Reviews by MathBrush

This is an ADRIFT game from 2008, and like most ADRIFT games (especially from that time), it has quite a few bugs.

It's not terrible; it has some fun moments as you wander around a bizarre, goofy landscape. But eventually, the bugs pile up and it gets too hard to play.

This game has you trying out various products in a puzzly environment. It has a snarky parser that jokes about a corporate environment, uses text pauses extensively, and has you assemble a complicated system.

It's actually pretty interesting, but the implementation has increasingly greater issues, making the latter half impossible to complete.

This is a big game. You have a long, opening sequence (very long!) that is entirely linear, then you begin the actual game, which is one of the best RPGs I've seen in text (Kerkerkruip is the other, and they're roughly equal in quality).

You are on a sort of elevator-like platform, and you ascend from level to level. To ascend requires 3 keys; each level has 8 doors with a variety of challenges. These challenges include trap-filled pathways, combat, mini-games of cards/fantasy chess, and occasionally some bizarre extra paths.

Everything is hyperlinks, making combat much more enjoyable than usual. Magic is simple. There is a complex money system, and most levels let you pick between seeing an armorer or an apothecary.

More than anything, it reminded me of Final Fantasy VII and Conan the Barbarian. The enemies start out as zombies and humanoid fungus, but you eventually find Guards of the Tower, Captains of the Tower, and Swordsmen of the Tower, much like Shinra Tower in FFVII.

I got to the 7th stage, but was unable to defeat the end guardian.

The story and writing is exactly the sort of thing TSR was putting out in the 90's. You're in a sort of dreamworld that is stable, and are hired out as an assassin, with the king as your target. The monsters are generally right out of a D&D handbook. There seems to be some mild racy parts, but my French vocabulary doesn't include that sort of thing, so it's easy to self-censor.

This game has the same sort of superhero tone as the Frenetic Five games. You are a superhero that isn't really that super.

The game had a fun tone, with some fairly silly humor. It's long though, and somewhat buggy. David Whyld's games tend to be fairly similar, so if you like one, you'll like them all-and vice versa.

This game is a short fantasy game set in a castle. I thought it was building up to something bigger, but most of the game is just wandering around equipping yourself.

There were many missing synonyms, and the game implied a robust conversation system that just wasn't there.

It had one fairly funny NPC in the armorer, though.

This shortish TADS game has you framed for murder at a biker bar in Australia.

It uses garish colors and the writing is choppy and strewn with profanities.

It's an on-the-rails mystery that has a good base story but implementation issues.

This short game has you escaping from a prison cell.

The walkthrough encourages you to do some very odd things.

The game is short, mostly about things like finding keys and opening doors.

I think it could have been better without the strange responses.

This game has you enter a series of parallel worlds where darkness is everywhere, and you must attack it with the light.

It seems intentionally to parody things at several points, with gophers as the bad guys and a random plant called Gorarry that is the key to the universe.

I don't see anyone beating this without the walkthrough, but with the walkthrough it has some fun narrative points about player/parser relations.

This game has you waking up in a closet after some drastic event. You need to save yourself and the ship.

This is a homebrew parser, which is fine, but it is also a homebrew parser that tries to implement the trickier parts of parser like conversation, which is not as fine. Simple shortcuts like 'l' and 'i' don't work, either.

It's not too bad, in general, but the parser causes too many problems to ignore.

This game has you wandering around a large map until you reach a manor, where you have to complete several puzzles to convict a rich man of fraud.

Most of the locations are empty, and when they are not empty, they often have strange disambiguation problems. The one NPC is very odd, to say the least.

This game needed a lot more polish.