Reviews by MathBrush

I love this game. Travel through the city of Khare using a beautiful 3d map and posable figurine. This city is a den of thieves, traps, liars, sorcerors, the undead, and worse. A stew pot of evil where the weak are mercilessly worn down, you must find a way to leave the city, or to save it.

By far the longest CYOA I have played. Allows unlimited rewinds to undo any number of actions. Innovative combat and gambling systems. Spells that you cast with 3 letter combinations with available letters changing at different locations. God's to serve, people to kill or save.

High fantasy at its best. Very strongly recommended.

It is rare to find a CYOA text game that combines a hundreds of thousands of words, extreme branching, a complex inventory and spell collection, 3d graphics, and orchestral music. The fact that it features a compelling narrative, unique gameplay mechanics, and at least a hundred npcs and monsters just makes it better.

Sorcery! 3 is part 3 in a series, but it is definitely not necessary to play the other games first. In fact, the game is easier if you play it alone.

You are a sorceror, who casts spells by combining lettered stars that differ from location to location. For instance, to command unintelligent creatures, you must stand where the stars allow you to spell L-A-W. Some spells also require certain inventory items, such as a gold-backed mirror.

You also can engage with creatures using a variety of swords and other weapons, as well as gambling with dice. Combat requires strategy, as you want to hit hard when the enemy leaves themselves open without expending your energy.

The game includes both ink illustrations and 3d maps. You move a figurine about a gorgeous 3d map from checkpoint to checkpoint. This could all be handled by hyperlinks, but the movement provides more variety. The game includes special beacons which have a unique mechanic with a gorgeous 3d effect.

You play a sorceror from Analand who must hunt down 7 serpents who seek to expose you to the Archmage, a powerful enemy. The serpents range from the relatively weak to the gut-wrenchig Serpent of Time. Few text game can give you that feeling of total despair that you can have meeting a boss, but this one succeeds.

In your quest, you will meet several sorcerors, magicians, thieves, tribes, and monsters. Conversations are difficult to lawnmower, which is a plus. You can negotiate, threaten, help, and so on.

The game is extremely nonlinear and branches strongly. There is one event at the fissure in the first area that I have tried to recreate over and over again and never succeeded. Whole quests, relationships, even a marriage to an NPC can be skipped or missed. Most serpents can be destroyed in two or more ways.

It took me most of a week playing 2-3 hours a day to beat. I restarted 3 or 4 times once I got a hang of it. There are some basic ideas that if you miss can make the game much more difficult.

I plan on nominating this game for the XYZZY for Best Game of 2015.

Choice of Robots is a game that has received high accolades, such as an XYZZY nomination for Best Game, and very favorable reviews from the general video game community.

I loved it. A very long game, perhaps of novella or screenplay length, and that is just in one playthrough. You can take wildly different paths, from prison to riches to love to all sorts of things. You keep track of 10 relationships, 4 robot stats, personal stats and political stats.

You are a young robot researcher, developing robot technology, and you have the chance to guide the development of robots toward autonomy, acting like humans, giant tank missiles, or advanced surgeons.

The gameplay can either be free-flowing, answering each question as it comes, or you can develop intricate plans to minimax your characters stats.

Well worth the money; this was the first commercial game that I bought since I purchased the complete Infocom collection.

This is just as good as Creatures Such As We and Choice of the Dragon, but longer. The only hiccups I found were inconsistent branches; when someone I married quit my company, the game said I wouldn't see them for a long time, for instance, without mentioning our relationship.

Like So Far, All Hope Abandon, and a large number of other games, Losing Your Grip is a trip through the subconscious.

The game is filled with beautiful and crazy imagery. For instance, the opening scene consists of (Spoiler - click to show)you standing in the mud next to someone buried up to their neck who resignedly chides you.

I tried this game without hints, and it was very hard. I explored every room in the first main area, tried everything I could think of, and I only got 2 points out of 100.

The game was previously shareware (i.e. you got a limited version, then pay for more), but now the author has released it for free (well, over a decade ago). It comes with well-written feelies, and ifdb has a walkthrough or two.

I cannot say how much I enjoyed playing through this game.

First Things First was nominated for an XYZZY award for Best Game, and won Best Puzzles, among others.

In this game that starts out very slowly, you quickly progress to an interesting situation similar to A Mind Forever Voyaging or Lost New York, where you can investigate a mid-size map over 50 years using a time machine. Your actions in certain time periods strongly affect the future in interesting ways.

This is definitely the best long-form time travel I have played, as I felt Lost New York (which explores New York over a century or two) and Time: All Things Come to an End (which explores many epochs in a linear fashion) had relatively unfair puzzles.

IFDB has version 3.0, but the walkthrough is for 1.1, so it didn't work in places. I am a walkthrough junkie, so it was hard for me to beat it, but I was able to guess from the walkthrough what I should try next, and eventually worked my way through it.

The game has good characters, beautiful settings, and a bit of a confused plot, which is natural given the main gameplay mechanic.

