Reviews by MathBrush

Ruined Temple

This game is exactly what I'd expect from an Alex Crossley game based on the last two. A straightforward fantasy game that promises complex and interesting mechanics but mostly has one main path worked out and is generally underimplemented and under-hinted.

I enjoy DnD quite a bit, and spent years as a kid collecting books for 2nd and 3rd edition and even earlier reading 1st edition in bed late at night. I remember getting the Epic levels book for 3rd edition the same day I rode in a convertible for the first time, and the epic book was the coolest thing that had happened to me for a long time.

This game has all the outward signs of the things I love in DnD, but few of the inward things. I enjoy characters with compelling stories. I love ambient storytelling. There is some of that in this game but it is all kind of generic. There's no personaltiy, no big boss, no spell list. As a parser game, there are many special interactions but none are documented.

I do appreciate having the walkthrough, and the 4 characters having their own rules and roles. The game does have several in-game hints that are quite useful, and the mechanic of 'here is an obstacle, figure out which of these four characters is most likely able to solve it' is fun. I would have enjoyed more plot and more story, more character conversation and expression.

This is the last game on the IFComp review spreadsheet without a review.

It's a short game, written in texture. It mentions violence, brief nudity and profanity but there's very little of each (so the author is being conscientious).

The concept reminds me a lot of the AI-generated fruit people videos I see popping up on my social media (I don't think this game is AI-generated, just the themes are common). A lot of them begin with things like this game begins with, a hospital room with two women fighting over one man, later kicking to a wedding scene (I don't know why hospitals show up so much in the ai-slop videos). Here, it makes sense, as I think it's drawing on the same tropes, mostly those of soap-operas, telenovelas and some of recent sci-fi.

There are multiple paths, all of which lead to the same general reveals but substantially different results. I thought the twist was interesting.

The game itself has a typo; it's listed as El Ruido (the noise, referring to the noise in the MC's head), but the search bar and title screen calls it El Rudio.

9 Days in a Van with your 3 Best Friends

Like at least 2 other people on the forums, I decided to play this game next because it was the longer of the last 2 unreviewed games.

This game has great design and UI and an authentic-feeling storyline, mixed in with some tedious but quickly-played grinding. You play as Dante, a fill-in as drummer for a band in 1991 driving cross country and living off the money they make during the 9 days of Spring Break. The grinding part is that you have to model driving cross country, choosing one exit at a time whether to keep driving or to pull over and get gas, and how much gas, and snacks.

The other reviews mentioned the game ending abruptly when the band broke up after money management didn't work out. I figured I'd try to end the game as early as possible by just playing poorly. I never talked to the band, just read books (loved the quotes) and listened to tapes, and kept going. At every point I drove as long as I could without spending money, driving on fumes and barely eating (the lentils were good).

I ended up making to Seattle, our goal, and played the last day, and then the game ended with me in the future reminiscing. The cut to the future part was abrupt since we had had dream sequences quite a bit, and I thought this was another one (maybe a giant banner called 'epilogue' would have helped). But I felt satisfied with my plot arc. I looked at the endings. I got the most boring one where I didn't keep in contact with anyone from the band (also, this game isn't twine, I think it's custom).

This brought back a lot of memories. I was in a jazz band in high school (an official school one) but was sheltered and never went out with friends. After a performance the drummer asked if I wanted to 'drag state' with him and his friends late at night (Utah's most populated areas are basically aligned vertically along I-15 and State street, and State was the big, populated road in SLC, which was the 'big city' to my suburb-raised eyes. 'Dragging state' meant slowly driving up and down the road.') The drummer was a blond kid with emotional control issues but seemed really cool. The game he and his friends played was taking off your shirt and hanging out the car window as long as you could in the frigid Utah winter air, then once you chickened out and pulled back in you got slapped as hard as you could by everyone. It was a glimpse into a world that I had never known. The lights did look beautiful and the air smelled so good late at night in the Utah winter.

The game also reminded of that exact same drive they describe (well, almost). I, too, have driven along I-80 from the Bos-Wash area (for me, Philly), through the rural and church-focused plains and hills of pennsylvania, across Indiana (always the worst part of the trip due to the change in what can be sold across state borders), across the Mississippi (which was much larger than I expected, opposite of the MC in the game), some other route I don't remember (I've been through Wyoming, maybe there?) and eventually to the west coast and Washington (I always remember a very specific place on the way to Washington or in Eastern Washington where the road is in a flatter area past some hills/mountains and there's a field of sunflowers, and for some reason the road takes a sharp 90 degree turn left in the middle of nowhere. I always wondered why).

