Reviews by MathBrush

In this AGT game (a parser that I find better than ADRIFT but not as good as Inform or TADS), you have to navigate an enemy stronghold using different cubes of software and slabs and pills.

It's not very polished at all, and the parser has some troubles, and the story has gaping plotholes (it's super easy to walk into enemy barracks and take things from soldiers). But it has a charm to it, and the story seems really deeply thought out; the author says they invented the world in their youth.

You've crashed your car in a small town, and you have to find your way out.

This game plays on a 3x3 city grid that is minimally described (more areas open up later).

Everything is minimally described. 'There is a swimming pool here. It sparkles' and stuff like that. I had a game-stopping bug early on in Gargoyle, but it looks like others found many bugs as well. Scenery is undersdescribed, and the ADRIFT parser makes playing harder than it should.

In this game, you are marooned on a small island, and you have to get off.

Like most adrift games, the parser is poor and has disambiguation trouble.

The game has a lot of under-described locations. And there is really no hint on what you are supposed to be doing. Also the walkthrough says to take tires, but the game says they are too heavy.

Overall, this seems like a really ambitious game with moving NPCs and fire simulation, but it was probably too big to polish up in time for the comp.

I was excited to finally play the first John Evans game, as he had become a legend in my mind from his other games.

John Evans is known for entering massive, extremely bold games into the comp that are just not finished. Games where you create the world, or where you can do anything you want, that kind of thing.

Castle Amnos is actually relatively tame and finished compared to the later games. There is a castle with five floors, reachable by an elevator whose buttons seem to work randomly. I was able to learn a variety of spells. It seems the game is mostly unfinishable, but the textdump showed me the ending.

Overall, it was fairly fun.

This is a completely freeform game. The computer gives you commands, which you respond to. It asks for items in the room, and then will try to TAKE or BREAK them, etc., as well as asking for exits and having you move around.

It was a lot of fun, but only for a short time.

This game is a short, linear story in a windows executable file where you mostly just click 'next' over and over again, with one or two choices you can make.

It's about a young boy who is being sent to juvenile detention after killing someone. It is very short.

It is in an RPG engine with hit points and so on. The author has the hit points represent ages.

This is a very touching game, whose ending gave me shivers.

You play a variety of characters, many of whom are (I believe) Canadians sent to fight in WWI.

The game jumps from character to character and situation to situation in an interesting way, likely influenced by the previous year's Photopia.

However, the interaction is given by choosing an action from a drop down menu of 3 to 4, and then guessing the exact words the game wants you to type. This is essentially impossible without the walkthrough.

This large game tells a wonderful native american tale. Set in a large village, and in the world of the dead, you have to hunt food for a village while the warriors prepare for the arrival of a deadly giant.

Big and ambitious, this game was massively buggy during the competition and placed in the bottom 10. It was updated later, fixing many but not all problems. I recommend playing with the walkthrough to see the great story.

This is a big grid of a city which you stalk as a vampire.

The game is winnable but the author ran out of time, making many of the locations underimplemented. I was able to complete the game, but only by asking the doorman about various things in the magazine.

It has some violence and sensuality, but both written so blandly as to have little effect.

You are a third-person observer in a ship as Captain Chaos, a relatively benign supervillain, is crashing to the earth.

The writing is good, and funny, but the game is super buggy, with events firing at the wrong time, repeating actions sending your score up over and over, and a whole slew of bad interfaced design problems and missing synonyms.

It's a shame, because the writing is so fun.