Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game uses the Adrift parser, which is inherently problematic.

It is a sequence of small rooms with really unclear puzzles, including a sound puzzle. The puzzles are really irritating.

However, this game did not come last in the competition. It's possible that hardcore puzzle fans may enjoy this game.

In this game, a female college friend gives you (a male) a disk of Advent 550 to help you over the blues.

You end up playing the game, and falling asleep with your friend on the couch. You have a trippy dream involving will crowther.

The Adrift parser isn't that great (I used 3.90), but the game pulled some clever tricks for the game-within-a-game. I actually enjoyed this, but I had to put it in the Adrift Generator to find all the necessary tasks.

This is a game with a big map but only 2 or 3 puzzles. You explore a creepy house (with some timed text effects at the beginning, creepy music/sound effects, and a popup image in the middle that's not supposed to be scary).

I ran this on Adrift 3.9. Like all adrift games, it has major problems. This game also has big text dumps.

WalkthroughComp was done by Emily Short, where she wrote out a telegram of a bizarre walkthrough for a nonexistent game, and then you were to write that game.

This game is one of the biggest responses to that; however, it's too big. The game is full of text dumps, and the environment (inside a VR machine) just veers wildly from genre to genre and location to location.

It must have taken a lot of effort, but it needed more coherence, I think.

Deadline Enchanter was one of my first games I ever played, and still one of my favorites and a strong influence.

This game came before deadline enchanter, but shares its same feeling of utter bizzareness.

You are the ruler(s?) of a kingdom that has been ravaged by a ghost. There is wearable honey/history, and all sorts of other interesting things. I love this little game. It plays on gargoyle.

This game has you pick a text speed, then color.

It has a parser that understands 10 verbs, most of them like save, quit, etc. It uses 'pickup' and 'use' along with directions.

There are 8 rooms in a grid missing its center. Each room has a key. One room has 8 keyholes.

The author claims this was intended as a simple demo.

In this game, you are a 9 yr old turned into a dog.

Much of the game revolves around acquiring coupons for a dog salon, to transform yourself. It uses graphics extensively.

The game would generally be fun, with a tight map and interesting puzzles, but it has so many puzzles requiring waiting for a long time, and it has a lot of underground bad feelings for women, non-white american peoples, and the aged. It also has a direct attack on a former IF author which is essentially vicious.

The Unnkulia games filled the gap between the end of Infocom/Magnetic Scrolls and the beginning of Inform. They were juvenile, focused on 'bro' type humor, misogyny, and underclued puzzles.

This game manages to ampmlify all of that. It suffers from several problems, including an overly large scope. Every location has several paragraphs of text, frequently a whole page. The puzzles use moon-logic where it's very hard to know what will happen next.

This game displays some bold text at the top, and then you pick out keywords from that to type in, which then changes the text.

This is essentially a short twine game years before twine was developed. It has short but intriguing thoughts on the nature of IF games.

In this TADS game, you spend much of the time smoking marijuana and passing it around, before later taking peyote.

The author's note claims the game isn't about getting enlightened for drugs, but it's hard to know what it is about if not that. It definitely seems like a good anti-drug advertisement, given that following the drugs leads you to being a dirty, unwashed bum that children run away from.

Scattered strong profanity, extensive drug use.