Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

Andrew Schultz's wordplay games can be presented on a spectrum between "the wordplay puzzles are extremely hard to guess without automated tools and/or lawnmowering" and "the entire game is trivial". This game is one of several that hit a sweet spot in the middle, closer to (but not on!) the easier side.

The mechanic here (which I won't reveal for spoilers) has small complexity and can be sounded out most of the time, making it not too bad. Another of this author's games, Wipe Out, is his third-highest rated game on IFDB, and I expect this one to end up high on that list as well.

I happily plowed through much of the early game and got about 35 out of 64 points on my own. After that, I had to consult the guide about 3-4 times. The main times I had to consult it were for puzzles that went beyond wordplay and required leaps of insight or finding patterns. I think those extra puzzles were interesting, and I wonder if I could have worked them out if I had been more diligent.

The plot is mostly held together by a common food-based theme. I enjoyed the help system and found it easier to use than some other games by this author, and I thought the ending was fun, though.

This was a longer, thoughtful Twine game with a clickable world map and heavy inventory use. The inventory occupies a side bar, and different elements light up in red and become clickable when in the appropriate location, allowing for some complexity.

The story is about a future where carbon dioxide is so prevalent that the air is poisonous to humans. Everyone lives underground while above-ground scientists work to purify the air. The purification plant has stopped working, though, and so you, a young girl, have been sent to the above-ground lands to try to get it working again.

The writing is melancholic and wistful. Simultaneously, I was excited by the writing style but found it hard to focus on. You have to click to make each line appear for some pages, which wasn’t too bad, but the slightly slower pace and the desolation of each passage made it easier for my mind to drift away from the game.

Mechanically, you basically plow through the map (I love being able to click directly on the map to skip to a room I’d been in before), and there are rooms with obstacles and rooms with obstacle removers (like locks and keys, for instance). There is a timer of sorts (your oxygen tank) but I think it’s cued to story beats and not to your actions, which is great. Near the end there are some trickier puzzles, but the puzzles in general aren’t too hard, allowing the story to take center stage.

I think this game nailed the atmosphere it was going for (no pun intended). The design UI is great. Something about the whole project didn’t draw me in fully, but that’s a completely subjective experience, and I did find it above-average for an IF-game.

This is my third game I've played by Mr Hoffmann. I've had essentially the same experience with all three: I encountered them in a German competition, where they are by far the largest game. However, since they use drop down menus, I can often get far even without knowing a lot of verbs. However, after an hour or three of gameplay, I realized I only have 100 points out of 1000 or 2000 or 3000. So I give up, then later find the game in an English competition, where I can complete it. The only one that didn't follow that pattern is Phoney Island, a german-only game about Trump being evil that I finished in German.

This game has you investigating a store after its owner has mysteriously disappeared. There is a lot of merchandise, junk, and random stuff in the shop, all of which you can investigate and put together.

The multiple choice menus help here a lot, just like before. There are a lot of specific verbs we need, like 'unscrew' and 'wedge' and so on, and the menus help with that. There are also three levels of hints for many puzzles, which is nice.

However, sometimes these systems fall apart. There are times when the multiple choice menu has the right verb but using it puts the noun in the wrong part of the sentence, causing it to fail. Sometimes the right word doesn't appear in the menu at all, so you need to type it, and often there are two places the word can be (the object being used and the object it's being used on) and you have to look at both objects to find it. Similarly, many of the puzzles have many conceivable solutions but you are forced into only one.

Overall, I think people will enjoy this who enjoy parser games for their ability to let you wander around a large space, tinkering with things, getting funny messages, and just existing in a parser world.

I often leave Arthur DiBianca's games to the end as a treat, but I decided to play this one early as part of my effort to play longer IFComp games.

You play as a hacker with a device that lets you hook into any system that has a certain kind of computer component. Your goal is to infiltrate a building and wreak havoc on an Agency, following a list of objectives. I'd definitely take inventory first in this game!

This game took me 2 hours, with 1 hour for a single puzzle (one of the last ones) and 1 hour for all the rest put together. I also ended up using the walkthrough for that puzzle.

This game is a limited parser game where all puzzles involve moving a character around a screen. There are a variety of mini-puzzles, although almost all have blurred in my mind after the time spent on that one puzzle. Many of them require optimization, memorization, and experimentation. Gameplay is closer to Baba is You or Adventures of Lolo than standard interactive fiction gameplay. This is a series of graphical games written in Inform connected by an interactive fiction overworld.

