Reviews by MathBrush

This game was a fun ride. You play as a new villain in a school for villains.

Everything is very self-aware; there are villains from every genre, and you study plot-twists and narrative arcs. Henchmen are trained on how to miss the heroes when shooting, etc.

What I think this game did exceptionally well was balancing your choices: there are 2-3 major things I wanted that I just couldn't do all at once (especially pleasing mom and becoming a monster).

I'm giving it four stars instead of five because I felt like the denouement was a bit rushed and I didn't feel properly satisfied at the end. However, I've had that feeling before with a few Choice of Games games (like The Sea Eternal), and usually I find a more satisfying ending on replay.

This game would make a great introduction to Choice of Games for people new to the company.

Disclaimer: I have worked for Choice of Games and received a free copy of this game.

Edit: Now that I've played through all the choicescript games, this one is high on my list for voice and character. I've bumped it up to 5 stars.

I'm a fan of Anssi Raisanen's games, and this one in particular was interesting, but it lacked a few key features that other games from this author have.

It had one particularly clever puzzle involving an extra image included with the game, one maddening guess-the-verb puzzle, and one short and sweet puzzle. Overall, it was shorter than most Raisanen games, and with somewhat less good implementation.

But if you're playing through the author's whole collection, I wouldn't skip out.

This is an odd little game with some major implementation problems.

You start out in a room with a tree and a mysterious force. Exiting this room proved too difficult for many IFComp reviewers in 2006. Evidently, it requires an action that is explicity denied by the GUI. This seems to be an oversight, and not a puzzle.

The rest of the game involves exploring a series of generic rooms. There is a minimal walkthrough, but it seems to leave out several interesting portions of the game. I was intrigued, but unable to discover more than a few hidden set pieces.

This was one of the few IFComp 2015 games that I never reviewed. On my old laptop, it wouldn't even run; every page of text would be immediately erased.

It works on my new laptop, though. And what an unusual game it is.

It runs in a command-prompt type window, and uses single-letter commands with occasional typing of names and numbers.

It is a surreal game, with huge standing waves surrounding a 25-location town and people getting murdered left and right, each murder announced by red lightning.

A hallucinogenic bunny hops around guiding you.

I've never come close to finding the murderer, but I've discovered many of the game's secrets over my 4 playthroughs. The best involved a tightly-timed sequence at a bar leading to a length CYOA sequence.

This is a game with several flaws, such as the fact that you can't scroll back through text due to it disappearing, and it's incredibly easy to hit a button and miss a whole page of text. There is no save command.

But these flaws enhance it; it makes you approach the game more cautiously. This game is a masterpiece in a way. But it requires length play.

Disclaimer: I write for Choice of Games and received this copy for free.

This game is set in an alternate reality where Robert Fulton had more freedom to work with steam and Napoleon survived long enough for succession to be a question. The game is meticulously researched to be as close to baseline reality as possible.

You play the personal bodyguard and childhood friend of Alexandre Walewski, the illegitimate but favored heir of Napoleon. You deal with court intrigue and assassination attempts as you mold the future of France.

I didn't like the beginning of this game, so much that I set it aside for months. I just didn't find it compelling.

But one of the biggest strengths that Choice of Games has is the length of their games. Once I played a few more chapters, I had spent so much time with these characters that I became emotionally invested. I was very satisfied with my outcomes.

I also enjoyed the chance you had to make major changes in the outcomes of different chapters, and to take charge.

I don't give 5 stars to all choice of games games; this one was, in my mind, special.

ADRIFT usually has the weakest of the popular parsers (Inform, TADS, Quest, etc.), and this game is no exception.

The concept is interesting: you play as a human playing a virtual reality video game after the main game has ended. There are several layers of reality, similar to Wreck-it-Ralph. You play in a single layer, though.

The video game is about giant mechas fighting aliens. The after-the-game playthrough that occupies most of Mishmash is a stealth game using a 'ghost cap'.

I enjoyed the opening scenario, but the game quickly devolved into walkthrough-only territory.

This game is a puzzle game with three difficulties (corresponding to more or less turns) and gender options.

You have to cram through a packed day of tasks to get a game produced.

I worked in the game industry in the early 2000's, and all of this was very familiar. The caffeine-fueled late nights testing bugs, the feuds, the wheeling and dealing, and the shiny, beautiful golden master CD. I was on the outside of it, but it was intense.

This game is really tricky, and not all solutions are coded for, even fairly reasonable ones.

This game also offers unintentional glimpses into game culture, which also ring true in an unpleasant way. The main puzzle involving a woman executive has her being embarrassed to ask you to open a box that she's struggling with. All women are assumed to have long hair, etc. The penknife you have is a Mexican penknife, about which the game says the following:

"* What's up with the "Mexican army knife"?

Again, no politics, I just needed something that could cut twine but still be flimsy enough to break off after one use. Given the comparatively small size and budget of the Mexican army, it seemed like an easy gag. Plus I got to put in a funny line about a hazy trip to Tijuana."

All of these things that I mentioned were fairly innocuous in the game culture when this is written, but don't hold up to modern scrutiny.

This is a surprisingly good Twine game from Spring Thing a few years back. I say surprisingly, because I never hear anyone talk about it.

It uses graphics and background colors to distinguish between two different worlds: one, a porpentine-like world with beings of slime and technology, and the other the human world, where a father is struggling with mental illness.

It has puzzles; at one point, there is a long sequence involving the food chain. I found bits of this fiddly, but interesting enough that I was happy when it was done.

The overall storyline was great, and that's what I like best about games. So I recommend this one.

This game hits up almost all of the classic overused parser game tropes: you are a wizard's apprentice in a fantasy town on a quest to get scrolls of spells by completing complicated fetch quests. The parser is another 'let's insult the PC' parser, and the game has hunger and sleep timers.

This style of game was popular for a time in the 90's (with Unnkulia and Westfront PC), but otherwise has continued to be produced since then on a regular basis.

Why do people still make it (even in 2018, years after this game)? Because it can still be fun, and sometimes overused tropes are overused because they're so good.

But in this case, I mostly felt frustrated. I stopped playing the first time I tried it a year or two ago because it was so frustrating getting killed over and over again in the windmill. This time, I completed the game (by (Spoiler - click to show)Taking several breaks to return the broom early).

I finally completed it now. If you're just hankering for some unforgiving old-school games, try this out. But I prefer some other more recent old-school games, like A Beauty Cold and Austere, or Speculative Fiction, or Scroll Thief, all of which had clever innovations.

This game was influential on my own writing. In this game, you play as a disembodied eyeball which must solve various puzzles on a desk and on a fireplace mantel.

It's creative and its fun. However, I found the interactivity frustrating, and so I never completely engaged with the writing and the concept.