Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is an interesting game. With wordplay games, the question is, how can you make a game about wordplay that lasts long? One answer is to follow Emily Short's example and just put tons of content into a game (Counterfeit Monkey).

This game achieves its length through unfairness. Parts of this game (it's basically several mini-games put together) are wonderful: Buy the Farm was particularly good, as was the Shopping Bizarre. Those two would make a wonderful game pulled out on their own, one relying on American English sayings and the other on homonyms.

Some parts of this game don't make any sense. I didn't understand In a Manor of Speaking (which btw is also the name of a great Hulk Handsome game) at all, and looking it up, I still haven't found a good explanation at all. I believe having the Doldrums was a mistake, because it made you think everything else had a gimmick (like Gary Larson's infamous Cow Tools cartoon).

But if the game wasn't unfair, it wouldn't last very long. The only way I've seen fair wordplay games achieve length is through tons of content, like I said. Andrew Schultz does this with exhaustive code-enhanced wordspace searches. Shuffling Around is a good example of this.

I also like the Act your Part session. It was nonsensical, but I was able to get a lot of points just doing dumb stuff.

I played the version released by Zarf who was re-releasing Jason Scott's releasing of previously unreleased Infocom releases.

This game is short but satisfies all of my requirements for 5 stars:

Polish: This game has a custom format with well-designed buttons and overall CSS and layout.

Descriptiveness: There are several characters who are described in exquisite detail (or not, with good reason), and the location and item descriptions were evocative.

Emotional Impact: I could really identify with the researcher and the anomaly. The final description complemented the main narrative in an excellent way.

Interactivity: This game allows quite a few paths, but is self-deprecative. It says: (Spoiler - click to show)This may be a multiple-choice story, but there's no multiple endings. If you pick the wrong options, the story has to pretty much drag you to me so we can have this little chat. You see, fundamentally, this just isn't a good multiple choice story. That's not what it is. It was never supposed to be that. A good multiple choice story has decisions, it has character development, it's got different pathways to get to different goals and most importantly it's got replayability. There just has to be at least one ending where you die. It's a game, and there's a different way to play every time. This is not a game. These are special containment procedures. And these procedures make a very bad game, but they do a very good job of containing me.

Coincidentally, I disagree with the game's self-identification as a bad game and with its overall design philosophy. The material in the spoiler is only one way of doing things.

Replay: I enjoyed this both times I replayed it.

This is a clever concept. You right click on a picture, and the menus are huge, with enormous branching.

Some do relatively nothing, or are just dumb jokes taking advantage of the menu structure. Others have functionality: turning off the whole system, or allowing editing.

An interesting feature is a text adventure in the 'games' section with nods to Leather Goddesses of Phobos and to Adventure. It tracks state and allows revisiting locations, but it is easy to lose your spot.

Overall, it's funny as an idea, but too tedious to explore fully, and tedious even in medium exploration.

This is one of Porpentine's games that highlights one fact of her games (especially her early games) more than any other work of hers: intense, destructive femininity. This is explored in other works, especially Cyberqueen and With Those we Love Alive, and, well, all of the other works, but it is the lifeblood of the game.

This game centers on being Kesha, infused with powerful glitter and mascara, driving vehicles named after genitals and destroying hater-men in a techno-cyber-surreal-sephora mashup.

It's more gruesome and sexual than I like, and Porpentine herself seems more toned down now. But the production values are really excellent. Few people, perhaps none, have managed to extract as much presentation value out of Twine's basic features.

There is a curious sub-genre in interactive fiction about surreal games on a train. There is something about the train as both metaphor and as a constrained, linear, isolated space that makes it ideal as both a narrative setting and a game setting.

Combined, then, these make for a perfect combination when it comes to interactive fiction.

As a standalone game, this one is short and trope-reliant but well-paced and compelling. You wake up with amnesia, opposite an old woman on a train. The game doesn't last long, but choices you make matter.

An interesting short read on a lunch break.

This game would be a 3 star game if not for the highlighting.

Visually, it's presented beautifully, with background images, multiple textured text boxes, and UI options.

Structurally, as a standard choice game, it leaves a lot to be desired. You have a menu of people and a menu of places, and take turns picking one then the other. For each pairing, you have a binary option or two. There is a lot of text per choice.

But with the highlighting on, you can see the trick of this game: some of the game is procedurally generated. Not in the sense that the game uses predetermined text replacement based on your choices, but in the sense that there is some kind of corpus generating new sentences.

Is this useful for the game? It's cool to see your choices produce new things. But a hand-written sentence would likely be just as good or better, which is the perpetual problem of procedural generation.

Still, the highlighting gave me a sense of involvement, and the overall story was dramatic and touching.

I played this game a year ago but somehow didn't review it.

This Parser Comp game has two facets: first, it's a space game where you wander an abandoned station. Second, unlike most such games, instead of amnesia you have access to many memories, most about unionized labor.

At the time this game was released, and the first time I played it, many people (including me) thought the puzzles were a bit fussy. But on this second playthrough, I found it pretty enjoyable. It does require a kind of relative positioning command that's not typical in parser games due to its complexity, but this is good for puzzle fiends, space buddies, or those concerned for social welfare and the plight of the masses.

I saw this game a few months ago, and I was pretty impressed. It has a beautiful story to tell.

The format is large pages of text with 2 choices at the bottom. The choices split quickly, so you get very little of the game in each playthrough. However, replay is quick and enjoyable. I've seen 3 endings.

The idea is that 4 siblings are chosen every few decades to become demigods corresponding to the seasons. You can choose summer and winter, love or war, peace or sadness.

I do wish their was less extreme branching, with more of the main story in each playthrough, and that it was easier to make decisions based on a strategy, but this is a stylistic choice.

This was the only IFComp 2018 game I had never finished. I finally finished it today. There was no walkthrough at the time of the comp, and the one in there now doesn't work for the last area.

But I finished it today, and that last area wasn't too bad!

The reason I had so much trouble is because Quest has synonym trouble, and the author didn't implement very many synonyms. Quest also has context-sensitive commands, which is great except when it makes commands seem wrong when you're just using them out of order. So for instance, "USE MATCH ON LUMP" gives an error unless you've done everything else completely right.

Other issues are unguessable puzzles, leaps of intuition, etc.

But the characters are fun, and it's all very imaginative. I remember Steph Cherrywell made the switch from Quest to Inform and ended up winning IFComp. I think almost all the issues here are with the Quest engine, and that the author has great ideas that may possibly be expressed in a different format.

This game took a lot of work, and will provide great enjoyment for many people.

It's a parser game that is (as far as I can tell) bug-free and has creative puzzles, lasting longer than pretty much all the other parser games in IFComp that aren't buggy.

So why am I only giving it 3 points? The interactivity and polish felt off to me.

The game is fairly generic, especially with the standard responses. X ME, JUMP, SING (even at a concert!), DANCE etc. either give the normal response or aren't implemented at all.

And many interactions seem purposelessly fussy, almost like imitating what they think old games were like. Possessing only one object capable of creating fires, the verb LIGHT asks 'with what'? Saying LIGHT WITH [FIRE THING] doesn't fix it; you need to turn on the fire thing. But TURN ON [FIRE THING] isn't implemented. You need to LIGHT [FIRE THING] then LIGHT [THE THING YOU WANT TO BURN].

Similarly, when there's one puzzle that requires you to listen to a loud ambient thing, just LISTEN isn't good enough, you have to say what to listen to. And so on.

It seems a definite stylistic choice, and one that didn't resonate with me. If you're looking for a bug-free game with a big map, creative puzzles, and extensive gameplay, this is your game.