Reviews by MathBrush

I tested this game.

Pseudavid has really turned out to be a Twine master in the last few comps, placing in the top 10 each time and making technically proficient games.

This game is more understated than the other games, but still complex and thoughtful. You, a night guard at a soon-to-be-abandoned housing complex, gets into a fast and stormy relationship with a remarkable woman.

The story takes place over three days simultaneously, with your choices in each day affecting the others (so a choice in the future can be a flashback with affects the choice in the past).

The effects in this game aren't as obvious as in Pseudavid's other games, but the ending I got was very nice. If this game has faults, they lie in it being somewhat opaque or dense, leaving the player to sort through several narrative threads at the same time. But taking that away would fundamentally change the nature of the game, so I'm not sure it's a bad thing.

+Polish: This is what Pseudavid is known for. At least to me.
+Descriptiveness: The characters were so vivid it hurt a little.
-Interactivity: It was hard to figure out what's going on at times. I was a tester, so I had a leg up, but still it was a bit rough for me. Like I said, I wouldn't recommend changing that.
+Emotional impact: I felt very invested in the character I was playing as.
+Would I play again? I'd like to explore other paths.

This game had a ton of buzz on Twitter and received a lot of early reviews, so I was interested in playing it.

It turns out to be really good. Raban seems to have a firm grasp of storywriting and interactivity. This is a perfectly well-crafted game, limited only by its relatively small size. I imagine, though, that many judges will be happy to find a quick and enjoyable game with excellent handicraft.

In this game, you are texting with your mother. You come from a family of immigrants, and your mother decides to try and teach you Tagalog over the phone. She quizzes you on your life and choices while trying to introduce you to various grammatical rules which, of course, you could never absorb in a single sitting, but which she seems determined to impart.

This game uses slow text to good effect, which is really rare. I think the keys are having a very short game with well-defined parameters. Here, we know we're in a text message conversation which can't last too long, and the game is advertised as short. The delays are realistic and not too long.

I think the best part of the game is showing the tension between a mother (especially a southeast asian mother), her desires for her American-raised children and the children's own personality and feelings. I think this is great.

+Polish: Very polished.
+Descriptive: The characters really came alive.
+Interactivity: I felt like my choices really mattered.
+Emotional impact: Felt some tension. Worried I'd say the wrong things.
+Would I play again? Sure!

This is a game about horrible people. It reminds me of a lot of depressing literature, like Six Characters in Search of an Author or Ethan Frome or other books about a collection of bad people gone wrong.

This game is about a family of four, all of which you take turn controlling, and their house and its environs, a map that stays static throughout the game. Each of you has your vices: the father likes lusty young boys, the mother as well; the son spends time with violent anarchists, while the daughter is a haunted by a ghost from the past.

I like hope in my reading, and that’s one reason why Verdi was never my favorite composer. He once said that he wrote operas to convince others of the impossibility of human happiness.

Narratively, this game is strong. The storylines weave together well and the writing is coherent and vivid. Visually, I found the game pretty hard to look at, like tomato soup with basil floating in it.

The game reminds me quite a bit of Pseudavid’s popular The Master of the Land.

In any case, this is an impressive piece of work and good writing. It was interesting to meet Marcel Proust, even if it was in rather indecent circumstances.

+Polish: Very smooth.
+Descriptiveness: The writing was very clear and descriptive.
+Interactivity: I felt like my choices had strong consequences.
+Emotional impact: It was good at making me feel bad, I suppose.
-Would I play again? Not my cup of tea.

This game is a classic RPG scenario. You arrive in a town cursed by darkness, get a quest at a tavern, level up by killing some mobs and getting gear, then take on the big bad.

There have been a lot of attempts at putting quality RPGs in IFComp (and there are several good ones this year, too). This one’s pretty good: lots of non-combat exploration and puzzles, some fun text effects and an interesting backstory.

On the other hand, it could use some spellchecking. One thing you can do in Twine is go to the menu where you can ‘publish to file’ and right above that is ‘view proofing copy’. That gives you an easy-to-read version you can put into grammarly to correct most errors.

Overall, this was pretty fun, but I feel like it could have used something to set it apart from other RPGs more.

-Polish: Could use some fixes to spelling and grammar
+Descriptiveness: The jokes are pretty good in this game.
+Interactivity: It's not groundbreaking, but it doesn't have to be for me to have a good time.
-Emotional Impact: I didn't feel very invested in the storyline.
+Would I play again? I might seek it out later on.

I beta tested this game several times.

First Inform games tend to have a lot of issues from authors not realizing Inform's quirks (like forgetting to describe things or making them portable). Lance Campbell manages to avoid those problems here and make a smooth and interesting parser game.

