Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This one is an interesting game that shows a lot of promise, but has a lot of little details that can make for a frustrating experience. With a few tweaks, it could work pretty well. I'd love to see a longer game from this author with a long period of testing entered into IFComp or Spring Thing one year.

You play as a plant geneticist who has survived an apocalypse. You must keep your little garden of food safe, feed yourself and create hybrid plants. There are 4-5 days of gameplay with time tracked.

The programming here is impressive, from the time tracking to the puzzles involving three nouns at once. But a lot of ground level work is missing, the kind of thing that generally comes with experience or exhaustive beta testing.

Here are my scoring criteria:
+Polish. The game is technologically impressive, with complicated puzzles, active animals, a time system, etc.
-Interactivity. The game lacked exit descriptions in important areas, and some interactions were 'fiddly'. (For instance, to drink water, you must 'drink canteen'. DRINK WATER instead results in 'The Canteen is not open.', since the water is modeled as an object inside the closed canteen.'
+Descriptiveness. The writing is spare at times, but so is the setting. And the author put a lot of effort into backstory and thoughts in 'the wilderness'. I think the writing is good for a parser game, and will only improve with time.
-Emotional impact. The fiddliness of the interactions kept me at a distance from the game. Had the background actions been smoother, I think the feelings would be stronger.
-Would I play again? It was fun to see everything possible, but the difficulties made me loathe to return and tinker around.

The author's other game (The Gateway of the Ferrets) has the same kind of complicated game techniques but adds some cute ferrets that amplify my enjoyment of the game. It's worth checking out!

Edit: The interactivity and polish have increased since I wrote this, so I've revised my score accordingly!

This parser game was made as part of last year's advent calendar.

It centers around a mysterious sort of room, inspired by Planescape and Land of the Lost but also reminiscent of Myst-like games and machines.

You have a pedestal with all sorts of doodads and contraptions. To get them to work, you need the help of two ferrets of varying talents.

The overall puzzle took me a while to puzzle out, and I was very happy to get the solution in a flash, but I was stumped before that.

The ferrets are cute and have nice little narrative touches, one of the highlights of the game.

The game only needs polishing to be great. A few things that could use improvement:

-The game starts with a wide open state space but only one thing advances the puzzle. I didn't notice that thing because (Spoiler - click to show)it requires examining the gateway and I had spent my first minutes exploring the device and trying to play with ferrets.
-Some actions can be difficult to phrase. In particular, instructing the ferrets to go to specific platforms was quite tricky for me to get (I tried climb to platform, go to platform, go up, etc. before hitting on the correct (Spoiler - click to show)climb mesh and (Spoiler - click to show)jump to w/e commands)

Those frustrations are mostly what made me feel the interactivity and polish could use some tweaking. But as a 'figure out this device puzzle', which I enjoy and I know quite a few others do, I would recommend this.

It's more or less impossible for me to review this game objectively, because (although almost certainly unknown to the authors) this game is tied up in the story of my life.

Enormous backstory behind spoilers for space:(Spoiler - click to show)
In 2015 I was desperately in search for validation in life. I had graduated with my math PhD with the hopes of being one of the best and brightest young researchers out there. However, I found my papers rejected again and again, and realized that I was in over my head.

Feeling like a failure and stung by the reviewer's comments that my exposition and overall writing were poor, and recently interested in playing interactive fiction, I decided to throw myself into writing interactive fiction and become a great writer.

When I began, I had a chip on my shoulder and viewed well-known and commercial authors as distant, vague entities, to be envied and imitated. My first game was well-received in general, but was noted, again, by reviewers as being somewhat lacking in the writing department. I vowed to do better.

Around that time, I joined the euphoria IF community, a discord-like website (that is now, I believe, defunct), where many of the great authors and up-and-coming ones congregated. I wanted to fit in, and here were the people I wanted to be like.

A lot of good came from that. I made my first transgender friends, which cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had from my youth and almost complete lack of experience with anything outside of the gender norm. I found out that a lot of famous people, like Emily Short, were just normal, kind individuals who happened to be very talented at writing.

But a lot of the community had different standards and ideals than I did, and I began changing in subtle ways to fit in, and eventually I realized I didn't like it and cut it out. At the same time, a lot of those same people joined the writing team of this game. As one of those not invited, it deepened my envy and pride. I thought negatively about the game, and felt a kind of smug assurance when I heard it had done poorly.

