Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

**You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf by BJ Best**

I beta tested this game.

In regards to the scenery and trimmings of this game, it's polished and nice-looking in the Chapbook format or lookalike (I remember I asked about the format while testing but can't find my correspondence anywhere). It has good music and flows naturally.

Writing-wise, this is GPT-2 (a procedural generation/ai tool). I usually really dislike GTP-2 because it just regurgitates whatever's put into it. Most popular uses of GPT-2 involves scraping other people's content without attribution and then spitting it out, with most of the 'best results' being word-for-word copies of the original input.

But in this case, the person using GPT-2 is the person who made the original content, so that makes it more interesting. I guess, then, that this is like a procedurally generated mirror. It lets the author see themself, and it lets us see that vicariously.

There are fun parts in the writing (the line 'You count the days until Christmas. I count the days when we didn’t know each other’s last names.' reminds me of Arcade Fire lyrics). Overall, it's an interesting experiment, and reveals a lot about the author.

+Polish: The game is smooth.
-Descriptiveness: It's made of interesting chunks, but they don't flow together in larger picture.
+Interactivity: It gives the sense of interaction, a weird sense of pseudo-agency. The footnotes help.
+Emotional impact: For me it was curiosity about the author themself.
-Would I play again? No, one run through seems enough for me.

Okay, so I think this game actually has a lot going for it, and I also think it will receive less votes than most games and score lower, and not necessarily deserve it.

This game is a windows executable. Historically, windows executables get very few votes.

This game is written by an Italian author and has numerous English grammar errors. Which is reasonable; I suspect that I if I wrote a game in Italian, I would have quite a few Italian grammar errors. But it can be confusing; the kitchen has ‘cookers’, but is that the oven (an openable thing?) or the stove (not openable?) When it says that the bench has a usable bottom, how was that meant to help me open it?

I got fairly far in the game, making it to the city of Radicofani before being killed in the church. This game has a lot of sounds and pop-up images (which mostly must be closed individually). I especially enjoyed the pixelization of the Beatles Revolver album cover.

I suspect the game is on a timer, as when I got further the missing woman’s picture frequently popped up telling me to hurry.

Typing HELP helped me a lot, as did typing words’ whole names rather than parts.

I liked the story, involving some sort of portal in spacetime, the power of the written word, a murderer and possibly demons?

Unfortunately, there is no walkthrough with the game. I’d definitely take another crack at it if I could have a step by step walkthrough (although I’d just follow it exactly so I could see the whole story).

+Polish: Lots of problems with the custom parser, but lots of good sound and images.
+Descriptiveness: Very vivid. Probably my favorite thing about it.
-Interactivity: It was very hard to guess the next step.
+Emotional impact: It was all mysterious and cool.
-Would I play again? Without a walkthrough, no. With a walkthrough, yes.

This game gave me all sorts of different reactions.

First of all, it has nice visuals and sounds chosen from a variety of operas and symphonies.

The text is slow during musical portions, but the game overall is relatively short.

This game is a retelling of the Phantom of the Opera, where you can customize it in 6 different ways depending on the time period and the way you perceive the story of the Phantom.

However, on replay, choosing entirely different options, I found myself with almost the exact same story. I checked the code of the game, and all the stats affect at most one or two paragraphs each.

The writing is interesting and makes for a good retelling, with narrative twists. I felt that the characterization of Christine as seductress was surprising to me and didn't really gel with my version of the character, and then later events further differed, but I suppose that's the variety in retelling a story.

So I honestly don't know. This is in no way what I would consider a bad game, but it has a lot of unusual choices that I need to sit and unpack for a while.

+Polish: Everything worked well from the get-go.
+Descriptiveness: The characters and locations were vivid to me.
+Interactivity: Despite the small effects of choices, I felt like it was interactive, especially the first time.
+Emotional impact: I'm a Phantom of the Opera fan, so it was fun to play it in Twine form.
+Would I play it again? I don't plan on revisiting this.

I beta tested this game in a pure parser format before the clickable version was enabled.

This is a very strong game for the competition, one of the most polished parser games. You play as a young girl who has to go around the house getting stuff ready for dinner. But as the blurb says, this is a game of 'peculiar proportions'.

In fact, it turns out that the main mechanic of the game is (Spoiler - click to show)manipulating objects and altering the size of things by interacting with a scale model of your house. This provides for wildly inventive puzzles that get better as the game progresses.

But, since it gets better as the game progresses, it struggles a bit near the beginning for finding motivation to continue. In a sense, that's a lot like Shade, which has a very similar opening (in the sense that you're fetching objects in a house) and also gets better and better as time goes on.

