Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This game was coded in 2.5 days by a first time author with one beta tester. It requires what is generally an annoying way of interacting with a game. By all standards, it should be a fairly horrible game.

But it placed 19th out of 35, and wasn't really that bad. I like fairly campy, psychological horror, and this game provides it. It had great descriptions, and spookily changing descriptions.

This is a very short game. I liked it, in the end.

This game casts you as a werewolf agent for a large group of werewolves. You have to travel to a snow-covered Chinese village to investigate its destruction.

The story and setting are actually pretty good, and I liked this game. Where it falls down is in presenting information to the player; nowhere, even in the extensive menu system, are you told how to transform between human and wolf. Conversation topics have to be guessed to proceed with little in-game explanation.

Fun mid-length game to take for a spin. Nice use of different senses in descriptions.

This game is big, and full of little easter eggs. It's one of those games that is created with love and creative, but seemingly based on things in the author's life and somewhat underclued.

Typical puzzles in this game include finding keys and operating semi-complicated machinery.

This game casts you as the vampire Martin Voigt, travelling through a hellish landscape to retrieve three talismans of power and find the three priestesses who can help him.

The setting is imaginative and well-defined. Generally, each room contains a challenge, which at first can be solved with a basic power, and later requires you to fetch items from the other parts of the (small) map.

It was a bit gorey and not for young children. Some of the interactivity was off, in the sense that actions were underclued. But the overall level of polish was high.