Since then, I've re-evaluated a lot of things in life; got divorced, changed careers, went back to my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I've found self-value in my church and in my high school teaching, interacting with students. I got a book deal and published a novel, and realized that it wasn't what I wanted to do. And that commercial writing isn't what I want to do. I find joy in writing the games I like, helping others write them.


But some old habits are hard to change, and probably will be forever. When I heard this game was free, I felt my old demons stirring up inside of me. I downloaded it and wrote pages of notes on why I disliked it or it was bad.

I finally realized, though, that my own personal hangups weren't a basis for a good review. And pushing through to the end revealed many good facets.

So what is this game about? Like Sunless Seas/Skies and 80 Days, its closest competitors, it's a narrative game with little storylets spread around a world map, coupled with some stat management in the background.

[Note: I had a lot of trouble finding info online about this game and was frustrated many times, so I'm going into tons of detail here. Spoilered for space]

(Spoiler - click to show)
You walk across America, and have 3 main activities:
-Collecting stories, which can occasionally deplete one of 3 stats. Later on, collecting turns into 'upgrading' where a story is retold to you by a stranger and becomes higher quality
-Replenishing those stats by finding work or buying food
-'Feeding' stories to one of 16 different wanderers on the map.

The feeding part is the bulk of the mid and late game. The strangers have detailed art, and they ask you for stories in one of 5 categories: sad, funny, inspiring, scary, and exciting. The stories don't come labeled, and it can vary from playthrough to playthrough, so you can either guess and check what the type is or try to remember from the first time.

Each character has 3-4 chapters, with 3 being the most common. In each chapter, you have 5 opportunities to find stories that fit their requests. As the nights progress, higher quality stories are needed. When you complete a chapter successfully, the character moves across the map and you gain their story or upgrade it. If you are unsuccessful, they still move but your progress is saved.

The character's stories, as I found out through experimentation, count as wildcards, level 3 stories that can satisfy any request. It can be amusing at time to tell the story of a character haunted by the phantoms of war and have the listener laugh and say how good a joke it was. I beat about 10/16 characters' hardest levels by saving up these wildcards for the final chapter.

My overall impression of elements of the game:

(Spoiler - click to show)
The 2d art and sound in this game are wonderful, with a very Americana atmosphere and some startling changes in the characters.

The 3d art is obviously the result of a lot of good effort, but it felt fairly repetitive after traversing the land over and over.

The writing is very good on a small, prose level, but weak on overall structure. The stories you collect are short little nuggets, and leveling up doesn't give you a new story to read, it just says essentially the title of the new version.

Everything in the game is allusions, allusions, allusions. You're supposed to know tarot cards and their meaning and names, as the font is too small to read if you don't know them. Most of the conversations with the characters goes like this:
-The player: Tell me about love.
-The character: Love? I've loved before. It's a strange thing, love. One day you can love, and what day you can be out of love. Me, I've been both.

There's a reason for that. One is that the writing is necessarily modular in nature. The authors didn't know what order the responses would be given in in-chapter or even if they'd be given at all, so none of them contains any essential information and they don't form a cohesive in-chapter narrative.

The other reason is that it seems to just be the direction they were given. The weakest part in the game is its overall direction/combining the various elements. I frequently thought as I played that I'd love to have all the elements separately: the stories in a book, the music on a CD, the art on a webpage. It's very disconcerting to see a beautiful transformation in the artwork at the same time that the story ends with one of several variations of 'Well, goodbye, I won't see you again.'

The game's controls and the style of play are very cryptic at the beginning. It helps to hit h and look at tips or escape to find controls. If you can push past the first part, it will start making sense.

Overall, my experience only improved as I played. As for my personal story above, (spoilers for uninterested):
(Spoiler - click to show)I came to realize as I played that I didn't need to hold onto the old envy, although I don't know if I'll ever be able to get rid of that feeling for good. I wouldn't have enjoyed writing for this game and I wasn't suited for it. I like on-the-nose fantasy and sci-fi, and I'm unskilled at literary-style text because I haven't valued it or practiced it. The game's direction leans against my values, with casual nudity included in art, strong profanity, and frequent diatribes against God, including by preachers. Getting my wish would have been a disaster for both me and the game, leaving everyone dissatisfied.

I received a free copy of this game, but only because it was on sale.

So this game is better, I think, than its steam reviews would suggest. A few people seemed to have bombed its reviews over there. But its not perfect.