Some of the subgames involve clever gimmicks that require some sideways thinking. Others can become tedious; one such game was a game where you have to memorize a map before navigating it in the dark, with any mistake sending you to the front. The first few of these were really fun, while the last few felt like homework with copying down lists of commands.

One of the very last puzzles had a countdown timer based on moves, and that's the one I spent an hour on. It's an optimization puzzle with a very large set of parameters. I attempted it from a lot of different mental angles, trying different strategies and approaches. I often got within a single move or two of the finale, after shaving off ten or twenty moves from my first approach. In the end, I followed the walkthrough, and there were just a few moves off of my approach.

I think most of the game was pretty fun, and I enjoyed the final door puzzle especially.

This was a refreshing game to play. In a time where a lot of games are using AI art or text that is bland and often nonsensical, this game stood out to me for its distinct art style (I think a combination of watercolors and something else?) and its well-planned, symmetric plot and characters.

This is one of only two games marked 'over two hours' on the website, and I spent about 4 hours from start to finish, but it would probably be about 2.5 hours if I locked in.

It's a wholesome game, the same way Eikas by by Lauren O'Donoghue is (for those who remember it from last IFComp). Both focus on relationships and nature in a nature setting and take place over a long period of time.

This game has its own unique elements, though. You are a newcomer to a town with a magical villa, with beautiful gardens, a mysterious library, and four characters, each having a tragic element in their lives as well as an interest in you. You yourself are afflicted by sleepwalking fits that take you into the garden at night.

All four characters have friendship paths and romance paths on top of that. I ended up romancing Penny the botanist and befriending the others.

Design-wise, some of the game does suffer from from having large, complex option and dialogue trees but requiring you to plow through almost all of them, which can feel like a chore at times, although the writing is charming. There are also options where you choose how to react, but these often boil down to "Be nice, be indifferent, be mean," with little use for the mean option (that I found). On the other hand, the ending choice was very well done, and I had to sit and contemplate for a while on what I'd pick, and there were both good and bad consequences to my choice. It's one of the best ethical dilemmas I've had in a game for a while. Similarly, there are some puzzle elements which are pretty fun, most of them relatively light but requiring at least some notetaking (one puzzle in particular feels like an Ocarina of Time reference to me).

Overall, I think that it would have been better to slow down and take the game in at a relaxed pace rather than rushing for the competition, as this is a pretty mellow and chill game to settle down with; a good game to play while drinking warm cider, snuggled up on the couch when it rains or snows outside.

There are two other games by this author in the competition; I definitely am looking forward to them now!

Murderworld, by Austin Auclair

I had both high and low expectations for this game. Austin Auclair previously wrote His Majesty's Royal Space Navy Service Handbook, which I enjoyed quite a bit. On the other hand, this game is X-men fan fiction, and many fan fiction parser games in the past haven't been that good.

Overall, I had a good experience with this game. It's big (it took me exactly 4 hours to play with total concentration, and the file is 6mb. I swear I saw Austin on blusky with an image showing this game has over 500K words, which I would believe, but I'm not sure it's the same game).

The idea is that you get to play as a ton of different x-men. You start off with a brief tutorial on a plane, then you have a chance to pick one of six different X-men to use to solve a major problem at the X-men's mansion. You don't swap between them; instead, the game just has six different paths through this section, which is quite long in itself. I played as Storm, which was fun given her powers.

This is about where the title screen drops. I'll spoiler the rest, although everything in this spoiler is only about as descriptive as the above and doesn't give much away (it's essentially the same as reading the table of contents of the walkthrough).

The game contains a set of young characters that I thought came from other media but which seem to be completely invented by the author. They fit well enough that I didn't really suspect that they were OCs (if they're not, someone can correct me!).

This game managed to avoid several of the flaws that very long games often have in IFComp. Instead of one sprawling world where everything is interconnected and you have to lawnmower trying every item in every room, the game silos off each section, so each section uses only the objects and people immediately available. It essentially is a collection of minigames with an overarching story, and I love that setup (I've used it for several games myself). It is also much more polished and fair than many long IFComp games, which can at times be very buggy or filled with impossible puzzles. I never had to consult the walkthrough, although I did use 'mission' a lot to remind myself of the goal, only realizing a little later on that it functions as a kind of in-game hint nudge (which I really appreciated). There are lots of blank white lines (a common issue for all inform programmers) and I did frequently try typing things that didn't work, but the VERBS command always got me back on track.

