Reviews by MathBrush

Shadow and Ink

This game was well-balanced. At first I thought it might be overwhelming, with options for fast travel and separate screens for inventory.

Instead, its fairly well balanced, and moderately more linear than it might appear. It's a Japanese setting with references to Borges, the American West, and other non-Japanesisms. You encounter a fairly magical land with talking trees, magical shadows, and rivers of ink.

In this world, you are tasked with creating magical books using recipes requiring a sheet of paper, a bottle of ink, and 1 or more magical items (kind of like witch hat atelier, which I haven't played but I have played a ripoff of). Then you find the person who needs the book.

There's a lot of game here, but it's not too hard to lawnmower through options when you get stuck. More fun is finding the person who needs help. Like many such combination games, the possibilities grow larger and larger until you reach a turning point and they start dwindling until only one option remains.

I feel like it's almost slightly overtuned, a great deal of apparatus (images, music, helpful UI, checks for your progress) for a plot and premise that is perhaps 20% thinner than it ought to be, like David wearing Saul's armor. But in a competition filled with long games, I appreciated a smooth and pleasant experience with a fun variety of characters and a large number of satisfying resolutions.

The Rat

This game isn't really what I'm expecting. Which can be a danger with these 'writing a sequel game as a prize' games! One of the 2-star ratings I got for Magpie Takes the Train was by someone who gave 5 stars to the original Alias: The Magpie game just a few days earlier. I can only imagine they loved the first game, an expansive puzzler, and, looking for more, was disappointed by my one-room game.

This game is an authorized sequel to The Bat by Chandler Groover, a game where you play as a butler to a deranged version of Bruce Wayne. In the course of that game, you gain and lose varying amounts, direct other people using a compass, and manage guests. You can only ATTEND to things. Its mostly a dark comedy, setting up goofy situations that you participate in as the butler.

This game is a combination of multi-character optimization puzzles plus a stream of dialogue in the background, almost like a mixture of Suspended and Violet (which reminds me, I should replay Suspended, I've never tried it without the walkthrough). As in Suspended, you control a variety of characters that each have their own attributes and qualities. Here, we have one person whose role is movement and sabotage, one that acts independently to steal things, and one who narrates and waits and moves the plot forward. More join later, with the capability to walk the mansion openly.

The stream of dialogue includes banter between our characters and rich people smoozing, one of whom runs an AI company and uses AI-based language.

I'll admit that I didn't always catch what was going on in the dialogue. While in Violet, the constant stream of background action took place as the backdrop of a one-room game, this game is mostly movement-based, almost like Arthur DiBianca's games. There is a great deal of experimentation, repetition, and retreading the same paths. This felt almost counter to or at odds to with the stream of text, as I just wanted to type N, W, W, W, Sabotage, etc. but had to be careful to try and tell what was new background text and what was not. The leads me to suspect I didn't piece together the secret identities of all the characters, especially Rat.

As an optimization puzzle, it was enjoyable, a nice balance between difficulty and progression.

A couple of times I felt befuddled, both when starting (trying to understand how Jackdaw works) and with final act (due to not noticing the map change). I solved the first by experiment and the second by hints.

Overall, I fell like this game is a lot like Boruto. I don't think Boruto really works as a spiritual sequel to Naruto, even though it's a literal sequel; the themes and drawing style are just so different. But I think Boruto is a good manga, better than most. Similarly, I don't think this game will be what people are looking for as a sequel to the Bat, despite the recurrence of people, themes, and mechanics; however, I do believe it is a good game, and better than most.

Pegasus Crew

This is a relatively brief Twine game where you play as the captain of a starship who is also a formerly mind-controlled soldier. You two compatriots are Locke, who is a kind of gambler/rogue, and Chicken, a sentient mushroom.

To get back your stolen memories, you go to a pleasure planet where everyone's feelings are shared and feeling bad is banned.

There is some music and there is custom styling, including character reactions that load a second or two after making choices.

The concepts and characters are interesting. The plot and writing are fairly straightforward; exactly the kind of things you'd think would happen happen (the collector guy running the place is bad, we have to choose between pleasing the mind control collective and pleasing out teammates, etc.)

I liked the whole backstory with Chicken's name origin. Some of the plot didn't gel with me as well. On a planet where everyone shares emotion, it seems reasonable to me that people would try to minimize unpleasant feelings in others. Their psychology and society would be very different than ours.

Some of the text left me scratching my head. When we flashback to Chicken, for instance, we're told that 'her spores are filling the room' but also that she is 'behind glass'.

A few other things were odd:

She offers me a metal canteen. I drink as if I am an abused pet that was forgotten and my owner finally came back from vacation.

