Reviews by MathBrush

Jared Jackson is one of the most innovative IF authors out there, always pushing the boundaries in weird ways to test what you can do with text. His previous games, Instruction Set and Language Arts, explored algorithms and text manipulation in fascinating ways.

This game is a card-based game where your attacks and defenses are represented by a deck of cards. There are 3 dungeons to work through, each with a boss, and there are checkpoints and small encounters like gambling, a maze, and a funny recreation of Leroy Jenkins.

I beta tested this game, and I didn’t help much. At the time, I couldn’t help but die really early on, so I felt like I was a bad player and didn’t try much further (sorry Jared!)

As a player, I’ve taken the game up on its offer to give me unlimited respawns with increased health each time. This made the game far more enjoyable. I ended up making it halfway through the middle dungeon as a berserker when the game stopped responding to my link clicks. Restarting the game and continuing my save, I found that I could not continue, as it took my to a blank screen (this possibility is mentioned in the game’s readme txt). I might give it another run as a wizard later. This is probably something I would have caught as a tester if I had embraced dying, so sorry Jared!

I’m not sure if this game is possible to beat without dying a lot. There are no healing opportunities between encounters (except very rarely), and even maximizing your defense actions still won’t be enough to protect you from attacks, so it’s mathematically impossible to keep from dying. Since dying is framed as bad in most games, that’s kind of a bummer at first.

The variety in the game is fun; as a combat system I find it genuinely enjoyable. The complexity though may be its own downfall; balance and bug-hunting become much more difficult with increased complexity.

In any case, I look forward to the next innovative game by this author, and I plan on playing this game again for fun after the comp.

+Polish: The game is complex and interesting. There are bugs, but the art and other systems make up for it for me.
+Descriptiveness: Lots of variety in creatures and objects and cool backstory.
+Interactivity: Once I embraced dying, I really enjoyed the system.
+Emotional impact: It was fun.
+Would I play again? Yest.

This game is written in unity, and, unlike most IF games written in unity in past years, it actually makes good use of the processor-intensive engine.

It’s a very slick design with hover-over links and a sidebar of choices. The art on this game is great; my son kept popping up by my computer to look at it.

It uses slow text, which is fine in a short game but really not that fine in a long game. Fortunately, you can click to speed it up at least a little faster.

In this game, you are a famous governmental figure in a space coalition between various races. You are known for having caused the death of a cat-like alien years ago, and now you are threatened by the repercussions of that. The different alien cultures are distinct and well-drawn.

It’s hard to know how your choices affect the story. The game never really settled down into a rhythm or gave hints about its length, or provided saves, so I was just kind of flying blind. In the ending I received, there were several loose threads, which makes me believe that the game has multiple paths and significant branching.

The art and UI programming were excellent, and the actual story were excellent, but I wonder if they worked at cross purposes at times. I guess it was the slow text that really inhibited this for me; I think the intent is to get people to read slow, but I have a reading pattern where I look over the whole page, planning which segments to focus on and then moving in. I read non-linearly, I guess I’m trying to say, and slow text really messes that up for me. And what’s the purpose of it? To make sure people don’t miss your text? The best way to do that is just to write only what’s essential. Clicking helped but was still fairly slow.

This is a great team, though. I could definitely see all 3 of them working for AAA if that’s something they were interested in.

+Polish: Very polished.
+Descriptive: Writing was great, not gonna lie.
-Interactivity: I couldn't figure out how to strategize or immerse myself in character, and either would have been fine.
-Emotional Impact: I felt an emotional distance from the character, and the stakes felt low emotionally, due to my issues with interactivity.
+Would I play again? I'd like to see more endings.

This game reminds me a lot of the games the teenagers made in my interactive fiction summer camps.

It’s got a broad, wide open map with generally one item of interest in each room or less. The puzzles are simple and represent broad tropes: find a key, talk to an NPC, kill a monster, buy an item. There are direct references to both Animal Crossing and Minecraft. The writing is spare and simple.

There are several typos in the game (like ‘Mine if I’ instead of ‘Mind if I’); in the future, you can type CTRL+G in the Inform IDE to do spellcheck (although some always slips through!)

