Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

I suspect that this may be a pseudonym, after I had a panic-inducing moment where something I posted in the author’s forum was liked by someone who I didn’t think was an author and who would write a game like this.

This was the first game on my personalized list, but I thought it was charming and wanted to take it slow.

This is an ADRIFT game, which means it comes with that ADRIFT style where precise verb noun combinations are needed and Inform’s and TADS’s automatic feedback systems aren’t in place. So you have to poke around.

This is a fantasy pastiche (with an especially funny moment where the game loads music by Peter, Paul and Mary and invokes the wizard Google) where you are teleported to another world and asked to bring a compass to a wizard.

While the storyline resembles a fantasy teen novel, the game itself is well-adapted to parser fans. It has traps you can fall into without knowing for sure if they are traps, and requires careful experimentation and searching, but it also has multiple puzzle solutions.

I had hoped to do most of the work on my own, and asked a few early hints, but ended up heading to the walkthrough around the bank segment. Given more time, I probably would have just left this open for a month and poked at it.

I definitely don’t prefer ADRIFT or Quest games for their systems, which often frustrate my gameplay style, but I have grown accustomed to their style, and they work remarkably well for menu-based systems (ADRIFT more than Quest).

This game was charming overall, and I had a good time playing it.

-Polish: The eternal bane of most ADRIFT games.
+Descriptiveness: I thought the game was well-described.
+Interactivity: I was often frustrated, but when I took it very slowly, it was fun.
+Emotional impact: I found it charming
+Would I play again? Why not? From the other scores I can see this early on, I might be in the minority, but I got a kick out of this game.

Josh Labelle is a fairly well-known professional narrative designer, so I was interested to see how this game turned out. Skills developed working in a team on graphical projects don't always translate to solo text works and vice versa, so I figured it could go either way.

For me, I find this very successful. I have a soft spot for dungeon crawls and western RPGs (I enjoyed the parser game Heroes and the Choicescript series Hero of Kendrickstone better than most reviewers on average), and this game satisfies that.

It's very polished, with slick menus and nice highlighting and color use. I wasn't even sure it was Twine until I opened the file.

You play as one member of a team of three who has been assigned to kill a dragon then return to town. But once you get back, you have trouble finding where to claim your reward.

There are some complicated stats. It does fall a little bit into the Choicescript meme where you pick one of 3-4 skills and just max it out the whole time, and there's no reason not to accept most side quests; both these options make strategy a little less well-developed. On the other hand, the relationships with your partners and your decisions with the enemies (like the dragon and your employer) have more long term consequences (and many side quests have meaningful ending decisions that last even until the end credits).

Writing, setting and story are all high quality, with huge variety between the taverns in the game and several plot twists. Overall, I think this will do pretty good in the comp; if anything limits its appeal, it might be that traditional RPGs have been considered overplayed in IFComp in the past. It'll be interesting to see where this places. I consider it one of the better games I've played so far.

+Polish: Very polished, smooth, well-designed.
+Interactivity: Even lets you pick how much of the game you want to interact with, by making a lot optional.
+Descriptiveness: The variety in the bars was strong.
+Emotional impact: Suspenseful and funny.
+Would I play again? Yes.

So I tested this game for the competition.

Like Accelerate earlier, this choice-based game has a lot of visual and audio detail.

When I first tested it, I was struck by the cute neopets-esque game graphics that it contains. But playing the full version, I was blown away by the voice acting. Great audio quality, believable voice, better than most podcasts I’ve listened to. Very impressive, and helps make the animations more cinematic.

I had a bit of trouble with my eagerness causing me to scroll quickly, while many of the animations reload the page. But that was minor.

The story is a long-term (as in 10 year) relationship with a friend on Neopets. You both experience marginalization by your classmates and you struggle with your relationship with your parents. There are hints throughout the game, but it’s later revealed that a major theme of this game is .

The writing is sharp and on-point; the chat feels real to me, and the pacing is good. Bez has put a lot of work into improving games and pushing boundaries over the last few years and it’s really paid off.

Check the content warnings for the game ahead of time.

+Polish: The animations could be smoother, but that's a small thing when the voice and art are so good.
+Interactivity: I've played it several different ways and it feels fairly responsive.
+Descriptiveness: I feel like I'm there when I read it.
+Emotional impact: Definitely feel it. On my 'be mean to stairs but not so much the game ends early' run I felt sick in my stomach when being mean.
+Would I play again? I've played it three times, so yeah.

I saw some positive buzz for this game and was looking foward to it.

This is a parser game with a map that slowly expands, starting with a pretty constrained area but slowly branching.

