Reviews by MathBrush

This is a shortish but heavily replayable game.

You are at a Halloween party in a haunted house. It's your job to watch 5 monitors to look for spooky activity.

There's a death, and the explanation for that death depends on which monitors you were watching.

I found the writing good, the sounds polished, and so on, but the core mechanic just wasn't clicking with me. Sometimes you were supposed to be looking, sometimes listening, sometimes talking; I felt like I would have preferred more segregation between the various activities you can engage in.

This game has the same design philosophy as the authors' last games, but with a very different set of mechanics.

The opening sequence is thrilling, with a strong buildup to... something extremely odd.

This game discourses at great length about advanced mathematics and philosophy while you are engaging in something utterly trivial, but it manages to blend the two together.

It was a trippy and surreal experience. I played until the game said I had no more to learn, but I didn't get a high score. If you get lost, shoot the magnet.

This is the first chapter of a longer game. It is written in free form verses, but they are quite easy to read as normal paragraphs, and the broken up style is quite nice.

The game has a sort of pagan witch style of magic, with archetypes like the crone, the elder, the maiden, and the mother, a shadow world, etc.

The game focuses a lot on mating and dating, but not in any explicit form; the society just has a more free form culture, a lot like the fictional society in Friends where there are few consequences.

Overall, well eone, especially in setting-building.

This game is in the spirit of the Problems Compound and Slicker City. It's a surreal adventure about self reflection and mean people, where everything is written using common phrases turned backwards (which reminds me, Andrew should write a game where every puzzle solution is a palindrome).

The puzzles were more interesting this time around, though I had the hardest time getting initial clues on how to solve them. I enjoyed the postponed mechanic, for instance.

These three games are all of one cloth. If you liked the others, you'll like this one.

Riot is a game that I thought I wouldn't like but which improved as I played it.

It's a longish twine game about a police officer who runs into a sticky situation in a Riot. It uses some basic styling.

The pages are pretty long with binary choices whose effects only carry over to the next page. This isn't necessarily bad; Ash had the same choice structure.

But a lot of the text seemed extraneous. I found myself skimming the text and focusing on the choices. The choices got more compelling as I continued to play, and I enjoyed switching characters later on.

I think that cutting out a lot of the text per page to focus on the raw story could have really helped this piece. I would definitely play another game by this author.

This game is quite a bit like the old Unnkulia games: snarky or rude to the player at times, obsessed with unfair puzzles, filled with little 'male gaze' comments about women, arrogance about religion and philosophy, and full of 'goofy humor'. I didn't really like it.

It is big and mostly polished, but the puzzles are pretty opaque, more of a 'look how clever I the author am' than 'look how clever you the player are'.

You spend much of the game travelling back and forth through time and your own mind.

I am a fan of opera, including experimental opera, so this was a really enjoyable game. You play as a woman in space investigating a planet and dealing with a recurring sequence of visions.

I found the game quite beautiful, especially Chapter 1: Sunflowers. I would listen to other interactive operas in the future.

There are only 2 or 3 chapters right now, so total listening time is about a half hour or so.

It took me 209 choices to complete this game on my third playthrough.

This game took third in IfComp 2016, but as of this writing, it has the highest rating and number of ratings on IFDB.

In this game, you arrive at and explore a mysterious old motel with a supernatural flair. The game uses two main types of links: mostly-static location-based links for movement, and then conversation/emotion links for small scenes that play out as you move.

The two kinds of links are very consistent, making for some great gameplay. The styling is also good, with some nice animations and fonts and colors.

This game is by the author of Open Sorcery, one of the best Twine games.

In this game, you play a side character in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-type world. You need to kill a vampire!

The game is heavily location-and-inventory based, similar to the other high-rated IFComp 2016 games Cactus Blue Motel and the Shoe Dept.

There are a lot of clever tricks, like testing you on how well you know classic texts, useful items hid among unuseful items.

The cluing is excellent; any one ending will give you hints on the other 15, and options that you should have thought of but didn't are greyed out.

It does have an unnecessarily large amount of profanity, though.

I beta tested this game.

Detectiveland is a great game in a unique interface created by Robin Johnson.

The interface is a refinement of the one used in Draculaland. You have a parser-like interface, but instead of typing in commands, you have a menu of visible things and people and an inventory; you click on an object or person, and a menu of verbs comes up. One object at a time can be 'held', and this affects the menus of other nouns.

This is one of the biggest IFComp winners ever, with a minimal walkthrough taking 250 or more moves. It is split into 4 cases, 3 of which can be solved simultaneously.

You play a detective resolving problems in a square grid town. The game has graphics of speakers, and has really good humorous writing.

The game is written Scott Adams style, so many of the locations have very spare writing. This, according to the other, allowed him to spend more time on conversations and scripted events.

**Edit**

I actually hadn't played any Scott Adams games before this one; now I have played three, and this game is a straight send-up of those games, down to the split window and empty room descriptions. It's a perfect homage.