That's why I didn't mind the grinding as much. It's real. The first day or two you might have music planned or fun things but near the end it's just a hypnotic state where hours fly by and all you care about is the next exit.

Fun game, good memories. That kind of music wasn't my scene (I was terrified of hearing damage and avoided loud music and concerts at all costs), but the nostalgia feels right.

The Two Seasons: Encounter With A Vampire

This game is a very well polished parser game. It's rare to see a game with this level of smoothness, with custom responses to most things, multicolor text, two protagonists, NPCs that respond actively, etc. Very well done.

Storywise, you play as Matty and Maddy, two friends in a band who discover that their teacher is a vampire. The name of the game somewhat implies more adventures in the future, and that would make sense. Together, they have to solve vaguely educational puzzles to collect the items they need to kill a vampire.

This author's last game, All That Shimmers..., had been described as a straightforward old-fashioned adventure. This one also has a lot of that in common. It lacks much of the irony and self-reflection of IFComp games of the past.

Instead, it feels very firmly like a game created in the culture of the 80s, specifically 80s children's work. Nerds are mocked, bullies are big and tough, the janitor gets drunk, teachers have romances, the boy's bathroom is gross and the girl's bathroom is clean, kissing is yucky, schools have computer labs (though, running Minecraft), history is boring, no cell phones in sight, teens are allowed to wander around without supervision, all of it feels like my childhood in terms of storytelling. The setting is definitely intended to be modern, though.

The game does involve a chapel and raiding it with Christ mentioned in a completely neutral fashion, which is something I've rarely seen (usually games involving Christianity tend to portray it negatively or, rarely, positively).

If you're looking for a parser game that provides traditional puzzles and which is not buggy, this is a good one. The hint system is excellent as well.

This game by improvmonster is a good game but suffers a bit by competition. Slappy the Squirrel by the same author is genuinely one of the funniest games I've played (not just recently, but ever) for my sense of humor. This game doesn't reach that level, but it's not bad; in fact, I think the overall trend line is still pointing up, with games getting more fun over time.

I think it just needed a bit more time to cook. With a postcomp update (or during-Comp update) adding a few more synonyms and tweaking a couple puzzles, I think it would be a very good game.

You play as a classic dumb but noble barbarian on a quest to defeat a wizard and rescue a princess. Along the way, you'll encounter ogres, trolls, pirates, and more.

The game is humourously crude, like Shrek, with fart- and belch-based puzzles and slapstick combat. I liked a lot of the jokes, such as the different penny interactions (getting it in the first place, giving it to people before they offer anything, etc).

The puzzles as intended are a combination of classics (find a shovel, dig a suspiciously shovel-ready spot) and slapstick (like the singing puzzles or the grate puzzle). I enjoy the participatory comedy.

Three things stuck out to me as things I struggled with.

First, the help system is a clever new feature, but can be difficult to use. It requires you to type HELP WITH followed by something in scope. However, several puzzles have timers that kill you in the presence of the thing you need help with, so it's easy to die while fumbling around trying to find the right thing to ask for help with.

Second, there was a bit of an issue with scope and synonyms. For instance, when ASKing people about things, if I ASK ABOUT the sorceror, it asks if I mean 'sorceror' or 'the sorceror'. Same with the castle, I think (I put my transcript in the hints thread). This made asking a bit hard. Other times I struggled to find the correct words, for instance, when solving the puzzle of the barber's chair.

Finally, some of the puzzles allow you to lock yourself out of victory with them without clear warning, such as the beans. Once you know the game has consumable resources that cannot be renewed, it's easy to know when to UNDO (just undo whenever you use up something without advancing the game). But that's not very common gameplay structure these days, so it may be worth giving a heads up about it.

That's a lot of space dedicated to criticism, but it's precisely because the game has great potential that I put it. If there's ever enough time to work on those things, I think this is a funny game that many would enjoy. Even without them, I suspect people will like this (especially if someone puts together a walkthrough.)

I was playing on not playing this game due to its strong language warning, but I decided to try it, and I found that the language was intense and moving but not offensive.

This game uses stark black and white graphics. I had to resize my window, as at first the text overlapped the 'monitor' that envelops it.

