Reviews by MathBrush

This game has really grown on me. When I first played it, I found the atmosphere a bit depressing and the puzzles underclued. However, after revisiting it, I've realized that this game is a true classic. Especially when compared to other mystery games; this one really stands out.

The writing has a very strong style; for instance, we have the following:

"This room is long and thin, like a jailhouse corridor, from the doorway in the northeast corner to the large bay window opposite which stretches the length of the room, overlooking the street outside. The colours are your eyes on a Sunday; red like blood, red like the leather of the over-stuffed chair, which sits a cheap trophy by the main desk. A bookshelf fills the east wall."

The whole game is filled with a feeling of inevitable loss or failure; not of the game itself, but for life in general.

The puzzles are difficult to figure out. For more casual players like me, I recommend exploring until you feel you've seen everything; trying to solve every puzzle at least once; revisiting it after a day; then using a walkthrough. The ending surprised me twice, and even now, I don't really understand all of its implications. For me, this game only improves more and more with time.

Christminster is set in a British University, where you are looking for your lost brother. You encounter a variety of obstacles and discover various ancient secrets.

This game has a host of well-crafted NPC's, timed events, and other difficult-to-implement concepts. The puzzles are logical, and exploring around for long enough is enough to get many of the puzzles. Several of the NPC's are quite funny, and there is a fun cryptographic puzzle.

Even though this game is well-crafted, it didn't really call out to me at first. I have realized that I am prejudiced against upper-class PC's, and against college-related games. I've had similar issues with Savoir-Faire, Violet, and the Lurking Horror. However, when I finally reached the end of the game with a walkthrough, I really enjoyed it.

This game was one of the most popular games in the mid 90's, along with Curses!, Jigsaw, and Theatre.

I first played All Things Devours 5 years ago as one of my first pieces of interactive fiction, and was very confused and felt it was impossible.

All Things Devours is a time travel game, where you must work together with past or future selfs to navigate several puzzles, subject to certain restrictions.

This game can be solved much more easily if you keep a detailed list of where you are and what you are doing at each turn. That way, you'll know where (or when) to be with other incarnations of yourself.

Fortunately, it's not necessary to jump around too much. A similar game called Fifteen minutes involves 8 or more copies of yourself in the same room, and it gets very tedious by that point.

All Things Devours is a classic.

In this Infocom game, you play PRISM, a sentient computer who has been designed to simulate the future for planning purposes.

This game has no real puzzles until the end. You simply explore. First, you explore your interface, which is very large (having 30+ distinct files you can open). Then you explore the actual simulation, which is a large downtown city, with what felt like 30-50 locations. Once you explore it long enough, the simulation accumulates enough data to simulate another decade into the future.

You must record interesting events and places in the future to bring back for planning purposes. I somehow missed out on a simple mechanic, and got very stalled in the game. (This is not a spoiler, because it is not a puzzle or a surprise, more of a guess-the-verb): To present your recordings, you must tell people "look at recording".

The developer has stated that the game was intended as a criticism of Reagan's policy.

The game is fun. You need to explore; don't just rush through, trying to do what they say. You need to record a lot of each decade to win, so try and get a mental map of the game.

I played this game on the iPad's Lost Treasures of Infocom app, which provides most of Infocom's games (except Nord and Bert, and the already-free Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

I played "So far" years ago, made it to the bird-animal farm, and never got any further. It was just overwhelming. I don't like games that are so extremely open-ended that you have no idea if what you are doing is helpful or game ending. That's not to say that I dislike non-linear games; a lot of non-linear games have items that suggest what you need to do, and then you find a way to do it.

In "So Far", you are utterly clueless most of the time. So I just gave in after a few years, grabbed a walkthrough, and checked out the game. The worlds I found were fascinating and alien, like many of Porpentine's games.

I was surprised that many of the worlds were connected with abstraction and metaphor; the first two worlds put me off by making me think they would all be well-established alien worlds without any explanation.

Having gone through with a walkthrough once, I plan on playing again, relying on my memory of the last attempt but not referring to the walkthrough. Hopefully, this will let me explore more, and have fun with some puzzles whose solution I didn't understand or can't remember.

For those who want a taste of the abstract worlds, there is a world where (Spoiler - click to show)everything is dark and everything is sound.

Sunset over Savannah is a relaxing, enjoyable read. You are a vacationer contemplating quitting their job, and looking for a sign or signs that there is more to life.

The writing is sweet and touching. As someone contemplating a career change, this

The game world is small but packed with interactivity. You can do so many things in every area that it is very surprising. It was fun to just play around.

However, this world's interactivity means that it is hard to know what to do with some puzzles. It can be figured out with persistence and logic, but the game is so fun to explore and the text is so fun to read that it felt like a shame to turn off my "reading" brain and turn on my "puzzle" brain. I ended up using a walkthrough, and loved what I found. Will probably play again to read it all again.

The author of "Worlds Apart" cites this as one of her favorite games, which led me to it.

