Reviews by MathBrush

Text-based games are so interesting because they get reinvented and renewed and spring up in different communities over time. Some groups have been making Inform-like games ever since Inform went out of business, while some have recently reconstructed and reimagined Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 style games for nostalgia's sakes, and others still have made text adventures based off of popular culture's depiction of text adventures in TV, webcomics and film.

So this Adventuron game seems firmly in the retro/nostalgia camp, with chunk text and old-style cursor together with beautiful pixel art. Unlike the Inform 5/6/7 stream of games, the emphasis here is less on exhaustive smoothness or synonyms and more on having a small set of commands to work with.

In particular, the main commands you use are LOOK and GET. While there aren't traditional puzzles, there are puzzles similar to those in Lime Ergot and other games where you have to examine something then a detail of something. It also tracks state from room to room, so LOOKing in one room can affect a LOOK in another room.

The story is about gathering mushrooms for a stew of differing amounts of lethality. There are 10 mushrooms to find. Before getting hints, I had only found 4 mushrooms and had no clue how to get more.

Here's my rating:

+Polish: For what it's trying to be (a speed-jam retro adventure) it is very well polished, with perfectly-fitting graphics and a lot of hidden nuggets.
+Descriptiveness: The mental images the game gives are very vivid, especially of the mushrooms, which aren't pictured in the art. The smells were described very well, too.
-Interactivity. The play style didn't gel well with me. Most of my experience involved error messages, and the central puzzle for unlocking more content (finding (Spoiler - click to show)the shears) was a puzzle where I definitely knew what I had to do but didn't know how to type it/bring it about.
+Would I play it again? I've already played it several times.
+Emotional impact: I've gone back and forth on this. I can confidently say, though, that it is charming, and that's a good emotion.

This game has been nominated in the XYZZY awards for Best Use of Multimedia.

If the first game in this series (Champion of the Gods) had Odyssey-themed elements, this one had ones reminding me of Greek philosophy--if Greek philosophy included brutal rampages across the countryside!

I have to admit, this series is one of the few Choicescript games where I love to play as a bloodthirsty, wild warrior who swears allegiance to the Gods at all costs. If I have any regrets from this playthrough, it's that I started out being humble and stuck with it. I plan on replaying as a completely arrogant jerk instead. In any case, I proved to be a loyal disciple of the Goddess of War.

I finished this game with my jaw open, scoffing, partly because I enjoyed twist and partly because it ends on a major cliffhanger. I felt like the main threads of the game itself were completely resolved; in my playthrough, the main antagonists were defeated and all big mysteries cleared up. But the action definitely sets you up for another surprise.

This game has you voyage away from your homeland. I ended the first game not destroying destiny and serving the Gods. In this game, though, you must travel beyond both the reach of your Gods and destiny. You go across the sea to two contrasting cities, and much of the game consists of investigating the two cities, their customs and Gods.

There is romance in this game, although I chose to stay faithful to the romance from my first game, my wife and queen. We had several romantic opportunities. I believe this game is so large because there are so many paths from the first game.

Overall, this game seemed more contemplative than the first. You are met with several who question your choices. I had a son who followed my footsteps but questioned, and both my mentor from the first game and my companion later on frequently disagreed with me. I felt like the game also made vague references to Plato's teaching, like the Parable of the Cave and the concept of ideal forms. For one like me, driven by the bloodlust of the first game, I was surprised, but I think it helped me as I had to double down on my beliefs and goals.

There is a war training section in the last chapters that is its own little minigame. You have to choose different training styles for both your troops and your ships and use them effectively in battle.

Overall, I found the narrative arc less compelling than the first game but the richness of the choices/branching and the ethical quandaries more exciting.

I've also come to realize that I enjoy series of Choicescript games much more than stand-alones. They allow for so much more depth and so many options.

I received a review copy of this (very large) game.

(Edit: I originally put this review on the wrong page)

I honestly enjoyed this game quite a bit. It kept all the things I liked from the first game and fixed some of the drawbacks.

This is a reality show-format game, like Slammed!, so a lot of the game is choosing what kind of image you want to project and going along with it. There are several romance choices, and I felt like I had more agency.

Now, it's interesting what different groups find appealing and don't. I saw some people on the Choicescript forums get mad at this game because it's possible to make wrong decisions and 'lose'. In fact, you can actually buy (with in-game cash or real money) hints on how to win.

