Reviews by MathBrush

This game is currently the highest-rated game on IFDB for 2025. I decided to see what it was all about.

I had a little bit of a rocky start. There are two time intro segments, and during the second I went to go get a drink of water so I could read it all when I got back. When I returned, there was just an empty text box with no context. Reloading brought me to the same screen. Eventually I just did an incognito tab and got the game to run again, but it didn't have many instructions here either.

That's when I realized that the game name was also the instruction (and I think it does display it after the tutorial, I had just tried typing something and overwrote it):type HELP.

Anyway, from there on it was a fun ride. It turns out that you're reopening a case that had long stymied investigators. You have access to audio files for many individuals at a house on a certain night long ago. The investigator has organized these files in a peculiar classification system.

Your job is to find all the files. The game, then, becomes a task of discovering the pattern in the file names and recovering all possible files.

Interwoven into this task and inseparable from it is the story. Names, family relationships, overheard plans, all of these are key to solving the game's meta puzzle. You must comprehend the story to solve the game.

The story is an intriguing one. Our 'viewpoint character' of sorts arrives at a house after receiving an invitation. Peculiarly, no one seems to know the man who sent the invitation. Soon, a dead body is discovered.

The dynamics on display include jealousy, romantic love, dark family secrets, and curiosity.

I had a lot of fun. There were times when the game was extremely frustrating. I didn't resort to looking up hints but at times I was stuck for 10 or 15 minutes with no progress at all. I ended up playing so much that I missed two things I've done every day for a long time: going to bed at midnight (I stayed up for a half hour to finish) and drawing (first day I've missed in a year!)

So, while the game was extremely frustrating at times, it would be silly to rate a game that consumed my attention so much less than a 5, which I've done.

Edit:
As a side note, a lot of the 'best puzzles' as voted for in the XYZZY awards over the years are ones where you learn a new system, like a language or a machine. This puzzle set is a great example of that, where you have dawning realizations and where you actually become better at a skill over time (the skill of deducing the next files).

In this twine game, you play as the Administrator at a mining complex (I think) run by a conglomerate. You are the bourgeoisie here, barricaded in your room as you contemplate your sins. Your company is out of contact. The workers are coming to kill you, as far as you know.

There are a variety of apparent paths, though I only took one. You have three or four different people or groups of people you can interact with and you can choose how to do so. No matter what, many choices require you to be an arrogant blowhard, which makes sense.

I ended up becoming a communist and ending the game with an Adam Smith quote.

It was a little one-note, but enjoyable, and had me really thinking about who to believe and how to strategize.

This French fantasy game is divided in both space and time. You have four days in which to act, and a large map where you can hop to different areas.

I found one ending, but I know how I could have gotten more.

The main idea is that a strange events has happened: the Gods that once ruled mortals have left, agreeing to deal with the human world no more. But some still cling to their worship.

Wandering around town, you follow clues that lead you to a conspiracy involving both gods and King. You must choose what to do with the news that you've learned.

Overall, it was fun. The giant map was intimidating, as well as the four days, but in the end most areas have nothing special and only one event of importance happens in one area each on days 2-4, making it a brief but interesting story with a large chunk of worldbuilding.

Like one comment said on itch, it would be fun to be able to order the tasty food described in the inns!

In this game, you are the lawyer or executor of Tatie Lucette and have to distribute her estate.

To do this, you examine each of the three objects (a fortune-granting golden scepter, a future-telling lamp, and some kind of weird sexual toy that transfers mind consciousness). You have to read many epistolary fragments of Tatie's history to figure out what she was like (a spy, a singer, actress, fighter, drug-user, extensive lover, and so on). Each of her 9 attributes maps on to one of the 3 artifacts.

In addition, there are 7 possible heirs (including a cat), each of which possesses differing amounts of those 9 traits.

So, it's pretty simple: find the three traits each object has, find the person who has those traits, and win!

Unfortunately, there is a time-limit, so you can't interrogate everyone. So you need to carefully pick what you'll ask who.

Or, like me, you can replay several times.

