Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game was part of the New Year's minicomp. I was pleased to see that it's a puzzly one-move game, and that the formatting was done well.

The setting is fairly standard fantasy, but it helps establish the setting quickly. You are a sort of paladin facing a 'Red Queen' vampire.

I'm very much into D&D inspired games, and one-move games. But some very basic things were not implemented, like 'pray' (when you're a paladin and the game mentions your orisons). But enough was implemented to be fun.

The original Lurking Horror was one of my favorite Infocom games, so I was interested in seeing Veeder's take on it.

This game is closer to Captain Verdeterre's Plunder than to any of Ryan's other games. Like Verdeterre, this game has a tight timer that sends you to your death, and you must play over and over to beat it.

This game exploits that structure for the story in amusing ways, though. You pick up in G.U.E. Tech (from Lurking Horror, itself inspired by M.I.T.), stuck in a time loop caused by the awakening of an Elder God. You are very aware of your previous iterations.

Progress is similar to Hadean Lands, in that you progress by gaining knowledge that your later iterations use. But instead of being tracked in-game, the knowledge is stored in password-like spells. The spell names include mangled versions of the author's name and a scrambled name of a D&D slime demon.

I enjoyed this game quite a bit; the solutions were generally very reasonable, and there was a nice 'power boost' or two near the middle of the game, with the end requiring you to tie everything together. I got impatient with one puzzle in the middle, when I had half a dozen unused spells and the same number of unsolved rooms and I couldn't figure out which ones went together. I decompiled to get past that stage, and didn't have any trouble after that.

This game is firmly in the modernist tradition of the early 1900s, similar to works by Kafka or T.S. Eliot.

The tags on this game include 'existentialist' and 'absurd', and that's a good description.

The game is dream-like; you are in a lushly detailed house where nothing really matters, and the story drives you forward. It's like a Ryan Veeder game without the Ferris Bueller attitude.

Overall, I found it effective, especially because I forgot the french IF commands and had to look them up (on the french play-IF card http://ifiction.free.fr/fichiers/play-if-card_fr.pdf), so at first I was just typing room names. This gives you a description of the room, but doesn't take you there, and doesn't give you the same description as actually being there. This made the game very odd.

Overall, I liked it.

This game seems like an advance upon the simple structure of Texture. In both game systems, you drag keywords onto other words. But in this game, you find the keywords, drag them into an inventory, and can pull them out whenever you like. A four-item inventory limit causes pressure in the game.

I like the system. The story is generic hack-and-slash, but I like generic hack-and-slash, so it wasn't bad. It was deeply implemented for all reasonable responses, though.

With a larger inventory, this could support a long and complicated game. The interactivity in this particular game though wasn't quite what I enjoy; it was mostly a try-repeat-again game, and it was frustrating losing at the end due to choices I made at the very beginning.

I beta tested this game, so it's hard to be objective about it. I think I would give it a 4.5/5, so I rounded up.

Faute De Servo combines several game ideas that I love, including waking up in a lab-like environment with no clue what's going on (like Babel) and gaining powers by devouring random things (like the under-played Mangiasaur).

Much of the game consists of figuring out the action system, as well as the backstory of your location. I found this somewhat confusing (which is why I gave 4.5/5) but the presentation is so slick that it makes up for it.

There's also a good deal of humorous banter in the game, which I enjoyed. It is derivved from a cast of characters with distinct personalities and varying levels of intelligence.

This is definitely worth playing, both for the overall game concept and for the nifty implementation.

After seeing several gritty fantasy choice RPGs this last IFComp that were just okay, it's great to see a complicated and balanced combat system where you have to make real choices.

In this game, you take the role of Hansel and Gretel, in a more modern setting, as they track down and kill sorceresses one at a time. Over several chapters, you have to solve difficult puzzles in an exploration segment (which also unlocks 'fragments' or powers you can activate in later chapters), followed by one or more combat segments.

Combat has a relative positioning system where enemies are different steps in front or behind you. You can turn around, advance, use weapons of different ranges and effectiveness, make use of cover, focus and dodge, etc.

It's of similar complexity to Kerkerkruip. It's written using Vorple, so that helps the complexity, but it prohibits saving. The author has found a clever way past this using a password system, which transported me to the 90's and my time playing Willow and Punch-Out! on the NES.

It was very long; the challenge of the puzzles, complex combat, and playing in a non-native language made me take 2 hours for the first 5 chapters, and I don't have time to finish it right now, but a look through the walkthrough shows that it has a complex plot. This is a high-quality game.

This French game is in a CYOA format. It’s an adventure story, almost novella length, set on a fantasy world. It has a tone that is lighter and appropriate for young adult and middle school readers. In fact, it reminded me of Norbez’s IFComp game If You Squint it Looks Like Christmas in its tone, genre, length, and choice structure (as a point of reference for ifcomp players).

I liked the story overall, even sharing parts of it with my wife. It’s a heartwarming and cheerful story, with vivid characters and moments of excitement.

The choice structure wasn’t what I’m used to; many of the choices were “do something awesome or leave”. I never tried leaving, because I wanted to see what would happen. Eventually, I become somewhat paranoid that the leaving choices were important, so it gave more weight to my decisions.

I would give it 4 stars if it had a save system. I couldn’t find one, and this is very lengthy.

This Twine game is intentionally short and linear, but it's not quite as linear as it advertises; basically, you are unwinding after a long day, and you get to pick what order to unwind in.

You seem to be a volunteer for a hospital, as well as a student. Actions like taking off your boots or untying your hair trigger memories from earlier in the day.

I found it fascinating as a glimpse into another, medical world, as well as portraying a character who seems to be a minority in their current situation.

This game was inspired by the debates in America surrounding the law passed in North Carolina restricting transgender individuals from using bathrooms besides those of their biological gender.

This game isn't really an allegory, as exactly the same things are happening in this world as in ours. Rather, it reframes the discussion using fantasy techniques to give events a greater emotional impact.

I played through one branch to the end, and rewound a bit to get three different endings. The Twine styling and coding was beautiful, with links represented by +'s for links that furthered the study and *'s used for asides.

It took less than 25 minutes for me. The interactivity was interesting, because it spells out the consequences of your choices in an in-game way.

Fans of DeNiro's other works or of topical commentary will appreciate this game.

This is an ePub game with hyperlinks. It consists of a series of articles with footnotes and cross references.

The idea is that a viral outbreak has caused the collapse of America, combined with Trump’s actions. As you dig deeper, though you find a greater truth.

It’s coever, but the chosen format is slow paced and sometimes dull in the name of realism, like when it had a largely standard ten page blank medical form. Many critical moments are hidden in transcripts emulating Reddit and 4chan, and the author took painstaking care to recreate the racism, homophobia and misogyny of these forums. This didn’t really suit me.

This was a creative format, and represents a great deal of work. The writing is detailed and feels authentic.