Reviews by MathBrush

I beta tested this game.

Detectiveland is a great game in a unique interface created by Robin Johnson.

The interface is a refinement of the one used in Draculaland. You have a parser-like interface, but instead of typing in commands, you have a menu of visible things and people and an inventory; you click on an object or person, and a menu of verbs comes up. One object at a time can be 'held', and this affects the menus of other nouns.

This is one of the biggest IFComp winners ever, with a minimal walkthrough taking 250 or more moves. It is split into 4 cases, 3 of which can be solved simultaneously.

You play a detective resolving problems in a square grid town. The game has graphics of speakers, and has really good humorous writing.

The game is written Scott Adams style, so many of the locations have very spare writing. This, according to the other, allowed him to spend more time on conversations and scripted events.

**Edit**

I actually hadn't played any Scott Adams games before this one; now I have played three, and this game is a straight send-up of those games, down to the split window and empty room descriptions. It's a perfect homage.

This game reminds me somehow of the old electronic devices you could get around the time of the NES that would play just one game, like Snake or other games. There were little, limited buttons, but they really did a lot with them.

This is the text version of that; you can just move N, E, S, W and Z. But this huge game exploits all of that. It can be finished in 2 hours with the walkthrough, but if you want to do it on your own, you need to do some exhaustive searching. Some of the truly unfair puzzles seem to be solvable if you just keep searching everything over and over again.

If you like this game, you should like DiBianca's other games. This was the number one game in the author's vote.

This game is truly epic. I felt like I was reading a novel as I played. It lasted long; longer than any of the other choicescript games I played.

I had trouble putting it down. A game about professional wrestling seemed so silly, but it's cinematic, almost like Rocky. There's a lot about second chances, betrayals, seeing the truth. It's so much better than it seemed from the blurb and art.

Subplots include a variety of romances, long term relationships with a rival, and so on. You can choose to be a face or a heel, and seeing the psychology about being a heel was very interesting.

Strongest recommendation.

Caveat: I was given a review copy of this game, but ended up playing the free public intro instead.

This game incorporates various multimedia effects including sounds, music, some animation and even apple watch interactivity, but I played it on android with the sound turned off.

So I'm just reviewing the graphics and story, and it's a good one. This is my favorite Fwlicity Banks game yet, perhaps because I just finished mistborn and I enjoyed the metal-themed magic vibe and the wilderness survival aspects.

In the free intro to the game, which by itself is quite long, you play as the unwilling holder of a special talent: "eating" souls. What that entails and its implications for you are slowly unraveled.

Your main nemesis at first is a ghastly creatute, a red eyed albino bear. The confrontations with the bear were exciting, and you get a lot of mileage out of the game before the pay/ad wall.

The visual styling is gorgeous. The choices were all binary, and the story 'felt' like the choices didn't matter at first, but I soon found that options that seemed unimportant led to dramatic results; the author must have spent a great deal of time working on the different threads to allow this level of choice.

As a final note, I've given this game 5 stars based on my judging criteria. I've reviewed several of Banks' games by her request, but I haven't been afraid to give less stars when appropriate. This game is polished, descriptive, gave me a real thrill of emotion, and made me want to play more, which are 4 of my 5 criteria. I didn't like the binary choices at first, but it fell into a rhythm that ended up working for me, which is my 5th star.

In this commercial game, you are trying to get around the world in 80 Days with Phineas Fogg. It is ostensibly based on the novel, although I haven't read it yet.

This game employs a beautiful map used to select various routes across the world, and has nice, mostly static visuals representing your conveyance, the city you're in, and various NPCs as well as the player and his luggage. However, this game is very much CYOA in beautiful packaging rather than just a text-heavy graphical game.

The usual pattern of the game is that you start each day in your current city with some funds and the chance to get more funds, buy some luggage, sell old luggage, or explore. You then pick a route to travel onto the next city, which may or may not require waiting a few hours or days for.

Each route can cost between a few dozen pounds to 7000 or more pounds. Faster routes generally cost more. Along each route, various events happen such as mutinies, romance, murders, etc. which you have to deal with. Your choices affect what city you are in, how fast you get there, NPC reactions, your amount of money, Phineas' health, and extremely poor choices can lead to death.

The setting is steampunk, a genre which I am on the fence about. Among steampunk games, the writing is very good. Some highlights for me were Haiti (Spoiler - click to show)with organic automata, Agra (Spoiler - click to show)A city that walks on four legs, with the Taj Mahal on top, and Salt Lake City, which provided my first glimpse at an interactive fiction treatment of Mormons, my religion. On their treatment of Mormons, I was pleased to see that they treated it fairly kindly, with any negative reactions being those typical of the day. This is typical of the whole game, in that it seems remarkably well-researched (although never perfectly) for its scope.

I found the game somewhat tedious at times, especially on multiple replays. I frequently found myself skipping filler text or repeatedly tapping on the clock. However, on playthroughs where I focused on exploration over time, I had an enjoyable experience.

Overall, I strongly recommend this game for anyone without a distaste for steampunk. I know several people who would love this game if it had a more realistic flavor. But the steampunk setting allows any historical inaccuracies to be waved away, and provides for some fun pictures, so it's a trade-off.

