Reviews by MathBrush

This was a really hard game to rate, as I went back and forth between 4 and 5 stars. It's definitely one of the best Choicescript games I've given 4 stars, and I think the rating comes down to my experiences with it.

In this game, you play a fox in a Japanese-themed culture whose family is slaughtered by a vicious farmer. When you reach 100 years old, you gain the power to be a fox spirit.

Choices in the game generally revolve around your personality (helpful vs demonic is a big one) and whether you encourage war or not. There are several competing goals (immortality, peace, and romance) and I'm not sure you can complete all 3 at once (I ended up with 2).

The writing is engaging, but a lot of it depends on how interested you are in being a fox. Having seen fox spirits as enemies in other games, I found it fun to be one in this game.

I had trouble engaging with the stats, though. I had very high cleverness but kept failing stat checks about knowing things or being smart. Then near the end I realized that most of those checks were for 'worldliness', which was low for me as I was a godly disciple of Inari. Even after I figured that out, though, there were many many times where I had no clue what was being checked or failed things I thought I'd be great at. Part of that is probably because I was trying at first to be a devout trickster, but most trickster options lower devoutness. So I think my own choices led to that lack of engagement.

The game had a great sense of being an animal in the human's world, which is its best aspect.

I wouldn't have minded having stats look higher, too. Since every choicescript game is different, it's hard to tell if you are good at something if you have, for instance, a 65 in that category. But that's just personal taste.

Overall, well-written and a truly fun set of final chapters. It felt large, and reminded me of the setting of Choice of Kung Fu (which I think also featured Fox Spirits; they'd make a fun session played one after the other).

This the third Exceptional Story of Groover's that I've played, and I definitely liked this one more than most Exceptional Stories.

In this one, you become entangled in a slug race which, due to the nature of slugs, takes over a month to finish. In the meantime, you must travel all over London to interfere with the race, investigate the mysterious woman behind the race who always plays tango music, and look into the backgrounds of the competitors.

The game was quite a bit longer than I expected, with an extended opening, three phases of the race with two different activities in each phase, and a long and moving finale.

The rewards were good, the lore about hell and the Carnelian coast was good, and the slugs were excellent. Also, I enjoyed having an option to 'Fight the lettuce'. Definitely recommend this one.

This is the first of four Chandler Groover exceptional stories I purchased for research for my new game (I've played his other story Paisley already).

Exceptional Stories are mini-games built into Fallen London's overarching scheme. They tend to have both in-game rewards and interesting storylines.

This one starts off well enough, though not entirely exciting. It's mostly hunting various monsters throughout London with a lot of Groover-esque mentions of food or eating until you end up finding and interrogating a suspect.

I thought it was a bit short but well-done, and then I discovered that that was only half the story. The rest takes you out of London and uses some unique mechanics, bizarre rewards, and difficult choices.

The Lore was good, the related art and the ideas behind the items given were good. It wasn't as good as Paisley (which makes sense, given the time frames) but is better than most exceptional stories.

Worth playing for the memorable monster in the second half and the rewards, especially if you are an early player (if not, you may be more interested in the Lore-heavy option that forfeits those rewards).

This is one of my favorite recent exceptional stories.

There are rumours of a special race going around Fallen London, where only the best captains are invited. Surprisingly, you aren't invited, but you know who is, and you discover a bizarre plot.

This story excelled at two things. First, it really uses your traits. I had a Zubmarine, a Hell's Hymn, successful terms as governor, and a monster hunter's harpoon, two things that take quite a lot of work to get, and the game incorporated both beautifully into the story. Many other things I did not have were also incorporated into the story.

Second, it is strongly connected to Sunless Sea. The race course passes by all of the major near-London locations from that game, so seeing the Sphynxes and the Iron Republic was nice.

The story was very lengthy, had memorable characters, and had some of those GO NORTH-like options (i.e. really bad ideas) Fallen London is known for.

Might be worth becoming an exceptional friend this month, as I think it's cheaper than just buying the story.

This game was created as part of an MFA in writing at the University of Pittsburgh, where it was accepted as part of the program’s requirements, the first time a game has been accepted as part of their requirements. The author has also taught classes in Narrative Design in Twine.

This is a huge Twine game. The main idea is that you experience randomly-selected stories, and in between them a greater story builds up. You must acquire certain attributes or tokens to sell to advance.

This game correlates well with my experience of the academic environment vs submitting a game for evaluation by the wide world through publication or (in this case) IFComp.

The academic ‘audience’ is typically 4-5 people, the members of your committee. If its anything like math, the committee will likely spend very little time looking at your work, trusting perhaps your supervisor who has had weekly meetings with you to assure you that the work is high quality. For this game, I suspect the committee likely played for a few minutes until a death happened. In this environment, appearing to be a big time investment is the main goal, and appearing to be deep is another (which this game accomplishes by referencing racism and misogyny).

In the ‘open world’, though, other things are valued much more, #1 of which is a lack of bugs and typos, of which this game has many. For a large game entered into the competition, it needs far more testing, and hopefully publishing a proofing copy on Twinery and running it through grammarly or hiring an editor.

The game also uses very slow text in the middle. It features an undo feature which is very helpful, but if you reach a segment where you have to pay more tokens, even very late in the game, and you die, there is no choice but to restart, playing through the entire game.

