Reviews by MathBrush

This is an exceptional story, a part of Fallen London that requires additional money and is more self-contained than the rest of the story.

The focus here is mostly on the writing and on piecing things together. Someone is on the lookout for a very old and special soul. The further you investigate, the more you realize that you are reading a retelling of an ancient greek myth.

This story has a lot of lore about devils and the means they take to shape souls ot have the 'flavour' they like. It also introduces some iron coins that force devils to tell a truth to whoever holds it.

Some other players found this story to be a bit short or to have a disappointing ending. I don't remember being unsatisfied.

This was a funny Exceptional Story from Fallen London. Exceptional Stories are paid stories that are more self-contained than most content in Fallen London and take a few hours to complete.

In this story, you've been asked to run a fashion boutique and to come up with different outfits based on increasingly ludicrous themes. As you have no prior experience and the clothing is genuinely kind of questionable, you have to wonder: what are the real motives behind your employment?

Gameplay mostly consists of wandering around London or your workshop to get ideas for the new clothes, plus some investigative sequences.

Overall, it was fun making the outfits (you can choose to keep one if you wish) and the newly revealed plot was fun.

I thought this game was really neat. You're presented with two choices at first, which you can click on, but the game immediately twists the way its presented into a really cool format.

The game has a French option and an English option and while I love French, I'll definitely pick the English option whenever given one.

The story is that you're visiting a psychiatrist. You can choose how your part of the conversation goes. There's a variety of options, and each one gives a voice over.

The game isn't really that long and may not be everyone's cup of tea, I just liked the self-referential parts. The '2/5' and the game's tagline of 'A pretentious, bland and predictable game, just like its author' refer to in-game comments and reviews left on the author's IF, and you deal with the feelings that that leaves you (which I found really relatable). Very glad the author wrote this!

This was a really clever game. It's currently implemented in Google Calendar, which means it may be ephemeral media; but the author is able to export a google calendar for download (player's can't as they don't have permissions to edit), so I hope they do so to keep this for future generations!

Playing the game means adding the google calendar to a google account (I used a burner account). You then look at appointments and the information in them. They link to real google earth locations and to youtube videos and, at the end, to pdfs.

Gameplay for me consisted of a lot of searching of names and keywords. The game is clever and makes some posts only consist of symbols to keep you from seeing everything at once by searching for 'le' or something like that (although basic words like that don't work anyway).

The story is science fiction and is non-linear in nature, and I experienced some ending things before some middle things. Themes include relationships, loss, liminal spaces, the Backrooms (?), and more. A lot of fun to experiment with. I don't think it holds much replay value but that's not intended anyway, I think.

Google translate works great for this game, very easy to copy and paste into another window and many of the links and some words are in English.

This French game in Concours de Fiction Interactive Francophone 2025 was a delight to play. It's a puzzle-focused Vorple game with extensive parser illustrations. Puzzles are fairly simple (although my lack of knowledge of a few words caused me some problems).

While the game doesn't feel small, each part of the game is pretty constrained so there aren't too many options and you are free to experiment till you figure out what to do next. There was one poem that was a bit hard to figure out, and I had the biggest trouble figuring out how to put something on something because I was bad at French (fortunately there are a lot of synonyms!).

The plot is that you are accompanying your master, a detective, to visit a monastery. You have to help him get in, then, the next day, solve a series of mysterious occurrences.

The game does take a pretty dramatic shift in what's possible in the very last act that surprised me, but the art for that part was also very nice. Overall, one of the more fun games I've played in a while.

I enjoyed this Choice of Games story. You play as the child of a former god. Her followers deposed her and stole her power, and she had to flee to a cave where she has raised you for the last few decades.

Now you have the chance to go back and restore her to power. But when you arrive at the big city, you discover the world is larger than you knew. There are many factions in play, and who gets power is up to you.

This game felt about 50/50 between 'cool magic stuff' and 'underhanded politics'. In the first category, you have things like collecting magic shards, blasting people with lightning, seeking immortality, learning the magic of the city itself, and dealing with your incredibly powerful mother.

The second category has things like siding with the cops, rebels and criminals, or current city leaders; running for election; dealing with the press; courting the favour of elected officials; and so on.

