Reviews by MathBrush

I beta tested this game, but didn't finish it at the time due to personal events.

This game is similar to Bullhockey 1, but it improves on it. Implementation is smoother, inventory is cut down a bit, and atmosphere is distinctly improved.

Playing through the entire game, the highlights to me were an old house containing a series of dramatic historical vignettes and a self-referential finale scene that breaks the fourth wall.

However, this game is opposed to my personal play style. I play light and breezy, skimming text and rushing through. This game is designed for careful and studious play, with dense and obscure puzzles and the need for careful notes .

Overall, each of these games is getting better.

(Note: game contains some mild BDSM imagery)

This game is one of the most complex Twine games I've seen.

Rather than focusing on conversation and emotional choices as many Twine games do, this game focuses on inventory management and movement around an extensive map, similar to typical parser gameplay.

This allows for some truly clever puzzles, including a major twist that only occurs in some playthroughs.

Strongly recommended for people looking for old-school puzzles and fans of sci-fi stories about artificial intelligence.

StupidRPG is a long game, split up into several acts in multiple genres. It has a custom parser with hyperlink shortcuts, and uses quite a few tricks and techniques to spice up the visual presentation.

The biggest drawback to me is that the interface is clunky, which detracted from both my emotional investment and sense of interactivity. The game has a dungeon master that types slowly, leaving large spaces of time where you have to sit and wait for it to type out. You could leave, make a small sandwich, and come back before it finishes, sometimes. Also, the custom parser isn't up to the standards of, say, TADS or Inform 7, which caused some frustration.

The writing is amusing and the settings, especially later on, are imaginative, with puzzle mechanics involving multiple worlds. I just wish I didn't get so frustrated with the interface.

Anno 1700 is an ambitious and sprawled-out pirate game involving two timelines, multiple NPCs, and a large map.

As is often the case with Adrift games, the game works well with the walkthrough but has trouble for someone without it. Very specific actions need to be guessed, and actions that seem like they would be easy (such as communicating with your base) cause trouble.

Playing this with the walkthrough, though, was enjoyable.

Edit: Several people pointed out to me that this was written in Adrift, not Quest, and I apologize for the mistake!

This is a game that was hard to play during the competition, for a few reasons, and those same reasons make it much better to play now.

-It is a large Adrift game, and Adrift is an engine where a lot of commands don't work. This game gives you hints about the commands in the text, but this requires careful reading of the text.

-This game is randomized, so you can't just repeat commands from memory. The map is the same, however.

-This game is big. It has a few dozen locations, runs on a timer, and has many NPCs with many interaction options. There are little encounters too that happen frequently.

-This game is hard. Really hard. I played it 5 or 6 times before completing one of the biggest mission objectives. You have to keep track of tons of things: where stuff is located, where people are, what times things happen.

So this is definitely a game to be savored. But it is rewarding.

This IFComp 2018 parser game is big and pretty tough.

I beta tested this game. You play as a person whose girlfriend has supposedly left them, trashing the house and hiding your clothes all over the town.

This is, I think, the author's first publicly released game, and a big one. It's clear while playing it that the author got better and better at programming and writing as it goes along. Thus, the first area is the sketchiest/most obtuse, while the later areas are an improvement. I recommend perhaps consulting the walkthrough until you leave the house, to get a feel for the game, then going wild.

I played this game early on in the competition. It was late at night, and I was listening to sad music on my phone.

This was the perfect game. A strange tale about a writer trying to get past writer's block (self-referential art has always impressed me), taking place both in the real world and in the author's book (I love dual world games), with both text entry and choice, this game absolutely impressed me.

I have to warn that the game is extremely explicit, and I played almost entirely on the least explicit level.

The game constantly pulled out surprises, and is big enough to feel like a real, living world. Just like in the real writing process, scenes and characters are written and rewritten, in and out of the game. Decisions are reversible. There's even an inventory and an economy!

I think some people might have bounced off of this because of length, but now that the competition is over, this is one I strongly recommend. This is going on my all-time top 10 list, was my favorite IFComp game, and is definitely getting my vote for XYZZY Best Game!

This game was created over a period of 30 years, using a variety of design systems.

You play a natural philosopher in medieval times, nicknamed Phil. There are a ton of puzzles and a magic system.

However, this game could use some thorough beta testing by six or more people familiar with modern IF conventions. Directions are omitted from room descriptions, puzzles are undervalued, and there's an inventory limit which doesn't really seem to do much in-game.

For people who enjoy struggling with the parser in old school games (I'm in that group, and intend to play this one again!)

I do everything I can to complete games before I review them. I read walkthroughs, I look up old message boards, and, at last resort, I decompile to get the text.

This game is one of those rare ones (such as Hard Puzzle 2) where decompiling is worthless. In this case, the text of the game is literally split into two interleaving fragments, so that no whole words remain.

You have a huge anagram machine which makes anagrammed words out of anything you put in it. The results can be used, eaten, modified, entered, etc.

There are a lot of rough edges in the implementation, which is part of the overall effect. I don't know of anyone whose solved it. I got very far this time, but I forget how to do all the puzzles I had solved when I tried this last year. I'd love to see a team of people on a forum solve this one.

This sequel to the 15-year-earlier Risorgimento Represso is a fairly large glulx game that uses advanced features such as graphical windows.

In classic parser game style, you are an eccentric wizard's apprentice in a blended fantasy/modern setting where you push the boundaries of the law to get what you want.

I enjoyed the variety of puzzles, such as timing puzzles and transportation puzzles.

This game reminds me a lot in style and quality to Bob Bates' game Thaumistry. Both games were charming, and reached a level of quality that is quite difficult to reach, but failed to grip my imagination. In both games, I felt like some solutions were unnecessarily restricted.

I believe this game is most likely to win Spring Thing (this review was written before the competition ended).