This is a futuristic game, set a thousand years from now when all life besides humanity has died. You play as Harlan, someone who is all alone. Your mother figure is now all but forgotten, and you have to inspect things for the government. In order to feel something, you play an underground blackjack game where the wagers are your body parts. The game deals with the complicated relationship you have with yourself, the world, and the mysterious blackjack dealer. The game also contains very discreetly implied sexual scenes.

The writing is solid, the design is hardcore. The worldbuilding reminds me of a couple of Fujimoto works (though of course Fujimoto borrows from others) and of an X-files episode about an organ-harvesting lottery.

Overall, I think the author set out to make an evocative work of art combining text, graphics and audio and succeeded (though I did have my console open most of the time, because having it open fixed the window size, and a couple audio files did fail to load.) Beyond those minor hiccups, this was great.

Triangle for Two

I was surprised to see this one unreviewed so far, since Naarel tends to have strong prose and games that are easy to finish, which usually means lots of IFComp reviews. I suspect that it comes from not having the game length field filled out (I'd put it in the 15 minutes or less category, though I took longer as I thought through it and reread chunks). Also, it ends without THE END or something similar at the end, so people may think they didn't finish it. I'm not as familiar with the co-author, though I suspect the text itself may elucidate that matter.

This is a short, polished twine game with literary text that deals with a social/personal facet of life. That's a fairly large field, but this reminds me more of Ann Hugo and Glassrat than any other authors (I enjoyed both of their games a lot).

The main topic of this game is that someone who has two people in the same body has to announce their mutual coexistence to a friend. This is complicated by the several differences in the two's personality. One sees the friend as a close friend, possibly even more. The other is hesitant, protective, tense.

There are three kinds of links: progressing links, 'aside' links that go to another passage and return, and replacement links. One page uses a lot of replacement links in a clever way.

It was interesting to read in the literal sense (by that I mean I wanted to know more and went back and forth and read it a few times to gather more information). I have family members with similar situations; my brother's wife has several alters (using her language here rather than the game's) including one that likes group video games when we do voice calls together.

What strikes me about the character in this story is the combination of '>1 people in =1 body' with body dysmorphia. The woman in the pair sees the male body as 'other'. I was also struck by the lack of other people; the few people I've met in life with similar situations typically have several different alters, some steering in groups. Having exactly two, one man and a woman, makes for a really compelling relationship, well, 'triangle', with others, as the name of the game reveals.

The writing was good as always, with multiple references to places and things in Poland.

I beta-tested this game, but I never got very far. I did complete it this time! (Possibly through exploits).

This is a difficult game to play. It combines in one several features at the start that make it extraordinarily hard to get use to.

1. The online version has no way to scroll back. The game now suggests using a transcript which is good. I downloaded it and made 6 transcripts which I'll upload to the hint thread.
2. Compounding the above, the game frequently prints several pages of text at once and clears the screen.
3. You do not control the main character of the game; instead, they perform random inputs while you observe and help.
4. You cannot WAIT for the main character to do things, since the game will yell at you and disable WAIT. So you have to come up with different actions each turn.
5. The game can randomly crash; I had 4 different crashes on Gargoyle, so saving often is useful.
6. The game still progresses if you save, and at the beginning there are several help menus to navigate that are required to progress that also move the game forward, and
7. The game yells at you if you are too slow and calls you stupid.
8. The game is a surreal game-within-a-game with multiple voices and POVs, and the game-within-the-game is intentionally buggy and underdescribed.

So, the average experience of a new player may very well be trying out different commands, missing chunks of text, having the game yell at you, and being booted out to try again.

If they are able to push past that and continue, they can find some amazing concepts.

The idea of the game is that Max Fog is dead and an AI trained on his consciousness has finished a game based on his notes. Years later, you and an in-game AI have to work together to make the game run for a real-life player. So, you move objects around, queue up routines, etc. in order to get the game running. Meanwhile, the in-game AI is annoyed with how buggy the game is.

More happens, but I'd rather not spoil it. It has much in common with the ending of A Mind Forever Voyaging.

I'm in the game! A neat trick is that whenever the game crashes/reboots you read a review by Me, Mike Russo, or JJMcC, with various scores depending on how well you did running it. I laughed at mine because it was extremely similar to what I'd write, down to a typo in the first paragraph.

The game talks a lot about AI, and is set in a future where AI has caused lasting damage to the earth.