At the same time, I saw a well-thought-out and clear review on this site talking about One Eye Open, and saying that, while it was well-written, it was not that interesting because it didn't have difficult puzzles.

So on the one hand, there is a group of people who want games to mold to their desires and be winnable no matter what. And there are others who want games to frustrate and challenge them. I started in the second camp but now enjoy both types, and I think most people have some overlap between the two.

In any case, this game has some difficult challenges. The characters and plot are written with broad strokes, and that's because, like many early Choicescript games, it was written by boiling down an entire genre.

At 180,000 words, it's not the biggest game, but playthrough length felt substantial. I played steadily and it still took a few hours. I think this one's worth playing, even if you haven't tried the first one.

I received a review copy of this game.

This was an interesting Exceptional Story for Fallen London, apparently expanding on a throwaway line in another part of the game (I think the conflict card between Tomb Colonists and others).

This game has a boisterous Tomb Colonist (kind of a living mummy, a creature preserved from death but full of wounds or rot that require bandages to hold them together and keep them presentable) who is trying (sort of?) to be decreed officially dead while leaving his estate to his nephew.

I may be mixing it up a bit with the perhaps more memorable Dilletante's Debut by Hannah Powell-Smith, which similarly featured a tug-of-war involving an estate and family.

And I suppose that's the problem. I don't have any negative memories about this story, but I don't have very memories of it in general besides wandering around the Grand Sanatorium fighting spiders. I do have much stronger memories of earlier stories from this year, such as the memorable Paisley, the very cute Go Tell The King of Cats (by the same author as this story!), and even Shades of Yesterday about a variety of pens.

So I'm giving this game stars for interactivity, polish, and descriptiveness, but not for emotional impact or replayability.

This Exceptional Story takes us to a restorative hotel in the Neath where the clientele tend to up with a deep orange tan (sometimes with burning cracks in it!)

I wasn't as impressed with this one as I have been with others. For me, the best parts were the connections with Sunless Seas (which involved hauling around a great deal of (Spoiler - click to show)sphinxstone), and the 'stinger' at the end of the story.

Here's my score:
+Polish: Smooth as always for Failbetter.
+Descriptiveness: I can still vividly picture the glow and the water.
-Interactivity: The main gameplay has a sort of fruitless cycle where you repeat the same things over and over. It made sense in-story but I found it frustrating.
+Emotional impact: Actually, yeah, some of the characters were pretty interesting and I've thought of a certain dreamlike nighttime scene on occasion.
-Would I play again? I don't think I would. But I would read other things by this author! This seemed more like an experiment in form that didn't resonate with me specifically rather than a failure on the author's part.

Fallen London is all about the impermanence of death in the Neath (the enormous cavern below the earth where cities get sucked into when they 'fall').

But this story follows a strange assassin who uses frogs and somehow manages to permanently get rid of people.

It ends up being quite charming. Here's my score:

+Polish: It worked smoothly and seemed well-thought out. Pretty much all Fallen London content is polished.
+Descriptiveness: I played it months ago, but I still remember the frogs and the (Spoiler - click to show)factory that threatens their wetlands
+Emotional impact: As I said it above, it's charming. Johnny Croak is a sweety.
+Interactivity: I definitely felt like I could make real choices.
-Would I play again? You can pay to replay (or play for the first time if you missed it) Fallen London's exceptional stories. This one was fun, but I wouldn't go out of my way to play it again, especially with some other very good stories out there.

I have a fondness for summer camp settings. Birdland is a game I really enjoy and recommend a lot of people, and it's set in a summer camp. Several tv movies and shows from my childhood and my son's are set in summer camps.

Also, Psy High is high on my list of best Choicescript games.

So I enjoyed this game. It's more serious in some ways than the first game.

You play as a camp counselor, and you make a big discovery about the camp. You have the opportunity to radically change your life and the life of others.

More than any other Choicescript game I've played, I experienced a lot of temptation here. I usually pick a role early and play along, and this time I played the 'help everyone as much as possible." But the game sets up competing goals really well, and by the end I had ended up acting very selfishly and killing several people.

I like how the game has truly meaningful choices interspersed with reflective choices; for instance, you can pick your relationship with your parents, which makes you feel powerful in and of yourself.

I saw someone complain on Steam that the game had a high school setting, so keep in mind that this is absolutely a high school game. I loved this game, and intend to play it again in the future, maybe try and change some of the darker choices I made.

I received a review copy of this game.

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.