There is an old story about a man who dreamed of a giant statue with feet made of clay mingled with iron, symbolizing strength mixed with weakness. This game really made me think of that image.

First, the iron: It is a mid-length game with three large portions to explore (though you can always return to a previous area). The implementation is good, and the story is pretty fun; I was excited when I first began to plan because I enjoy a good action game.

The puzzles seem overwhelming at first, but experimentation soon shows that the gameworld is more limited than it seems, which makes it easier to solve the puzzles.

The puzzles include a variety that I have never really seen in other games, especially in the introductory section.

Second, the clay: The game falls short in several areas. One is in length and size; the game feels unnecessarily small in the last two big areas. You almost expect an area about the size of Babel, but you end up with something a lot smaller.

As others have noted, the NPC implementation feels sparse after playing more modern games. Compared to Infocom games, this game does pretty good; however, having a travelling companion that has about one line for every 50-100 moves gets discouraging after a while.

I was stuck near the end, and used the walkthrough to make sure I had done everything up to that point, but somehow couldn't trigger a cutscene. I had to manually enter the walkthrough using the @ sign to get to the ending, which may have soured my reaction.

Thus, overall, I can only partially recommend this game. The first half made me ready to recommend this is another great hidden treasure, but the second half left me wondering.

Savoir-Faire is a longish game set in an alternate-world version of France. The game prominently features a magic system involving linking items together so that they share certain properties.

The puzzles are brilliant and the game is well-implemented. You can experiment to your hearts content, and most reasonable solutions to problems work. The writing is excellent, and the storyline well-thought out.

I finished the game years ago. Every time I try to replay it though, I lose interest. Why would anyone lose interest in such a technical marvel? Because I really don't care about the PC's situation. He's a wishy-washy wimp; he can't decide if he's investigating his adoptive family's disappearance or looting their house; he can't decide if he's a rake with a million love interests or a romantic with one woman at heart; he can't decide if he's a member of the royalty-hating lower class or a priviliged upper-class man; and he can't decide if he's starving or picky.

Short hasn't written him poorly; she's just very accurately portrayed a disagreeable man. I wish I could have him slap himself, remove his silly white feather, and tell him to just eat the andouilletes plain or stop whining. I don't care about finishing the game because I don't want to go through all that trouble just so his aristocratic palate won't have to endure stale bread and unseasoned lentils. The ending helps a bit, but it is too little, too late. If he really cared about his family, why is he stealing everything?

Others may not have the same reaction.

Edit: I recently replayed it during a long fight, after having replayed a lot of other highly rated games in a row. It really stood out with its craftmanship, so I'm revising its rating to 5 stars instead of the 4 I had before.

"Theatre" was developed after "Curses" and before "Anchorhead", and has many elements in common with both of these games, including some shared puzzles. It is a large, sprawling game, with many puzzles in the find-an-object-use-an-object category.

I found it slightly easier and slightly smaller than the other two games, but it may have just felt smaller because I always felt drawn forward to complete the game. A series of lost journal pages for collection provide a fascinating backstory.

As others have said, the writing feels a little off at times; however, the game gave me quite a few genuinely creepy moments during exploration, similar to the famous (Spoiler - click to show) "you forgot to close the front door" moment in Anchorhead. The game was strangely compelling despite the weaker writing.

As I said, the puzzles are slightly easier than many similar games. I also noticed that the author favored certain puzzles; for instance, there were at least five puzzles where the solution involved (Spoiler - click to show)pushing or moving a large object around.

A couple of times in the game, I thought I had put myself in an unwinnable situation by entering an area without some object I needed to get out. However, I found I was wrong. I don't think there is really any way to lock yourself out of winning, except by using one-use items when you shouldn't (when you have used a one-use item correctly, it will be obvious).

A couple of things, I wasn't quite sure what they did: (Spoiler - click to show)turning the switch in the electrical panel, and wearing the amulet. Also, as other reviewers noted, there were quite a few plot points never resolved.
However, I didn't feel cheated.

The one star off is for the lack of polish and the plotholes. Overall, though this is one of the most enjoyable games I have every played (for reference, the other games I've most enjoyed are Curses, Anchorhead, and Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina). I anticipate playing through it again several times in the future.

(I added the star back later)

There are at least three camps in the IF world: those who hate using hints; those who rely strongly on walkthroughs; and (the largest group) those who like to play as long as possible without getting hints, and then use just enough to get them through.

This game appeals to all three groups; on one hand, the game world is fairly open and completely forgiving, allowing explorers to try other areas when they are stuck on a given puzzle.

On the other hand, the hint system is embodied in a large group of NPCs with fun personalities. Even better, some of the hints are wrong, as the NPCs have imperfect knowledge of the world.

The gameplay is most similar to Heroes, with a magic system and a lot of find-item-use-item puzzles.

The one annoying part was having to repeat the same basic commands over and over again. The "record" command is very helpful, although I won without it.

Unlike many similar games, the endgame was very rewarding.