You play as the village idiot who's out of a job. You head back to the farm you live at and try to find useful things to do around the farm, including dealing with the mutated squirrels you accidentally unleashed earlier.

The writing is pleasant and funny, with what I think of as 'dad humor'. The puzzles are well-constructed, with some animal-based conversation puzzles and some construction problems. While testing, I had some difficulty at times knowing what to do, but the game has numerous hints and a walkthrough that makes it pretty accessible. I had fun testing this.

+Polish: The game is pretty smooth.
+Descriptiveness: It has a definite writing voice.
+Interactivity: The animal puzzles are pretty fun.
+Emotional impact: The game is funny.
-Would I play again? After extensive testing, I think I'm done with this. But if I revisit this in future years I'll change this point!

This is one of two games co-authored by Xavid, both making use of the same kind of cool map code Xavid used in Future Threads a few years back.

This game is definitely my sort of thing. I love games with two worlds that are mirrors of each other, and this game has four.

In this game, you’re sent back in time to stop an apocalypse from being cause by a cult. For some reason the cultists seem completely unfazed by your presence, and you can’t understand their spoken language but can understand their written language. But this is a fairly mild concern.

There is a compact map that persists through four different time periods you can warp through. At first, you are heavily constrained, but over time you unlock quite a bit more.

Some of the puzzles were real headscratchers, but other reviews and the in-game hint system got me through. One of the main puzzles and one of the optional ending puzzles rely on urban legends about animals that may not actually work in real life.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed the game. Thanks for making it!

+Polish: Very smooth.
+Descriptiveness: There was a lot of creativity with the different rooms.
+Interactivity: Cool time travel makes up for weird puzzles.
-Emotional impact: It was fun, but I didn't really get 'in character'
+Would I play again? Definitely!

I think this game is too hard.

It's a combination energy management simulator and basic electrical engineering quiz game.

You are a young single adult who is living in a solar-powered van trying to make a living. Earning a living and being happy require electricity, but use too much and you die.

I started this game on the easiest mode possible. Each day I made choices to get money or be happy as it required. When you use electricity, the game quizzes you on how much electricity it will use through simple voltage/power/wattage/etc. calculations.

I'm a math teacher, but always struggled with engineering, and I didn't find the calculations part enjoyable or edifying. I think in the long run you're supposed to get good at estimating, so I guess if I stuck further? But after a few days, I didn't estimate right and died from too much electrical use.

The game suggested restarting and paying more attention to my panels. "My panels?" I thought, not knowing what it meant. I looked all over and couldn't find them.

Then today I tried again, and noticed a small arrow on the left-hand side that opened up to an enormous amount of choices, incredibly specific ones, which detail every single part of the solar panel system.

I was overwhelmed. I just decided to buy the most expensive of everything. Confident, I started the game. On my first choice, with 100% battery and fully upgraded system, I decided to use my laptop for 8 hours.

I died on the first choice, and I gave up.

The graphics are cool, the interactivity is cool, the platform is interesting. But this is too hard for me.

+Polish: This game is very polished.
+Descriptiveness: The game is fairly bare in its descriptions, except for the electrical components: that is incredibly detailed.
-Interactivity: I found this game too challenging for me to handle.
-Emotional impact: This game didn't compel me emotionally.
-Would I play again? I'm too afraid to.

This is a fairly short game, and the author’s first game. Because they mentioned trying to learn things, I’ll keep that in mind.

This is a multimedia-heavy game, and it encourages you to use headphones while you play and uses timed text, sometimes fast and sometimes slow.

The game is translated from Spanish, but I didn’t notice for a while because it’s a fairly good translation. But it needs some more work; when running around the room, for instance, one of the links was ‘pedizquierda’.

The story is about being creeped out and attacked by a demon at night. Interaction-wise, you have a sort of maze (that’s not really a maze), a couple of ‘guess the right option’ things and some battles.

Knowing your audience is important. A couple of things to keep in mind about IFComp are:

1.The winning games are often very polished, having been worked on for dozens or hundreds of hours. Not every game does this, but
2. Having your games tested is a plus. Having it tested by people who’ve done IFComp before is an even bigger plus. Having it tested by a lot of experience people, responding to their feedback, and improving your game over months is best.

3.Making fun of the player isn’t as popular as it once was. For instance, if you choose the wrong thing, the game has the demon say:
I think you’re too stupid for me to feel like playing with you.It was the worst decision you have ever made, but thanks for being so stupid.

As a player, that’s not super fun to read. It’s not horribly bad, and I know it’s about the person in the game, but it was my decision, and saying I’m stupid is kind of frustrating.

