Reviews by MathBrush

This game has you wandering around a space ship with slowly evolving goals. You begin as a tourist and end up as much more.

The game was competently programmed, but dry. I found it difficult to be invested in the game.

One of the biggest sticking points is a maze with randomized directions (so every turn the game spins you around). There is an item that helps, but it's a bit tedious, especially since there are 4 locations leading off of it that you need to get to.

This is one of several different executable games entered into the 2001 IFComp where you wander around a very large area and engage in random RPG combat.

I only played a few minutes of the game. The music and images were interesting, but I just had a hard time getting into the interaction; also, I could see from the walkthrough that this is a very very long game.

When I saw this had the same opening as You Were Doomed From the Start, my heart sank.

This is a two-part ms-dos game, but I know of noone who has passed the first few rooms, as every step has you fight a monster called Double J, an in-joke about one of the author's friends, I believe.

By examining the code in Notepad++, I could read a lot of the text; there's a giant shape to the map, and a bomb of some sorts. Apparently there is a cheat, and a new game++. But noone's ever reached it.

This is a long and well-polished game, but it has a number of difficult features, like items you have to take at the right time or you'll be closed off forever, a maze, etc.

It felt somewhat tedious to play through. It had a teenage girl that loves swearing; in fact, it's one of her main characteristics.

Interesting, but ultimately not one I'd replay.

This is a big, old-school game with tons of pictures. Expect quicksand, killer mosquitoes, a big maze, a light puzzle, a hunger puzzle, searching many random objects, etc.

I played with the walkthrough, but this would be a big, big game without it.

Story was pretty good, but navigating the swamp was tedious. The puzzles weren't too bad. Randomly has a troll.

The Unnkulia games filled the gap between the end of Infocom/Magnetic Scrolls and the beginning of Inform. They were juvenile, focused on 'bro' type humor, misogyny, and underclued puzzles.

This game manages to ampmlify all of that. It suffers from several problems, including an overly large scope. Every location has several paragraphs of text, frequently a whole page. The puzzles use moon-logic where it's very hard to know what will happen next.

This game seems strongly influenced by the previous year's massive Mulldoon Legacy. You are investigating your uncle's museum/hotel, and you discover a crackling energy portal leading to ancient times.

The game has some tricky puzzles, and the published version is in fact not completable. However, the source code provided does compile correctly.

I found the game to be fun but to have way too many 'guess the author's brain'-type puzzles.

This is a big game with a lot of personality. I haven't heard of anyone who's actually finished it, though.

You play an overweight, nerdy character who wants to be popular with the head cheerleader. You are going to try to get underage beer. It has a Jim Munroe sort of feel.

This game is full of NPCs and things to do and strange subplots, but its somehow hard to achieve anything besides wandering around. This is a game that would strongly benefit from a walkthrough. As it is, the hints are good, but each hint leads to other hints you should do first and the first steps are never really mentioned.

I was excited to finally play the first John Evans game, as he had become a legend in my mind from his other games.

John Evans is known for entering massive, extremely bold games into the comp that are just not finished. Games where you create the world, or where you can do anything you want, that kind of thing.

Castle Amnos is actually relatively tame and finished compared to the later games. There is a castle with five floors, reachable by an elevator whose buttons seem to work randomly. I was able to learn a variety of spells. It seems the game is mostly unfinishable, but the textdump showed me the ending.

Overall, it was fairly fun.

This game had just too big of a scope and not enough polish to work out. It is a sprawling fantasy game, with a village and a town and a tower and an underground dungeon and an island and so on and so on. It has a homebrew parser. Contrast this with The Land Beyond The Picket Fence from the same year; its homebrew parser is much more polished, the map is tiny (7 or 9 or so locations), and its slick and smooth. Both games probably had roughly similar amounts of work put into them, but Eldor is just spread too thin.

However, Stuart Allen released The Unholy Grail the next year, which is a fantastic game, so I strongly recommend it.