Reviews by MathBrush

This game puts you in the role of a secret agent who is similar to James Bond. The player drives a Jaguar, encounters beautiful women, uses spy gadgets, and deals with corrupt individuals.

The implementation and polish isn't all the way there. There are several typos in the game, which becomes sort of a joke when the main character mentions 'incrementing evidence' and an NPC corrects them. It's clear the author has an exact sequence of events they want the player to do, but it's not clear how the player is meant to achieve them without the walkthrough. The walkthrough itself seems confused with directions at times.

There's some female objectification here, including ASCII art of what I think is a nude woman but possibly may be something else. It seemed typical of James Bond films, but those aren't exactly a good role model.

Overall, I think that a game this size probably could have benefited from beta testers with experience with IFComp games. There were some testers though, and it's clear they made the game better (the car and elevator especially work well). I think it just needed more work. Great parser games can take hundreds of hours of time, or use coding tricks to limit players' actions and look like they took hundreds of hours to make.

This games is pushing a bit higher than 4 stars, maybe 4.1 or 4.2.

When you put effort into an Ink game, it looks good. This game has nice crisp scrolling and nicely-chosen images from Unsplash. It looks good!

Structure-wise, it seems like it's written by someone with no real IFComp experience, and so it's a sort of new thing not tied down to overused IFComp tropes. This is a good thing; if anything, it reminds me of Ayliff's Seedship game.

You have a growing colony with a lot of stats (resource use, pollution, etc.). The major decision you make is which technologies to import from the earth first. You also have occasional binary decisions to make regarding strategy.

The story is about two people who love each other very much sending letters and images back and forth. There names are of Arab origin and the images seem to be from Africa, so the setting seems to be somewhere in North Africa.

The game has a few problems. I swear I saw a few typos like stray punctuation. The science in the game is grossly oversimplified (a colony of 400 people can create enough incidental pollution to affect the entire planet's climate over a few months) and the 'check stats' link can be overwhelming.

But it was fun, and the story made me think about life. I believe the author achieved the goals he had when making this game.

Carter Sande is just trolling us all at this point, I believe.

Last year, his game Let's Explore Geography! Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise was a tongue-in-cheek take on edutainment game. He spent a long time in the forums going back and forth on whether his game was actually edutainment or not, and it's still a little hard to tell.

This game has you clicking on a jpg island map to get help in different areas, in addition to taking small mini-tests of three questions at a time.

The tests are a bit hard (and I swear the compound interest one is wrong!). The little story segments between are more story-based and more clearly Interactive Fiction, but they honestly wouldn't be out of place in a real edutainment game.

The only place I found anything odd was (Spoiler - click to show)the very end, where there was no 'end game' link, and I scrolled down and found I 'missed something'. I noticed the replay this time was different, but not significantly so.

I then followed the walkthrough, the game went all (Spoiler - click to show)Zalgo, and the end result convinced me more than ever that Carter is trolling us all. I did reach a final The End after (Spoiler - click to show)destroying the obelisk.

Why 4 stars, not 5? Because, and this is written in my heart:

"Simulated Boredom is Still Boredom"

Otherwise, I had a good time.

Luke Jones has released many games, and has a definite style. His games are whimsical, kind of roguish (with a foul-mouthed pigeon), sprawling, with a big cast of NPCs.

They are also a bit spare. When he started with Quest games, they were above average for Quest games in terms of implementation. Inform games (which this one is) generally have room for smoother programming, and this game could use a litte bit of polish, both in synonyms and in typos (especially the problems with stray punctuation that inform has).

This is a sequel to The Bony King of Nowhere, featuring the same map, just a few years older. I played with the walkthrough, as some puzzles I had great difficulty in guessing.

My favorite part about the game is the frank and friendly NPCs, like Donella or the Wizard of Ounces (Oz). I also liked the tie-in with other games by this author.

This game is the kind of thing Steph Cherrywell is known for: smooth humor, a large, easily navigable map, genre tropes pursued to their logical end, plenty of polish, and vivid characters.

I found this game's puzzles more logical than some other Cherrywell games, though I had trouble with one particular artist. Looking back, I ignored many, many, hints.

You play as a flapper (with all the 20's lingo) who's desperate for a drink. But it's all been soaked up by ghosts, so you have to hunt them down one by one!

I really enjoyed this game, and I think that it has a great chance of wining this year's comp.

This game meets my criteria for five stars:

Polish: I found no bugs, and everything ran smoothly. The game logic was sound.

Descriptiveness: I learned new things. I was intrigued by the game in ways that bled into real life.

Interactivity: This game explores parser space in a way that (Spoiler - click to show)Take, The North-North Passage, and Lime Ergot did. These games take the player-parser interaction and do 'variations on a theme' like composers.

Emotion: I felt a warm glow.

Play again: Sure!

Sobol's been reviewing games for at least 5 years, it's high time he post one of his own. This is a lovely game.

It's a real shame. This game has a sandbox environment, reasonable puzzles with multiple solutions, several endings that require completely different strategies and have distinct results, no bugs or typos that I found. Basically, everything you'd want a comp game to me.

The problem is that it's super offensive. You play a morbidly obese teen that is so fat they can eat anything and smash things with their fists. Your eyes and ears are so full of cholesterol that you have to type 'WUOOO' for echolocation every few turns.

There are other instances of, as the game calls it, 'crass humor and worse'. I didn't like that, not at all.

'Wizard/Witch's Apprentice' games are very common, from old ones like "The Wizard's Apprentice" and "Berrost's Challenge" to more recent ones like "Charming" and "Oppositely Opal" (one of my favorites!).

This game avoids many of the problems of the genre. It restricts its state space nicely both with regards to books (there are only a few, and only a few topics to look up), locations (only about 7), and ingredients (about 4). Most of these witch/wizard games just open up too quickly.

I found the puzzles very satisfying. My most negative experience was right at the beginning with the crystal ball. (Spoiler - click to show)I couldn't reach the ball, but there were length-enhancing things around (like the duster). It was not intuitive to me that you could climb up).

I felt like the ending could have used a bit more build up or that there could be more details here and there. But that's more of a design preference, and not a bug. This is a solid game that will please parser fans.

This polished but small Ink game has you trying to rescue 7 cats from a cruel breeder.

You have three different places you can go to earn 'coals', the currency in the game. Each cat costs 3 coals.

There are many ways to get money, including some dark paths, some scientific. While the game is very short, it has 10 different endings, and is worth replaying a few times.

I may have given an extra star just because I love cats. But what's wrong with that?

This game is essentially a home-made remake of the obscure old CD game Bad Milk.

In both games, there is no text, only videos or audio. You pass out after consuming something bad and must go through puzzles.

The interactivity baffled me here, with spinning icons and bizarre link options.

I don't decide what's interactive fiction and what's not, and I think this is fine to have in IFComp. But I really don't know how to play and find the whole thing pretty opaque.