For simulation fans, it has an interesting money/bank account/investment system.

Strongly recommended for everyone. (Note: the first area seems incredibly boring, but it gets better and better. I started to like the game as soon as I made it into (Spoiler - click to show)the garage.)

Chancellor is a game that got a bit overlooked in the IFcomp for being long, of moderately hard difficulty, and not having a walkthrough. Later, it got more attention, being nominated for Best Game, Best Story, Best Writing, and Best Individual Puzzle in the XYZZY awards.

You play in two different worlds. The first is a fantasy world, where you must leave your father to undertake a quest. The second is (Spoiler - click to show)the real world, where you are a chancellor (like a resident aide) in an abandoned dormitory.

Both have a grim and brooding atmosphere, but also one of wonder at the world around you. The two worlds are interconnected.

The writing is excellent. The game is excellent. The author has a hints guide up somewhere that got me through a few tricky points, although the guide is very very minimal.

Strongly recommended.

I'll be upfront and say that, by modern standards, I wasn't impressed with the original Ditch Day Drifter. This sequel, however blows my mind.

The introduction is especially good. Reminding me of the hidden temple sequence in Lydia's Heart, you have to race another tech firm to pitch a product to a southeast asian company. You have to deal with both fidgety technology and a decaying factory.

The game then makes a huge transition to Caltech, scene of the original Ditch Day Drifter. As then, you must explore the campus, solving stacks, reading memos, going in the tunnels, going to the store and kitchen.

But boy, the world has changed! Crowds of independent NPCs, immersive room descriptions, real conversations, etc.

The game has a fairly unique premise: your character must learn (or relearn) about physics and engineering to crack the code on a high-tech box. Puzzles are drawn from real-life techniques, and you learn a lot; however, the game is adapted for those with no real-life experience. You convert IP addresses to hex form and back; you learn about quantum coherence and decoherence; you learn how to use network analyzers and even cherry pickers.

I enjoyed the beginning more than the rest of the game, but that's because open nonlinear games often intimidate me.

I recommend this game for everyone. Even if you're not great at IT, like me, the game treats it like any other 'magic system', telling you how to use things. It's fun.

What an enjoyable game! My heart was racing in chapter 12. This is a quite long game set in a world dominated by clockwork; the religion, the city, the people's mindset, everything is based on clockwork (a funny moment was seeing that pagans worshipped non-mechanical timekeeping devices like water clocks or sundials).

You play an assistant clock keeper who must investigate a future robbery. The game is a very long example of what I call the linear thriller type of game. You encounter a more or less linear sequence of challenges where you are given a good amount of hints on what to do, there is always a sense of urgency, and everything you do is the right thing in just the nick of time.

This game is what I wish the illustrated book Hugo had been from its cover; you jump and leap and fall all through a giant clock early on, you use an early calculating machine like a computer, etc.

The writing is as good as Anchorhead, in my mind, and the implementation is smooth. The story wasn't as compelling to me at first, but the last few chapters really got me into it.

The game has probably not received very much attention because it was a commercial game for a while. But everyone should try it now.

Spy Intrigue is not my type of game. But it is an incredible game, which I have played through twice, and is excellently crafted.

It is a game of layers. It literally has two layers of text, interwoven within each other.

It also has two levels of meaning. The top level is just crazy and silly (you very quickly learn that most spies have died of "spy-mumps"). But there is a much deeper subtext in the game, much like another 2015 IFComp entry TOMBS of Reschette. Both games encourage you to look under the standard shoot-kill-loot structure of normal games and see what existence would really be like for protagonist and enemy.

That's probably the deepest contribution of this game: to show the protagonists humanity. The author has succeeded in a very well-crafted game, which I feel should be nominated for several XYZZY awards. She has done an excellent work here.

As I said, this isn't really my type of game; I'm not into profanity or sex, of which the game has it's fair share. But it's certainly never exploitative, and it all makes sense in the context of the game. I will also always fondly remember (early spoiler)(Spoiler - click to show)"OATMEAL TIME."

Future Boy! was a commercial game from 2004. A large game (it took me about 4 and a half hours, using hints 27 times), it has illustrations with gif-like animations for every room and character, as well as voice-acting for all dialogue.

The game is split into two parts, one with the parser, and one with little windows with graphics, usually one for the room itself, one for each character present, one for the compass rose, and one for effects like rain.

The game starts out fairly linearly, with a succession of challenges that set up the story. I found some of the early puzzles fairly difficult, which is unusual for commercial IF. I resorted to the hints as early as the second scenario.

After the first few scenes, the game opens up considerably. It ends up being reminiscent of Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with a cast of crazy characters and a variety of random locations that you can visit.

One of the highlights of the game is an unusually well developed (Spoiler - click to show)computer system. It's like a miniature game within a game, and gave me fond memories of the 90's.

My winning game was ~1500 turns long.

The plot is fairly intricate. Overall, I enjoyed this game. If it were an iPad app, I would price it at around $5-$10.

I came into possession of the game by contacting the creators using the email on the Future Boy! website.