Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is an interesting game. It's a conversation between ELIZA and some human-mediated input that is taken from a collection of computer-generated speech.

The conversations at first are pure nonsense, but later evolve into partial nonsense, with recurring themes of frustration, curiosity, and romance.

There are sexual references in one portion. The overall feel is one of experimental poetry, very appropriate for the Spring Thing competition.

This sequel to the 15-year-earlier Risorgimento Represso is a fairly large glulx game that uses advanced features such as graphical windows.

In classic parser game style, you are an eccentric wizard's apprentice in a blended fantasy/modern setting where you push the boundaries of the law to get what you want.

I enjoyed the variety of puzzles, such as timing puzzles and transportation puzzles.

This game reminds me a lot in style and quality to Bob Bates' game Thaumistry. Both games were charming, and reached a level of quality that is quite difficult to reach, but failed to grip my imagination. In both games, I felt like some solutions were unnecessarily restricted.

I believe this game is most likely to win Spring Thing (this review was written before the competition ended).

This was a first for me: a visual novel with RPG elements. I know visual novels are a big field, but I've generally played text-only games.

The art seemed high-quality, but characters would switch positions on the screen at odd times, which was kind of distracting. It was hard for me to distinguish the two male protagonists, who changed expression sometimes when they were talking and sometimes when others were talking.

The overall storyline was interesting, and seemed like part of a larger and well-developed world.

The RPG combat was fun, I don't see that a lot. I was allowed to go into negative MP with the main character, making winning easy.

Overall, I found some of the graphical elements unpolished, but the story very descriptive. The interactivity worked for me, and the combat and some of the decisions made me feel anxious for the characters. Overall, I feel satisfied with my playthrough and don't plan on revisiting the game. So I'm assigning it a score of 3/5.

This is a complex Quest game with a life-like map and NPCs that are responsive and numerous.

For my personal taste, the NPCs were too lifelike, with your main companion having a foul mouth, using profanity as a form of verbal seasoning rather than a means of emotional signalling. It made me uncomfortable the whole game. For some players, though, this is a selling point.

The game itself is fun; you try to convince all the members of your band to get back together. Each one is vividly defined, and you're asked to perform various fetch quests, intuition-based puzzles, and logic or experimentation puzzles to get to your goal.

Quest has its usual limitations, but this game was better programmed than many quest games. Great for puzzle fans and fans of real-life slice of life games that don't mind strong profanity.

I beta tested this game. This is an ambitious conversational game with a parser that recognizes sentences in addition to keywords.

This increases the complexity of possible inputs to a great extent; just typing in topics isn't enough, you have to add extra words.

I beta tested this 2 or 3 times, but I never beat it until after it was released. When I beat it, I was shocked and surprised at what I hadn't seen before.

This is a well-written and interesting game, but I found the complexity of the possible inputs overwhelming.

This is a game in the vein of DiBianca's other games, with an emphasis on a minimal verb set and getching puzzles.

You have to help sixteen animals in a gridlike town. Each asks for various things, and you have to help them. Some give hints, and others just add flavor.

I beta tested this game, and I enjoyed it then and now. Highly recommended for a pure puzzle experience.

This game is the third by Mike Gerwat, after Hill 160 and Escape from Terra.

This is in the top tier of long parser games if played without a walkthrough. You play a version of the author, a former piano tuner who was born blind and is now deaf and tuned pianos for famous bands. You now go back through time to college and other places.

The gameplay length is increased by the difficulty. Some important room descriptions are only printed once. If you didn't see it the first time, you'll never see it again. Seemingly minor actions lead to game over's hundreds of moves later. Searching the code, there are 542 instances of the phrase "GAME OVER!", ranging from leaving the taps on when exiting the shower to using shoddy condoms.

The walkthrough is not completely accurate, either, leading to more random deaths. Random deaths cannot be undone, meaning that you must save constantly.

The game is split into four sections, the first and last of which have alternate paths. I was unable to complete the first section with either path, but I read through much of the game in the decompiled text strings.

I'm giving it three stars because it is descriptive, it is reasonably polished, and it seems to communicate the emotional feeling that the author was going for when adding in all of the pitfalls.

This interactive fiction game uses a unique engine: an RPG-maker.

There are no RPG elements, just dialog boxes. You have somewhere between 2-4 choices, and the game gives you a diagnosis of a mental illness.

There are some spelling mistakes, and the game is pretty short. But it's creative and uses images in an interesting way.

Adam Brendenberg has written several interesting poetic games in the past, including War of the Willows (a fighting game in poem form) and Fallen Leaves (a procedural poem generator).

This game has a sort of puzzling aspect. You wander a physical space, including what seems to be a labyrinth with mysterious controls. It's all written in Twine. The topics of the poetry include the game itself, a meditation on video games in general, and Donald Trump in a boat.

This game reminds me of last year's spring thing game Niney, where you gathered up 'roles' and distributed them to other characters.

This game isn't similar in form or content, but it's similar in creativity. Your motions affect time, and there are hidden stats affecting what you are able to do.

My main interest in playing this game was piecing together the backstory, which was fun.

There were some unifinished corners here and there; many of the standard responses (like X ME) are left with their standard forms. But I enjoyed this.