Reviews by MathBrush

This has to be a troll game; Panks admitted before that some of his IFComp games are troll games (such as Ninja II). But if not...

You play as a weakened mythological god, except that that never gets mentioned after the first screen. You can find and kill Jesus. Most of the game is fighting DnD characters. There is a village with a tavern, like most Panks games.

It was interesting, but not his best offering.

This story is actually pretty fun, given how little this is done in IF.

It's a traditional ghost/creepy story with an old abandoned house to search through.

It has numerous bugs, and a huge number of 'guess the verb' problems, but I was glad I played it and enjoyed it overall. I used the walkthrough.

This game is mid-length; it has you play as an assassin infiltrating a house to avenge their daughter's death.

I have to wonder if this is a troll game. It is over-the-top, and includes a random adult scene (in metaphor form), and involves toilets and superglue as weapons of death.

There were several bugs and the writing wasn't especially polished.

This game placed low in IFComp 2016. It is in Inklewriter, a beautiful story-focused engine that is now being discontinued.

Snake's Game has several variants depending on the play through, but most seem to deal with a world where time and space can be warped at will, taking you to hell and a variety of other places.

It's fairly short, and the writing felt unpolished, but the other had a lot of heart, making this game more emotionally powerful than most low-ranking games, to me.

This game casts you as The Packrat, and adventurer who is trying to fight their urges to take anything and everything they can get a hold of.

This is played up for laughs early on, but not so much later.

This game centers around 'guess the author's thoughts'-type puzzles, and as such is very difficult to finish unaided.

A ton of work went into this, but it could have used more polishing.

This is a small chapter book with a story about a cat.

It is well-written, with no typos that I saw. It incorporates animations that respond to screen touches and (I think) accelerometers. It also includes sound.

This type of augmented story is not something that has traditionally been entered into the IFComp, although I could see a day when things become more common. For me, though, I found it uncomplying emotionally, and the interactivity that was available was not exciting.

This is the most-illustrated IFComp game I've played, and one of the least appealing. Your girlfriend broke up with you, and you have to manipulate a dozen or so women into sharing their phone numbers.

The game is deeply misogynistic, and the art is in a style somewhere between simpsons and family guy in style and content.

This game was entered in IFComp 2016, but disappeared shortly thereafter.

However, lglasser recorded multiple playthroughs, which completely shows the gameplay, as it is a disjoint collection of sequences/videos triggered by clicking on labelled items on a screen.

The game is graphics-heavy, with pure white silhouettes against hand-drawn backgrounds. It also comes with music.

After hearing good things about the game, I was surprised how angsty and profanity-laden the game was. There is a whole genre out there of shocking confessions, which isn't my style, but this story is well done in that genre.

This game is strongly (by the author's admission) influenced by porpentine.

It mimics Porpentine's uses of multi-colored links and cycling back to one location, and background music, as well as visceral/gooey scenes and identity horror.

However, it lacks a great deal of porpentine's pacing. Frequently, new text is delayed for several seconds before appearing. There are no consistent 'rules' for how scenes proceed; many threads are introduced that are not resolved.

I found that the game was stronger the longer it went.

In this game, you use a remote control to interact with various tv shows. These include a game show, a survivor-like show, and one I'll leave unmentioned for surprises.

The concept is fun, but the execution combines under-implementation, heavy-handedness, and lampshaded 4th wall breaking that is never resolved as to why it should occur.