Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

The programmers and artists did a great job on this game. We have a smooth interface with lush, hand-drawn designs.

The story is not really salvageable, though. You play a judge in death-penalty-era England, and you are asked to review death row cases. The following facts are true in this game:
-You can only appeal one case
-The ones you don't appeal are executed
-You have no choice about these rules
-Your wife acts like you are killing people

and...

-The people you free (Spoiler - click to show)are sent back so that all but 1 die.

So much of this doesn't make sense. And the text is very trope-y and short, almost like a distilled ideal version of truth. The entire courtroom transcript is boiled down to two paragraphs, including "The defendant said 'I didn't do it!'".

The tension with your spouse is not reasonable. These people were all going to die. Your job lets you save at most one. If you didn't do your job, they would all die. So you're literally doing the opposite of what she says; you're not killing anyone at all.

I think games focused on political issues can be amazing, but I feel like this one doesn't quite reach the goal its hitting at. Love the interface, though.

This game satisfies my criteria for 5 stars:

Polish: This game has been well-tested, includes achievements and stats, has a pleasing choice structure.

Descriptive: The mother, Macleod, the protagonist, and especially the horse were vivid characters.

Interactivity: I felt like I had real choices that could affect the game, and saw the effect of some of those choices.

Emotional impact: I was drawn into the story and could identify with the protagonist.

Would I play again?: I would definitely revisit this. Lovely game.

In this game, you play a young girl who suspects that there is something unusual about her neighbors new horse. She's drawn into a web of tales and choices, and has to decide whether to obey her mother or follow her own mind.

This game is translated from Spanish, and has some definite language issues.

But the underlying story shines through, and I think it's a fine example of the time loop tale.

Your friend Beto has recently passed away, and you don't feel very good. Nervous and fearful, you are convinced you will die.

The story ends up taking some loops, and doesn't last too long, but I found it to be effective and enjoyed some of the symbolism. It painted a strong picture of the protagonist.

The final link is broken, but it's just supposed to reload the index.html file.

I've seen the Alaric Blackmoon series suggested to me on IFDB for years, but never tried one of the games.

There are six or more in the series, and they involve a valiant warrior in Europe in the times of swords and armor.

In this game, you travel to America to encounter a Native American shaman.

I'd love to talk more about the game, but I encountered a game-destroying bug. A thief comes into town, and you chase him out. When I killed him, he kept appearing anyway, and so I was periodically kicked out of town and could not reach the trading post.

I'd love to update my review if this bug were fixed!

Edit: There is an updated version that fixed that bug, and I had fun exploring the town. I added another star to the review. I got stuck again, because I couldn't find Henrik, but I'll keep trying!

This Twine game places you in the position of a young witch-girl that gets marooned on an island with an interesting cast of characters.

The beginning of this young fantasy game is pretty promising, but the conflicts begin and end fairly quickly. I found the ending abrupt. In my playthrough, I (Spoiler - click to show)openly defied a powerful wizard with a tiger pet and just found a boat, and the game was over.

I found a passage that was completely blank ((Spoiler - click to show)offering to let Corbin live with you).

I think all of the issues could be addressed by increasing the game length and a little bit more beta testing.

Robb Sherwin is legendary for a certain kind of game, one with many creative NPCs, imaginative and creative language, and blood, sex, and profanity.

I love his style, but frequently it gets too much for me. But Enceladus has the wittiness and imagination without as much of the blood, sex and profanity. This IFComp game is like Respectable Robb Sherwin, as if Sherwin's writing were a teenager seeing a cop drive by, doing their best to walk normal and not look like they're high.

So this is a Robb Sherwin game I can genuinely recommend for most audiences. It's not meant for kids, though (there's some gore and it could get pretty scary for them). This is a great chance for more people to discover Sherwin's clever humor (or stupid humor? or both?).

You play as a character on the HMS Plagoo. A werewolf is loose in space, and you soon crash on the moon Enceladus. You have to defeat your enemies while simultaneously taking care mentally and physically of your friends while they do the same for you.

The game is completely linear; the interactivity is "do the next thing we tell you too". There's a few smatterings of puzzle elements, a little bit less than Photopia, for instance, but more than 0.

This style of interactivity made me feel like I was an actor in a play, giving lines at the appropriate part. And since Sherwin's writing has always reminded me of Shakespeare (focusing on witty turns of phrase and a mixture of lowbrow and highbrow), it works well.

(P.S. It may seem hyperbole to compare anyone to Shakespeare, but I'm not saying that quality of writing is exactly equal. I'm just talking about the sense of humor)

This game is quite large, definitely longer than 2 hours. I got as far as the first walkthrough went.

This game is confused. The simplest problem is language: the author has asked for help in the description from people willing to work on the English.

But even with perfect English, the plot would be bizarre. You're getting wristbands for doing pirate activities, and one of them involves (Spoiler - click to show)Using a durian fruit to bait a hook to catch a man in a manatee suit made of a giant pile of meat that another man sews for you, and somehow this gives you the 'barbecue' badge.

Conversation was simple due to the nice extensions used, but actions were difficult to guess.

The plot, writing and action issues made me not feel emotionally invested in this game.

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.