I definitely think this work is valuable and I think that this is worthwhile to make, but it’s difficult to please two groups of people at once, and making a game that appeals to a wide audience is something that takes practice and a lot of help from others.

-Polish: Needs more polish.
+Descriptiveness: The game was very descriptive.
+Interactivity: This was good for the most part; the tokens are what got me.
+Emotional Impact: This game made me think a lot about my own past in academia.
-Would I play again? No, it felt a little too dificult to go far and the tone of some of the segments left me cold.

I played this game over a week before writing this, but put off reviewing it. It’s because I really enjoyed the concept, but found it very buggy (such as every important object being listed in the room as ‘You see…here’ or having scenery objects be takable).

I sent a list of possible bug fixes to the author, who took it under advisement, and tried playing it again.

I really enjoyed this game. You play as the assistant to a magician who was been kidnapped by a logician who leaves clues for you scattered around a mansion. Along the way, you encounter a whacky set of characters and bizarre magical implements.

The overall structure resembles Karella’s other games, but this is the first Glulx one. So there are still some iffy spots, but that’s to be expected: getting all the bugs out of an Inform game takes a long time and a lot of testing. But the writing was funny, the puzzles were generally well-clued and involved very creative concepts (more in the items used than the puzzle structure itself). and I think that overall this was great.

I wasn’t sure about whether I felt good or bad about a certain Christian clown in the game, as it seems generally mocking but presents him as sincere, so I’m on the fence about that. Otherwise, I heartily recommend this game.

++++Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional Impact, Would I play again? Yes, yes, yes, and yes
-Polish: Could use some more!

So, I have played Fallen London for years, and am especially fond of Sunless Seas and Sunless Skies. I also did my dissertation in geometry and am a fan of Flatland. So I definitely think I was the target audience of this game, which is essentially all of the important locations of Fallen London but flat.

The game is quite large, and has a Zork-like structure where you put treasures in a trophy case. There are plenty of locations, people and items.

This game is centered on parser structure, Fallen London lore, and geometry. I want to talk about what worked well and less well for me personally in each area.

What worked well with the parser: The puzzles are clean and solvable, usually, with few red herrings. I had a couple of disambiguation issues (especially with books and with the chess set) but very few if any genuine bugs. Interaction with NPCs generally worked well, always a hard thing to do. The piano puzzle was great.

What worked less well with the parser: The puzzles could use a little more creativity. Many of them are just ‘take the object’ or ‘follow the instructions here’. On the other hand, the chess puzzle was, as your testers indicated, perhaps too hard. It might have been worth giving a visual interpretation or even having a scrawled note in the chess handbook that says what the ‘real meaning’ of rule 1 is so people know they’re supposed to translate the rules and use them.

What worked well with Fallen London: This was clearly written by either a fan of the game or someone a lot of time to browse the wiki (or both?). Locations seem true to form, from poking around in the banks of the river to the exhibits in the Labyrinth of tigers to the expeditions in the Fallen Quarter.

What worked less well with Fallen London: Fallen London relies almost entirely on atmosphere and on the idea that there are forbidden secrets just around the corner. This game reveals many of the secrets of Fallen London, so many that I would almost recommend people not play it if they plan on getting into Fallen London and want to have more surprises. This has a second negative effect, which is that by revealing so much of the secrets at once, they’re deprived of their power, and the impact of the setting is lessened. Likewise, the game lacks the lush descriptions of Fallen London.

What works with geometry: Things like the elevator shaft work very well and the endings. But otherwise the 2-dimensionality is not used very much. How are murals drawn? How do locks work? How can the sigils be drawn as (presumably) 1-dimensional paint? How can you bridge a river without blocking its flow?

So I think this game has a lot of positives, but that it could make use of its three sources a little bit more.

+Polished: Mostly so.
-Descriptive: The writing is, well, somewhat flat.
+Interactivity: There was generally always something available to do.
-Emotional impact: I didn't feel emotionally invested in the game.
+Would I play again? After I've had enough time to forget the solutions, yes.

Well, my personal shuffle lined up for me three pretty hefty games that I beta tested all in a row. But fortunately they’re all fun to play.

This is a big game, longer than 2 hours for me (I only replayed the first 2 ‘acts’ for this review). It’s basically the ancient rituals of the Eleusinian Mysteries (as far as we’ve recreated them) retold in the style of P.G. Wodehouse.

The game is split up into 4 or 5 acts. Each is large enough to be an IFComp game in its own right, especially the first act (which involves searching for items in an expansive map) and the last act (which is a madcap action scene set in a single room and involving a form of optimization).

The game provides a ton of jokes and just text in general, with full-screen text printouts being a regular occurrence. Overall, it’s a masterpiece in terms of total content and polish.

Structure-wise, I found the open-world segments more effective than the narrowly constrained 2nd act. Quite a few of the puzzles were more difficult than I could handle, as well, with my typical loose and easy playstyle. For the thoughtful and methodical player that examines every item, carefully checks exits and works through every takable object, this game will exciting and rewarding. For everyone else, like me, the hints are quite good and let you see the witty writing more easily.

+Polish: For a game this large and complex, it is very polished.
+Descriptiveness: The witty writing is a plus.
-Interacivity: For me, the puzzles were too hard to figure out easily.
+Emotional impact: This game is funny, for sure.
+Would I play again? After the comp is over, I'd like to revisit this.

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!