There are a ton of words in this. As a non-native speaker, it was a struggle to read a pageful or more for every choice when each of 8 different options on the screen leads to 8 or more options (so basically like a 50-100 page French book).

The game openly embraces drugs and sexuality, even having you show pornography to a minor at one point, which stuck out to me as something I didn't really feel comfortable with.

Overall, the writing was amusing and the puzzle structure was a good one that I could see being fun in future games as well.

This was quite a difficult French IFComp game for me to finish, as it's a wordplay game and involves several words that I don't know well.

It's a (mostly) one-room game where you arrive at an old professor friend's lab to find yourself locked inside! All that you have with you are the random objects that you can scrounge up as well as the professor's amazing machine that can manipulate letters.

The main rules are that you can take away one letter from an object (which transforms the object) and you can apply that letter to another object. You can only ever store up one letter at a time.

While the main story is a little thin, the setting is amusing and has a lot of nice little details. Though of course hard for me as a non-native speaker, the wordplay was fun, and there are help commands like 'penser' that are a real lifesaver.

The game is not too long, with 3 or so main puzzles to get through and a few sidequests you can do.

If you like wordplay and French, this is a great game for you.

This is a 10K word prologue to a longer planned game, entered into the French IF competition.

It has a compelling story: your uncle whom you've rarely spoken to writes to you, asking you to come quickly. Much of this prologue is occupied with travelling there while simultaneously making choices that define your background (I made myself a poor unemployed person who brought nothing along with the journey).

You soon discover that (through a series of events I won't spoil) you owe a massive debt. You encounter a few interesting people (I thought the neighbor and the ruler of the town were well-written), and then the prologue stops dead in its tracks.

This has a lot of good in it now and could become great one day.

This game is the author's first experience with programming ever, which is pretty impressive given how nice it is.

It's a twine game where your character finds a box of documents on his doorstop dropped off by his mother.

Inside is a blank family tree and envelopes with different names on them. You open yours first, finding a lot of documents about your birth and upbringing.

The family tree can be filled out via a kind of quiz where you select from dropdown boxes, and if you get the information correct you unlock new envelopes.

The author didn't complete their full vision, but there is a lot here. I like epistolary storytelling (is that you you say it? Epistolic? something else) and there is a lot of variety in tone and structure here.

I didn't receive a dramatic ending; I just unlocked the whole tree and didn't see any new links. It felt satisfying though.

This is a choice-based French game that has, I think, 20 or so songs that play in the background (which I didn't realize until afterwards, as I play on a device with quiet speakers).

You are tasked with carrying a cadaver through a dark and twisted land where people live in fear and much destruction has occurred.

Gameplay consists of binary choices, like whether to go north or south or whether to follow fireflies or not.

The writing was great; even as a non-native speaker, I could imagine a lot of the cool scenarios and things that were written about. I had more trouble with the choices, as it was difficult to make any sort of overall strategy, and often (but not always) felt like one had to just guess. There is an undo button which is nice, and other players report there being at least 3 very distinct paths.

This is a short French game in Ink. There are always two choices: "nous" [us] and "je" [we].

It tells the story of a burgeoning civilization, learning to find food and learn language. Choosing 'nous' gives communal results, while 'je' gives individual results.

It's a fairly short game, with two endings which the author says are meant to lead us to reflection. I thought it was pretty interesting, but I felt like the plot was a little generic, and it would have been nice to have some effect of mixing the two options or some other effect of the choices.

It was pretty fun though!

This was a fun game with a short playtime but some replay value.

You are in a village in a post-apocalyptic, bucolic life. Unfortunately, looking out the window, you discover that a zombie, a monster of legend, is coming to attack you!

You have to run (or, if you die, your neighbor runs) to the nearby houses to try to recruit more villagers to help you survive against the zombies.

It's a kind of optimization puzzle, where some people only respond if you already have a large group, or if you've talked to the right person, etc.

I played 3 times, and managed to save everyone the third time. Parts of the story felt a bit thin on replay, but the puzzle and seeing the network of relationships was fun.