Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game had a really promising opening. You board a cruise ship, and you are unguided; you wander into a gift shop, and can buy many things, there is a 4-day schedule, meals are offered throughout the day, etc.

And then BAM, it becomes a completely unoriginal text adventure where you have to solve unmotivated puzzles to find crystals to defeat a wizard. Why? It was so promising...

I like the atmosphere in this game. You're in a town on the Gulf Coast, exploring a town and an old wharf.

The game isn't large, so it doesn't take too long to finish. But it could be much better-clued. Without clues, this game is like playing monopoly for the first time without instructions.

There was one action required at the end that I found unusually gruesome, but somewhat logical in hindsight.

This game is the first Quest game ever entered into IFComp.

You wandering in the first to give a flower to a girl. Then more stuff happens. It is really a teenagerish game (male, specifically), from the plotline to the poor spelling and bugginess.

At least the author was bold by going out on a limb, entering the first Quest game ever.

This game uses the Adrift parser, which is inherently problematic.

It is a sequence of small rooms with really unclear puzzles, including a sound puzzle. The puzzles are really irritating.

However, this game did not come last in the competition. It's possible that hardcore puzzle fans may enjoy this game.

In this game, a female college friend gives you (a male) a disk of Advent 550 to help you over the blues.

You end up playing the game, and falling asleep with your friend on the couch. You have a trippy dream involving will crowther.

The Adrift parser isn't that great (I used 3.90), but the game pulled some clever tricks for the game-within-a-game. I actually enjoyed this, but I had to put it in the Adrift Generator to find all the necessary tasks.

This is a game with a big map but only 2 or 3 puzzles. You explore a creepy house (with some timed text effects at the beginning, creepy music/sound effects, and a popup image in the middle that's not supposed to be scary).

I ran this on Adrift 3.9. Like all adrift games, it has major problems. This game also has big text dumps.

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.