Reviews by MathBrush

This is a French IFComp entry, and it worked pretty well for me.

You are a cybernetic soldier who has been massively damaged on the field of battle. You have a screen/HUD sort of thing that you can control (the theme of this year's comp is 'screens'). Clicking on different armor pieces gives you different options.

The storyline, dealing with the aftermath of war, goes in fairly standard directions for sci-fi, but I found the presentation charming and my mangled non-Francophone reading ability found the writing interesting. Slick game, and not too long, for any English speakers trying to get some mileage out of Google translate.

This game presented a conundrum to me. As a non-native French reader, I couldn't tell if the lack of punctuation and capitalization was avant-garde or the result of less-than-perfect design processes. However, I reached a point where 2 out of 3 choices lead to death and the third said 'click anywhere to edit this node', so I believe that this is simply an incomplete game.

But the idea of it is fun. It hearkens back to more riddle-based gameplay than most narrative-focused Twine games. You're trapped, and there's a madman with a knife coming to get you. You must find six digits to unlock a door, each digit being given as a reward for a puzzle. Puzzles include logic puzzles, wordplay puzzles, etc.

I would have liked to see this finished and polished. But, in its incomplete state, I can't recommend it.

This game is cool. It’s illustrated and animated. It’s big. It has some real time events, great worldbuilding, and rich settings.

Unfortunately, it suffers in implementation. There are huge numbers of implemented items. Actions can be difficult to guess. I constantly found myself struggling against the parser and the system, not understanding what was wrong.

I recommend checking out the first few scenes to get a feel for this interesting game.

Norbez has written quite a few games over the years now, including several IFComp games, and it’s clear that their style is progressing, adapting, and improving. This is the best Norbez game I’ve seen, and definitely one of the best “PSA” games I’ve seen. Just like Depression Quest for depression or Hana Feels for self-harm, Bi Lines is meant to help you consider what it’s like to be a bisexual man in an unacceptably society.

What made this piece work for me was the presentation. Nice chalk/like effects when you click on choices, smooth writing, and a supernatural setting with a reporter talking to ghosts make an excellent frame over the deeper charcterization choices and the central narrative.

This game takes place over three days, but is still fairly short. It contains some strong profanity in a scene or two. I recommend this game.

Zarf/Andrew Plotkin has said before that he thinks about a certain interaction he wants players to experience in a game, and then builds the game around that.

This game was built around one interaction at the end. It’s a cool interaction, but the rest of the game doesn’t do enough to build up to and support this special interaction at the level it deserves. It’s like having a small 1-tier cake with a huge crystal wedding topper that it can’t quite support.

The cards were a nice visual feature: this is set in a futuristic Vegas casino, and you can see the cards being dealt.

Overall, this shows a high level of craftsmanship, and I anticipate that a longer game by this author would be great.

Despite my low star rating,this game succeeds in (what I believe is) it’s authors’ goal. It seems like their intent was to write a complete parser game from scratch that had an interesting storyline, and they’ve done so.

This game is pure fantasy, with mysterious ailments and amulets. It’s very short. The parser lacks almost all conveniences of modern parsers, such as standard actions and abbreviations and robust keyword detection.

The game is short, but has some puzzles I personally found enjoyable, as well as some nice dream/star imagery.

For the IF player used to playing Inform games, I would not recommend this. But as someone who has tinkered around with parser programming, I know how hard this was to make, so the authors did a good job.

I beta tested this game.

Devotionalia is a shortish but replayable fantasy game that is all about atmosphere and contemplation. It is a choice-based game, but not immediately recognizable as Twine, due to the extreme customization: graphics, music, many variants of link types, and more.

The game comes with a helpful instruction page. Essentially, you are a priest of an ancient religion, the gods almost forgotten. You wish to learn from them, and thus you make your devotions.

There's not an action-driven story or a big cast of characters. It's a somber reflection on life. If you've ever seen the painting "The Monk by the Sea" by Caspar David Friedrich, this game is essentially the interactive fiction version of that painting.

Anno 1700 is an ambitious and sprawled-out pirate game involving two timelines, multiple NPCs, and a large map.

As is often the case with Adrift games, the game works well with the walkthrough but has trouble for someone without it. Very specific actions need to be guessed, and actions that seem like they would be easy (such as communicating with your base) cause trouble.

Playing this with the walkthrough, though, was enjoyable.

Edit: Several people pointed out to me that this was written in Adrift, not Quest, and I apologize for the mistake!

This game is listed as educational, but I found it to be amusing and well-written as well.

You play as a character being asked to repair a sort of magical computer, with a crystal ball instead of a screen and an abacus and magic soup as part of the internal units.

The style seems more like old CYOA books, with most paths leading off to death. I think a 'back-up' button or more cluing could make this less frustrating. As it was, I was put off by the frequent deaths and didn't finish the game. But the writing was enjoyable, and the illustrations were very well done.

I bounced off of this game during IFComp. It has white text on a light blue background, and occasionally has combinations even harder to read (like lime green on light blue). Also, it has most of its content locked behind actions that take multiple in-day actions without promise of reward.

But now, going through slowly after the comp, and especially using the walkthrough, this is a great game. Having a real-time pegasus race in the clouds, exploring haunted houses and underground worlds, there's a lot of fun to be had.

It's all disconnected and a bit weird, but that's some of the fun of IF. I just wish there was an option to change the background color.