The writing in this game is descriptive, and I could picture all the characters clearly. You play as an aid to one of 4 different congressional candidates. Unlike other games that play it a bit safer, this one uses real life US parties (Republican and Democrat). It doesn't seem extremely biased one way or another; someone mentioned the game as treating Republicans as 'evil' but I chose a Republican millionaire and the game seemed just fine with that choice.

In this game, similar to Werewolves: Haven Rising, werewolves have been around for a while and are subject to harsh restrictions on their freedom.

The main threads of the game are:
-Deciding to do a dirty or fair campaign fight
-Making a decision about how you feel about werewolves
-Dealing with the aftereffects of a grisly murder
-Running a monthly budget

Someone said on Steam that the game seemed to assume a female protagonist. You can choose your gender, but some scenes in the game do feel written for a female protagonist in mind. For instance, there is a frightening scene where the protagonist (major spoilers for the middle of the game) (Spoiler - click to show)is being followed on a dark street alone at night, and is attacked in an alley by a werewolf, and is worried for about a month afterwards so it can see if they turn into a werewolf at the next full moon. Its easy to see this as an analogy for (Spoiler - click to show)rape and possible pregnancy, and that's not a theme that's very common in other media (except for the (Spoiler - click to show)Alien series). But it worked for me, and I don't see it as a drawback.

The biggest drawback I do see is that the narrative arc is relatively flat. I didn't feel a real build-up in tension in any of the main plotlines, although there was some there. The overall writing level was great, though, and I felt like my decisions definitely mattered. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to fans of werewolves, political games, or simulation text games.

I received a review copy of this game.

The Last Monster Master is a game very different from most Choicescript games in some respects.

First of all, the bulk of the game is a simulation like Metahuman Inc, another unusal CoG game. About 60% of the game consists of taking 4 monsters with different personalities and strengths, training them and getting various amounts of money for it, spending the money on improved training facilities, and seeing how they respond to different scenarios.

The main stats are discipline/compassion, nerve and respect, but there are also two 'power' stats: telepathy and body language. I focused entirely on body language. These two abilities aren't used to do things directly. Instead, in many options in the game, you can either guess what to do from 3 normal options or use telepathy/body language to get a hint.

The weird thing is that the hint is often not apparently useful, and the game frequently has you try everything from a list, exhausting all your options, with the last option frequently being something out of character. So I'm not sure how useful getting the body language hints actually was.

The beginning is a bit slow, and the end a bit abrupt. The characterization of you, your helper, and your monsters can shift quickly.

But the premise is fantastic, and it allows enough flexibility to make the game overall enjoyable. I guess it's kind of like a Choicescript version of Pokemon, but you can talk to your monsters about their feelings and what it's like living in human society. You get to visit them after they graduate and see how they turned out.

Be warned that the game changes the goalposts on you frequently.

Definitely recommended for fans of simulators, not so much for others.

I received a review copy of this game.

Pros: It was much easier for me to choose the stats I wanted to have than other games, and to get them high. I chose to be like Heracles, and was a completely brutal and narcissistic champion of the Gods. The game absolutely let me take this path, and justified it in-game as being a champion of the goddess of war.

I enjoyed the writing quite a bit. The characters were on par with other good Choicescript games, but the overall plot and themes are what resonated with me.

There are several romance choices. At least two are thrust upon you in terms of their attraction to you, but you have a lot of agency over what you'll do.

This game is inspired by Greek mythology, but has its own pantheons and cities. I suggest that you try the opening before buying to get a feel for it. I'm excited to try its sequel, which is substantially larger.

As a final note, this game does something I've never seen in a Choicescript game before: (Spoiler - click to show)it has you switch to another character briefly mid-game, with a different stat set you can adjust to.

Cons: The game has a fairly linear main story (though I've only played once, many choices seemed to converge, and other reviews confirm it). Until the end, that is. However, in a game centered around destiny, that's not so odd a thing. But I bring it up because some have questioned its replay value. It felt quite long to me, though, and it had enough choice in characterization that I feel who I was as a character could be completely different from playthrough to playthrough.


I received a review copy of this game.

This quite large Gothic horror game reminded me of quite a few games and stories over time.

In its early phases, it has much of the feel of Dracula or the Mysteries of Udolpho (one of the stories inspiring Jane Eyre and Northanger Abbey). You are in a small town where a beautiful and sensual Lord or Lady (depending on your choices) presides and where strange disappearances happen, like that of your uncle.