To me it felt like a weighty, rich game, and I'd play a chapter or two and let it sit in my mind for a few days. It's pretty long (at least if you take the time to think your choices through like I did).

I've only played once, so I don't know for sure how viable different paths are, but I had the impression that there was tons of variability. I played as a vengeful zealot who was completely committed to my tyrant mother and wanted her to come and destroy everyone. I always had options, which was nice. I also played as aro-ace which I regretted later on as there was a great romantic interest I wanted to pursue.

Definitely recommended for anyone who likes either of the themes (gaining powerful magic or navigating complex politics).

This game was apparently the tutorial game in Aaron Reed's book on writing games in Inform 7, which is pretty neat.

It features a disaffected native American youth who is having school, family, and girl problems and ends up blacking out and driving fifteen miles off the road and into the desert. When you crash, you find that bad weather is coming, and you have to figure out how to either keep safe or get back.

The game has a lot of symbolic/bizarre scenes as well as a spooky abandoned place to explore.

It's completely believable that this is a tutorial game, as it shows off a wide variety of Inform tools (such as things that can be opened or closed or pushed or pulled, smelling, darkness, listening, hidden objects, conversation, etc.). Speaking of conversation, it uses 'suggested topics' which it seems was controversial when the first reviews came out but is now pretty common and generally accepted (such as in Counterfeit Monkey).

Others have pointed out that the polish is a little thing when it comes to custom responses or synonyms. I do generally dislike this in games but as a tutorial game it makes sense; you don't want to overwhelm a new author with the immense amount of custom declarations you need to make to make a game 100% polished.

I liked the storyline overall. I don't see too many Native American IF stories, and while the author doesn't seem to be (?? maybe I'm making assumptions here) firmly rooted in that culture, neither does our protagonist, who specifically struggles with being placed in between three or four different kinds of culture and tradition. I liked this, and I'm glad it was recommended for the Player's choice tournament.

This game was made specifically for Emily Short by Sam Kabo Ashwell, and contains a great deal of procedural generation.

The idea is that you're sorting through a large collection of scents that you created during your life. Each one has a collection of smells and a unique bottle that it finds itself in. Each one also brings to mind a specific memory from the past. You can then associate different parts of the smell with different parts of the memory.

In the end, you can conceive of a smell that includes all the elements and memories you chose, even if it could never exist in reality.

The writing is descriptive and evocative. The game uses vorple and has great-looking UI and transitions. I played it a couple of times to see how it worked and what variations there are. It has a definite kind of feeling to it, a kind of worldliness and world-weariness. When confronted with its procedural nature and open-endedness, I struggled to find any meaning in my choices, feeling like it was more like a brainstorming session or tarot reading (which may be a plus for some). Glad I played! Good writing.

This is a Bitsy game, which uses two-color-palette minimalist pixel art and arrow controls to create a world to navigate, and text pops up when you run into certain interactive parts.

The story is a poetic description of the impact whales have on marine life both while they live and after they die. Its fairly brief, and the whole thing hinges on the writing being good, which it really is.

The artwork pushes Bitsy to its limits, with majestic whales, beating hearts, deep sea life, dithered gradients, and more. The music fits the game quite well.

Not too long, but enjoyable.

This game was once intended for Infocom (one of its authors wrote Suspended, among a few other Infocom games). When that didn't pan out, it was later repurposed for Cascade Mountain Publishing, a commercial imprint that was started by members of r*if and also published Once and Future.

The game's premise is that you are assisting a physics professor in finding a particle. Instead of finding it directly, you enter a visualization machine that represents everything as a surreal space, and if you find the particle in that space, it will let you find it in real life.

Structure-wise, it has a hub-and-spoke format, with a central 'lab' room connected to eight smaller passages. Your main goals are to find the particle and (in order to do that) to acquire five keys.

The game is solid overall in puzzles, with not too high of a difficulty and an extensive in-game hint system. Do note that there is one puzzle (a kite race) that requires copy-protection access.

Occasionally there are small bugs. I got locked out of victory by such once and had to reset. There are several non-bug ways to lock yourself out of victory, some of which are non-obvious.

The plot is a bit thin. The theme is generally about having fun, and while meditation is another theme the game doesn't dig into it very deeply.

I recommend reading the documentation ahead of time. I had fun with this game overall.