Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This game has you read through 5 sort of interviews in Twine. Each one has a background character from a fantasy (or science-fi or both) tale explain to you how they feel about life while you react.

Each ends with a choice, which you must explain via text entry.

Reading all 5 stories unlocks a sixth story.

I liked the interactivity of it, the text entry and so on. But because the game seems designed to be a mirror for the reader, a lot of the text was bloodless and generic, designed to apply to as many situations at possible.

It covers some fairly controversial topics, including a dedication to a notorious American criminal.

I enjoyed this game, which took me a few hours to complete (and one big part I missed out on because I didn't notice a certain room exit).

This game uses the same hybrid system as in Detectiveland and Draculaland, where you choose a noun to hold and various options become available.

The breadth of the puzzles is impressive, and the humor is great. A few times I was frustrated by not knowing what to do, but when I realized what was needed, I felt like the puzzles were fair.

The endings were nice, I think. It's good to have satisfying endings for a game.

The Marino family has released several Mrs. Wobbles games over the years. This one is fairly long, and features two different protagonists.

All of these games feature a heavily costumized and illustrated Undum interface, like Twine but with a single, unbroken page of scroll. Text appears and disappears, stats are tracked, and there are several images.

This game seemed to have more depth than the other Tangerine House games; it offers two paths through the game, and a complicated inventory and even an economy.