Reviews by MathBrush

I beta tested this game.

This game is about a private detective hired to track down a woman, and features a number of unusual animals (for instance, it starts in a petting zoo with an aye-aye and an iguana).

Robb Sherwinn is an incredibly funny writer who makes games that involve bizarre logic and creative situations. Mike Sousa is a talented programmer who also has a knack for humor.

So this game is a tag-team effort that warms my heart. When I beta tested this, I laughed out loud several times. Parts of this game are so funny to me specifically. It really depends on what type of humor you have. For me, the thing I think I like best is that it’s good-natured humor; the people might be weird, or violent, or non-human, or troubled, but they’re inherently kind to each other. I’ve always been averse to games with strong profanity and sexual references, which featured in early Sherwin games (not in this game, though), but the inherent goodness and kindness in the stories overpowered that for me. Because isn’t that more important? Isn’t doing your best and trying to help others more important than the way you talk? I still felt uncomfortable with the content, but this game is like ‘clean’ Sherwin and I can’t say how much I appreciate that that exists.

I also enjoyed the references to Mike Sousa’s earlier games, like the computer sports news about Jake Garrett the baseball player (from At Wit’s End) and the garrulous taxi driver from Fake News. I also appreciated (of all things) the smooth elevator in the game. I did some ‘Inform tutoring’ with someone and we spent an entire week of lessons working on his elevator extension he was trying to write, so I confidently say that this game has an excellent elevator, the kind of elevator I aspire to write.

Finally, I love the art in this game by artist asteltainn. So I definitely plan on revisiting this and playing it again in future years.

+++++Polish, Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional impact, Would I play again? This game satisfies all 5 criteria for my star rating system. It's great for my tastes!

I beta tested this game.

This is one of two games this year to be co-written by Xavid and which implement the fun map-building extension used in Xavid’s earlier game Future Dreams. It looks good in both games!

This game is wildly ambitious, and the concept is clever: you take people’s intents (and even more, later) and move them around to each other.

This concept has been used before (most clearly in Delightful Wallpaper) but never on this scale. This game is very large, with three sections that easily could have each been their own IFComp game.

The game expands in the middle so that it has cubic complexity. You can apply any of one category of object to another category of object to each person in the game.

This creates an enormous state space unlike anything I’ve seen before (except possibly Andrew Schultz’s Threediopolis with exponential complexity). In my experience, even quadratic complexity can be crushingly painful (I wrote a murder mystery where any topic can be combined with any other topic).

This is both good and bad. On the good side, it provides freedom, and that’s imperative for most parser games. On the other hand, without careful guidance, the complexity overwhelms the player and the game becomes frustrating.

For me, the game had generally enough hints so that solving puzzles wasn’t too hard (I replayed much of it before this review). The final act, though, I find very difficult indeed, and it was beyond me.

I enjoyed the writing in this a lot. This game is verbose, and riffs on things from quantum mechanics to religious symbolism. It’s clever and witty. As an IF ‘historian’ I’m very interested in its placement; the nice graphical elements are the kind of thing that, in the past, have raised the scores of games a lot, while the complexity may or may not have an effect on the outcome. In any case, I’m glad I played it, and feel inspired by it as an author.

+Polish: The game seems bug-free, and the map is nice.
+Descriptiveness: The writing is really solid.
+Interactivity: The mechanics are clever
+Emotional impact: Parts of it are very funny
-Would I play again? The increasing complexity and overall size of the game are fairly intimidating!

Okay, so I think I spent more time on this game than almost any other, but about half of it wasn’t playing.

This game uses immersive text, graphics and sound to tell a story of a man with amnesia and a curse who meets another man with the same. Together the two of you must discover a cure to your awful curse.

The overall storyline seems interesting, but this game is inaccessible in many, many ways.

Several other reviewers online have already talked about the slow text (including someone who screenshotted a tweet of mine about slow text), but I still want to talk about it a bit.

Slow text has essentially one use: in short, mostly linear contemplative games like Congee. And even there, Congee loads the whole thing at once, instead of the typewriter effect that’s distracting.

Long games with slow text can be excruciatingly painful to read. But at least you can get through them.

But if you have to replay a game frequently, then being able to quickly click back to where you came from is essential.

This game is full of frequent deaths, is very long, uses slow typewriter text and has disabled the UNDO button. It does let you save, but to know that you have to click on the ‘controls’ button at the beginning of the game to learn that L brings up the load screen, and then you have to guess that you save at the load screen.

These decision weren’t just casual decisions by the author. They are completely baked in. I often go through and modify game code to disable slow text (that’s how I played Lux two years ago, and loved it!) This game’s code absolutely embraces the slow text. It’s baked into every phrase. It’s cooked into a macro hidden deep in the javascript (not the game’s in-Twinery javascript sheet, but the html file itself). Disabling that macro gets rid of all in-game links, as those are timed to appear when the text is done. Restoring the undo button doesn’t restore the picture, just a blank box.

