Reviews by MathBrush

There should be a name for the genre of 'biting commentary on society that is self-aware and occasionally dips to crudity, with hints of cheerful ideals always tinged by irony, using an overload of text as literary device.' Such games include Spy Intrigue and Dr. Sourpuss Is Not A Choice-Based Game. It seems increasingly common.

Charlie the Robot is gorgeous visually, and is innovative in its sheer variety of input methods and looks. There are 5 chapters accessible at any time, like Birdland.

The themes include surface themes of humans vs. robots, a lower layer of the mindlessness of modern office life, a lower layer of individualism, and so on.

But it was just too much filler for me to enjoy. The packing on and on and on of text is a literary device that doesn't work for me. I appreciate the themes in the game, and its cleverness, but the overall feel is just overwhelming.

This game is centered around a spy drama, like the Bond movies. It is translated, with several errors.

The main characters is a chauvinist, who 'negs' women and is over macho. That really turned me off.

It does have a clever plot, involving a conspiracy (led by you) to manipulate the world.

This is one of my favorite Andrew Schultz games. It has you in a world where pseudoscience is real and real science is pseudoscience.

You play on a giant colored cube, and have to manipulate some transponders using a mood ring.

There's a second puzzle later that I did have trouble with, but overall, I liked the concept, and the game.

This game strongly reminds me of Owlor's pony-based games, even though the game never says that the protagonists are ponies (or humans, for that matter).

Your sister has sent a curse at you, and you have to cancel it out somehow. This is a navigation-based Twine game, and you have an inventory of sorts (you can pick different birds to follow you, and so on).

This game was pretty enjoyable; I would give it 4 stars, but it has some glaring errors, like Twine 'if' errors that post big messages on pages that occur in every playthrough. If those were fixed up, I'd bump up the score.

This game is one that I changed my opinion of over time. When I first played it, I skimmed it quickly, and I sort of dismissed it. I liked the sentence-shortening puzzles, but the text was confusing.

After reading several good reviews over the course of the competition, I'll admit, I revised my opinion due to popular opinion. In this case, I went through, and re-examined the writing, and I realized that it was a good depiction of a character that I disliked, rather than dislikable writing about a bland character as I had initially assumed.

For me, this places the game in the same category as Savoir-Faire, which had a similar roguish protagonist.

This is a high quality game; I'm giving it 3 stars only because I didn't connect on an emotional level. I feel like others will enjoy it even more than I did.

I beta tested this game.

This game has a utilitarian interface, but don't let that fool you: this is a seriously great game.

Your magical witch house is broken, and you need to fix it. You have an inventory (even though it's web based), and you have the power to alter the elements of various inventory elements.

It has a cheerful backstory. Different items you carry interact with each other.

The various interactions are fiddly sometimes, and perhaps even unfair; but somehow everything gelled for me in a great way. Not everyone may feel the same.

In 2006, Theo Koutz entered an IFComp game called Sisyphus, where you roll a stone up a hill and it rolls down again. It was a troll game that was smooth and polished.

This is essentially the same game, but with shiny new polish. You have to open some doors, but you can't. Replaying this, though, I found that I actually enjoyed the writing, perhaps more than any other game in the comp.

So this was pretty fun, despite the author's intentions.

I beta tested this game.

This is a unity/Ink game which takes place over several weeks in an apartment as the main character deals with life and with dreams.

Most of the choices are about how you interact with others and your view on life. The story is very malleable; your choices have strong effects on the outcome.

It turns out that the story is based on (and is an implementation of)(Spoiler - click to show)a personality test. Finding this out tied the whole game together for me. But I felt disconnected during the game, and I wish I had more idea of where my choices would take me.

I beta tested this game, and it was my personal choice for winner of IFComp 2017.

It is a grotesque game; you are a child granted a bottomless pit by a magical character in a fairy tale. You are imprisoned in a dungeon where countless other children have met gruesome deaths.

The game revolves completely around eating, with eating the only real action. Like DiBianca's Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box, where USE was the only verb, the puzzles in this game revolves around timing and sequence.

I found this game satisfying, and have played it 6 or 7 times.

Escape from Terra is huge, with 3 or 4 or 5 acts, each act as large and complicated as an IFComp game.

You can pick from two different characters, including one who is deaf. You have to use weapons to battle your way to a safe space, before being take to outer space.

In outer space, you have to interact romantically with aliens, change bodies, use strange plants, etc. with many NPCs and companions.

It's also impossibly buggy. The walkthrough frequently doesn't work, and anything off the walkthrough doesn't work at all.