Reviews by MathBrush

Andrew Schultz's wordplay games can be presented on a spectrum between "the wordplay puzzles are extremely hard to guess without automated tools and/or lawnmowering" and "the entire game is trivial". This game is one of several that hit a sweet spot in the middle, closer to (but not on!) the easier side.

The mechanic here (which I won't reveal for spoilers) has small complexity and can be sounded out most of the time, making it not too bad. Another of this author's games, Wipe Out, is his third-highest rated game on IFDB, and I expect this one to end up high on that list as well.

I happily plowed through much of the early game and got about 35 out of 64 points on my own. After that, I had to consult the guide about 3-4 times. The main times I had to consult it were for puzzles that went beyond wordplay and required leaps of insight or finding patterns. I think those extra puzzles were interesting, and I wonder if I could have worked them out if I had been more diligent.

The plot is mostly held together by a common food-based theme. I enjoyed the help system and found it easier to use than some other games by this author, and I thought the ending was fun, though.

This was a longer, thoughtful Twine game with a clickable world map and heavy inventory use. The inventory occupies a side bar, and different elements light up in red and become clickable when in the appropriate location, allowing for some complexity.

The story is about a future where carbon dioxide is so prevalent that the air is poisonous to humans. Everyone lives underground while above-ground scientists work to purify the air. The purification plant has stopped working, though, and so you, a young girl, have been sent to the above-ground lands to try to get it working again.

The writing is melancholic and wistful. Simultaneously, I was excited by the writing style but found it hard to focus on. You have to click to make each line appear for some pages, which wasn’t too bad, but the slightly slower pace and the desolation of each passage made it easier for my mind to drift away from the game.

Mechanically, you basically plow through the map (I love being able to click directly on the map to skip to a room I’d been in before), and there are rooms with obstacles and rooms with obstacle removers (like locks and keys, for instance). There is a timer of sorts (your oxygen tank) but I think it’s cued to story beats and not to your actions, which is great. Near the end there are some trickier puzzles, but the puzzles in general aren’t too hard, allowing the story to take center stage.

I think this game nailed the atmosphere it was going for (no pun intended). The design UI is great. Something about the whole project didn’t draw me in fully, but that’s a completely subjective experience, and I did find it above-average for an IF-game.

I often leave Arthur DiBianca's games to the end as a treat, but I decided to play this one early as part of my effort to play longer IFComp games.

You play as a hacker with a device that lets you hook into any system that has a certain kind of computer component. Your goal is to infiltrate a building and wreak havoc on an Agency, following a list of objectives. I'd definitely take inventory first in this game!

This game took me 2 hours, with 1 hour for a single puzzle (one of the last ones) and 1 hour for all the rest put together. I also ended up using the walkthrough for that puzzle.

This game is a limited parser game where all puzzles involve moving a character around a screen. There are a variety of mini-puzzles, although almost all have blurred in my mind after the time spent on that one puzzle. Many of them require optimization, memorization, and experimentation. Gameplay is closer to Baba is You or Adventures of Lolo than standard interactive fiction gameplay. This is a series of graphical games written in Inform connected by an interactive fiction overworld.

Some of the subgames involve clever gimmicks that require some sideways thinking. Others can become tedious; one such game was a game where you have to memorize a map before navigating it in the dark, with any mistake sending you to the front. The first few of these were really fun, while the last few felt like homework with copying down lists of commands.

One of the very last puzzles had a countdown timer based on moves, and that's the one I spent an hour on. It's an optimization puzzle with a very large set of parameters. I attempted it from a lot of different mental angles, trying different strategies and approaches. I often got within a single move or two of the finale, after shaving off ten or twenty moves from my first approach. In the end, I followed the walkthrough, and there were just a few moves off of my approach.

I think most of the game was pretty fun, and I enjoyed the final door puzzle especially.

Garry Francis has a good system for taking a concept ('mystery in a high school', 'searching for the holy grail', 'fairy tails') and turning it into a tersely-worded parser game on a grid-like map with traditional fetch-quest and lock-and-key puzzles. His games are consistently well-coded and are generally well-received.

This game is one of the larger of his games, and it is very open-ended. I and a few others ended up exploring large portions of the map before discovering key items we needed very early on. The game recommends drawing a map, and so do I. It's also useful to look under things.

The map takes us across plains and hills, ponds and cabins, cemeteries and crypts. I once made a game with a horror area and, to instill that horror in players, used the scariest thing I could think of: diagonal directions. Here, the author has made the same decision, with numerous diagonal directions possible.