After about three hours of trimming it down, I got it to work. I raced through the game, clicking and feeling euphoria. And then I realized that the main mechanic the game relies on is broken.

According to the walkthrough, if you pick up books you’re supposed to be able to ‘rewind’ at key decision points. But that didn’t happen for me.

I looked at the games Twinery code, and even this is obfuscated. All of the structure is hidden because boxes have generic names (like passage 1-1) and are lined up in exact geometrical rows to hide the overall structure. But I finally found the correct passage, and it has code for the rewind to display, but it doesn’t work.

I picked through the rectangles, trying to glean the story. It seems to me that this game is about (Spoiler - click to show)vampires, which explains (Spoiler - click to show)the reaction to garlic and holy water, and the lack of a reflection.

As a final note, I saw that the author had included a secret debug code accessible by typing D. That suggests to me that the author found his game too tedious to play through repeatedly, and ended up using the debug to test it.

I’ve seen a few other people do that in this comp. I really recommend playing through your game from start to finish the way that you anticipate others will throughout the development period.

Also, another tip that’s been very helpful for me: start beta testing before you’re finished with your tricky coding, so that people can give feedback on the concept. My first version of Alias the Magpie that I sent to JJ Guest for testing was pretty crappy, but I wanted to see if the idea worked. You can even just shop the idea around before implementing it.

In any case, it took serious programming chops to create this game, and I’m impressed by the author’s abilities.

-Polish: Has several errors.
+Descriptiveness: Is very descriptive.
-Interactivity: Very frustrating.
-Emotional impact: The UI frustrations made it difficult to get invested.
-Would I play again? Not without several changes.

Custom parser games only available as windows executables are always a mixed bag, but this is one is better than most.

You play as Prince Charming (or Cinderella) and you have to get yourself and Rumpelstiltskin back to a wedding. Along the way, you have to complete several fairy tales such as Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Jack and the Beanstalk.

The map is expansive, with a lot of diagonal directions and several little colleges.

The parser is definitely better than most custom-made parsers but has a lot of work it still needs. Conversation especially is very picky; I had to use the walkthrough a lot. I don’t think TALK TO or SAY _________ TO ________ or similar constructions work, and you have to use quotations in a way I’m not used to. There is a provided manual, though it is very long.

The puzzles are logical, and the included art looks nice, although it started bouncing up as soon as it came down later.

Rumpelstilstkin got a little annoying as he says ‘Let’s hurry’ pretty much every 3-5 lines.

Creating a parser from scratch is very difficult, so this game is a technical feat. But unless the author is planning on making several games with this engine and refining it over and over (like Linus Åkesson with his game engine Dialog), it might be worth using previously-refined engines instead.

+Polish: Despite the problems with the parser, the setup here is clean and looks great for a Windows executable.
+Descriptiveness: The characters and locales are described in detail.
-Interactivity: I was frustrated by the specificity of required commands.
+Emotional impact: I was fairly amused by a few parts.
-Would I play again? I think I've found everything I wanted to.

So this one has a lot of good features and some that didn’t mesh with me. I’m not sure I’m the target audience.

This is a long Twine game with a mechanic that I’ve not really seen in IFComp before. There’s a long, mostly linear prologue where you meet all the main characters, then you’re given a bunch of journal entries/case files to go through. As you go through them, you can type them into a database to learn more, kind of like Her Story.

This is a game about a serial rapist/murderer. In fact, it’s the third game I’ve played in this comp that prominently features a kidnapper/sexual assaulter. This game specifically seems heavily influenced by stories like those featured in true crime podcasts and documentaries, and by the Golden State Killer specifically.

+Polish: A lot of work went into this game.
+Descriptiveness: Has a level of detail similar to true crime podcasts.
-Interactivity: The main mechanic was overly difficult to me. Typing in things that I knew were important (like 'bulger') didn't always work.
+Emotional impact: It was an emotion I didn't like, but it did it.
-Would I play again? Not my cup of tea, content-wise.
The graphic depictions in one of the assaults and the extensive profanity/abuse definitely set me on edge, and I don’t think I’m the target audience for it. Writing-wise, this game is good on the individual level, but some of the twists didn’t make much sense to me, especially the ending sequence which changed the genre of the game completely.

The mechanics are interesting, but I think they could use more testing for robustness. I will say if you haven’t played it yet that it keeps a running notebook for you at the very bottom, which I didn’t notice until near the end.

Overall, the author seems very talented. This game was beta tested by several people, but I think the next game in the series could use a couple of more people, especially Twine authors who have done well in the comp before. I’m assuming there will be more in the series, and I’d be happy to see that, especially ones with less sexual violence (for my personal taste, may not reflect all readers).

