Reviews by MathBrush

Hard Puzzle is obnoxious on purpose. You need to assemble a stool, but everything goes wrong, and you start to find more and more parts.

The author intentionally makes the game underimplemented, with guess-the-verb, standard response, etc. going on. It claims to be a speed-IF that isn't too hard, but it is hard.

I decompiled it to figure it out. I'm giving it 4 stars because it's good at what it sets out to do.

Scott Adams created many games in a short time, but the Count is one of the most famous.

I played this game only recently, after experiencing more modern games, but I love its charm and open exploration. I feel like in the 70's, when it came out, and people only had a few games, it's unfairness and picky parser would actually be a bonus, adding many hours to gameplay as you try to figure out something to type.

But even for more modern players looking for a quick fix, it's enjoyable. The ultra-minimalism works really well, here, as you are captured and wake up the next day with little explanation beyond your own dark imagination.

A real keeper. Beating it on your own could take quite a while, though.

In this game, like other Scott Adams games, you have a minimal 2-word parser, with spare rooms with a few objects.

Also like the other games, every inch of the game is used for something good. This game is also really, really funny. An opening joke made me laugh out loud.

This has been one of my favorite scott adam adventures so far.

This is Scott Adam's second game, and fits into just a few kB of data; it's really miraculous how well it works, and I liked it better than Adventureland.

This game forces you to conjure up your own explanations of things; a hidden passage, a bloody book, black mamba snakes, etc. are described only once. There is no desire for mimesis, just for game.

Having played these games has given me much more respect for Scott Adams' work.

This game has the same design philosophy as the authors' last games, but with a very different set of mechanics.

The opening sequence is thrilling, with a strong buildup to... something extremely odd.

This game discourses at great length about advanced mathematics and philosophy while you are engaging in something utterly trivial, but it manages to blend the two together.

It was a trippy and surreal experience. I played until the game said I had no more to learn, but I didn't get a high score. If you get lost, shoot the magnet.

I beta tested this game.

Detectiveland is a great game in a unique interface created by Robin Johnson.

The interface is a refinement of the one used in Draculaland. You have a parser-like interface, but instead of typing in commands, you have a menu of visible things and people and an inventory; you click on an object or person, and a menu of verbs comes up. One object at a time can be 'held', and this affects the menus of other nouns.

This is one of the biggest IFComp winners ever, with a minimal walkthrough taking 250 or more moves. It is split into 4 cases, 3 of which can be solved simultaneously.

You play a detective resolving problems in a square grid town. The game has graphics of speakers, and has really good humorous writing.

The game is written Scott Adams style, so many of the locations have very spare writing. This, according to the other, allowed him to spend more time on conversations and scripted events.

**Edit**

I actually hadn't played any Scott Adams games before this one; now I have played three, and this game is a straight send-up of those games, down to the split window and empty room descriptions. It's a perfect homage.

This game reminds me somehow of the old electronic devices you could get around the time of the NES that would play just one game, like Snake or other games. There were little, limited buttons, but they really did a lot with them.

This is the text version of that; you can just move N, E, S, W and Z. But this huge game exploits all of that. It can be finished in 2 hours with the walkthrough, but if you want to do it on your own, you need to do some exhaustive searching. Some of the truly unfair puzzles seem to be solvable if you just keep searching everything over and over again.

If you like this game, you should like DiBianca's other games. This was the number one game in the author's vote.

This game is truly epic. I felt like I was reading a novel as I played. It lasted long; longer than any of the other choicescript games I played.

I had trouble putting it down. A game about professional wrestling seemed so silly, but it's cinematic, almost like Rocky. There's a lot about second chances, betrayals, seeing the truth. It's so much better than it seemed from the blurb and art.

Subplots include a variety of romances, long term relationships with a rival, and so on. You can choose to be a face or a heel, and seeing the psychology about being a heel was very interesting.

Strongest recommendation.

Caveat: I was given a review copy of this game, but ended up playing the free public intro instead.

This game incorporates various multimedia effects including sounds, music, some animation and even apple watch interactivity, but I played it on android with the sound turned off.

So I'm just reviewing the graphics and story, and it's a good one. This is my favorite Fwlicity Banks game yet, perhaps because I just finished mistborn and I enjoyed the metal-themed magic vibe and the wilderness survival aspects.

In the free intro to the game, which by itself is quite long, you play as the unwilling holder of a special talent: "eating" souls. What that entails and its implications for you are slowly unraveled.

Your main nemesis at first is a ghastly creatute, a red eyed albino bear. The confrontations with the bear were exciting, and you get a lot of mileage out of the game before the pay/ad wall.

The visual styling is gorgeous. The choices were all binary, and the story 'felt' like the choices didn't matter at first, but I soon found that options that seemed unimportant led to dramatic results; the author must have spent a great deal of time working on the different threads to allow this level of choice.

As a final note, I've given this game 5 stars based on my judging criteria. I've reviewed several of Banks' games by her request, but I haven't been afraid to give less stars when appropriate. This game is polished, descriptive, gave me a real thrill of emotion, and made me want to play more, which are 4 of my 5 criteria. I didn't like the binary choices at first, but it fell into a rhythm that ended up working for me, which is my 5th star.

In this commercial game, you are trying to get around the world in 80 Days with Phineas Fogg. It is ostensibly based on the novel, although I haven't read it yet.

This game employs a beautiful map used to select various routes across the world, and has nice, mostly static visuals representing your conveyance, the city you're in, and various NPCs as well as the player and his luggage. However, this game is very much CYOA in beautiful packaging rather than just a text-heavy graphical game.

The usual pattern of the game is that you start each day in your current city with some funds and the chance to get more funds, buy some luggage, sell old luggage, or explore. You then pick a route to travel onto the next city, which may or may not require waiting a few hours or days for.

Each route can cost between a few dozen pounds to 7000 or more pounds. Faster routes generally cost more. Along each route, various events happen such as mutinies, romance, murders, etc. which you have to deal with. Your choices affect what city you are in, how fast you get there, NPC reactions, your amount of money, Phineas' health, and extremely poor choices can lead to death.

The setting is steampunk, a genre which I am on the fence about. Among steampunk games, the writing is very good. Some highlights for me were Haiti (Spoiler - click to show)with organic automata, Agra (Spoiler - click to show)A city that walks on four legs, with the Taj Mahal on top, and Salt Lake City, which provided my first glimpse at an interactive fiction treatment of Mormons, my religion. On their treatment of Mormons, I was pleased to see that they treated it fairly kindly, with any negative reactions being those typical of the day. This is typical of the whole game, in that it seems remarkably well-researched (although never perfectly) for its scope.

I found the game somewhat tedious at times, especially on multiple replays. I frequently found myself skipping filler text or repeatedly tapping on the clock. However, on playthroughs where I focused on exploration over time, I had an enjoyable experience.

Overall, I strongly recommend this game for anyone without a distaste for steampunk. I know several people who would love this game if it had a more realistic flavor. But the steampunk setting allows any historical inaccuracies to be waved away, and provides for some fun pictures, so it's a trade-off.