Some have called this 'old-school' and I'd say that that's true, in the sense that the storytelling is mostly environmental, the puzzles are well-recognizable tropes with clever twists (color-coded switches, complicated devices, machines with missing parts, keys and locks, etc.), and the writing is mainly devoted to describing objects and things briefly and succinctly.

The puzzles form an enjoyable whole; I liked figuring out the different ways of handling the fusebox. I ended up needing to use the walkthrough when trying to find the (Spoiler - click to show)spring, and I locked myself out of the best ending accidentally when I (Spoiler - click to show)incinerated the worker and the device for making the cure. I hadn't saved in a long time, so I'll have to go back some time and try again. I got a sub-optimal ending, but still felt satisfied.


If anything could improve this game, it would be additional coverage of scenery implementation and synonyms. Much of the game depends at looking at scenery and looking at its sub-details, yet numerous such scenery objects are not implemented at all or require specific phrases. For an example of specific phrases, I couldn't refer to the (Spoiler - click to show)big red button as just (Spoiler - click to show)'red'. For an example of synonyms, 'push red fuse' doesn't work, but 'turn on red fuse' does. For missing scenery, when you see a faint light in the distance, you can't look at the light.

These aren't major impediments, but resolving this would take this game from good to great. I definitely think that this game will do well in the comp, and that the author could create future awesome games.

-Polish: As described above, I felt that the game could have benefitted from another few rounds of refinement with synonyms and such.
+Descriptiveness: The writing does a good job of describing the various objects you find.
+Interactivity: I enjoyed the puzzles outside of the polish issues.
+Emotional Impact: I felt a sense of mystery and exploration.
+Would I play again? I plan on finding the good ending some time.

This game seems strongly influenced by Adam Cadre's work, specifically Photopia (for its fragmented story, multiple viewpoints and use of color) and Narcolepsy (which is specifically referenced in the text)..

This game switches back and forth between multiple points of view, including real-life people and fantasy stories. The game is themed around three lights: red, green and yellow.

It uses fancy techniques such as color and even upside down text.

Unlike Photopia, the overall story didn't congeal for me. I see themes; for instance, (Spoiler - click to show)all of the three 'colored' passages involve an option to help yourself or to help someone else and die right before you achieve your major goals.

Similarly, I couldn't really see the connections between the real-life stories. (Spoiler - click to show)While writing this, I realize that Diane went from scared kid helped by Ben to teenager missing Ben to woman on a train getting a call from (or calling?) Ben. But how are George and co. connected?

There are some typos (like a double period somewhere, and some missing letters in the upside down text. If I play through again I'll record it!) More importantly, on my first playthrough, I was (Spoiler - click to show)selfish in yellow and green scenarios and kind in red, and that led to the game crashing (Spoiler - click to show)immediately after getting my POV after the white door where Diane is in the train. The game just stopped and ended with 'press any key to close the interpreter'. I then replayed trying to be as nice as possible, and got an ending.

So, for me, this is technically and narratively impressive, but the storyline remained inscrutable to me.

This game contains segments with frequent strong profanity.

-Polish: Several bugs, including game-ending bug
+Descriptiveness: The fantasy sub stories were especially vivid
+Emotional impact: Again, the fantasy segments carry this for me, especially yellow and green.
-Interactivity: The conversation system required both typing a topic number and retyping TALK TO instead of letting you continue in menu format. This and a few other such things were frustrating.
+Would I play again? Yes, especially if it gets a post-comp release.

I was a beta tester for this game.

I feel like this is the bread and butter for parser games in the comp. Reasonable but interesting puzzles, funny wordplay, an interesting protagonist, and solid implementation.

In this game, you play a vampire who has come to sabotage his rival, who is a real jerk to everyone around him. Unfortunately, you have a lot of weaknesses: running water, death by stakes, etc. Menu-based conversation plays a big part in this game.

I enjoy this game, and could happily recommend it to parser fans.

+Polish: Smooth. Experienced no problems with the parser. Nice cover art.
-Descriptive: Could use a little bit more richness in the descriptions. It was hard to visualize a lot of things in the game, just for me personally.
+Emotional impact: I found it genuinely funny and delightful.
+Interactivity: Smooth puzzles that I enjoyed more than most things in this comp.
+Would I play again? Definitely!

So this game is something pretty rare for IFComp. It's laid out like a board game, with four different rooms and three independent characters who move around.

Discovering what this game was and what it's rules are was a great difficulty in and of itself. When the game begins, the only options you have are to wander around and insult John Cage. The only things you can do in other rooms is to turn the stove off or on or take a watch (which puts a timer up on the screen).

John Cage starts walking around, and sometimes you can ask him about events that happened. I learned that he got a message from a lawyer, and that was about it.

After dying, I read that I could get hints by clicking a book in the bookcase. But I didn't see any bookcase!