Given the popularity of Flexible Survival together with the excellent production values of this game, I predict that this game will find a lot of success with certain communities after the comp, perhaps ending up as the most-played game form this comp. I also think, though, that it has some features that will end up hurting it in this comp’s voting.

This is a hardnosed combat and storytelling game with furry characters (well, animal/human hybrids, including reptiles). It has very nice-looking screens, including an action video later on when an SUV pulls up that’s certainly the best-produced thing I’ve ever seen in IFComp.

You play as a series of characters in a run-down and dark world where mob bosses rule. Characters can pick up a variety of very specific weapons and ammo.

Gameplay is stat-based, with an initial point buy system and later gains. Every part of the game is turned into a puzzle that either depends on stats or correct choices. Even ‘click-reveals’ (when you click on a link and it expands) are gamified: you have to click them in the right order to get bonus points.

This game is difficult. Without God mode, you have to make very specific point buys to get past even the second challenge (when the truck comes by, if you don’t have quick feet or health, then you get hit for 0 damage, but your 0 health gets checked and results in death.

With God mode, I made it very far until I made a bad choice and got an instant death. I think I could have restored but I had the following bug:

"I can’t find a save slot named ‘AnimaliaBookI4’!►
I tried to save or load the game, but I couldn’t do it."

Overall, I actually like the writing quite a bit. The intense difficulty of the game will likely be a plus for the target audience, as I think this is meant to be a game you replay a lot and have strategy guides about, something like Sunless Skies or 80 Days.

For the comp, though, it makes it hard to play through in a short time, even with God Mode.

-Polish: Great production values, but bugs need fixing.
+Descriptiveness: Nice writing
+Interactivity: For the comp, it's no good, but I like the extra challenge for more replay value.
+Emotional impact: Yeah, I was invested.
+Would I play again? Yes, especially the finished version.

This is one of two games co-authored by Xavid, both making use of the same kind of cool map code Xavid used in Future Threads a few years back.

This game is definitely my sort of thing. I love games with two worlds that are mirrors of each other, and this game has four.

In this game, you’re sent back in time to stop an apocalypse from being cause by a cult. For some reason the cultists seem completely unfazed by your presence, and you can’t understand their spoken language but can understand their written language. But this is a fairly mild concern.

There is a compact map that persists through four different time periods you can warp through. At first, you are heavily constrained, but over time you unlock quite a bit more.

Some of the puzzles were real headscratchers, but other reviews and the in-game hint system got me through. One of the main puzzles and one of the optional ending puzzles rely on urban legends about animals that may not actually work in real life.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed the game. Thanks for making it!

+Polish: Very smooth.
+Descriptiveness: There was a lot of creativity with the different rooms.
+Interactivity: Cool time travel makes up for weird puzzles.
-Emotional impact: It was fun, but I didn't really get 'in character'
+Would I play again? Definitely!

Jared Jackson is one of the most innovative IF authors out there, always pushing the boundaries in weird ways to test what you can do with text. His previous games, Instruction Set and Language Arts, explored algorithms and text manipulation in fascinating ways.

This game is a card-based game where your attacks and defenses are represented by a deck of cards. There are 3 dungeons to work through, each with a boss, and there are checkpoints and small encounters like gambling, a maze, and a funny recreation of Leroy Jenkins.

I beta tested this game, and I didn’t help much. At the time, I couldn’t help but die really early on, so I felt like I was a bad player and didn’t try much further (sorry Jared!)

As a player, I’ve taken the game up on its offer to give me unlimited respawns with increased health each time. This made the game far more enjoyable. I ended up making it halfway through the middle dungeon as a berserker when the game stopped responding to my link clicks. Restarting the game and continuing my save, I found that I could not continue, as it took my to a blank screen (this possibility is mentioned in the game’s readme txt). I might give it another run as a wizard later. This is probably something I would have caught as a tester if I had embraced dying, so sorry Jared!

I’m not sure if this game is possible to beat without dying a lot. There are no healing opportunities between encounters (except very rarely), and even maximizing your defense actions still won’t be enough to protect you from attacks, so it’s mathematically impossible to keep from dying. Since dying is framed as bad in most games, that’s kind of a bummer at first.

The variety in the game is fun; as a combat system I find it genuinely enjoyable. The complexity though may be its own downfall; balance and bug-hunting become much more difficult with increased complexity.

In any case, I look forward to the next innovative game by this author, and I plan on playing this game again for fun after the comp.

+Polish: The game is complex and interesting. There are bugs, but the art and other systems make up for it for me.
+Descriptiveness: Lots of variety in creatures and objects and cool backstory.
+Interactivity: Once I embraced dying, I really enjoyed the system.
+Emotional impact: It was fun.
+Would I play again? Yest.

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.

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.