Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game is, it seems, written in Esperanto. I thought it was Portuguese at first, but the game itself corrected me.

You are Alice, and, I believe, you are headed to an Esperanto-speaking conference, where you meet someone who tells you about Esperanto. I learned that Esperanto has between 100,000 and 1,000,000 speakers. Given that the number of Twine fans is probably somewhere in that range, too, and the intersection is fairly low, I don't think many people will be able to complete this game.

I only got through the first third of the first chapter. Looking through the code, it seems like there is a compelling fantasy element in the middle.

This is an intriguing game, and a great amount of work.

Cryptozookeeper is an XYZZY Award winner, and is one of the biggest games out there in terms of content, especially in terms of NPC content.

You play as a character who is sucked into a world where you can blend together DNA and create new monsters, who then fight each other in a pokemon-like system.

The system takes center stage story-wise, but not mechanically. The game is structured in a series of 'episodes', each of which results in new DNA for your devices.

The game has a ton of characters, many of whom constantly follow you around and talk and joke.

The implementation is selective; some parts are extremely detailed, while many synonyms and scenery descriptions are omitted.

This game is truly monumental. It also has a great deal of profanity and suggestive language.

I swear this game was different the first time I played it. In any case, what it is now is a living dungeon Twine game; you are a living dungeon, and adventurers come in in a cycle. You choose from a menu of 3 randomly generated options until either the adventurer dies, or succeeds.

I thought it was clever, and the graphic was helpful. But I felt like it could be further developed.

Arthur DiBianca has made several popular limited parser games, including Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box, Inside the Facility and The Wand.

Excelsior was their first attempt, and its player respons/reviews influenced the later games.

Excelsior restricts all action verbs to movement and 'USE'. Your goal is to reach the top of a tall tower.

I thought I had played through this whole game before, but I played through with the walkthrough, and I was surprised at how much there was. I think this game does not measure up to DiBianca's later games, as there is a great deal of "something changes somewhere that you can't see" devices here, that makes the game very complicated.

This is a mid-length IFComp game from 2006. It's a surreal afterlife/coma type game where you've been in a car crash and must travel through your mind to escape back to reality, hopefully with your wife.

It has a maze of rooms, inaccessible at first due to the fact that doors and archways are placed on ceilings and high walls, willy-nilly. You eventually learn to control the maze.

Much of the game revolves around smells. There is a Nim game and also a difficult cryptographic puzzle. I found it under-clued and somewhat unfair.

This game has all the usual Panks trappings:

inn - check
Jesus as a combatable NPC - check
hellhound - check
automated randomized combat - check

This game adds some of the Japanese atmosphere of the Ninja games to the mix. But overall, it's more of the same.

I have to give a caveat about my score first; I think this game is really around a 5 out of 10 on the IFComp scale; it's short, silly, self-conscious. But, it satisfies all of my 5 star criteria:

1. Polished: I didn't encounter any errors, and the writing was consistent, and even the plain twine styling seemed to fit the story.
2. Descriptive: The game has a nice voice and inventive language (I chuckled at the word turdburglar, especially because I misread it at first).
3. Interactivity: The game presented me with exactly the kind of options I wanted at several points in the game. It was actually very effective at presenting options that made me go 'Yes! This is exactly what I want to do'.
4. Emotion. I smiled a lot.
5. Would I play it again? Yes, I'm interested in exploring the mechanics.

So this is technically a 5, but on the 'how much will the average IF player like it' scale, I'd give it a 2-3.

This game has a great premise: you are a trolley driver on a monotonous route who has a plan which is only slowly revealed to the player.

This has all sorts of potential, and the game throws in some interesting characters and narrative twists.

But it has two main issues: one is a lack of synonyms and other implementation errors; and the other is a lack of in-game guidance.

Other than that, I found it a pleasant game, with a surprising ending.

This quest game has refreshingly original storybuilding. It includes a big pamphlet you can read which does a good job of displaying a 'descent into madness', although I think it could have done better if it left a bit more mystery in the last few pages.

The game has a layout (story-wise) similar to Karella's earlier Night House. You are alone in a building, and something is outside, and you have to figure out what it wants.

I was unable to complete this during Ectocomp. Afterwards, some people commented on intfiction with the solution.

Overall, this was a positive experience once I knew what to do.

Some people really enjoy difficult puzzle games, like Fish! or Praser 5 or System's Twilight.

This is the first time I've seen such a game done well in Twine. It is very hard; it has been given a 'nasty' forgiveness rating by the author, and that is completely appropriate.

There are frequent deaths and ways to lock yourself out of victory, but there is a multi-save feature which helps.

The first part of the game is an escape the room puzzle. I thought it itself was one of the hardest twine puzzle I had seen, and I thought it was the whole game, and a longish one at that. Once I escaped, I realized the main game was much, much, much bigger. In fact, the next area was huge, and I thought that was the whole game, and then it opened up into the real game! And there's an epilogue about as long as the first complex.

I couldn't finish, even looking at the source code. This is unfair, difficult, and crazy, so if you're in the mood for something like that, you've found it.