Reviews by MathBrush

This story is fairly linear, more like dynamic fiction than puzzle-based or branching cybertext.

In this game, you read the story of an old witch who, out of loneliness, creates a girl out of turnips.

This game has Megan Stevens' most imaginative writing of her IFComp games, and presents an interesting analogy between the witch/turnip girl and parents/millenials. It's short, and worth reading.

This game is a fairly traditional RPG, where you find better and better weapons/armor and equip them, and gain gold. It's framed as a VR story in a casino to better explain why items disappear in a puff of smoke and why all treasures get converted to their cash values.

I found the game enjoyable, and fairly long, although I bug kept me from going from the novice half to the expert half. I would recommend it for fans of RPGs.

This game is pretty aimless; you are on a bus that runs into something on the street, then you go around the park.

I think this part of what 'slice is life' is defined to be; there are no real goals. You can buy soda, talk to an old man, take Tylenol (which has very different effects than the Tylenol I'm used to. Unless it's Tylenol pm; maybe that makes more sense).

I found two different endings.

This is one of the large puzzle fest games out there in recent years.

You play an adventurer entering a strange castle where all actions are performed by a wand: you set the wand to a color combination, then you go on.

It has a fun feel similar to Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box, by the same author. Slowly, more and more combinations are revealed to you, often allowing you to go back and do things that you've been wanting to do for a while, but were unable to do.

HIghly recommended.

This game is by Luke Jones, who also wrote the interesting Bony King of Nowhere for Spring Thing in 2017.

This game is a treasure hunt puzzle fest type game, but it's kind of spare and with some hard-to-guess puzzles. The puzzles mostly revolve around finding the item or items that will induce NPCs to do things for you.

The game has a large cast of characters, many of which have multiple versions of themselves over 3 time periods. It has also has many rooms over the same time period. But much of it is under implemented. A porter is present in each time period, but has very little description or conversation in any, except for one short paragraph once. However, the author was explicitly inspired by Robin Johnson's minimalist games, so it is likely intentional.

The game has good bones, though, with a pleasant run through campus history and future. If the author switched to Inform 7, like Steph Cherrywell did, and budgeted more time for beta testing and polishing, they could build on the success they already have.

I beta tested this game.

Stephen Granade has written a wonderful game here about an old man coping with dementia.

It makes magnificent use of unreliable narrator to depict the disorientation that dementia causes.

It is a fairly long Twine game, but autosaves, and has a nice feature that tells you how long the game has been playing.

Highly recommended.

This is a very funny, long limited parser game about being a pig. A hero follows you, and believes you to be able to smell a polymorphing wizard. Anything you sniff, he smashes.

The first part of the game plays out in the tradition established by Arthur DiBianca, where a few key verbs are used in unusual ways to accomplish your goals. Later on, the game branches out, allowing you to switch between certain 'tools' to accomplish various goals.

This game is unusual among limited parser games in that it has quite a few large text dumps, often spanning more than a screen on a laptop computer with maximized window. The writing is good, the story is strong, but it can be a bit much, especially on a second playthrough.

This game also touches on several social issues (not least the annoying habit of young men singing Wonderwall).

This game kind of threw me off at first; I used the walkthrough, which seemed super unmotivated, and some large pieces of occasionally-awkward text made me not like it as much.

But then lglasser said she loved it on her twitch stream, as did an Italian IFComp judge, so I gave it another shot, walkthrough-free.

This time around, I liked it. All reasonable commands seemed to be accepted. The game allowed a great deal of flexible exploration and a money system that worked. Exploration was all that was needed to trigger the story, and the hint system was just strong enough to get me through and just vague enough to make it a challenge.

It seemed oddly fixated an alien mating systems, but it was more National Geographic than anything else.

This game attempts quite a bit. You are trying to get into a mysterious club. The game is full of puzzles and many, many red herrings.

There was obviously a lot of thought and effort put in, but it could have used more testing. Fun with a walkthrough.

I had just played Fetter's Grim and Westfall (or Westport or whatever it is), as well as a few other Panks games.

This game has all the usual suspects: a village, a tavern, a cathedral on the west side of town with a nook to the north, jokes about the author being drunk or not being drunk, a hellhound that is in the first dark forest area south of town, etc. exactly what's in all the other games.

It doesn't understand 'X' or 'TAKE' even though other Panks games in the same year do. It's just bizarre.