Once I found the necessary items (I found it useful to use HINT in multiple locations; it is location dependent, which I didn't realize), I found the finale gruesome, but satisfying. I do wish in some ways that the game were either more terse or less so; at times there are descriptions of reaction and emotion, and at others none, giving an odd disparity.

Whether due to Puny Inform or the author's own choices, the parser can be petulant, a feature I've seen a few times in this author's punyinform games. By mimicking an old school parser's features when new school features are available, it can give the feel of instructing a toddler who is not very motivated:

"Johnny, can you go east?"

"But there's a door in the way!"

"Johnny. It's okay. Open the door, and then go east."

or:

"Johnny, can you pick up that rock?"

"But my hands are full! Wait, let me see." He takes off his backpack and rummages around with the items in my hand. "Can this grapefruit fit in the backpack? No. Can my dinosaur toy fit in the backpack? No."

You are waiting patiently.

"Can my coin fit in the back pack? Yes!" He puts the backpack back on and struggles to his feet. Then he bends down to pick up the rock. "I did it! I picked up the rock."

or:

"Johnny, can you look up 'abracadabra'?"

Johnny looks at you very seriously, and says, "You have to say, 'can you look up 'abracadabra' IN something."

Me, looking at the only book in the room:"...can you look up abracadabra in that book right there?"

"Okay!"

or, finally:

"Johnny, can you write 'hello' on the paper?"

"I don't have anything to write with!"

"Oh, Johnny, where is your quill? Look for your quill."

"Here it is!"

"Where?"

"In my backpack!"

Me, increasingly frustrated: 'Can you take it out of your backpack, Johnny? I was hoping you would do that yourself."

"But my hands are full! Wait, I have an idea." He takes off his backpack and sets it on the ground. "Will this grapefruit fit in the backpack? No. Will this plushy fit in the backpack? No." Johnny looks up at you with very serious eyes. "Sorry, I can't pick up the quill. My hands are full."

Besides that, I thoroughly enjoyed the game, and expect that most people that play parser games on a regular basis will do so as well.

This game is all about discovering commands, similar to the author's previous game The Wand.

The very start of the game is itself a puzzle, so I'll spoiler the rest of the review (although I won't spoil anything past the early game):

(Spoiler - click to show)
Most commands you enter at the beginning are rejected. You soon find that only 3-letter commands with 1 word can be accepted. You'd think that'd help narrow it down, but there are still over 17,000 such combinations, and some only work in certain rooms or in certain combinations.

Once you try a few simple, normal English words, you discover hints that words are often more complex combinations. The game then becomes about trying all combinations and following up on all hints you see.

There are multiple endings to the game. The first can be achieved by just following up on every lead you see. The others require you to think about patterns in what you've seen before. If you like this kind of thing, you'll definitely like The Wand by the same author. Hadean Lands has a little bit of this as well.


Overall, I like this kind of game and had fun here.

I like ghost stories, and mystery games, and circus settings, so this mystery game helping a ghost pass on set in a circus was enjoyable to me, though hard.

It's a choice-based game, and you move from location to location, trying to find all the information you can.

The game is randomized like Clue, with the murderer, location of the body, and murder weapon all chosen separately.

I at first thought I could play like some mystery games where it automatically records all pertinent information, so I didn't take notes, expecting the Notes tab would be an automatic collection of my thoughts. I was dismayed when I found that the notes was just a place for you to personally mark off what items you thought were most important! I played through a couple more times and used it then.

Another thing that makes the game difficult is that you have to visit areas repeatedly to see all info. Some things appear only on the second look-through.

Some of the randomized clues are much easier than others. The body location is the easiest (once you find it). Some of the murder weapon clues are much clearer than others. The person involved is the hardest; I was only really able to see what counted as an alibi and what doesn't by playing multiple times and comparing the two games.

So there are a few rough edges here and there, but I had enough fun to try it multiple times, and the art made by the artist (the author) contributed to the game.

This game was entered in Spring Thing 25, and it was a pleasure to play. It consists of three smaller games all tied together by a larger meta-story.

The first game I played was Sticks and Stones, which reminded me a lot of Tavern Crawler, an IFComp winner from a few years ago. This mini-game is played completely by arrow keys, with arrows serving both as navigation and as ways to interact. It includes combat, a money system, two protagonists, a variety of NPCs, and made me feel like I was playing a really enjoyable game (as Spring Thing organizer, I can reveal that this game actually came in 3rd in votes, and was only off by 1 vote).

I then played Treasures of the Deep, which I had seen someone else mention as short and linear, which it was. I saw the author mention in his postmortem that he went out of this comfort zone for the writing here, and I think it paid off. It gave the feeling of 'this is a person who often writes gripping stories' rather than 'this is this author's first time.'