The bulk of the game (15 or 16 chapters, each substantial) reminded me of Anchorhead, or of Udolpho again, or of Curses!, my favorite IF game of all time. A giant mansion filled with odd and horrifying characters and objects (like a mysteriously strong 90 year old butler, or a door wrapped in wrought iron vines that seem to prick your finger no matter how careful you are).

The game overall tends towards 'weird fiction' in the latter half, a genre commonly identified with Lovecraft but which here seems to align itself more with other works such as Algernon Blackwood. There are no cults here, no bizarre combinations of consonants and very little of madness. Ghostly horror is more of a theme.

There are several rewarding romantic opportunities. Like all of Choice of Games' titles, there is a lot of diversity and inclusion, but unlike some games that reviewers have complained of, all of the diversity here is very well-explained and genre-sensitive. After all, a strange manor in a strange town where the owner is known for startling and forward-thinking views is the perfect place for a non-binary character or for same-gender romances, much like the early vampire novel Carmilla, which is even referenced in-story.

Gameplay revolves around choices to be trusting or distrustful, to be physical or charming or spiritual, to investigate more or to help others, etc. There are several layers of mystery, and the game seems very replayable. I'd especially like to replay as a completely skeptical investigator.

There are some questions that I still have, and hope to explore more (especially about a figure you see in the very first chapter).

Overall, I'd say that this game in the Choice of Games canon occupies the same place as Anchorhead in the parser game canon: a long, replayable, evil house horror game that is very popular and basically great for everyone to play.

I received a review copy of this game.

This is definitely one of my favorite Choice of Games so far, for my personal tastes. It manages to make you feel powerful while forcing you to choose between competing goals, and has great options and fun writing.

It has a lot of mysteries and it has a character with psychic abilities, and both of those things are personal favorite genres of mine, so I think others may not have the same response I did. But I can definitely say I enjoyed it quite a bit!

You play as a clairvoyant teen in a high school where much of the student body has unusual powers which sprang up the year before. Other students look to you for investigating strange or missing things, and there is a general conspiracy.

It had a lot of good romantic options. One is kind of pushed on you (in regards to your feelings), but in a way that feels true to my experiences in high school, when your emotions and feelings are out of whack anyway.

One thing that I've noticed is that as I play more Choicescript games, I enjoy them more. A lot of them have similar rhythms and expectations, and it helps me strategize and find a way to enjoy them more. I would definitely put this game in my top 10 Choicescript games so far.

I received a review copy of this game.

This game is based on the world of Tekumel, a world setting almost as complex (or more) than Middle Earth and created starting in the 40's by M. A. R. Barker.

This game uses this setting well, but relies on prior knowledge of it or the desire to read several pages of backstory in the stats screen. I had that desire, so it was okay.

It's a lush world that incentivizes you to act violent, proud, sensual, etc. It's very interesting, and it leads to an exciting underground adventure.

And then, it stops. I thought I'd have quite a bit left to play, but it ends at what I thought would be the midpoint of the game. There are several pages of epilogue, but I felt like the overall narrative arc wasn't satisfying. It doesn't have to be longer, but the plot threads that are given prominence should, I feel, occupy more time.

I enjoyed it, regardless, and would recommend it to people who want to see if Tekumel and its novels and RPG settings are worth reading. It's made me think about reading them.

Out of the Choicescript games I've given 4 stars, this is definitely at the higher end. It's a pirate game, felt fairly long, had great worldbuilding and nice action scenes and romance.

The main thing holding me back from a higher rating was my lack of emotional investment, most likely due to the characters. Outside of the main character I romanced (the pirate captain Redwing), I couldn't tell you who any of the other characters really were or looked like. What side was Maurice from? Who is Lex? Pretty much everything else about the game was enjoyable.

There are a few sea monster fights. The game is set in an alternate Atlantic, with countries similar to England, France, and Haiti, among others. The main conflict is with slave traders.

There was also a bit of an issue with stats. I was disappointed at first that there were many stats and not many boosts in the opening chapters, but that soon went away as the game provides many opportunities to boost stats throughout the game.

But a bigger issue was confusion of stats. There was too much overlap. How can you tell the difference between a check for wits or cunning, or finesse for that matter? What is the difference between your combat skill and being straightforward in battle? I was able to succeed more often than not, but it made me realize that having closely-related skills may be a bad idea (something I've struggled with in my own game, having a stat for being friendly and a stat for having friends).

I received a review copy of this game.