Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This game has you speak completely in symbols.

You are bird, a child living with a single male named Ty. Ty has problems, and so do you.

You communicate with Ty completely in symbols. What this means in-game is never explained.

This story didn't grab me, but the presentation was slick, and it's a game worth replaying. Sometimes technical stuff is enough to impress me on its own; however, the author has a great knack for characterization as well.

Ojuel is a master of setting, and this is a great game. You play as an former dancer in 1958 in a communist Carribean country. You have to extricate something from a house party, but you don't know what it is.

The game has great storytelling, using flashbacks and conversation to good effect. I see it getting nominated for several XYZZYs.

There were several implementation difficulties, though, because it was sometimes hard to know what verbs to use. A post-comp release that implemented every command response contained in judges' reviews would not take much time, and would add the finishing touches to this already great game.

This was a strange game. It has some great ideas: extricate yourself from a pile of rubble (which reminds me of an old comp game where you start in a pile of dead bodies and have to crawl out). You then explore a small underground complex with a Lovecraftian vibe.

But the game has a lot of implementation problems, leading to numerous judges missing out on big chunks of the game.

I didn't have too much trouble getting out of the pile, like some judges did, but I didn't even so the cabinets or the slicing machine.

Worth trying. I wish it were expanded.