I finally turned to the hints, and discovered that the game requires very precise sequences of events and conversation to unlock more things. Many of those things involve a large group of identical objects, and you have to pick the right one, but the info on which one to pick is randomly given in different playthroughs and most playthroughs won't give you that knowledge.

The writing is sparse and terse, suiting the board game setup. The main goal of the game is antagonizing John Cage, which isn't motivated. Before IFComp, I was playing through all the Choice of Games published titles, and I noticed that games where you could be evil were popular, but only if motivated. Being a jerk without motivation is something very few people find appealing in a game.

This is heavily-modified Twine, and the visual presentation is the best part of the game in my opinion.

+Polish: The game is very polished visually.
-Descriptiveness: This game is terse and sparse.
-Interactivity: I had great difficulty in discovering how to engage with this game.
+Emotional impact: I felt annoyance during the game, but a lot of it was intentional by the author, so it succeeded in its goal!
-Would I play it again? I peeked at the possible endings, and I'm not sure I'd like to keep playing.

I remember playing a game by Skarn a few years ago about an alien in t.he future, and so I was definitely interested in seeing what this one was about.

Mechanically, this game is very impressive. You're part of an underpaid, understaffed community group who needs to take care of three magical problems: decaying magical protections, dangerous magical books, and finding herbs for werewolf potions.

You have 9 characters that you can split up for these different tasks, with diverse options like Cheshire Cats, golems, centaurs, etc. One person is pre-assigned to each task, and then you choose the other 2. Each task then lets you pick who does what, each with their respective text.

This is a combinatorial explosion like Animalia, although shorter in each runthrough. The fact that the author was able to code in so many special combinations (and even ones that interact with each other!) is absolutely amazing.

I don't know if the tone of the writing matched the game, though. The tone is crisp and businesslike, told at a distance, while the content it is describing is wondrous and magical and deals with people's inner thoughts and feelings and interpersonal relationships. But I doubt that will be a universal reaction.

I'd definitely be interested in playing through this one again to see everything! The cast of characters and the worldbuilding is excellent.

+Polish: Pretty smooth.
-Descriptiveness: The game is quite descriptive, but as I said above I felt a mismatch between tone and content.
+Interactivity: I was impressed by the many options.
-Emotional impact: I felt a distance from this game, emotionally
+Would I play again? Definitely. Got to see all the cool options!

So the original Limerick Heist was something that had never really been seen in IFComp: a game consisting entirely of a constrained poetical form (in this case, a ton of limericks) while still telling a coherent story with items and actions.

It did very well, and defied usual voting patterns (by being one of the shortest Choice games to place in the top 10). It also picked up some well-deserved XYZZY nominations.

I wondered what this game would be like, and its receptions. Did people vote highly for the novelty only? Would a second game that has the same tricks as the first do as well?

Unfortunately, we won't find out because Limerick Quest manages to be just as novel and ingenious as the first game, improving substantially on the original formula.

In this game, you encounter several puzzles involving completing Limericks under various constraints. Your partner (her text in purple, yours in green) gives out generous hints on request. The constraints vary quite a bit, and include timed puzzles near the end (with very short times, so watch out if you use text-to-speech!)

The puzzles were really ingenious. I could see this picking up a 'best puzzles' nomination for next year. I was shocked to see this game get so much mileage out of, for instance, 100 identical objects labelled by number only.

So, I had fun. The visuals were great, with animated text, expressive use of color (especially with voices in unison) and background color changes.

+Polished: Very much so.
+Descriptive: The limericks are carrying all the weight here, and they do well.
+Interactivity: The puzzles were honestly very clever and enjoyable.
+Would I play again? Definitely.
+Emotional Impact: Fun and excitement.

This game was interesting, and I think it shows a lot of promise for the future.

In this game, you wake up in an office building that seems fairly destroyed and embark on a search and rescue mission. It was quite a surprise when I discovered that (Spoiler - click to show) someone had taken all my fingers!

The map consists of two floors (for most of the game) with several rooms, each room containing various objects. As you explore the map, you find more of your (Spoiler - click to show)fingers, which gives you greater access to other things.

The UI was smooth and the writing was good. The puzzle structure was a little constrained, though. At most points in the game, it seemed like there was only one course of action possible at a time, so I spent most of the game 'lawnmowering' through choices (trying every possible action over and over). I think that allowing a bit more nonlinearity would make this an awesome puzzle game, and so I'd definitely look forward to anything else the author puts out.

+Polish: Smooth and perfect.
+Descriptiveness: The writing had some pretty clever moments for me.
-Interactivity: The linearity of the puzzles felt constrained to me.
-Emotional impact: Because I was repeating options so often, they lost a bit of their impact.
+Would I play again? I think I would, yeah.