Reviews by MathBrush

This game showcase a new parser, which usually makes me skeptical.

But I was very impressed with this IntFicPy game.

Pros of the engine: Smoothness! It looked fabulous, typing in and scrolling up and down felt natural and very nice, saving and loading was easy. Different text colors worked well, timers, changing room descriptions, conversation was implemented. Many of the hard problems were dealt with well.

Cons of the engine: Could do with some better synonym handling, and especially pronouns (IT, SHE, HER, etc.) It felt sometimes like it was just reading a part of my command and not all of it.

Game wise, I love the worldbuilding here. Not such a huge fan of timers, but it seems forgiving until the endgame. I did well in the first part and then hit a big bump sending me straight to the walkthrough for the rest of the game (finding money was the bump, I think, and I could have solved that, but then the commands I saw seemed intimidating).

You play as a newcomer to a dangerous magical island where the Storm kills all who dare approach, except for you. You go about the island seeking to repair your boat and discovering a village with a large religion.

A good showcase for the new engine. Online play would be a huge boon, though.

I played this game through to a death after about 30 minutes.

You play a man who has recently moved to a small town with wells, town doctors, taverns, etc.

The interface is wild. On the left is an illustrated book, with lines in slow typewriter text appearing as you make choices. You have three categories of 'inventory': thoughts, places, and things. These appear in the lower right.

The upper right contains the contents of your current location.

Actions are done by dragging inventory onto each other.

It's a good mechanic. It's slow, though, as is the typewriter text. And the game is long. And I couldn't find any way to save, and there are insta-deaths.

So I'm going to keep my rating and review as it is and maybe one day revisit this game. A save feature would help a lot!

I rated this game on the following criteria, one star for each:

Descriptiveness: This game is descriptive. You play a man mourning his brothers death. A bizarre occurrence happens, and you must recover your five chess pieces from a forest full of wizards, dwarves, beasts, and magic.

Polish: This game is not polished. Many synonyms are not implemented and the game doesn't recognize reasonable solutions. I even received the extremely rare 'something dramatic has happened' inform library message (not necessarily a bug, but requires a bizarre combination of circumstances).

Emotional impact: The frequent praying was interesting, but praying for points seems kind of hypocritical. The dwarf seemed kind of like a bad caricature of a dumb Scottish person. Big, emotional moments were compressed over too short a time span (a problem I had in my first published game).

Interactivity: So many commands just didn't work. There were multiple devices that 'revealed' things, and it was very frustrating trying to figure out if, when one failed, it was a bug or intentional. I didn't even know I could reenter my cabin until I read a transcript. Very buggy.

Would I play again?: I would not. Parts of this game were charming, but I believe it's too buggy right now.

(Thanks to stian on intfiction for posting a transcript! Extremely helpful!)

Luke Jones has released many games, and has a definite style. His games are whimsical, kind of roguish (with a foul-mouthed pigeon), sprawling, with a big cast of NPCs.

They are also a bit spare. When he started with Quest games, they were above average for Quest games in terms of implementation. Inform games (which this one is) generally have room for smoother programming, and this game could use a litte bit of polish, both in synonyms and in typos (especially the problems with stray punctuation that inform has).

This is a sequel to The Bony King of Nowhere, featuring the same map, just a few years older. I played with the walkthrough, as some puzzles I had great difficulty in guessing.

My favorite part about the game is the frank and friendly NPCs, like Donella or the Wizard of Ounces (Oz). I also liked the tie-in with other games by this author.

So, a few things about this game. First, it's by an author whose work I love, Hanon Ondricek. On the author hand, it's an erotic hand. On another other hand, it has a 'tame setting'.

But this is perhaps the least tame 'tame' setting I've seen. The author is just bursting at the chance for you to sample some of his erotic writings.

Case in point: the whole point of the game is to interview four sex robots and ask them a series of 7 questions to help determine the cause of a murder. But the robots get bored, and you have to do other things to get them to respond. Eventually the only options, even in the clean mode, are sexual. The pictures correspond to the hardcore version, no matter what you pick. Your character still has erotic encounters with bots at the factory.

Well, in any case, this sort of thing in a game comes along with a feeling of shame, which is not what I'm looking for in a game.