Implementation is spare as well. I see that the author posted their draft of the game on the forums in May, and got some responses, but I think that the game could definitely use some more thorough beta testing (although that effort definitely did happen).

Honestly? This is simple and clean. The maze wasn’t my favorite (it looks like it was created by drawing a 9 by 9 grid and connecting rooms with a big squiggly path, and has no special features to distinguish it from other mazes). But I’d much rather play a simple game where everything works than a game full of complex systems that fail miserably. This game, though, could do a lot more to distinguish itself.

-Polish: The game had several typos.
-Descriptiveness: The writing was bare and relied on tropes for your imagination rather than its own ideas.
+Interactivity: The maze wasn't the worst thing ever and I like playing through clean simple games.
+Emotional impact: The game was fairly flat, but at least I had some fun.
-Would I play again? I think I've seen enough.

So I'll admit, I was skeptical before playing this game. Many claims about game length in interactive fiction are wildly exaggerated, and custom engines are typically done poorly. So hearing about a custom engine game with 15 hours of gameplay, I was skeptical that it would be that long and expected it to be quite bad.

In fact, though, this is a very funny game and the mechanics, though hard to get used to at first, end up making sense. I've played about 5 hours so far, using a ton of hints but also taking breaks, and I have explored only about half of the map and still have several puzzles left on that part, so the 15 hour claim is accurate. I definitely intend on finishing it.

You play as a young girl who is asked to chop wood by her mother. You decide it would be more fun to make a friend, though, and that is your first quest. After that, you and your friend have a big open world with many simultaneous puzzles to solve.

The game is translated from Italian, and is generally pretty good (I've sent some possible corrections to the author where I thought it sounded a bit off). The girls' attitude to horrifying or shocking things is pretty funny. The art is also great, especially the background art of the final version that has been shared in a different thread.

The weakest part is the opening. This is a weird system, and most people have trouble adapting to a weird system. That's why many people don't play parser games: you open it up and what do you do? Knowing it's VERB+NOUN and that examining and taking and talking takes some training.

Similarly, this game opens up with a pretty small area (good) but also a ton of menu options from the very beginning. It might be better to give an incredibly easy puzzle right at the very beginning, so easy the game basically solves it for you, with no menu buttons but the one that solves it, just for people to get used to the game, the map, etc.

I found the puzzles engaging and interesting, and it made me happy. They are also hard, and I used all the hints. Sometimes the trigger for events didn't make sense. I had a small period in the game where all the hints said 'you can't do this yet' and I kept talking to people, and eventually a random scene triggered. Several times in the game random scenes trigger that advance the plot and I don't know why (usually 'Let's go talk to so and so').

How does this system compare to others? I think this system is like the programming language C++. C++ is very powerful and lets you do amazing things but it is a pain in the butt to learn, a little scary, and sometimes you feel helpless. I saw that in the graphical version the buttons are replace with pictures, and I think that could help a lot.

Overall, this is a game I would pay money for, especially the art version. Again, I know not everyone agrees. I've realized during this comp that my enjoyment of things is not a reliable indicator of whether other people will enjoy it, and my score isn't always a good indicator of how much I enjoyed things. But I like this game and will score it well, whatever that means to you!

+Polish: Very polished graphically, with some small language problems when I played.
+Descriptiveness: Very funny and easy to imagine.
+Interactivity: Interface was hard to get used to but puzzles were really fun.
+Would I play again? Definitely going to finish it.
+Emotional impact: Very funny.

**You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf by BJ Best**

I beta tested this game.

In regards to the scenery and trimmings of this game, it's polished and nice-looking in the Chapbook format or lookalike (I remember I asked about the format while testing but can't find my correspondence anywhere). It has good music and flows naturally.

Writing-wise, this is GPT-2 (a procedural generation/ai tool). I usually really dislike GTP-2 because it just regurgitates whatever's put into it. Most popular uses of GPT-2 involves scraping other people's content without attribution and then spitting it out, with most of the 'best results' being word-for-word copies of the original input.