Dialog is looking strong as a game language here. This is very complicated stuff, with a lot of disambiguation and complicated parser directions, and it's handled beautifully. The hyperlinks threw me off a bit as I was surprised that the mouse arrow turns into a text cursor when hovering over them. I wonder if some kind of color change when hovering (like Twine's highlighting) or turning the cursor into a hand (like both Twine and Windrift), as text cursor doesn't indicate 'click here' in my brain.

+Polish: The game is very polished.
+Descriptiveness: I was going to say that the setting is very commonplace, even with the cool mechanics, and doesn't lend itself to impressive descriptions, but then I remembered (Spoiler - click to show)the little hamster-sized hat you put on the hamster. There's a lot of cute little things in this game.
+Emotional impact: Very fun.
+Interactivity: Love the puzzles.
+Would I play again? Happily.

In Adventures in the Tomb of the Ilfane you play as an adventurer who is running from Nazi scientist Doktor Chirlu while you break into the tomb of Ilfane, ancient Autarch of the Teresten people. You have access to a beautiful mural of Teresten history, a Dais that represents the planets, and a sarcophagus covered in strange runes.

Below is a spoiler that may help those who didn't see the blurbs and cover art in IFComp 2020:

(Spoiler - click to show)Check out
"Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!" by Tarquin Segundo and
"Terror in the Immortal's Atelier" by Gevelle Formicore
and return here if you get stuck after that.


Below is more spoilers for people who've seen the first spoiler.

(Spoiler - click to show)I'm clumping these three games together because they have remarkably similar presentations. The titles all use quotations, their cover art has similar themes, and they all contain the phrase:

"Remember, no knot unties itself. You may need to seek aid from an unusual place."

in their blurb, in addition to using the same names for different characters in their blurb.

In case it's not clear, these games are part of a set, and in particular, they are all parts of the same game.

I've seen some people speculate about this on the forums. This is strongly reminiscent of the Hat Puzzle (see the second-to-last section of https://intfiction.org/t/what-makes-a-best-puzzle/46852).

The large amounts of worldbuilding and lore in each game can be overwhelming. It's descriptive and interesting, but I wonder if we could have gotten by with more names like 'the Knot' and less like 'Willershin Rill', not because they're bad but because it can be difficult to parser, especially since the first game contains several many-page books.

Fortunately, the author(s) foresaw that and put anything that you need to know in flashing lights with the words 'you need to know this' and puts them in an ordered list.

As you can guess from the similarities, the games are all the same game. Once you know that, the puzzles become easy: search everything you can for a password. Find out which game it belongs to and input it there, getting the next password. The final puzzle has the credits.

Overall, I'm pleased with these. I definitely think this works better than the infamous Hat puzzle which was not discovered without hints. The styling (especially on the runes and star chart) is nice while I usually despise slow text, it went quickly and much of it is skippable on replay.

+Polish: This game is definitely polished in appearance and effects.
-Descriptivenes: The proper names were a lot to deal with, and I couldn't picture things vividly.
+Interactivity: Great puzzles. Love it. Maybe XYZZY Individual Puzzle nom?
+Emotional impact: I felt excitement upon solving the tomb and the fade-to-white almost gave me chills.
+Would I play again? I'll check it out again in the future.

In Incident! Aliens on the Teresten! you play as a member of the starship Teresten which was attacked by an evil horde called the Ilfane after your scientist Chirlu experimented on The Knot. You have a computer that can unlock the knot if you can chart a correct course on a grid, as well as a dictionary for alien runes and a beautiful planetary logo to look at on the wall.

Below is a spoiler that may help those who didn't see the blurbs and cover art in IFComp 2020:

(Spoiler - click to show)Check out
"Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane" by Willershin Rill
"Terror in the Immortal's Atelier" by Gevelle Formicore
and see my review of 'Adventures' for more detail.


+Polish: This game is definitely polished in appearance and effects.
-Descriptivenes: The proper names were a lot to deal with, and I couldn't picture things vividly.
+Interactivity: Great puzzles. Love it. Maybe XYZZY Individual Puzzle nom?
+Emotional impact: I felt excitement upon solving the star chart and the fade-to-white almost gave me chills.
+Would I play again? I'll check it out again in the future.

Terror in the Immortal's Atelier has you fleeing an evil sorceror named Chirlu, Autarch of Telestren, who has stolen the Knot and placed it in the container called the Ilfane, which you have to open. You have 4 books telling you about magical creatures, and a huge table full of reagents you can mix and match in any order.

Below is a spoiler that may help those who didn't see the blurbs and cover art in IFComp 2020:

(Spoiler - click to show)Check out
"Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane" by Willershin Rill
"Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!" by Tarquin Segundo and
and see my review for Adventures for more detail.