Okay, that out of the way, this has some interesting things going on with it. Like Howling Dogs, it has a day/night cycle in a grey cube in a futuristic setting. There's really a sandbox feeling, as you can choose to go to work or not, spend money on things you like, configure your room with different virtual reality setting, sleep in the mimddle of the day, etc.

It can all get overwhelming. I reached a first ending on accident, and my next one implied I had missed a huge portion of the game ((Spoiler - click to show)involving accessing robot memory in-game). I'd replay, if not for the issues mentioned above.

The game is very polished. It is descriptive...perhaps too descriptive, lol. It certainly filled me with emotions, not all pleasant. And the interactivity, once I worked it out, was really intriguing. But I don't plan on playing again!

This is a lengthy game that has you surviving a fall in a dream, and wandering around the dream landscape.

I love the whimsical setting here, and its very imaginative, especially the whole cloth situation in the market.

The game uses dream logic, though, and I soon turned to the walkthrough and became baffled by the suggested actions. Errors litter the game as well, such as the game saying you have a smock when you don't get it later.

This is a game that needs more polish. Having experienced beta testers run through it over a few months would have helped a lot.

Homebrew parser games are notoriously difficult to get right. Most are frankly bad, with poor parsing and tiny games.

Bradford Mansion is one of the better downloadable, executable homebrew parser games I've seen. Sensible floor layout, puzzles tied by common themes, most puzzles relying on simple verbs.

But the parser isn't completely up to the challenge. There are small inconveniences (like L not being recognized as LOOK), but larger ones as well. A few key puzzles require extremely precise commands, with anything just a tiny bit off being unrecognized. This makes the game extremely difficult to solve without the walkthrough.

It has some tricky combinatorics/code puzzles, which are not completely covered in the walkthrough (being part of a hidden track). A plus for the puzzle fiends out there!

This game was actually pretty good. You are on a different planet, but in a very grungy-noir city. I didn't think of it at the time, but the aliens take the place of non-white races or transgender individuals or any other minority you want to think of.

A murder has occurred, and soon enough the mysterious artifact known as the Myothian Falcon (a direct nod to the Maltese Falcon) shows up missing as well.

Two things make this game problematic: guessing conversation topics (often impossible feeling!) and a few bugs. I asked out an encryptionist on a date, didn't do so hot, was told not to bother again, but when I talked to her, she acted like she was still on the date.

Beating without restarting or using a walkthrough seemed impossible for me, but otherwise this was a great game.

This game is so similar to other games that I kept having deja vu. Games where a master wizard gives you tasks are very old and very common. It reminds me of Berrost's Challenge, Risorgimento Represso, the Erudition Chamber, Junior Arithmancer (althugh the twist makes that one amazing), the Enchanter series, etc.

This game doesn't really bring anything new.

I wouldn't usually give 1 star to this game, however, I found it not very descriptive, with a bit wonky interaction via the puzzles, not emotionally touching, and not a game I'm interested in replaying. These are 4 of the 5 stars in my rating scale.

The biggest achievement of this game is an impeccable rope. Emily Short once described the challenges of programming rope:

"This is one of those things that has received so much attention that it almost seems pointless to recount the variety of the challenges associated therewith. First of all, a rope has two ends, so you have to remember the state of each (and disambiguate between the player's references to them, of course.) Then there's marking what the rope can be tied to; the possibility of cutting the rope in the middle, making multiple ropes of new lengths; the problem of using the rope as a fuse, of tying it to something in one room and then carrying the other end, of tying the ends together, etc., etc., etc. Ultimately I think the very trickiest part of all this is the disambiguation problem, ie, figuring out exactly what the player means when he says >TIE ROPE TO X (which end? Do we untie something that's already tied, if both ends are in use?) But it's all pretty grotesque, frankly."

All of this is handled in this game except for fire.

Basically, you wake up for an exam in a simulated world, but everything is strange. You have to enter a robot's body and do some odd IP-address voodoo to fix everything.

This involves finding cables, which you can combine or cut, and which trail from room to room.

There is a secret path (kicked off by (Spoiler - click to show)looking at yourself). Fun game!

I just felt a bit of an emotional barrier between me and the game, which makes sense, as you are a robot.