Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This is a shortish Twine game entered into the 2017 IFComp.

It consists of free verse, sometimes with poetic styling, and sometimes in a more conversational tone.

There is some profanity, in a sort of navel-gazing self-aware way. In general, I liked the poetry, though, and found it enjoyable even on a second or third read.

I beta tested this game, and I found it very funny.

Mike Sousa has written many past IF games, and the polish of this game is testament to his experience.

This game is tied together by various real-life newspaper headlines. You are having a pretty crazy day, and you hop from sequence to sequence trying to deal with mistaken identities and rogue celebrities.

There isn't a lot of direct interactivity in the traditional sense, but there's a lot of room to play around in each scene, with plenty of coded actions.

I helped to beta test this game, which is one of the three Qiaobook translation entries.

In this game, you play as a young man who wakes up in bed with a dead body.

You have to play through a few times to identify the killer.

The game is developed with background images and sound.

I like the general 'find the killer' concept, but I found it difficult to wait for the typewritten text.

This is a game with a brilliant premise; you are some sort of alien being charged with protecting a young girl.

You have visions of the future, showing you that seven enemies will come and attack her.

You can do various things to improve her chances of survival, with each thing you do providing you with a new vision.

This was very successful in general, but I found it fiddly in two areas. First, some things weren't implemented; for instance, the first thing you learn about Kayla is that she has pulled-back hair and a simple dress. But if you try to examine either one, there is an error.

Second, the game essentially becomes a hidden-object puzzle. You have to scour descriptions for nouns, examine each noun, and hope that you find the right thing. Some solutions that seem like they should work, don't; like finding alternate things for burning/clogging, etc.

But I still enjoyed this game a lot. It has a nice map.