Reviews by MathBrush

I only recently played this game, and it quickly became my favorite Emily Short game. I have seen in her notes that she often works ideas that she has into games as a proof of concept; for instance, Metamorphoses and Galatea were both intended as trial-of-concepts for ideas for a massive game that never took off.

I wonder if this game was a proof-of-concept for the city and npcs in Counterfeit Monkey. The idea of a sidebar, a map, numerous npcs with complicated conversation systems, and a large city seem very familiar between the two games.

This game is about a balance between two forces, but it is difficult to categorize the two. This is more of a story game than a puzzle game. There are some puzzles that are oddly difficult to solve, so I occasionally resorted to Victor Gisjber's hints. However, the game has many ways of hinting things to you if you look for them.

Like Counterfeit Monkey, this was a laggy game. Gargoyle had trouble with both of them, as have every other system I have used. I believe the refreshing graphics causes it.

Wonderful storyline and worldbuilding. Loved the final sequences, especially.

This is my first Andy Phillips game. It felt longer than any other game I have played, but it was about 200 turns shorter than Once and Future, and I suppose that Blue Lacuna or Worlds Apart might be longer.

The game is absolutely linear, consisting of 40 or more scenes. In each scene, you must do exactly the right things in a small number of turns or die horribly. You often have to grab items long before you need them, and manipulate them in unexpected ways.

The story and writing is actually quite interesting, but it seems to decay over time. The writing becomes less fresh and more repetitive in the middle (like others have said, everything is described as 'evil' for 20 or more scenes), and typos creep up in the last third.

I only recommend this with a walkthrough. The difficulty is frequently just from poor puzzle design, and not from hard puzzles.

You are a chef! is a short and purposely dumb game. The game has bad spelling and grammar, poorly defined locations, and mainly consists of picking up ingredients falling from the sky.

The humor is that of Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die: make a minimalist game with dumb puzzles. Some people don't like it; I admit, I chuckled the first time I played it.

I came up with an interesting hypothesis as I played the game. Everytime you put an item in the pot, the game says:

"Good work Chef!!! But you must find more!! Ingrredients!!"

This game came out in 2000. Savoir-Faire came out in 2002. I suspect Emily Short found this message amusing and incorporated it into her game, as the cooking device in that game says almost the same thing with similar punctuation. In fact, I have to wonder if a lot of the food puzzle in Savoir-Faire was somehow born out of an attempt to make this game into something with more substance, in which case, she succeeded. It is also possible that they are both referencing something earlier; I don't know.

This is perhaps the most unique Lovecraftian story I have played from IFDB. Jon Ingold, one of the great writers of interactive fiction, has put together a fairly odd game here.

First of all, the game tells you what you should type each turn. This was off-putting at first, but gave me a bit of a start when it stopped right when I would actually need it. Also, on replays, there are very significant areas of the game that you can't access if you follow the cues.

Next, there are odd pencil sketches that appear in every room.

Third, your inventory always shows up. I liked this.

Noone seems to know if they got the right ending or not, because the game is somewhat anticlimactic. However, reading the author's notes, you see that one of the requirements of the game was that it has a 'dubious ending' (or 'doubtful ending' or something like that).

The game is about an old man with a precious book collection. There are no tentacles, no cult, no fog, no slime or sacrifices in this game. It does manage to be fairly creepy, however.

It is short. I recommend it to everyone just to try it out, as it is fairly unusual and not at all like The Lurking Horror/Anchorhead and their imitators.

I tried to play this game years ago on the iPad but failed. I'm very glad I have now finished it. It is a very interesting take on Snow White, mixed with other legends. It was a collaboration among many authors, and has eighteen different endings.

It works very well. The story is engrossing, and perhaps due to the large number of authors, it feels like most topics and commands have good responses.

This is a one room game, where you as the huntsman are with Snow White and a dead Hart in the forest.

This game is a typical Eric Eve game:

Good points of Eve games: several NPC's, large map that doesn't really need mapping, optional side quests, great writing, interesting plot.

This game is a bit like Dante's inferno, but with a more 'modern' take. In particular, there are forces that disbelieve the truth of heaven and hell, and the game doesn't say who's right and who is wrong. As a case in point, one of the first things you see is that hell is closed, due to mythologicalization.

The general gameplay was very enjoyable. It felt like Blue Chairs without the drugs and profanity.

Bad points: trophy-ization of women.

Just like Elysium Enigma with the naked Lena and Blighted Isle with Betty the buxom, All Hope Abandon is chauvinistic. The main woman is referred to frequently as just 'the blonde', and there is a green-skinned demon, who makes you uneasy because they 'use sexuality as a weapon, just like many mortal women'.

It's a shame that these games all pigeonhole women, as otherwise I would strongly recommend them to everyone.

Mrs. Pepper's Nasty Secret is about a woman in your neighborhood who stole your skateboard and is pretty mean.

You investigate her, and discover quite a bit about her past. You meet some interesting NPC's, and have to work out some really very clever puzzles.

The game lasts not very long; it took me 508 moves the first time I played it. It really feels like investigating the home of the antagonist in Wishbringer.

I recommend this game; it is short and entertaining.

As others have noted, this game has essentially two parts (not including short, one-shot scenes).

The first part is very enjoyable, more than any Eric Eve game I have played. In its crispness, focus, and detail, and linearity, it reminded me of Dual Transform by Plotkin. You are an adventurer in the snow, trying to helo your civilization.

The second part fell flat for me, especially the ending. It seemed the author left much unfinished. The puzzles were still good; although I missed an inventory item by not reading descriptions.

Overall, I recommend this gamee.

In this game, you slap about 10 fish to death in order to survive and to avenge.

I thought Slap That Fish was boring at first, but by the fourth or fifth fight, the game started getting really fun. It turns out that just slapping is not optimal; it'll get you through the first few fights, but there are other methods that can sometimes even end a fight in one hit.

The later fights require inventive items and difficult items.

I had no shame using the walkthrough when I got stuck on the shark, because the puzzles were a little obscure, and the walkthrough will NOT give you the best score. You have to be creative to get a perfect score.

I managed to get a perfect score on the first 3 fish the second time around, but I don't know how to perfectly defeat the catfish or the tuna.

Sometimes I think Emily Short has a competition with herself to see how many different magic systems she can come up with.

In this short game, you can take amounts of time from an object and place them in another object. The game makes this fairly simple.

This is a speed-IF, which generally means messy implementation. That doesn't show up as much here, except for leaving the tower. Also, the ending took me a bit to figure out.

Beyond being just a speed IF, this was a new-language speed IF, which means that Emily Short learned TADS and made this game all in a couple of days. Extremely impressive.