Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is a political game by what I presume is a non-native English speaker who is very experienced in their own language, as there are numerous typos together with a very creative story.

The game also contains a great deal of offensive material, but it's difficult to tell who it's aimed at; I could see it being equally offensive to everyone, but curiously inoffensive at the same time.

The central storyline is that slugs have changed the world into a hyper-connected group of individuals that subsist on trashy news stories, including stories about Soros and Clinton.

Playing this game was certainly an experience.

This is a Quest hyperlink game written for Ectocomp. It was written in less than 4 hours.

You play as a vampire masquerading as a newspaper delivery girl, visiting different areas in the city.

The game had nice styling and art, and I appreciated the apparent depth. But there were some translation issues that made the puzzly parts of the game hard for me to understand, and several typos.

This Ectocomp Petite Mort is a tricky little pentagram puzzle.

It took me a while to understand what I needed to do. The game had a fairly entertaining framing story which (especially the latter portion) elevated the game in my opinion. Even though I didn't necessarily agree with its message, I respected it.

The main puzzle consists in placing objects on a pentagram (with both inner and outer pentagons). I thought for half of the game that I could only walk on pentagram lines themselves. Certain objects repel each other, and the game encourages experimentation.

This is a speed-IF game, written in just 4 hours, but it has some pretty good heft; I've seen some IFComp games with less material, and it has nice styling.

It presents a scenario in which you've run out of biscuits, and the effects of Brexit have made it difficult to get enough food.

There are multiple paths, most of which have no choices (which makes sense for a Speed-IF), and the game encourages replay. Probably the best use I've seen of Twine in a Speed IF for creating the most material in the shortest amount of time. A nice game to add to Benson's growing portfolio.

This is a neat little puzzle/story written up in just a few hours.

You are in one of Caleb Wilson's bizarre worlds, a world of blood and ectoplasm and strange gods.

You are provided with a multitude of items and left to sort it out for yourself. Every object has a use, and in the end there are 7 ways to finish the game.

The best part of this game is the immersive worldbuilding.

First, a note about my ratings. This game is very short and is necessarily unpolished (as a game written in just 4 hours). So I took off one star for that.

But I found it had emotional effectiveness, I would play it again, the interactivity worked for me, and the writing was descriptive.

You are having a terrible nightmare and feel paralzyed. There is only a small amount of time to help yourself.

It took me a couple of play-throughs to get through it, but I was impressed at the level of craftmanship in an Ectocomp game. Well done.

This game drew my attention when I discovered that the 'provided map' is just google maps centered on the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian islands.

This is not my favorite Veeder game, but it was enjoyable, both when I played on my own and then later at an IF meetup.

The game as-played seems to have two phases: an exploration phase, and an action phase. I found it necessary to google some locations in the game at different points, and google provided information that helped in some puzzles.

The game offers several methods of interaction, including one that may be time-limited.

If you like this game, I recommend Crocodracula. If you hate this game, I recommend An Evening At Ransom Woodingdean House. If you haven't played this game yet, I recommend Taco Fiction and this game.

This game is the result of an immense amount of work, and was, for a few years, frequently recommended on rec.games.int-fiction.

I'm giving it such a low score due to my rubric. The overall game design is mixed, with the most time spent in the least interesting areas, extreme amounts of waiting being required, and so on. The game feels fairly unpolished, and could have used more tester feedback. It's the kind of game that could use a group of people working together over time, sharing hints on the forums, more than one person solving it, which is probably why it was once so popular, especially since it was released before 1998 and the explosion in high-quality story-focused games with original storylines.

This game copies the format of Spellbreaker, with spells that you gnusto into a spellbook and cast, and which frequently fail. You spend a lot of the game wandering around a monastery, as well as investigating other parts of the Great Underground Empire.

If there is someone who is a fan of Infocom games, feels like current games are too easy, and loves picking over a difficult game during a period of weeks or months, keeping careful notes and a map, then this would be a 5 star game for them.

For everyone else, I wouldn't recommend this game in general.

I do everything I can to complete games before I review them. I read walkthroughs, I look up old message boards, and, at last resort, I decompile to get the text.

This game is one of those rare ones (such as Hard Puzzle 2) where decompiling is worthless. In this case, the text of the game is literally split into two interleaving fragments, so that no whole words remain.

You have a huge anagram machine which makes anagrammed words out of anything you put in it. The results can be used, eaten, modified, entered, etc.

There are a lot of rough edges in the implementation, which is part of the overall effect. I don't know of anyone whose solved it. I got very far this time, but I forget how to do all the puzzles I had solved when I tried this last year. I'd love to see a team of people on a forum solve this one.

I had played Fallen London for over a year before I purchased Flint. It is the most expensive story of Fallen London, one of the older ones, and most likely the longest.

Flint is split into two portions. The first ended faster than I thought it would. It mostly consisted of preparing for a trip. However, despite the fast-ish ending (which was still long; the first half felt as long as some exceptional stories), many interesting things happened. The game plunges into deep lore that explains so much of the game (including the prison), nets you cool items/people, and has some exciting action sequences.

The second sequence was longer, and had several lucrative opportunities, and ended in some highly unusual and unique interactions that I found poignant and touching, and which feels like one of the most important events possible in the life of a character.

The story ends with both strong lore rewards and strong in-game monetarial awards.