+Polish: This game is definitely polished in appearance and effects.
-Descriptivenes: The proper names were a lot to deal with, and I couldn't picture things vividly.
+Interactivity: Great puzzles. Love it. Maybe XYZZY Individual Puzzle nom?
+Emotional impact: The evil version of 'The Giving Tree' was honestly pretty great.
+Would I play again? I'll check it out again in the future.

Nick Montfort wrote Ad Verbum, a great wordplay game that predates both Andrew Schultz and Emily Short’s wordplay games (but not Nord nor Bert), and has since then done a lot with the intersection between text and software.

I had heard a lot about this game, mostly consternation and mystery.

I’m happy to take this game at face-value. Without digging deeper, this reminds me of ASCII and the Argonauts, but slightly less complex.

In this game, you are presented with yes/no options on what kind of interactions to have with a scrambled group of towns. It seems that there is a pattern on what to do (and I was able to be right more than half of the time, so either there is a pattern or the game is good at making you feel there is a pattern, which there’s not really much of a difference there).

I’ve always had a fondness for little games done well. I came up with my current star-rating system on IFDB just so I could feel consistent giving the tiny micro-game ‘Creak, Creak’ and ‘Counterfeit Monkey’ both 5/5.

So, yeah, this is cool. Not what I expected from Nick Montfort, but then again I didn’t know what to expect, and this definitely fits his recent work. If more about the game is uncovered, that’s fine, but I kind of like its meditative simplicity.

+Polish: It does exactly what it sets out to do.
+Descriptiveness: I found that it packed in meaning in small chunks.
+Interactivity: I liked discovering the pattern.
+Emotional impact: I'm still pondering on sacrificing to Gods of a dusty planet.
+Would I play again? Yeah, I think I'll take another look at it.

Abigail Corfman has a very impressive Twine record with Open Sorcery (a popular quadratic-complexity puzzle-based commercial Twine game with upcoming sequel) and 16 Ways to Murder a Vampire at McDonalds (which is known for its complex puzzles).

So I was definitely looking forward to this one.

It wasn't quite what I expected. I thought at first it was child-oriented, but I'd rather say it's similar to fairy stories of the darker type (such as SCP-4000 or the poem The Goblin Market).

Gameplay is based on word puzzles. Initial gameplay has word-search puzzles. A long chunk of the game revolves around figuring out complex bureaucracy.

Most, if not all, of the puzzles are optional, as explained in the very brief walkthrough (which doesn't really spoil anything puzzle-wise, only offering ways around it).

I thought I was uninterested in the game at first, but then I found myself going out of my way to find more puzzles to try. In a way, it's almost like a Twine counterpart to Dibianca's Sage Sanctum Scramble, both a fantasy/sci-fi pastiche of wordplay.

I was progressing pretty nicely on the murder when I lost about 45 minutes of gameplay due to a random death with no undo possible (but restoring possible). I hadn't realized I needed to save that often, so it was a devastating blow to my will to go on. I used the walkthrough's cheats to progress to the ending, and found some satisfaction there.

Really not a fan of the random insta-death without undo (I'll admit there were some hints I was acting dangerously), but I liked the rest, so I don't know.

The protagonist is in a wheelchair, and it affects gameplay pretty much exactly how wheelchairs affect real life. I was married for 10 years to a woman who used a wheelchair full-time, and the game's emphasis on spotting out traversable paths, being stymied by a single stair step, and dealing with tedious bureaucracy to get accommodations is true to form.

There are also some personal details revealed through memories (whether of the author or of a created character), which were meaningful.

Overall, very nice experience, but make sure you save often!

++Polish and descriptiveness: Beautiful and lovely, smooth sailing.
+Interaction: My delight with the puzzles overwhelms my sadness about not saving.
+Emotional Impact: I felt intrigue.
+Would I play again? Yes, after the comp when I can dig in deeper.

I tested this game. When I tested it, it didn’t have its flashy index page, which I thought was pretty cool, especially the worldbuilding elements and the cool animation. I had trouble at first though because I thought it was text-entry and not links.

The game itself is small and simple, a one-room game. The main feature here is that you have an app on your cell-phone that lets you connect to items by their ID and manipulate them through reading and writing. There are multiple endings, one normal and one which lets you be a hero.

There are a few niceties missing here and there (you’re told that everyone is working, looking at their screens, but can’t X SCREEN) but given that I was a tester I can’t really complain, can I?

If you like this game, you should try Michael Roberts’ immense game Return to Ditch Day which includes a lot of testing ports and running cable to access devices. Other games for gadget/tech people/fans of oldschool interfaces include Rover’s Day Out and Final Exam.

+Polish. The cool file system makes up for the implementation.
-Descriptiveness. The game is pretty sparsely written, and most objects described are generic.
+Interactivity. Great system!
+Emotional impact. Mostly wonder for the phone access.
-Would I play again? Doesn't have a ton of replay value, but that's okay.