Reviews by MathBrush

This is a mid-length game that has you trying to find, then deliver, a letter to Dr. Aardvarkbarf.

The game has a fairly large campus. Puzzles mostly focus on examining items, and physical things such as PUSH and PULL.

The game is clever, but the map is large and many things aren't clued to well. Nothing about it really stuck out.

This game has a long prologue as a young woman who dumped her boyfriend. After the prologue, you play the boyfriend.

The boyfriend's game is nonlinear and interesting, as you explore a mad scientist's house. It suffers too much from 'flail about until something interesting happens' syndrome, though. Its hard to know exactly what they want you to do.

But the writing is good and there are several interesting and well-written NPCs.

This game has you as a student of the future in a little pod who has to print a paper. This is one of 6 virtual reality games in IFComp 1997, probably as a response to Delusions from IFComp 1996.

This game also reminds me a lot of The Legend Lives, which has a very similar opening setup.

I actually liked this game; it was overwhelming, getting started, but I liked the well-thought out means of transferring information between the physical and virtual realms.

This is a standard epic fantasy quest exploring a temple, just like a DnD module.

You find a variety of keys and hidden passages, and different pieces of things that look like they go together, and magical clothing.

It's just not clued well, and its tedious. Keys are used multiple times, without much sense to it, so you end up trying every key on every door.

It's pretty long, and could be fun for fantasy fans.

This game starts out pretty cool, and basically consists of a linear series of challenges in a surreal prison environment.

I would give it 3 or 4 stars, but it just gets dumb, involving marijuana quests and another interaction involving a statue that could only be conceived by a teenage boy.

This is a short, loosely timed game about waking up after some sort of accident and then trying to help yourself and others before time runs out.

The writing is interesting, and the game feels fairly polished. However, it really suffers from 'guess what the author is thinking' syndrome. Some of the actions are completely unmotivated. However, playing around on my own was fairly fun.

This game reminds me a lot of creepypasta: intense writing with something of a neglect of proper writing techniques (such as grammar and some other things that careful testing could fix). However, it has an intensity of emotion that makes it more enjoyable than a polished, bloodless game.

You play someone who has a dark secret inside of them, which affects them throughout their life. Eventually, you must journey to your own psyche to confront this secret.

It's fairly long, with choices that felt mostly meaningful. It features combat. It has some profanity and violent sequences.

Well, I guess marketing works. After seeing months of promotional materials for Strayed, I decided to try it while it was on sale out of curiosity.

This is a longish hyperlink game. Although the ads seemed to show graphics for the pc version, the android version was, as advertised, pure text.

The game has a strong central horror narrative, with several detours allowed on the way, with many of the choices being flavor choices.

Just before this game, I had played Abyss, which is a similar game (twinelike without stats, on the play store). This game has better writing, less typos, and is more mature than Abyss, but is of comparable size. Those differences, though, make the difference for me between a free game (Abyss) and a commercial game (Strayed).

On replaying Strayed, I found quite a few new areas I had not previously explored, and the grand finale was different in a way that ties into the nature of the horror.

However, I did not find the horror gripping. It reminded me the most of some creepy pasta stories, where some reactions of the participants don't reflect reality (an example not from the game: "You see an airplane that morphs into a fluttering leaf. You shrug it off.")

I guess I was hoping more for emotional investment (like Hana Feels) or persistent consequences of actions (like Choice of Games), both of which the authors had written for. But $1-$2 is an appropriate amount for this game.

Edit: I added another star when I found out the underlined text showed you what your choices had affected; I really like this in a game.

This 1997 IFComp game shows to me how Twine didn't ruin parser games and IFComp; if this game had been entered in the 2010's, it would certainly have been a short twine game. I feel like authors are writing the same games, just on more appropriate platforms.

You spend most of the time typing well-clued commands and pressing enter a lot, and it's short. Its clear the author just wanted to write something short and fun. You play as a digital avatar near the digital highway, opening your digital mailbox for the first time.

This game is like a DnD or serious Munchkin game: door, challenge, reward. You select some attributes about yourself (like luck, strength, etc.).

Then you are shown two doors, and you have to pick one. Behind each door is a text scene with some sort of dnd-like encounter, like a feast of food you can eat or not, or a chest that is obviously trapped.

The font, colors, and atmosphere were very good, and the writing was good.

I had to download the entire ifcomp 2016 file to get all the files for this game.