Reviews by MathBrush

This game starts with a long cinematic-type sequence where you are thrown in jail for dressing like a boy.

It's notable for changing location descriptions. However, everyone I've seen that beat it used the walkthrough. It contains several unintuitive puzzles, and is one of those games best experienced via walkthru, in my opinion.

This is a fairly entertaining parody of Indiana Jones that has some implementation problems. You are at the end of a long adventurer, and already have thousands of points, but you just need to get the jewel and go.

This game borrows some text from and parodies Francesco Bova's The Jewel of Knowledge, and credits that author.

I liked it, but it was annoying trying to figure out the correct syntax and logic of the three main puzzles.

This game has you exploring a mid-sized map with a music building, a post office, and a Hardee's knockoff.

The game is well-coded and funny at many times, but many of the puzzles are of the absurd variety that only makes sense in retrospect. Puzzles include 'look behind the one scenery item in the one room that has something', 'try something that has no chance of working in real life', and 'make sure you're carrying a completely random item that will save your life'.

I wasn't a fun of the puzzles, but a large segment of people are. If you like methodically working through a game, drawing a map, and checking every item, you will probably really like this game quite a bit.

This game is extraordinarily hard to run. I ended up poking around in the code and reading past reviews to get an idea of this game.

You are in a future with a robot that is a copy of Floyd from Planetfall. You are investigating an office complex.

A huge part of the code is taken up by a long, involved fight, describing how you or your opponent kick each other's trash.

This MSDOS game, which I played in DOSBOX, is a collection of extraordinarily hard puzzles. You enter an intersection of hallways, with each direction in the hallway having a door with a puzzle. Past those puzzles are harder puzzles. Past those puzzles are...way too many puzzles.

This is one of the very largest adventure games, and even the easiest puzzles are way too hard for most people. If you are an adventure puzzle fanatic, you can try this game. Expect many, many, many random deaths. I'm giving it 3 stars for being polished, descriptive, and good at instilling an emotion: annoyance.

You're King Arthur, and can't leave because Guinevere won't let you.

This is a short game, yet still frustrating. The many actions you have to do are hard to conceive of before doing them.

The author said on rec.arts.int-fiction that they wrote this game in 3 days, and it shows. It's not horrible, because the scope was small enough to allow for some polish, but it doesn't sparkle.

This game had just too big of a scope and not enough polish to work out. It is a sprawling fantasy game, with a village and a town and a tower and an underground dungeon and an island and so on and so on. It has a homebrew parser. Contrast this with The Land Beyond The Picket Fence from the same year; its homebrew parser is much more polished, the map is tiny (7 or 9 or so locations), and its slick and smooth. Both games probably had roughly similar amounts of work put into them, but Eldor is just spread too thin.

However, Stuart Allen released The Unholy Grail the next year, which is a fantastic game, so I strongly recommend it.

This is a point and click adventure. I couldn't get past an ogre, and from reading reviews, I don't know anyone (except maybe one person) who actually beat it; there's an ogre that's hard to get past.

You wander around a girl's boarding school at night before discovering an unsavory conspiracy involving scientific experiments on dreams.

This is a fun little Alan game (requiring an older interpreter from ifarchive.org) about running to get to playing ifcomp games on time.

The game is well-hinted; I only had one guess-the-verb problem. You basically just hail a taxi and drive over to your friend's house.

The game is on a timer, but its so short that once you figure it out, its super easy to redo. It also has a clever ending.

I downloaded this game and got it to run with the batch file. However, it was buggy; I couldn't figure out how to throw the soup on the fire, one of the earliest commands. The soup kept being an object ON the fire. And examining the hat at the very beginning was supposed to send out a dove, but that never happened.

It seems like a complicated game, but it is just intractable.