This makes sense at first glance, but if the pet was abused, wouldn't it not want to be around its owner? Maybe it was kidnapped, I suppose. Also I don't associate drinking water with reunification celebrations.

One last example is

Every instinct she drilled into me screams to finish the mission.

Aren't instincts the opposite of things that are drilled into us?

This is all really nitpicky, for which I apologize. But I've ran into similar things with a couple of games, so I thought it might be helpful to point out some examples in case authors plan on making improvements in future games.

I expect many readers will enjoy this game. It has a real guardians of the galaxy/Flash Gordon vibe and has the traditional 'choosing friends over personal benefit' narrative.

Ultraviolent Unicorn Deathmatch of Destiny 4

This was a great compact easy-playing game with fun consequences.

It's a parser game but each keystroke automatically takes action. Many of those actions cause immediate destruction and death. You're a deathmatch violent unicorn at an office job, so its very easy to chainsaw a janitor in half or trample your boss to death.

You have a list of tasks that you can see with Q. Most are reasonable; I had to get help with 1 or 2. I think there might be a bug with the help system, as I asked for help in the cans room at one point and it said there was nothing to help with, but decompiling I saw some can hints.

The writing is funny. The office space isn't super well-described but that's part of the joke, that you're an intense violent mythical creature causing havoc while existing in a very spartan and mundane office environment (outside of a lone chupacabra).

Everything was coded well, there was a time period of learning a system and implementing it. I don't think I'll revisit it (felt like a complete one-time experience) but I'd definitely recommend it if I had friends who asked 'what's ifcomp?' and I wanted to show them something amusing.

Wild Ride to Earth

This is a choicescript game with a cool space map. You basically get abducted by aliens and only have a year to return to earth to pick up your lottery winnings. So you hop from planet to planet working odd jobs to build up money to buy things to become better at other jobs to make more money to either pay for a ride or hitch a ride with friends back to earth.

I missed my deadline to get back to earth, but I had a good time with the different planets. Jobs range from professional scyophant to terrorist in training. You can get hurt, but you can also heal. Money feels both hard to get and bountiful at the same time, since you can get a good chunk from different jobs but have to spend a lot on planet hopping and items.

I was never quite sure how TUs mapped to days since sometimes I'd take a 3 TU job and a whole month would go by. Possibly I was skimming over in-game events that took up extra time.

Overall, it felt like a fun game, kind of reminded me of Roald Dahl-age books (not of Roald Dahl himself, but just that combination of reader age groups).

I don't know why, but this line made me laugh:

Her smell is part caramel apple, part..no, on renewed sniff, she's all caramel apple.

Necromanceers

I enjoyed this game. It wasn't what I expected at first, or at second.

One thing Pacian does very well is creating characters that feel alive (or, in this game, often dead) with distinct and interesting personalities. Another thing Pacian does well is worldbuilding that answer many questions but always leaves more.

You play as a necromanceer who can summon the dead if they know their name. You're fighting in a war against the armies of Godde and the saints, and you have to stay alive and keep your friends alive. Or not; they can come along even if they die.

This game is mostly linear with stopping points where you can choose who to summon. There are a lot of options, and each one you pick can have subtle effects on what happens next, like opening up new names to find in different branches. The total number of ending combinations is huge.

On one hand, replaying the game can get tedious reading the text over and over. On the other hand, jumping to chapters helps speed things up. On the other hand, it can be easy to lose track of who you summoned. On the other hand, there's a compendium to help you. And so on.

I do like the idea. I don't really think the idea could have been implemented any better than it has been (maybe highlighting text you've never seen before in yellow once you've summoned a specific spirit?) Loved the variety in endings.

Oh, that reminds me, endings. The ending came very suddenly for me. I didn't feel in any way that we were close to an ending; the plot arc didn't feel like it was heading for that. Looking back, it makes sense the game was structured that way, as with so many endings there is no way to build a plot arc that fits them all.

Interestingly, there was another game this year, Maybe you'll respect this dead person instead, that has the premise of being a mostly linear story where you have to choose at each junction which of a pre-set number of spirits to summon. As a connection in a different direction, it's interesting that both CEJ Pacian and Ryan Veeder made games this competition where you have a large set of named people and a different ending for each named person.

The Flourishing

This is a downloadable Godot game that includes 3d art depicted as peach or reddish wires wrapped around an invisible model.

It jumps around and is surreal. I've played it twice but don't know what happens. I had theories but they don't hold together. In the game, you go on a train trip home, interact in surreal ways with several objects, see your mom who is getting back into smoking, trip and hit your head, and then there's something we refuse to confront involving a knife and blood. We also have self-introspection and there's a symbolic woman, and lines of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in Italian spiral around us.

