Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game seems strongly influenced by the previous year's massive Mulldoon Legacy. You are investigating your uncle's museum/hotel, and you discover a crackling energy portal leading to ancient times.

The game has some tricky puzzles, and the published version is in fact not completable. However, the source code provided does compile correctly.

I found the game to be fun but to have way too many 'guess the author's brain'-type puzzles.

This is a big game with a lot of personality. I haven't heard of anyone who's actually finished it, though.

You play an overweight, nerdy character who wants to be popular with the head cheerleader. You are going to try to get underage beer. It has a Jim Munroe sort of feel.

This game is full of NPCs and things to do and strange subplots, but its somehow hard to achieve anything besides wandering around. This is a game that would strongly benefit from a walkthrough. As it is, the hints are good, but each hint leads to other hints you should do first and the first steps are never really mentioned.

This is a Star Trek-esque game. After a brief opening sequence with some guess-the-verb stuff, you are woken from cryosleep and have to repair a station.

The station has hallways A through J that are all identical, and minimally described, as well as a variety of other rooms. There are some fun things here, but I found a lot of it frustrating. The centerpiece of the game is a series of several EVA expeditions that realistically model 3d movement without friction. I found this to be tedious.

This game has you wandering around a beach, just exploring and experimenting with life.

This game has around 40 endings, some after a very short time, and some after a very long time. It has some fairly complex NPCs.

As a beach game, there are several references to babes and illicit activities under boardwalks, and some fairly non-explicit scenes involving such. There's also a touching scene with a toddler.

In this game, whose opening reminded me a bit of Infocom's Border Zone, you play a man who is in a train bathroom when terrorists take over.

The game has you do exciting things like climbing on trains and so on, but the puzzles are pretty nasty, almost impossible without hints. Even with hints, I found it fairly difficult, as a cumbersome inventory system led me to drop some things I later discovered I needed.

Overall, an interesting story, and worth playing for puzzle fiends.

This game is a well-written and programmed Lovecraftian horror game set in the time of slavery and wooden sailing ships.

You wake up, bound and gagged in a fascinating sequence, before landing on a mysterious island.

This game does a good job of being disorienting and horror-filling. It is grotesquely violent at some points, and has some non-consensual and non-explicit advances by one character.

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.