I did find the ending hopeful.

The game is very ambitious, with using Inform menus and keystrokes and regular text to progress, random commands, writing to external files (I think; I never triggered the text that I think does that), and text animations which I've rarely if every seen in Gargoyle. It doesn't 100% pull it off, since it crashed a few times, but it 90% pulls it off, which is great. I did decompile it, which is funny as the fake me in the fake review also decompiled the game (good thinking, future fake me).

This is a work made as part of a PhD project. Some college project IF games are real stinkers, while others (like Blue Lacuna) can be impressive. This one is complex and literary, and should, I believe, serve well as a PhD-level material.

I do have some complaining to do to contrast with later praising. When I saw '2 hours' and the term 'detective poem', then tried the opening page and saw the text was being slowly typed out, I was possessed with terror and flashbacks of other poetic games like Succor that used slow text for hours at a time. I even started downloading the code and opening it up to remove the timed text, when I saw it wasn't that much. Reader, I pushed onwards.

The first scene was difficult to parse, I kind of wandering through nature and establishing your physical identity. I thought at first that nothing was being tracked, but quite a bit was, and there were callbacks later on. I genuinely didn't understand much of the intro, except that there was water there.

Then we break into a more story-focused segment that was cool. You are in New Zealand in Dunedin and have to climb up a street with a map and clear out several drains to help a plumber/concrete company owner. Everything is mystical, and at first I wasn't sure if it was realism, ADHD causing us to over-fixate on every detail, or that our character was under the influence of perception-enhancing/changing drugs, but after playing later parts I think it was more magical realism. We do find a talking animal or two.
<img src="upload://jTVR2k4YLZdfyuGpOYcVxUgad9X.jpeg" alt="image|370x500" />

Once I had unclogged everything, in the evening light, I felt very satisfied with the game, which had felt lengthy. To my surprise, I saw 'End of Part 1', and was troubled. Wasn't this a good place to end the game already?

But the next part was interesting in a different way. Like @alyshkalia's Blossom, NY, this part of the twine game features real landmarks from a city (in this case, Dunedin) and gives info on them, but combines it with story. This part of the game has you exploring an underground tunnel in the city with a strange mechanical contraption equipped with periscope and walkie talkie. By rolling up and down the tunnel, you encounter different things (like a urinal that knows your name) and objects that you can acquire and use elsewhere. Meanwhile, you encounter the plumber more and more. Eventually, you can leave the tunnel and explore more of the places you passed. This final segment was bewildering with its number of possible choices but I believe it was actually funneling you all along, as I made it to an ending safely.

The best character in the game is the river Toitū itself, which is extremely prominent in all 3 parts, serving as a linear organizer of locations and as a source of refreshment and even holy water at one point.

Overall, I found the grate-unplugging to be the strongest portion, but the overall effect was good. I tend to be less open to poetic works, and have found that my reaction to such things as the games of B-Minus or furkle/mother or the poetry game Portrait with Wolf tend to be less enthusiastic than those games deserve, and the same is likely true here; others may find the first opening area to be more enlightening than it was to me.

Finally, I loved the hand-drawn maps, very cool.

PS Oh, I forgot to mention! The game also contains a dozen or mor images of pages from the works of Janet Frame, a NZ poet who was saved from lobotomy by winning an award for her works. This game shows an alternate history.

Wait-Our-Way Tower

For those who haven't played Andrew Schultz's games, he typically chooses a mechanic to center the game, often about wordplay but in other circumstances involving chess or complex movement. The wordplay games typically involve you typing words as solutions to the wordplay and navigating NESW. The storyline is generally centered around a series of surreal events, with dialogue often being discussed in general rather than reported directly and with topics like self improvement and confidence.

There are some types of Andrew Schultz games I look forward to and some I don't look forward to, and this game combines three of the positive ones. It is in Adventuron with pixel art, which I think really improves these games a lot by grounding some of the more surreal objects with easily-readable pixel art. It is long and polished. And its central wordplay system is hard enough to be non-trivial but easy enough that gameplay doesn't come to a halt as you run to a pencil and paper or online solver.

It also has people that follow you around that are also illustrated, which I don't recall happening before (I remember people following you and illustrated people but not both).

Overall, I've conditioned myself to enjoy his games by playing so many of them (I've played 31 out of 44 total). And I like this one more than most of the others.