Visually, the game is extremely good for my tastes. The way the meaning of the logo is revealed is especially well-done.

Story-wise, I feel like it does a great job of presenting emotion, an okay job with developing characters, and a bad job of plot. But that may be intentional; some of the best short stories of all time are also emotion-based rather than plot based.

I do think that the somewhat-timed text (which you can speed up except for a few cutscenes), 3d interface and download-only may put some people off of this and limit its potential audience.

Overall, though, I'm glad this game exists and that I played it. It has a kind of raw element to it that I don't identify with but empathize with, and I like the artistic direction. It has some strong profanity that seems in character with our PC.

The Acquisition

This is a quintessential staple of the last ten or so years of IFComp: a short, unstyled branching Twine game with no variables that has witty dialogue and a clever premise.

(okay, I actually looked up games on IFDB made in twine and tagged IFComp game and actually could find almost nothing satisfying the above criteria. So it's the opposite of quintessential. But it felt familiar and homey).

This game is styled as a CYOA book, with turning to pages. In it, you play as a man of moderately wealthy means who wants to buy a $3300 Glen Baxter drawing. You can't actually afford it, and your wife will be and is very upset if you decide to buy it.

The nagging wife/mid-life crisis dynamic feels a bit like a throwback to earlier eras of humor (combined with the suicidal/surreal humor, it feels vaguely millennial, like me), but the writing is sharp and witty. It's not a long or substantial game, especially due to the branching, but it fills out its time well.

The 9:00 AM Train

This is the third tzbits game I've played, and it's more fleshed out and well-implemented than the others.

This is a Dialog game with a nice grey background styling in the online version. It's a fairly serious game, but the story doesn't get unveiled until later on. It includes some branching dialogue and some timed scenes.

The idea is that you need to get onto the 9:00 am train out of the area, and you haven't picked up your ticket yet. Trying to grab it, you find the service counters empty.

As another reviewer pointed out, the game is very constrained. While most actions you can try are implemented, they are implemented to express helplessness or frustration. Some games have tried that before and only ended up frustrating the player as well. This game keeps things moving though, making it fairly easy to keep going.

There's an option to add German or Italian into the game. I added German for practice, since I'm teaching it for the first time this semester. It was added in some key moments, but the game also used rot13 to express some soldier dialogue that is meant to be unintelligible.

I think the story here is much more effective than tzbits' earlier games, with some understated moments and some overt explanations. I wonder if it could be pushed even further; while I can't put my finger on it, some parts felt like there could have been more story or emotion or description, especially early on, more individual characterization. But I only say that because I like what is already there.

The Last Voyage of the Warsaw Queen

I felt this game was an improvement over the last two Charles Ball games I played, and I had a good time. The world map was big and complex, and there were a lot of moving NPCs and multiple solutions and active scenes, but the hint system and provided map got me through.

In a way, it reminded me of what MT W's games could have been. That author would often have very complex games with multiple independent NPCs in interesting settings (including a riverboat accessed by time travel), but it was often underimplemented and hard to play without a guide. I often thought that, with more polish, they could be more successful, and I feel I'm seeing vindication of that here with this style of polished, complex game. Interestingly, this game also features the Necromonicon, which shows up in several MT W games. It's like an AU where all those games ended up fully fleshed out.

You play as a visitor to a steamboat-themed hotel who is sent back to the past by a medallion. You enter a steamboat, the Warsaw Queen, where you ancestor is up to no good. Everyone is a phantom, and moonlight makes them disappear. You are there for a long time and tons of events happen, especially gambling card games, and you can go in and out of 12 cabins and a big map of rooms on the ship. It is the night before the ship historically crashed and burst into flames, killing everyone. Can you stop it?

There were some flaws. The provided map doesn't cover all floors. In a rare instance of lack of polish, I was able to take the ship's wheel in the pilothouse. Some story parts don't make sense; why does our great grandfather keep going into the cabin and writing more in his journal, then leaving? And why when it says he comes out to join the game, does he disappear back into his room to write more? Maybe I missed a scripted event. The rules for when you can interact with each other are also inconsistent, but the story notices this and gives justification or points it out. It's easy to get lost in what you're doing.

Highlights include the alligator and plots by others to get the alligator, the descriptions of the medallion and evil symbols, the intricate period details (including the wallpaper reference). I also liked the hint system, which gave good nudges forward and provided puzzle solutions I wouldn't have conceived of (though they made sense in hindsight).