Reviews by MathBrush

I do everything I can to complete games before I review them. I read walkthroughs, I look up old message boards, and, at last resort, I decompile to get the text.

This game is one of those rare ones (such as Hard Puzzle 2) where decompiling is worthless. In this case, the text of the game is literally split into two interleaving fragments, so that no whole words remain.

You have a huge anagram machine which makes anagrammed words out of anything you put in it. The results can be used, eaten, modified, entered, etc.

There are a lot of rough edges in the implementation, which is part of the overall effect. I don't know of anyone whose solved it. I got very far this time, but I forget how to do all the puzzles I had solved when I tried this last year. I'd love to see a team of people on a forum solve this one.

This sequel to the 15-year-earlier Risorgimento Represso is a fairly large glulx game that uses advanced features such as graphical windows.

In classic parser game style, you are an eccentric wizard's apprentice in a blended fantasy/modern setting where you push the boundaries of the law to get what you want.

I enjoyed the variety of puzzles, such as timing puzzles and transportation puzzles.

This game reminds me a lot in style and quality to Bob Bates' game Thaumistry. Both games were charming, and reached a level of quality that is quite difficult to reach, but failed to grip my imagination. In both games, I felt like some solutions were unnecessarily restricted.

I believe this game is most likely to win Spring Thing (this review was written before the competition ended).

This is a complex Quest game with a life-like map and NPCs that are responsive and numerous.

For my personal taste, the NPCs were too lifelike, with your main companion having a foul mouth, using profanity as a form of verbal seasoning rather than a means of emotional signalling. It made me uncomfortable the whole game. For some players, though, this is a selling point.

The game itself is fun; you try to convince all the members of your band to get back together. Each one is vividly defined, and you're asked to perform various fetch quests, intuition-based puzzles, and logic or experimentation puzzles to get to your goal.

Quest has its usual limitations, but this game was better programmed than many quest games. Great for puzzle fans and fans of real-life slice of life games that don't mind strong profanity.

I enjoyed this game, which took me a few hours to complete (and one big part I missed out on because I didn't notice a certain room exit).

This game uses the same hybrid system as in Detectiveland and Draculaland, where you choose a noun to hold and various options become available.

The breadth of the puzzles is impressive, and the humor is great. A few times I was frustrated by not knowing what to do, but when I realized what was needed, I felt like the puzzles were fair.

The endings were nice, I think. It's good to have satisfying endings for a game.

This is a very large game/story, comprising 3 Twine stories, 1 inklewriter story, 1 Instagram album, and three wordpress blog entries.

Reading quickly, even skimming from time to time, it took around 3 hours to finish.

The story is compelling: an unemployed woman gets a business opportunity from her brother that's too good to be true.

It's gritty and dark. It's full of profanity, which I filtered on my computer. It's also completely believable.

I'm giving it 4 stars because the fifth star is for "would I play it again?" and while it was very compelling, I felt mildly traumatized by the time I was done.

I've enjoyed the full Guttersnipe sequence of games; they generally feature well-thought out puzzles involving an urchin doing ridiculous things and eating junk.

This game puts a spin on things by placing your long-standing help system and narrative device Percy the Rat in confinement.

It features stereotypical Italians as the antagonists, with names like Tony Macaroni. It would be somewhat uncomfortable, except that it's less of a parody of Italians themselves and more of a parody of gangster movies's and novels' parodies of Italians.

There were several bugs in the version that I played, but it made the game more interesting, as I had to type exactly the right command, and it became just another puzzle. But polish and interactivity correspond to two of my stars, which is why I'm giving 3/5.

Edit:

Since my original review, the game has been revised to fix many bugs, so I'm increasing my score to 4/5.

This is one of the longest and most plot-intensive games entered into IFComp.

The story is a sort of self-insert fantasy. A college student who is bullied and shy is courted by beautiful women and powerful men due to his latent universe-changing powers. It unfolds over several days, over a week.

Unfortunately, there are two flaws in the implementation and design. First, the author has decided to implement in great detail the most tedious parts of the game. Ordering food takes several steps, repeated daily. Campus contains many non-essential locations, which seem possibly to be based on the author's actual campus. Most of the game consists of opening your backpack, selecting the right book, putting it in your backpack, closing it, marching across campus, sitting in class, waiting, going to the cafeteria, ordering food, swiping your id, sitting, going to your dorm, swiping your id, and entering your room. This is repeated at least five or six times in the game.

The second flaw is that only this path is implemented, and only with the exact walkthrough commands. Attempting to order food without the walkthrough is extremely difficult.

Overall, I was glad I played.

This was one of the few IFComp 2015 games that I never reviewed. On my old laptop, it wouldn't even run; every page of text would be immediately erased.

It works on my new laptop, though. And what an unusual game it is.

It runs in a command-prompt type window, and uses single-letter commands with occasional typing of names and numbers.

It is a surreal game, with huge standing waves surrounding a 25-location town and people getting murdered left and right, each murder announced by red lightning.

A hallucinogenic bunny hops around guiding you.

I've never come close to finding the murderer, but I've discovered many of the game's secrets over my 4 playthroughs. The best involved a tightly-timed sequence at a bar leading to a length CYOA sequence.

This is a game with several flaws, such as the fact that you can't scroll back through text due to it disappearing, and it's incredibly easy to hit a button and miss a whole page of text. There is no save command.

But these flaws enhance it; it makes you approach the game more cautiously. This game is a masterpiece in a way. But it requires length play.

Disclaimer: I write for Choice of Games and received this copy for free.

This game is set in an alternate reality where Robert Fulton had more freedom to work with steam and Napoleon survived long enough for succession to be a question. The game is meticulously researched to be as close to baseline reality as possible.

You play the personal bodyguard and childhood friend of Alexandre Walewski, the illegitimate but favored heir of Napoleon. You deal with court intrigue and assassination attempts as you mold the future of France.

I didn't like the beginning of this game, so much that I set it aside for months. I just didn't find it compelling.

But one of the biggest strengths that Choice of Games has is the length of their games. Once I played a few more chapters, I had spent so much time with these characters that I became emotionally invested. I was very satisfied with my outcomes.

I also enjoyed the chance you had to make major changes in the outcomes of different chapters, and to take charge.

I don't give 5 stars to all choice of games games; this one was, in my mind, special.

ADRIFT usually has the weakest of the popular parsers (Inform, TADS, Quest, etc.), and this game is no exception.

The concept is interesting: you play as a human playing a virtual reality video game after the main game has ended. There are several layers of reality, similar to Wreck-it-Ralph. You play in a single layer, though.

The video game is about giant mechas fighting aliens. The after-the-game playthrough that occupies most of Mishmash is a stealth game using a 'ghost cap'.

I enjoyed the opening scenario, but the game quickly devolved into walkthrough-only territory.