I love this game. Travel through the city of Khare using a beautiful 3d map and posable figurine. This city is a den of thieves, traps, liars, sorcerors, the undead, and worse. A stew pot of evil where the weak are mercilessly worn down, you must find a way to leave the city, or to save it.

By far the longest CYOA I have played. Allows unlimited rewinds to undo any number of actions. Innovative combat and gambling systems. Spells that you cast with 3 letter combinations with available letters changing at different locations. God's to serve, people to kill or save.

High fantasy at its best. Very strongly recommended.

It is rare to find a CYOA text game that combines a hundreds of thousands of words, extreme branching, a complex inventory and spell collection, 3d graphics, and orchestral music. The fact that it features a compelling narrative, unique gameplay mechanics, and at least a hundred npcs and monsters just makes it better.

Sorcery! 3 is part 3 in a series, but it is definitely not necessary to play the other games first. In fact, the game is easier if you play it alone.

You are a sorceror, who casts spells by combining lettered stars that differ from location to location. For instance, to command unintelligent creatures, you must stand where the stars allow you to spell L-A-W. Some spells also require certain inventory items, such as a gold-backed mirror.

You also can engage with creatures using a variety of swords and other weapons, as well as gambling with dice. Combat requires strategy, as you want to hit hard when the enemy leaves themselves open without expending your energy.

The game includes both ink illustrations and 3d maps. You move a figurine about a gorgeous 3d map from checkpoint to checkpoint. This could all be handled by hyperlinks, but the movement provides more variety. The game includes special beacons which have a unique mechanic with a gorgeous 3d effect.

You play a sorceror from Analand who must hunt down 7 serpents who seek to expose you to the Archmage, a powerful enemy. The serpents range from the relatively weak to the gut-wrenchig Serpent of Time. Few text game can give you that feeling of total despair that you can have meeting a boss, but this one succeeds.

In your quest, you will meet several sorcerors, magicians, thieves, tribes, and monsters. Conversations are difficult to lawnmower, which is a plus. You can negotiate, threaten, help, and so on.

The game is extremely nonlinear and branches strongly. There is one event at the fissure in the first area that I have tried to recreate over and over again and never succeeded. Whole quests, relationships, even a marriage to an NPC can be skipped or missed. Most serpents can be destroyed in two or more ways.

It took me most of a week playing 2-3 hours a day to beat. I restarted 3 or 4 times once I got a hang of it. There are some basic ideas that if you miss can make the game much more difficult.

I plan on nominating this game for the XYZZY for Best Game of 2015.

Choice of Robots is a game that has received high accolades, such as an XYZZY nomination for Best Game, and very favorable reviews from the general video game community.

I loved it. A very long game, perhaps of novella or screenplay length, and that is just in one playthrough. You can take wildly different paths, from prison to riches to love to all sorts of things. You keep track of 10 relationships, 4 robot stats, personal stats and political stats.

You are a young robot researcher, developing robot technology, and you have the chance to guide the development of robots toward autonomy, acting like humans, giant tank missiles, or advanced surgeons.

The gameplay can either be free-flowing, answering each question as it comes, or you can develop intricate plans to minimax your characters stats.

Well worth the money; this was the first commercial game that I bought since I purchased the complete Infocom collection.

This is just as good as Creatures Such As We and Choice of the Dragon, but longer. The only hiccups I found were inconsistent branches; when someone I married quit my company, the game said I wouldn't see them for a long time, for instance, without mentioning our relationship.

Like So Far, All Hope Abandon, and a large number of other games, Losing Your Grip is a trip through the subconscious.

The game is filled with beautiful and crazy imagery. For instance, the opening scene consists of (Spoiler - click to show)you standing in the mud next to someone buried up to their neck who resignedly chides you.

I tried this game without hints, and it was very hard. I explored every room in the first main area, tried everything I could think of, and I only got 2 points out of 100.

The game was previously shareware (i.e. you got a limited version, then pay for more), but now the author has released it for free (well, over a decade ago). It comes with well-written feelies, and ifdb has a walkthrough or two.

I cannot say how much I enjoyed playing through this game.

First Things First was nominated for an XYZZY award for Best Game, and won Best Puzzles, among others.

In this game that starts out very slowly, you quickly progress to an interesting situation similar to A Mind Forever Voyaging or Lost New York, where you can investigate a mid-size map over 50 years using a time machine. Your actions in certain time periods strongly affect the future in interesting ways.

This is definitely the best long-form time travel I have played, as I felt Lost New York (which explores New York over a century or two) and Time: All Things Come to an End (which explores many epochs in a linear fashion) had relatively unfair puzzles.

IFDB has version 3.0, but the walkthrough is for 1.1, so it didn't work in places. I am a walkthrough junkie, so it was hard for me to beat it, but I was able to guess from the walkthrough what I should try next, and eventually worked my way through it.

The game has good characters, beautiful settings, and a bit of a confused plot, which is natural given the main gameplay mechanic.

For simulation fans, it has an interesting money/bank account/investment system.

Strongly recommended for everyone. (Note: the first area seems incredibly boring, but it gets better and better. I started to like the game as soon as I made it into (Spoiler - click to show)the garage.)