Reviews by MathBrush

This is an Adventuron game that is a nice small nugget of a game, with classic adventure gameplay (TAKE and DROP feature prominently).

You play as someone who often walks by an abandoned house at night but who finally decides to break in and see what’s going on inside.

The game was written in 4 hours, so many things aren’t perfectly polished. The author does foresee this issue and says ‘You won’t have to ____ in this game’ a lot, which helped reduce frustration by reducing verbs. It would take substantially more work to implement every reasonable action, but this approach isn’t bad even in a polished game.

The font and color combo was hard to read for me; I’ve seen some Adventuron games that have a font selection option, and that would have been nice here.

Fun overall!

This is a haunting twine game set in an apartment building. Every day, you can wake up and wander around the building, surprisingly being allowed in all your neighbor’s rooms. There, you can try to help them out with their problems. But, for all of you, life is kind of ‘meh’.

This is the kind of game that transforms the more you play it, which I found effective. I liked the game’s use of color and its gradually increasing use of mythological references.

I’m still not sure if I figured out the theme of the game in terms of the artwork we see at the beginning. The number 3 comes up a lot in the game, but given the prominence of that number in mythology, I’m not sure which 3 it was referencing, and would be interested in hearing others’ theories on it.

A brief but time-worthy game.

Ruber Eaglenest has made several games before with serious themes written in sensitive and poetic ways.

I found this game beautiful as I started it. The emphasis on colors and nature felt soothing, mixed with melancholy at being a ghost.

Interaction was confusing at times, perhaps to show what being a ghost would be like. You have three options most of the time, but they change as you select things, possibly in a pattern, possibly just based on how long you've waited. I never had too long to feel frustrated.

The ending was moving, and a reminder of (Spoiler - click to show)the horrors of war, and our responsibility to seek peace throughout the world. A very effective piece.

I saw the name of this and thought, ‘sounds like a Damon Wakes game’. Then I saw it was a Damon Wakes game.

What can I say? This game was longer than just one room. It seems based on Clue, with a bunch of different secret passages connecting different parts of a map.

The only real question is…when will the jumpscare come?

The actual jumpscare noise sounds like the FNAF ones but slightly different; was it homemade? Overall it reminded me of playing Ultimate Custom Night a bit. It seems like it acheived all of its goals (if its goals were to make players sigh, open up the game anyway, and then click through until jumpscared).

This is a Spanish Grand Guignol game about waking up in a seedship on its long journey through the stars.

It uses what is either AI or modified stock images for its scenes.

It hits on the most exciting time for a colony ship, the kind of time where you have to wake people up and make big decisions.

The system is choice-based, with an inventory (which, for me, wasn’t used) and a little space below the room description to describe the results of various actions.

It was neat, but ended very abruptly for me. I’ve asked others for confirmation, but it looks like right now the game just ends after a surprising reveal. If that was the whole game, I would have wanted more; if it’s a bug, I hope it’s fixed!

paravaariar, the author of this game, is (in my mind) well-known for literary, high-quality spanish Parser games.

This game uses fi.js, an interactive fiction parser platform for web. It uses a small number of verbs (provided in the ‘manual’) which makes gameplay easier than most parser games.

The background image of the game is a beautiful field of stars. The story of the game is that we have woken unexpectedly early from cryogenic storage on a kind of space station. We need to explore to understand what’s going on, but, more importantly, to understand ourselves.

The game is compact, both in design and in story. In the game, a repeated idea is that there is no room for wasted space, and nothing is wasted in this game.

I think the main idea could have supported a longer gameplay, but I think the game as it exists is well-done and very poetic and literary.

This is a German Grand Guignol game that is about Ghostbuster’s in everyway except the name.

It’s a simple, lovely tribute game. You’re in a Ghostbuster’s museum with wax statues, but every exhibit is missing an important object. Your goal is to find all the objects and return them to whence they came.

Size-wise it feels like a game that started as Speed-IF but which the author turned into Grand Guignol (I can’t confirm this). The detailed descriptions of the Ghostbuster’s equipment and objects were fun; you can tell the person who wrote this really likes ghostbusters.

There is some sparseness, which is what made me think it might be upgraded speed-IF. At point point it is said we see a distant Universe, but this cannot be examined (as far as I can tell).

The game does have an independent NPC in addition to the mannequins.

Overall, this game gave me fond memories of Ghostbuster’s and was easy to play as a non-native speaker (needing just NIMM, X, GIB, SCHIEBE ___ [direction], and WIRF, as well as directions).

I had a few different revelations while playing this game. First thoughts: interesting mix of hyperlinks and parser. Second: is this vorple? No, Dialog. Third: a joke about Peano arithmetic? This is someone who's really familiar with parser games and math, I have to know this person. But I didn't recognize the itch name until I went to their page and saw it was Draconis!

This game is very polished. I had no idea it was meant for Petite Morte, as it would fit in just fine in IFComp. I'd say I had a 10/10 experience in the beginning, 7/10 in the middle, and 8/10 in the end.

It's a limited-verb game where you, a kind of homonculus or familiar, gain new verbs by absorbing other homunculi or familiars. These can give powers ranging from eyesight to motion to strange alchemical powers.

The game is educational as well as fun, with references to chemistry, tuning, literature, math, etc.

I was proud of not needing hints until I got stuck on a certain puzzle. I eventually realized I wasn't closely reading the results of all my actions, but only after hints. "Nudge" was useful, but for a large chunk of the game my nudge was 'gong', so I kept assuming I had to do something *to* it. That lost period was my 7/10 section.

Two things that could have been clued a bit more were what can be 'cached' and the rules surrounding the security familiar in all its uses.

Overall, very good, exactly the kind of stuff I hope for when I play interactive fiction.

This is a game that I suspect rests entirely on understanding the lyrics of a song. Unfortunately, I’m playing without headphones while my son’s on a call, and so I had to keep it down, and the genre is metal with a screaming/distorted voice, so I have no idea what’s going on. The artist is credited, but not the song name, so I have no idea what the lyrics are.

The idea of the game is that you see a cute little worm which wants you to follow him. You then peek through a hole to see a party, and the song plays while the worm grows horns. I can only assume that .

It looks like this game is another game advertising Moiki’s new sound capabilities, which seemed to work very smoothly. The graphics and color transitions were also great. Judging as a game itself, its low interactivity and brief length, coupled with its reliance and careful listening, made it rank a bit lower in my mind, but I don’t think the author was trying to make a complex game, just show off some great multimedia. The band does sound nice, and I’m surprised their youtube channel only has 192 followers.

I believe this is an extended game that is part of the same group of students that produced the game Hotel Halloween, but this story is much longer than those (although still completable in under 15 minutes).

In this story, a visit to a graveyard takes your mind to a different time and a different place, where you are tasked with finding out exactly what is going on.

The game has several surprises, and the writing has touches of emotion and descriptiveness. There are a variety of endings. I felt like its plot arc had a good resolution by the end. One thing that could be improved is better spacing of the paragraphs in the text (just adding another blank line between them would work, I think).