the seriousness of this crime will be justified in the story. But in the actual game, nothing at all depends on the duke planning to rape you. The story could just have easily had you kidnapped for any reason whatsoever and it would have made no difference at all. So I'm not sure why the rape is dwelt on so heavily.

Many puzzles require nonstandard actions, usually involving examining scenery items that are in the middle of room descriptions and discovering extra parts to them, using special verbs (in at least two puzzles, EXAMINE doesn't work but closely related verbs work).

The characters are well-differentiated and have interesting conversation, but for me at least they had all conversation topics available at the same time; so, for instance, I was able to ask the cook about things that I had never heard of, and which I later heard of from another character, and which were involved in puzzles I was very far away from, providing a sort of spoiler.

Here's my final score breakdown:
+Polish: The game was very polished. Most of my issues were with interactivity, not with overall polish.
+Descriptiveness: Characters were well-differentiated and there were a lot of little details.
+Would I play it again? Yes, especially since I feel it has more secrets than I discovered.
-Interactivity: I found myself fighting the parser a lot, and I feel that several of the puzzles were designed in a way that didn't click with my brain.
+Emotional impact: I wavered back and forth on this, but in the end, the game made me feel a lot of things. I wouldn't have played through this slowly and analyzed it the way it did if it didn't have an overall effect on me.

Larry Horsfield has a long-running and fairly successful series of ADRIFT games with the hero Alaric Blackmoon.

I always have a bit of trouble finishing the games. These games are definitely in the older school fashion, which Adrift is suited for. Adrift only encodes specific verb-noun combinations, although you can set up a few synonyms. So in particular, if an action works in one room, it might provoke an error message in another. To climb down a rope, you must type ‘CLIMB DOWN ROPE’ but not ‘DOWN’. This isn’t necessarily a drawback…it ends requiring careful analysis. These games are the perfect games to slowly pick at over a month or so.

During the comp, though, I rushed with the walkthrough, until I messed up a part with a bucket and got stuck. In the part I saw (about 2/3 of the game), I found some really fun dynamics (like growing and shrinking), intervened in a goblin war and navigated through some crazy caverns. Definitely one to come back to later!

+Polish: It has a lot of effort put into nice color changes and complex mechanics.
+Descriptiveness: I could imagine a lot of the scenarios vividly.
-Interactivity: I frequently had trouble doing what I'd like to with things, and commands frequently had to be very specific.
+Would I play again? I plan on looking at this again.
+Emotional impact: A lot of parts of it were just fun, like crossing the ravine and changing shape.

This game seems like a sequel to Gotomomi, AvB's expansive parser simulation game of 2015 set in Gotomomi, a neighborhood in Japan. In that game, you gathered money by various means (working carrying a bucket of fish, posing as a model, etc.)

In this game, you return to the same scenes, but your path is a lot more constrained at first. The main goal seems to be finding better and better housing.

There are elements of the game that seem surreal, especially near the end. I wouldn't use the term magical realism, because there's not any magic here, but maybe 'enhanced reality'? There is violence in the game more surprising in how it is reacted to than its existence.

Overall, the game's narrower focus than Gotomomi aids it in telling a coherent narrative. However, many required actions are things that, while dramatically sensible, don't make much sense in a typical parser game. I ended up using the walkthrough for most of the game. 

+Polish. The game uses an in-depth conversation system and has a lot of interesting moving parts (like a gambling game and holding your beath).
+Descriptiveness. This game is very descriptive.
-Interactivity. I often found myself at odds with the parser.
+Emotional Impact. The ending was very intriguing. I don't know if it was moving, but I'd describe it as a thoughtful game.
+Would I play it again? I'd be willing to give it another go some time.

Equal-Librium is a short, replayable Twine game about how our daily choices affect our lives in deep ways, and interesting topic that I had actually been reading about before the comp began.
The game uses complicated styling, like shaking text and some timed delivery (which didn't really annoy me here as it was fairly fast and the game was short). It emulates e-mail systems.
The story is about being a CEO of a company and receiving a bribe offer with ecological consequences. There are several endings with a suggestion to replay.
I found some typos and a broken macro, but the story was interesting.
-Polish: The effects were fancy, but there were too many typos and errors for my liking.
+Descriptiveness: I found the writing vivid and interesting.
+Interactivity: Branches a lot but is short enough to make replaying feasible.
-Emotional Impact: I got where it was coming from, but for some reason or another the message didn't sink in.
+Would I play again? Wouldn't mind giving it another spin to find more endings (already found 2).