Reviews by MathBrush

This is a brief Adventuron game that has a short tutorial at the beginning.

In it, you play as a young child at a hotel who wakes up to find an old woman in your room. She beckons for you to follow.

And that's most of the game; the gameplay is pretty simple. There are a few small puzzles, but this is otherwise mostly linear. The concept has a lot of implicit horror in it, but I feel like that theme wasn't developed as much as it could have been.

Overall nothing is bad in this game, there's just not much: not much story, not much interaction, not much game. I feel like it could be expanded a bit, but as it is, it was fun while it lasted.

I played the English version of this game as part of the TALJ.

This is a fairly complex Adventuron game. Your girlfriend, a self-conscious milkmaid, is devastated that she forget eggs for her special salad, but you promise to bring some from your farm, in addition to another surprise.

The game is fairly large, with many rooms and also many items hidden within items within each room.

The writing is rustic and fun, with different animals you can interact with.

It's actually pretty hard; I found at least two different ways to completely fail without any warning given that I had failed, making it 'cruel' on Zarf's cruelty scale. But it's short enough that I was able to replay a couple of times to fix it.

This is one of the author's first full parser games. It's far more polished than most 'first' entries, but one kind of bug that slipped through is that many locations describe objects after you take them, like the alum.

Overall, it was one of the most rich and well-written TALJ games I played.

This game is entered in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, designed to introduce people to text adventures through tutorials.

It's kind of a weird game. EXAMINE and TAKE are disabled for most things. The writing is minimalistic, based on an old French story. And things just kind of happen in ways that are pretty disturbing, like the poor lamb that wanders too close to the hermit.

UNDO is disabled, which is baffling in a game meant as a tutorial that has actions that are non-reversible and can prevent you from winning the game.

Overall, I found the writing style charming and the interaction slightly frustrating. I'm glad I played but like others have said I'm not sure I'll replay the final fight.

This is an interesting game. It seems to be the author's own custom system, and uses a multi-pane format kind of like Scott Adams, with a room description constantly displayed and then parser responses in another window, with important items listed in a third.

The first part is very hand-holdy, as it is designed as a tutorial. Each room is a page or more full of text describing how interactive fiction works. It takes you through navigation and basic use of items.

I found this part to be relatively well-polished but also pretty verbose. That may be more useful to newcomers but also may not. I've seen a lot of IF tutorial games (like Bronze, Dreamhold, 'So, You've Never Played a Text Adventure Before, Huh?') and I've written my own, but most people I ask about who got into IF found a big hard game without a tutorial and tried it on their own.

This tutorial includes things like mazes and darkness which aren't quite as ubiquitous as once they are.

It then segues into a main game which is exploring a creepy abandoned house. This part has very well written descriptions. The story and puzzles form a coherent atmosphere but not a logical plot. Overall, though, I thought this part was pretty fun and well put-together.

This game has a lot of the hallmarks of Garry Francis' work: puzzle-focused gameplay, polished responses, gentle hints on what to do next, short and easily digestible room descriptions, etc.

The idea is that you're a troublemaker at a school that's going under, and you need to find some treasure reported to be hidden in your school.

Gameplay is generally satisfying, the kind of thing like finding a can and later finding a can opener and using it (not the example in the game). There were a few times I had trouble with the interactivity: trying to leave the room early on (without the tutorial, I would never have thought to do the action, and even with the tutorial it took me a while to find it); and finding the right word for what to do with the (Spoiler - click to show)pencil was hard (I kept trying words like (Spoiler - click to show)rub and (Spoiler - click to show)shade). A couple of the phrases stuck out as odd (I was told many time I thought my teacher was ugly; I think the random chance might need to be lowered a bit).

Overall, I expected a polish parser game and I got one, so it was worth playing. I used in-game hints several times.

This is a Python-based game. It asked me to install colorama, which seemed to work, but then in command prompt my colors didn't show up, so I think I had something wonky going on.

This is a combinatorics puzzle framed as writing. Your options are to Write (W) or Reflect (R).

But, there are rules! Some combinations of writing and reflecting aren't allowed. And as you go on, larger chunks of writing and/or reflecting are allowed.

Once you beat the game, there's a second round with more rules.

The text is abstract, focused on the meta-concepts of writing and reflecting and whether you obtained inspiration or not, how difficult this session was, etc.

I had some hints about the patterns from outside sources, but it was interesting to try and work out WHY the patterns were the way they were, which I found enjoyable; one of my favorite math problems in college was very similar to this (if you have N parallel parking spaces and can fill them up with Yugos, which take up one space, or Lincoln town cars, which take up 2 spaces, how many ways can you fill up the N spaces?) and of my own PhD thesis, which was concerned with strings of symbols with local rules like this.

I wasn't drawn in emotionally into the game as I was in 'solve' mode, but otherwise I enjoyed this puzzle.

This game is a demo for a Twine engine that lets you pick up things, move around, open things, etc.

The system works pretty well for me and looks cool, I think it'd be fun to have more games like this in the future.

The game itself was a bit confusing for me. You kind of pass out and wake up in a labyrinth with nothing but an old man for a companion. It's basically just a big maze, and at one point I thought I had gotten locked out, so I restarted, and ended up in the same spot, but then found something new and interesting, so I went to try it out on a room I remembered, but then it wasn't there any more...I eventually found an ending that seemed 'real' but overall the plot was disconnected and the maze wasn't super exciting. I feel like a lot of the elements of a great game were there, but just needed something more to glue it together.

This game is heavily centered on world-building. It's a Twine game and it's focused on you, a person who is not quite alive and not quite dead, who has to stop your mom from destroying the world.

The main attractions here are the characters and world-building. This definitely seems like a setting and a group of people the author has spent a great deal of time thinking about, from the murder-happy girlfriend to the html-breaking Ataxia monsters to the mother figure herself. All of them seem well developed and polished.

I think what's in this game is solid (nice use of text manipulation, too), but I'd love more chance to explore the world and see more of these concepts in play. I guess I'd either prefer a tighter focus with the current level of interactivity or the bigger story with the wider exploration.

This is a cute little game made together as a family.

Your goal is to retrieve the Sacred Shovel of Athenia, which is stuck in the road. Unfortunately, you can't do that right now, because you aren't a cat lover, so a kind of restrictive device has been put on you until you are kind to a cat.

That doesn't really make much sense, but that's okay, because the game wasn't made to make sense. It's mostly a framing story to help a kid learn how to be kind to a cat.

I struggled a bit with the parser here and there, like trying to figure out how to use the fishing rod. Overall, the core concept of the game is good, but it just lacks a bit of cohesion and polish.

This is a wordplay game centered on the phrase 'Beam me up Scotty'.

You play as Captain Kirk, and gameplay consists of the presentation of some silly scenario involving you, Bones, and/or Spock, as well as Scotty. To get out of the situation you have to type 'B____ me up scotty', where the blank is some word starting with B.

So it's all riddles/wordplay, and mostly centers on finding synonyms for words in the text. You either get it or you don't; if you just can't get it you pass. I got 70.86%, so I had to pass a few times.

At a basic level it's pretty funny, but I kind of found the hints and pass system abrasive. They're basically 'ha you loser you're dumb and didn't get it'. But why would I like that? It's just a made up game and I'm playing it for fun. The author doesn't even know I'm playing it. I'm just deciding of my own free will to have a computer say I'm dumb. I'm not really into that.

The humor is the best part of this.