Reviews by MathBrush

This was an Ectocomp 2016 speed game. This is set in a MLP-type world, similar to Owlor's other games.

You are a hardened and vicious magic-using pony out for revenge. You need to go an a quest to find the ingredients for your potion.

This was relatively straightforward, and fun, with good cluing, until I got stuck on one ingredient for a long time due to misunderstanding a description.

It is unpolished and didn't draw me in, but that is due to it being a speed-IF.

This is a shortish alt-game about bullying and abusive relationships. It is illustrated with various hand-drawn illustrations.

You play as a character who is in a sort of abusive relationship, and who doesn't fit in. You have to deal with this relationship and how it affects the rest of your life. It can get intense, with some strong profanity.

It gave me a good sense of the emotion involved in the game, but it felt like it could use more polish.

In this game, you are reading through diary entries of a young child going through several years of school. It's a twine-type game, and it has a large scope, going through several years at a fast space.

You have several friends you interact with, with mechanics keeping track of the relationships, but I found this fairly opaque; I wished I had more feedback on my choices. One nice feature was that choices you were not able to make due to past choices were crossed out, showing you 'what could have been'.

The game treats very serious subjects, including sexual assault. The biggest drawback to me was having trouble seeing how my choices relate to the pages you reach.

This game was really talked about a lot in the 2016 IFComp. It is unusual; it consists of many (< 500) short stories about apocalypses, many of them grim or with body horror, but with good writing. The player was invited to add to the total number of apocalypses.

I found a lot of the apocalypses very enjoyable. The format was hard for me to navigate, though; I couldn't find new stories at the pace that I wanted to. They are linked by keywords, sometimes, and sometimes not (i.e. there are dead-end links).

I enjoyed it.

This game reminds me in length and quality of a hosted Choice of Games commercial game. It has similar amounts of text per choice, and has 9 different relationships you can work on.

The main difference between this and choice of games is that there are frequently just 2 choices, while CoG tends to have 3 or more choices.

However, the author did a good job at making the game interesting by not making it clear which, if any, option is the 'right' option. I think this game provided a very clear picture of what a psych ward might be like. I chose to ally with a friend with borderline personality disorder.

This is the third Magnetic scrolls game. It was meant to be based on magical spells, like Enchanter, but you have to do a LOT of work before you get any spells.

The game lets you get through deathly obstacles, but you will lose a bit of luck if you do, which blocks you out of the endgame. So if it says you lose a little bit of luck, go back to an earlier save!

Overall, a super british game, with all of the spells based on British slang for 'thing' (like wossname and so on).

Very frustrating, very unfair, but interesting and with good graphics.

After playing another of DBT's games, I looked forward to this one, because it sounded cool.

However, it just has 9 rooms, all lined up one after another, with no items to find whatsoever. You just take the exits one at a time, and at the end, you see one character, whom you can't interact with, and there's exactly one thing you can type to end the game.

Looking at the code, there's really nothing there. It's 281 lines, more than half of which is standard code for every DBT game (the text header takes up about a fourth of the code). The doll itself is referred to as the 'cusred doll'.

I'm disappointed, because this game sounded cool, and the other DBT game I played wasn't that bad.

This game take the purposeful obfuscation of the last 2 games and ramps it up even higher. There are numerous independent NPCs, every turn has an ongoing story, the stool and parts from the first two games shows up, etc.

Decompiling again got me the ending, which was a fitting ending for this trilogy of games.

The writing may be interesting to even those who haven't played the first two games.

This game is the sequel to Hard Puzzle, and like the first, it has some purposely underimplemented parts, and lies about its difficulty and even about your goals (or does it?)

I haven't finished it yet, but I've read all the text from decompiling, and I know the last command(s), just not the middle.

In any case, the game has a large number of critters with independent AI and some emergent behavior. It's fun to play around with.

Hard Puzzle is obnoxious on purpose. You need to assemble a stool, but everything goes wrong, and you start to find more and more parts.

The author intentionally makes the game underimplemented, with guess-the-verb, standard response, etc. going on. It claims to be a speed-IF that isn't too hard, but it is hard.

I decompiled it to figure it out. I'm giving it 4 stars because it's good at what it sets out to do.