Reviews by MathBrush

I beta tested this game.

Napier's Cache is in an unusual niche of historical fiction, and is based on a family story of the author.

It is fairly linear in story with nonlinear interactions in each 'phase'. You first have a small treasure hunt, followed by a dinner scene, then another treasure hunt and a simple maze.

In design it reminds me quite a bit of Christminster, an early (pre-IFComp) inform game that was well-regarded at the time, that also had you doing things like eating at a dinner with scholars and discovering the history of old alchemists.

Overall, the quality is well-done, and most reasonable interactions are coded for. I enjoyed each iteration of this better than the previous, and I believe this is something to be proud of.

This is game that is hard for me to review, in many ways.

First, it was difficult to play. It is in French, not my native language, but it also is written in a very allegorical and elusive style. It is very long, with at least four chapters each with a dozen or more pieces. I encountered a bug while looking at my objects list at the very end of Ch. 3 where the link to return to the main story disappeared.

Also, it's hard to say what score to assign. According to my rubric, I give 1 point for being polished (it is), 1 point for being descriptive (which it also is), and 1 point for interactivity (despite the fact it's linear, giving me a choice to see the objects page or not was in fact useful). But I didn't feel an emotional impact as the scenes were too disconnected, and I was too exhausted by it to play again. I believe that many of these problems would be mitigated for a Francophone.

This game is a fine addition to the long tradition of murder mystery interactive fiction games.

This is a one-room game. You, Celia Swift, are aiding Inspector Land in researching the mystery of an orchestra member's death.

There are two phases: a puzzle-based investigative phase, and a deduction phase.

The investigative phase requires patience, and the deduction phase doesn't give too much away if you guess wrong.

The one thing that mars this game is the large number of unhelpful responses. If a second edition were released, or a similar game released in the future, I would wish for more custom responses.

I beta tested this game.

Visually, this game is nice and polished, and the text is free from typos and bugs.

You play as a man blinded by the government and sent to work. While at work, you encounter a cast of characters entangled in a web of intrigue, and must make your own decisions and what to investigate and who to help. There are 6 different endings, some of which can happen unexpectedly, which makes this game pretty difficult (especially with no undo feature I saw.)

The first chapter's text is incredibly dense, with a lot of big words and long sentences. Once other characters are thrown into the mix, the pace picks up, and the dialogue especially is fresh and well-written.

I would love to see a dialogue-only game by this author (like the very popular games Birdland and Hana Feels). As for this game, I was interested enough to play to several different endings, and felt satisfaction at reaching a good one.

Andy Phillips is a figure in the IF community known for occasionally releasing massive IF games that generally feature science fiction of some sort, large maps with a few puzzles available at a time, and deadly women.

In this game, you're a super-fan of Andy Phillips who has been locked in by his roommates. You're wearing a jumpsuit from an Andy Phillips game and you have tons of memorabilia around the rooms, all of which is directly based off of the games.

There are a few start puzzles and then one main one, getting out of the room. I found the starter puzzles not too hard, but the main puzzle requires few leaps of intuition. Given the constrained size of the game, however, it's possible to suss out the solution after time, and there is a great help system.

Like the original Balderstone (which you don't have to play to understand this), you are at a gathering of horror writers who tell 'stories' which are minigames. The order of the stories is randomised.

The games are coded well, and the tone varies a lot, sometimes dramatic, sometimes silly, sometimes frightening, all sort of tongue in cheek. Many of them have twists, whether geographical or as a meta-narrative etc.

I came, I saw, I had fun, the stories aren't really related, so why don't you just go try it out and see for yourself?

I'm a fan of 'two-world' type games, and this one fits the bill.

This game starts out with you in a sort of Plato's Cave. Soon you find yourself in Faerethia, and then there is a flashback to (Spoiler - click to show)the real world.

While there is an overarching story (one that has been done by several people, even up to Dr. Who and MLP fan fiction), the real thrust of this IFComp entry is its philosophy. It tries to tackle identity and the idea of continuity of self.

Does it work? It might have been hard once to imagine getting any kind of deep discussion out of interactive fiction games, but there's been quite a lot of work in IF that tackles big issues in a professional and educational way (like the excellent game Hana Feels).

Does this game reach that level? I'm not really sure, but it has a lot of polish, and it's not quite so heavy-handed as many other 'deep' games. I felt my playtime was well-spent.

Robb Sherwin is legendary for a certain kind of game, one with many creative NPCs, imaginative and creative language, and blood, sex, and profanity.

I love his style, but frequently it gets too much for me. But Enceladus has the wittiness and imagination without as much of the blood, sex and profanity. This IFComp game is like Respectable Robb Sherwin, as if Sherwin's writing were a teenager seeing a cop drive by, doing their best to walk normal and not look like they're high.

So this is a Robb Sherwin game I can genuinely recommend for most audiences. It's not meant for kids, though (there's some gore and it could get pretty scary for them). This is a great chance for more people to discover Sherwin's clever humor (or stupid humor? or both?).

You play as a character on the HMS Plagoo. A werewolf is loose in space, and you soon crash on the moon Enceladus. You have to defeat your enemies while simultaneously taking care mentally and physically of your friends while they do the same for you.

The game is completely linear; the interactivity is "do the next thing we tell you too". There's a few smatterings of puzzle elements, a little bit less than Photopia, for instance, but more than 0.

This style of interactivity made me feel like I was an actor in a play, giving lines at the appropriate part. And since Sherwin's writing has always reminded me of Shakespeare (focusing on witty turns of phrase and a mixture of lowbrow and highbrow), it works well.

(P.S. It may seem hyperbole to compare anyone to Shakespeare, but I'm not saying that quality of writing is exactly equal. I'm just talking about the sense of humor)

Carter Sande is just trolling us all at this point, I believe.

Last year, his game Let's Explore Geography! Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise was a tongue-in-cheek take on edutainment game. He spent a long time in the forums going back and forth on whether his game was actually edutainment or not, and it's still a little hard to tell.

This game has you clicking on a jpg island map to get help in different areas, in addition to taking small mini-tests of three questions at a time.

The tests are a bit hard (and I swear the compound interest one is wrong!). The little story segments between are more story-based and more clearly Interactive Fiction, but they honestly wouldn't be out of place in a real edutainment game.

The only place I found anything odd was (Spoiler - click to show)the very end, where there was no 'end game' link, and I scrolled down and found I 'missed something'. I noticed the replay this time was different, but not significantly so.

I then followed the walkthrough, the game went all (Spoiler - click to show)Zalgo, and the end result convinced me more than ever that Carter is trolling us all. I did reach a final The End after (Spoiler - click to show)destroying the obelisk.

Why 4 stars, not 5? Because, and this is written in my heart:

"Simulated Boredom is Still Boredom"

Otherwise, I had a good time.

It's a real shame. This game has a sandbox environment, reasonable puzzles with multiple solutions, several endings that require completely different strategies and have distinct results, no bugs or typos that I found. Basically, everything you'd want a comp game to me.

The problem is that it's super offensive. You play a morbidly obese teen that is so fat they can eat anything and smash things with their fists. Your eyes and ears are so full of cholesterol that you have to type 'WUOOO' for echolocation every few turns.

There are other instances of, as the game calls it, 'crass humor and worse'. I didn't like that, not at all.