4. Multimedia and timed text can make a game look a lot cooler, but if you think about, why are people even interested in a text competition? Some people like it because the games are easy to make. Others are blind and use text to speech readers. Some (like me) like having games you can play as fast or as slow as you want, take breaks, play without sound while taking a break at work or at home. So having a lot of your game dependent on keeping up with the text or having to listen intently to the sounds can be hard. That’s why games like Limerick Quest that have timed text have options to turn it off.

Overall, I think this game shows cool programming and a fun writing voice. It’s okay that it has some faults, because it’s your first game. Nothing would be more depressing than having your first game be your best game, because it’s all downhill from there. I think of Victor Ojuel and Ruber Eaglenest who both entered IFComp for the first time with games that were heavily criticized. They listened to the feedback, tried again and both placed in the top 10 with excellent games (and Victor has a job as a narrative designer now).

+Polish: There are bugs and typos, but the sound effects and art are fancy.
+Descriptiveness: The game makes its world come alive.
-Interactivity: I was frustrated by having to choose exactly the right option.
-Emotional impact: This game didn't really impact me.
-Would I play again? As it currently is no.

So the author of this game (I had wondered if there were several, but there seems to be one main author with some help from Norbez) has been advertising this on Twine for quite some Twine, and I was interested to see how it would come it.

Story-wise, this is one of the stronger games in the competition. There’s a delightful tension between the two protagonists (you get to play both): a hero named Lightbearer, middle-aged and with the ability to control energy; and Promethium, a villain who creates synthetic humanoids.

The story takes you through a strange situation where the two of you must work together for each other’s good. I found the writing and storytelling to be witty. Lightbearer is fairly generic as a hero, but interesting as a person. I wondered if Promethium was coded as autistic (reacts poorly to sensory stimuli, has a specific soothing sensory experience, and, as we later discover, ).

The graphics and styling are very nice.

Interactivity-wise, I went back and forth on my feelings. It’s the same kind of model as the successful game Dull Grey from last year, where you make the same choice over and over again leading to a final ending (although I don’t think there are any Dull Grey-style secret endings here). I think that works fairly good here, but I think there’s not very much reason in-game to pursue the ‘be mean’ options.

That’s something I’ve thought a lot about while playing Choice of Games titles this summer. Several of them offer ‘mean paths’, but it’s best when they’re strongly motivated. For instance, in Champion of the Gods, it’s okay if you are wild and kill everyone on site because the Gods commend you and the people around you are glad to be protected. It’s also okay to spare the enemies because the Gods are cruel.

But in this game it just seems set up to always pick the same choice. I’ll go back and try another run. Overall though, the story was great, and I’d definitely be eager to see a new Storysinger Presents game in the future.

+Polish: Very smooth and nice
+Descriptiveness: Loved the writing in this one.
-Interactivity: I felt like my choices could have used a little more oomph.
+Emotional Impact: Yeah, I was definitely curious about the big mysteries.
+Would I play again? I could see me coming back to this in the future.

This game is another parser game (like Elsegar I) that is simple and spare in writing, with a small number of locations, each with one task to do, and generally written in an older-school style. If anything, it reminds me of the older adventures JCompton has been putting on IFDB recently. I will say that it has less empty rooms and significantly more complex puzzles and interactions than Elsegar I.

In this game, you play an Indiana Jones-like adventurer (complete with bullwhip and fedora) that must find the Golden Egg of Man-Toomba, Along the way, you meet a jungle tribe, consult your journal, and interact with several animals.

The puzzles were interesting, but I had some trouble with guessing the verb (for instance, figuring out what to do (Spoiler - click to show)when climbing up the tree or interacting with the sun stone in the temple).

There are several beta testers listed, which is likely why this game runs smoothly in general. The hint system makes winning a lot easier, too. I guess that (like my own game) I feel like this game could be significantly expanded in scope, and maybe give a bit more direction. Otherwise, it was a smooth play.

As a final note, raiding jungle tombs doesn’t feel quite as fun anymore since someone pointed out to me online that ‘jungle tribes’ are just people of a different culture and we’re just taking our stuff. It’s kind of like playing a game where you’re a Nepali breaking into Notre Dame to steal a gilded crucifix. But I was happy that you have to pay the tribe for their skilled services in this game.

+Polish: In what it does, it does pretty well. I'll leave the synonyms to my Interactivity criterion.
-Descriptiveness: The writing seemed a little flat to me.
-Emotional impact: I didn't feel invested emotionally in the game.
-Interactivity: It was hard to know what commands to type even when I knew how to solve the puzzle.
+Would I play again? It's short enough and responsive enough that I wouldn't mind taking it for another spin.