Reviews by MathBrush

WalkthroughComp was done by Emily Short, where she wrote out a telegram of a bizarre walkthrough for a nonexistent game, and then you were to write that game.

This game is one of the biggest responses to that; however, it's too big. The game is full of text dumps, and the environment (inside a VR machine) just veers wildly from genre to genre and location to location.

It must have taken a lot of effort, but it needed more coherence, I think.

Deadline Enchanter was one of my first games I ever played, and still one of my favorites and a strong influence.

This game came before deadline enchanter, but shares its same feeling of utter bizzareness.

You are the ruler(s?) of a kingdom that has been ravaged by a ghost. There is wearable honey/history, and all sorts of other interesting things. I love this little game. It plays on gargoyle.

This game has you pick a text speed, then color.

It has a parser that understands 10 verbs, most of them like save, quit, etc. It uses 'pickup' and 'use' along with directions.

There are 8 rooms in a grid missing its center. Each room has a key. One room has 8 keyholes.

The author claims this was intended as a simple demo.

In this game, you are a 9 yr old turned into a dog.

Much of the game revolves around acquiring coupons for a dog salon, to transform yourself. It uses graphics extensively.

The game would generally be fun, with a tight map and interesting puzzles, but it has so many puzzles requiring waiting for a long time, and it has a lot of underground bad feelings for women, non-white american peoples, and the aged. It also has a direct attack on a former IF author which is essentially vicious.

The Unnkulia games filled the gap between the end of Infocom/Magnetic Scrolls and the beginning of Inform. They were juvenile, focused on 'bro' type humor, misogyny, and underclued puzzles.

This game manages to ampmlify all of that. It suffers from several problems, including an overly large scope. Every location has several paragraphs of text, frequently a whole page. The puzzles use moon-logic where it's very hard to know what will happen next.

This game displays some bold text at the top, and then you pick out keywords from that to type in, which then changes the text.

This is essentially a short twine game years before twine was developed. It has short but intriguing thoughts on the nature of IF games.

In this TADS game, you spend much of the time smoking marijuana and passing it around, before later taking peyote.

The author's note claims the game isn't about getting enlightened for drugs, but it's hard to know what it is about if not that. It definitely seems like a good anti-drug advertisement, given that following the drugs leads you to being a dirty, unwashed bum that children run away from.

Scattered strong profanity, extensive drug use.

This game purports to be an exploration of the Christian faith. You are the son of the centurion who stood on Golgotha, and you are sent on a quest to explore various cities.

In each city, you explore different areas, and see NPCs, but you don't have to do anything.

As you leave each city, you are given a choice of three directions to go in corresponding to 3 beliefs. You have to choose the correct belief to progress.

The game seems to me to be a subtle parody. The graphics are at times ridiculous (the meditating shopkeeper); the character is very excited at how clean the angel is; your character ends up suffering quite a bit, but is grateful that thieves left him his shoes; it all seems a sort of fun-poking 'from the inside' the way that Jacek Pudlo troll RAIF 'from the inside' (where you pretend to be a fan of what you hate, and then say things that other fans are embarrassed by).

This game has you house-sitting for your friend, but problems begin to show up.

It's bold and innovative: there's a responsive cat NPC, there is a system where you read and study books to memorize them, a slick TV hint delivery system, and so on, but it seems like it never got that last month or weeks of polishing that would have pulled it all together. Like Happy Ever After from this comp, this game seems influenced to a degree by Mulldoon Legacy, with a mysterious friend who has left, leaving their house open with a portal in it to a more rustic world.

This game starts with several puzzles involving climbing out from a pile of corpses.

After that, you need to memorialize the dead.

This is certainly an unusual game. It could have been far better if the various puzzles had been better clued, and synonyms for verbs and nouns implemented.