I then played The Labyrinth, which I enjoyed but didn't like quite as much. The escape room model matches his other games, but the difficulty is reduced, so some of it felt like busy work (this is amplified by me playing all 4 people at once. I've only ever managed to pull off one multiplayer IF game.) I saw in his postmortem that new players got confused, so it wasn't super easy, but I think the real issue here is that it's important in a puzzly game to model early on the type of content and puzzles you're going to have. The Labyrinth has a lot of frustrating things (including early deaths) and content you can't interact with yet (like door riddles and the patterns on the well) before you reach the first sharable piece of information. I think it might have been better to have an optional early piece of information you can share that just gives the other players a thumbs up or encouragement or something so they can get the pattern down early. But I'm not sure.

I enjoyed the meta-puzzle at the end. I had expected it to be more subtle and had copied down patterns of gem-pushing in each game, sure that I'd have to do something like navigate to the menu to find a secret meta-puzzle by the order I push gems at the beginning. Instead, everything was quite clear and out in the open, which was fun.

Seeing only one review on IFDB, I assumed very few people had completed the game. I was really surprised to get to the end and see that over 30 people had recorded their names. I guess that really shows that the general rule of the internet applies (10 times as many people see something as interact, 10 times as many people interact as comment).

In this game, you play as an explorer searching in the ruins of a dystopian civilization. In this world, a cruel Caretaker manipulated both humans and animals, inserting cybernetic implants and controlling society.

The online play version has sound and AI-generated images. I originally played just the downloadable gblorb without the image features. While I typically don't find AI images enlightening, playing the version with graphics was useful as it gave me a quick reference point to know where I was and what the author thought was most important in a given room. It did break down at times, producing images that didn't really make sense in context.

Gameplay mostly revolves around exploration and conversation, with a few puzzles here and there. There are a ton of random deaths. I ragequit at one point because there is a timer on the surface that kills you if it's night and some kind of timer underground that kills you if you stay too long, even while wearing a disguise, so I ended up in an unwinnable state after a couple hours of play. I came here to review and saw other people mention graphics, so I tried the online version and completed it. I don't feel like the random deaths add much storywise. I also found a bug: (Spoiler - click to show)covering the solar panel doesn't give you the beetle until night has fallen I also felt that puzzle in particular was not enjoyable, as it relies purely on random coincidence; I prefer puzzles where you can see a goal and make a plan to achieve it yourself.

Storywise, it's clear a lot here was written by AI with some parts seemingly handwritten and then restructured by AI as well. Fortunately, the author seems to have a strong vision in some parts and managed to write genuinely interesting stuff, but overall this has the same problems a lot of AI-written things do:
*overly-complex descriptions of boring and mundane things (if you are so bored by an object you have AI write the description completely, why have a description at all? The player won't want to read it either)
*misunderstanding of plot arcs and appropriate emotional responses (we find the main villain just chilling in the middle of the lair with no build-up. You can just wave hi as you walk by. Wild events are described mildly: "As the cyborg drags you away, you are filled with fear and defeat." and mild events are described wildly: "Your heart pounds as the projector accepts the sleek metal device, and the display fills with text."
*the story follows mostly generic plot beats. Is there any surprise that (Spoiler - click to show)the robot overlord is evil? Or that society (Spoiler - click to show)collapsed due to a rebellion?
*The logic is often off; at the end, we discover the (Spoiler - click to show)a spaceship is seemingly prepared for us to an uncomfortable extent: air, gravity, etc. It's clear we're being welcomed here and it's uncanny. But there's randomly a door that won't let us through unless we put on a tarp to block it? It completely spoils the whole 'walk into my lair' bit.
*The walkthrough contains a lot of weird self-analysis too, explaining in a list the various forms of irony the game presents. What is the purpose of this? To tell people how to feel about the game? Would my reviews be more enjoyable if I told people "This review is well thought-out. It uses critical analysis to highlight several failures of AI writing in a thoughtful and cheerful manner, inviting the reader to ponder on the benefits of original thought and action."?

It's clear a lot of work went into the coding, which is enjoyably smooth in most parts.

This game is written in Toki Pona, a minimalistic conlang (artificial language) designed to have only around 100 words. The whole dictionary can fit on one page, so it's possible to (slowly) play this game without any prior knowledge.

I first got an idea of how to play by reading a Let's Play on the intfiction forums. After I tried playing a bit, I found that you can TRANSLATE any bolded word you see, which translates the object, its description, and context. With that as a base, I found myself slowly able to translate lines one at a time.

