Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game feels just like all of the 60's scifi stories I read growing up, in a good way.

You play as a young child on a lonely outpost in the sea during a war between Earth and Mars. Alone for the day, you get to use your imagination around the island, until events take a sudden turn.

The multiple viewpoints reminded me favorably of Rover's Day Out and Delphina's House.

There were a few parts where the interactivity just didn't do it for me, which is why I deducted one star.

This game has numerous issues, and is best played with a walkthrough.

With a walkthrough, it can be pretty fun. It does include steps like waiting 19 times in a row, with each Z producing a text dump.

The reason it can be fun is that its story, which has early hints about employees not being all the way there and oddly intelligent robotic devices, is compelling in the large scale.

Worth trying if you like to skim read and don't mind walkthroughs.

This game casts you as a demon in the bureaucracy of hell. You decide to make a break for it and get out.

This game has several NPCs, most of whom respond to just a few topics/activities. It has well-coded puzzles involving searching and manipulation.

But much of it just feels underclued, especially the second half of the game. This makes it somewhat difficult to finish.

This game has you sent on a quest to collect parts to make a magic item, escape from a jail cell, search a dungeon, and has both a classic logic puzzle and a collection of riddles.

I didn't really like it at first, and played through with the walkthrough the whole way. Along the way, though, I began to like it more. The descriptions can be fun and interesting, though unpolished. The story has some fairly large plotholes, but I feel like the game was close to being complete, fun, and bug free, if the author had had more time.

Saving John is a Twine 1 game with the standard CSS and formatting. In it, you find yourself in a dangerous situation and have the opportunity to construct a backstory for what happened.

The backstories involves jealousy, betrayal, love, profanity, and so on. The game is fairly short, but can be replayed several times.

The writing was descriptive, and the interactivity worked, but the story just didn't click with me, and It didn't feel all the way polished.

This game by a good author (see 'Delusions') reminds me a bit of Gris et Jaune by Jason Devlin, another talented author. Both games have very strong openings that hint at a great game full of polish.

However, both were not completely finished/polished in time for the competitions they were entered in. This game, in particular, falls flat in the most exciting part: the actual game simulation. You play as Mario, and you have to jump with timed Glulx effects, but it just doesn't work out, and later levels are, I believe, unfinished.

This game seems to almost certainly have been written by a talented but inexperienced teenager who had a great idea for a game but fell down in the execution.

This is a mobster story, with gunfights, methlabs, explosions, burning buildings, etc. But everything is disjointed; creative scenes are established, but not connected to each other. No one seemed to notice horrible deaths or accidents that had occurred minutes earlier, and massive plotholes come and go without comment.

It was an entertaining read, though, with the walkthrough.

This game has you waking up in a club, needing to go around solving a number of unclued and unmotivated puzzles, some of which are unfinishable due to bugs.

It implements a number of complicated things, including a car with ignition, an apartment intercom, a hose that needs to be taken/dropped and turned off/on, a sink to wash dishes in. Unfortunately, all the least interesting things are the things that are implemented in the most detail.

This is a Zorkian game that has you travelling to Viking times to search for various items in order to join a society of time travellers.

The score is lower than the work going into the game deserves; but according to my system, it is fairly unpolished, the rooms aren't descriptive, it didn't inspire any strong emotions, and the interactivity was frustrating.

But in general, this is an inoffensive game, wandering around a large landscape looking for treasures. Includes a light puzzle.

This game was created in 2012, and uploaded recently by someone besides Porpentine. It was created at least as early as March of that year, since it's mentioned in an AdventureCow forum.

It is the shortest of the early experiments (which include Myriad and a few others). However, it contains a lot of Porpentine's signature style, including body transformation and horror, protagonists which evoke multiple emotions simultaneously, and surrealism.

This is not the kind of game I imagine Porpentine would release today, but it's interesting as a historical insight.