But in this case, the person using GPT-2 is the person who made the original content, so that makes it more interesting. I guess, then, that this is like a procedurally generated mirror. It lets the author see themself, and it lets us see that vicariously.

There are fun parts in the writing (the line 'You count the days until Christmas. I count the days when we didn’t know each other’s last names.' reminds me of Arcade Fire lyrics). Overall, it's an interesting experiment, and reveals a lot about the author.

+Polish: The game is smooth.
-Descriptiveness: It's made of interesting chunks, but they don't flow together in larger picture.
+Interactivity: It gives the sense of interaction, a weird sense of pseudo-agency. The footnotes help.
+Emotional impact: For me it was curiosity about the author themself.
-Would I play again? No, one run through seems enough for me.

Okay, so I think this game actually has a lot going for it, and I also think it will receive less votes than most games and score lower, and not necessarily deserve it.

This game is a windows executable. Historically, windows executables get very few votes.

This game is written by an Italian author and has numerous English grammar errors. Which is reasonable; I suspect that I if I wrote a game in Italian, I would have quite a few Italian grammar errors. But it can be confusing; the kitchen has ‘cookers’, but is that the oven (an openable thing?) or the stove (not openable?) When it says that the bench has a usable bottom, how was that meant to help me open it?

I got fairly far in the game, making it to the city of Radicofani before being killed in the church. This game has a lot of sounds and pop-up images (which mostly must be closed individually). I especially enjoyed the pixelization of the Beatles Revolver album cover.

I suspect the game is on a timer, as when I got further the missing woman’s picture frequently popped up telling me to hurry.

Typing HELP helped me a lot, as did typing words’ whole names rather than parts.

I liked the story, involving some sort of portal in spacetime, the power of the written word, a murderer and possibly demons?

Unfortunately, there is no walkthrough with the game. I’d definitely take another crack at it if I could have a step by step walkthrough (although I’d just follow it exactly so I could see the whole story).

+Polish: Lots of problems with the custom parser, but lots of good sound and images.
+Descriptiveness: Very vivid. Probably my favorite thing about it.
-Interactivity: It was very hard to guess the next step.
+Emotional impact: It was all mysterious and cool.
-Would I play again? Without a walkthrough, no. With a walkthrough, yes.

This game gave me all sorts of different reactions.

First of all, it has nice visuals and sounds chosen from a variety of operas and symphonies.

The text is slow during musical portions, but the game overall is relatively short.

This game is a retelling of the Phantom of the Opera, where you can customize it in 6 different ways depending on the time period and the way you perceive the story of the Phantom.

However, on replay, choosing entirely different options, I found myself with almost the exact same story. I checked the code of the game, and all the stats affect at most one or two paragraphs each.

The writing is interesting and makes for a good retelling, with narrative twists. I felt that the characterization of Christine as seductress was surprising to me and didn't really gel with my version of the character, and then later events further differed, but I suppose that's the variety in retelling a story.

So I honestly don't know. This is in no way what I would consider a bad game, but it has a lot of unusual choices that I need to sit and unpack for a while.

+Polish: Everything worked well from the get-go.
+Descriptiveness: The characters and locations were vivid to me.
+Interactivity: Despite the small effects of choices, I felt like it was interactive, especially the first time.
+Emotional impact: I'm a Phantom of the Opera fan, so it was fun to play it in Twine form.
+Would I play it again? I don't plan on revisiting this.

I beta tested this game in a pure parser format before the clickable version was enabled.

This is a very strong game for the competition, one of the most polished parser games. You play as a young girl who has to go around the house getting stuff ready for dinner. But as the blurb says, this is a game of 'peculiar proportions'.

In fact, it turns out that the main mechanic of the game is (Spoiler - click to show)manipulating objects and altering the size of things by interacting with a scale model of your house. This provides for wildly inventive puzzles that get better as the game progresses.

But, since it gets better as the game progresses, it struggles a bit near the beginning for finding motivation to continue. In a sense, that's a lot like Shade, which has a very similar opening (in the sense that you're fetching objects in a house) and also gets better and better as time goes on.