I like the plot; I'm divided on the writing. It's clear that Austin Auclair is talented at executing his desired goal, I just have some minor quibbles with the goal itself. Two things that stuck out were character descriptions and overall emotions. The descriptions are focused on detailing the costumes of the characters in minute detail; this seemed more like a replacement for visual media rather than writing for writing's sake, if that makes any sense, kind of like alt-text for a picture. The descriptions for the OCs were much more natural which makes sense, as that was 'pure Auclair' and not a reassurance that the x-men are in their authentic costumes. As for the emotions, I felt like the setup made this game very dramatic, but when we arrive at the disaster everyone seems relaxed and chill, joking almost. This fits in great with the comedic later segments (appropriate for the 'Murderworld' setting) but that initial dissonance of 'why are we pranking each other with the phone when people might be dying?' threw me off.

Dialogue is appropriate for X-men. I thought Storm was stilted and Scott was cringe, both of which are 100% accurate. Nightcrawler's segment had some great dialogue, and I enjoyed the final battle (and the reveal of who the true instigator is and why (Spoiler - click to show)Storm was spared).

I think people will like this. You don't have to be an X-men expert to solve this, as there are numerous help systems (especially VERBS) to remind you of what the powers are. This is probably one of the best superhero parser games I've played, similar to the Earth and Sky series' later entries. My big gripe with most superhero games is that I really want to use my powers, but most games limit you severely in how you can use them. This game really thinks out the limits of your superpowers, and lets you use them quite a bit (Storm gets a big playground for doing all sorts of weather shenanigans, Wolverine can chop up almost everything, etc.). With my minor gripes, I'd rate this a 9/10 or 4.5/5, which I'll round up to 5 on IFDB. (I won't mention most of my ratings here on intfiction, but I thought this one would be good).

I've been going through the cheapest Hosted Games, which are self-published games hosted on the Choice of Games platform.

This game has you play as a young adult in a war-torn kingdom who bounces between rival factions for the government while escaping a cult and gathering magic items.

The core concept of the game is a good one, and there is some fun in using magic spells and working with your one-eyed friend/romantic option partner to face off against enemies, and there are some mysteries set up with satisfying payoffs.

It needs a lot of work, though. There are numerous typos, including on the first full page of text. The pacing in terms of paragraph breaks, reactions to significant events, page breaks and word choices is really off. In four succeeding paragraphs, the player can have a loved one violently die, train for a week to buy a horse, ride it for a couple of days, then leave it behind, all while cracking jokes. Your partner can randomly offer you sex 'with no strings' despite very little other romance happening in the game. For some reason, the country map is a map of Turkey.

I think the author is capable of making this very solid; typos can be fixed with more beta testing, and the pacing whiplash could be solved by putting each major event on its own screen and fleshing it out with some more reactions by the player or descriptions of the surroundings or events. This definitely seems like the talent is there, but more time could be invested.

This game starts out with abstract text in an unreadable font. It soon changes, so I'll put the rest in spoilers.

(Spoiler - click to show)You discover that you are in the arms of your mother, who can provide you with drinks, words, etc. You can look out the window or at your mother. At times, it seems like there is no way to progress, but as you complete the cycle, you can. There are 3 achievements; I got one of 3.

The more you play, the more you realize that there is something else going on here, a different genre and setting. The vocabulary used is grim and strong in this game. I found it interesting and was glad to play it.

This is a Neo-Twiny Jam game about a relationship where you and the other person meet and care about each other but there is, it seemed like to me, space between the two of you, a lack of complete emotional intimacy. I enjoyed the writing, and it brought to mind some close friends of my own in a positive way.

The text is on a timer, specifically a very slow timer and it refreshes to a new screen each time the timer goes off, with no way to go back, so you have to sit very still and watch carefully to avoid missing anything. Text comes in passages with each passage having three sentences followed by a binary choice. The game lasts around 4 choices, so it doesn't take too long to play. I found this pretty frustrating, which was balanced by my enjoyment of the lovely way the writing connected with me.

This is a Neo-Twiny Jam game written in 500 words or less. Its text is rich and symbolic, though difficult to understand. I felt that it was saying that I was some kind of monstrous creature, part lizard and part bird or maybe even insect, whose body was bleeding and rippling and changing in a liquid way.

The writing had a lot of good similes and metaphors and strong verbs. The game doesn't last too long, and it all ends up kind of in the air. Fun for its length.