However, there are some big text dumps where TRANSLATE doesn't work. For those, I searched online for a Toki Pona translator and only found LLMs that do it. I decided to use Copilot to translate big chunks. I vary in my feelings on AI usage, focusing mainly on whether the AI produces good work, is depriving others of work, and on resource usage. AI is pretty good at translation, there were no other ways to translate Toki Pona except by hand, so I was only concerned about resource usage, so tried to limit my use to very large pages where I was stuck. I also assumed the author would oppose AI usage and want people to pick up the language, so I did my best. It was fun to realize that some words were just english or romance languages adapted to the alphabet (like 'group' becoming 'kulupu').

Once I was done, I realized that while the translation was done in a cool way and the game by itself is fun (and has cool CSS), they don't mesh well. I play a ton of foreign language IF, and I've found that such games are easiest for foreigners when:
-Vocab is kept simple and most commands are given on the postcard or given in the text (I found it hard to figure out how to TAKE things in the game, as it's missing from the IF command postcard and only found in text. You have to KAMA JO something or JO something. Furthermore, you MUST put an E before the object of any verb. So you have to both somehow figure out you need to type JO and to put E before something. Also, the vocab is quite complex given the simple language, as we have mechanical devices and bizarre creatures).
-All connections and points of interest in the world model are clearly labelled (In this game, there is an important action and an important exit not mentioned in the text. The exit is hinted at in a very long text dump, but the action of (Spoiler - click to show)looking under the bed is one I only tried because it was a verb on the postcard).
-Talking is handled by menu, choices, or simple TALK TO (in this game, you can ask about different topics).
-Actions like unlocking and taking and dropping are handled implicitly.) (In this game, you have a two (!) item inventory limit!)

The points above are not 'good game vs bad game', just 'games that are personally easier for me to play as a non-native speaker' vs 'harder for me'.

The story is pretty neat. To help any future players, here's a long explanation of what I encountered as I played (essentially complete spoilers):

(Spoiler - click to show)I woke up in a house and found a letter describing my affection for a dark-haired person named Penelopi. Penelopi went to the underworld. I wanted to follow. I looked under the bed and found a coin. I went outside and went to a forest. I saw plants and a bug that I remember Penelope liking. On a later playthrough, I saw a tree and had a memory of her being kind to a lizard while I flirted with her, and she suggested climbing the tree. Up in the tree I found a mechanical egg.

Later, I went (Spoiler - click to show)to a town where I went to a shop. On my first playthrough, I had no money, so I went out and talked to a guard at the mouth of a cave to the underworld. The guard wouldn't let me in and also had a copy of Counterfeit Monkey in a bag. They wanted to learn english to play it. I went and found the coin under the bed and spent it to buy an english dictionary. I gave it to the guard. He then let me into the underworld after warning that it was dangerous.

Once inside, (Spoiler - click to show)I fell down a broken floor and saw some cool CSS. I took a yellow flower. I then fell more and found Penelopi turned into a lizard monster. She saw the flower and like it so she ate me. I then replayed, looking at the game textdump uses glulx-strings and saw that there was a mechanical egg (that apparently has a neat distraction tool inside). I sold the egg and bought the ring and took the letter. This time I showed Penelope the letter and the ring, and she decided she liked me and that I could stay.

Overall, the frustrations with the difficult content in a conlang game made me want to rate 3/5, but making a game in a conlang feels like a 5/5 thing, so I'm giving 4/5.

Compared to the Gostak, this game has hard basic structure (remembering stuff like li and la and e was hard) but easy vocab ('jan wawa' isn't too hard to understand after a while), while the Gostak has easy basic structure (just English) with almost impossible vocab. Since the basic grammar structure is most of reading, I found the Gostak easier to read in a 'flow state' but this game easier to understand the overall narrative.

Charles Moore, Jr. is an author who I associate with very large, complex games with difficult puzzles.

This game is pretty big an puzzly, but not quite as hard as his others. The tutorial is very friendly and the cheat sheet is a great help together with the 'help' system, which I used a lot.

You are a bear in the woods, and you are very hungry. There are 12 different meals you can get, almost all from humans that you find. You lack most of the powers of a usual adventure protagonist like speech or fine motor control but you make up for it with fearsome presence, growls and brute strength.

The map is quite large and complex. I used a mental map and got through, but got lost many times partway through. Mapping would both help solve a ton of puzzles and make the game a lot easier.

The only drawbacks I found were that sometimes I had difficulty knowing what to type for a puzzle solution I already knew (for instance, I didn't know I had to (Spoiler - click to show)push the atv UNDER the beehive instead of just pushing it to the room.), and that sometimes the puzzles solutions involved a seemingly random combination of items from far across the map (especially the puzzles involving the (Spoiler - click to show)rubber duck and the flare gun). Other than that, I found this a well-written and enjoyable nature journey.