Dialog is looking strong as a game language here. This is very complicated stuff, with a lot of disambiguation and complicated parser directions, and it's handled beautifully. The hyperlinks threw me off a bit as I was surprised that the mouse arrow turns into a text cursor when hovering over them. I wonder if some kind of color change when hovering (like Twine's highlighting) or turning the cursor into a hand (like both Twine and Windrift), as text cursor doesn't indicate 'click here' in my brain.

+Polish: The game is very polished.
+Descriptiveness: I was going to say that the setting is very commonplace, even with the cool mechanics, and doesn't lend itself to impressive descriptions, but then I remembered (Spoiler - click to show)the little hamster-sized hat you put on the hamster. There's a lot of cute little things in this game.
+Emotional impact: Very fun.
+Interactivity: Love the puzzles.
+Would I play again? Happily.

In Adventures in the Tomb of the Ilfane you play as an adventurer who is running from Nazi scientist Doktor Chirlu while you break into the tomb of Ilfane, ancient Autarch of the Teresten people. You have access to a beautiful mural of Teresten history, a Dais that represents the planets, and a sarcophagus covered in strange runes.

Below is a spoiler that may help those who didn't see the blurbs and cover art in IFComp 2020:

(Spoiler - click to show)Check out
"Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!" by Tarquin Segundo and
"Terror in the Immortal's Atelier" by Gevelle Formicore
and return here if you get stuck after that.


Below is more spoilers for people who've seen the first spoiler.

(Spoiler - click to show)I'm clumping these three games together because they have remarkably similar presentations. The titles all use quotations, their cover art has similar themes, and they all contain the phrase:

"Remember, no knot unties itself. You may need to seek aid from an unusual place."

in their blurb, in addition to using the same names for different characters in their blurb.

In case it's not clear, these games are part of a set, and in particular, they are all parts of the same game.

I've seen some people speculate about this on the forums. This is strongly reminiscent of the Hat Puzzle (see the second-to-last section of https://intfiction.org/t/what-makes-a-best-puzzle/46852).

The large amounts of worldbuilding and lore in each game can be overwhelming. It's descriptive and interesting, but I wonder if we could have gotten by with more names like 'the Knot' and less like 'Willershin Rill', not because they're bad but because it can be difficult to parser, especially since the first game contains several many-page books.

Fortunately, the author(s) foresaw that and put anything that you need to know in flashing lights with the words 'you need to know this' and puts them in an ordered list.

As you can guess from the similarities, the games are all the same game. Once you know that, the puzzles become easy: search everything you can for a password. Find out which game it belongs to and input it there, getting the next password. The final puzzle has the credits.

Overall, I'm pleased with these. I definitely think this works better than the infamous Hat puzzle which was not discovered without hints. The styling (especially on the runes and star chart) is nice while I usually despise slow text, it went quickly and much of it is skippable on replay.

+Polish: This game is definitely polished in appearance and effects.
-Descriptivenes: The proper names were a lot to deal with, and I couldn't picture things vividly.
+Interactivity: Great puzzles. Love it. Maybe XYZZY Individual Puzzle nom?
+Emotional impact: I felt excitement upon solving the tomb and the fade-to-white almost gave me chills.
+Would I play again? I'll check it out again in the future.

In Incident! Aliens on the Teresten! you play as a member of the starship Teresten which was attacked by an evil horde called the Ilfane after your scientist Chirlu experimented on The Knot. You have a computer that can unlock the knot if you can chart a correct course on a grid, as well as a dictionary for alien runes and a beautiful planetary logo to look at on the wall.

Below is a spoiler that may help those who didn't see the blurbs and cover art in IFComp 2020:

(Spoiler - click to show)Check out
"Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane" by Willershin Rill
"Terror in the Immortal's Atelier" by Gevelle Formicore
and see my review of 'Adventures' for more detail.


+Polish: This game is definitely polished in appearance and effects.
-Descriptivenes: The proper names were a lot to deal with, and I couldn't picture things vividly.
+Interactivity: Great puzzles. Love it. Maybe XYZZY Individual Puzzle nom?
+Emotional impact: I felt excitement upon solving the star chart and the fade-to-white almost gave me chills.
+Would I play again? I'll check it out again in the future.