Reviews by MathBrush

This was my favorite game of the comp, on the strength of its writing and its use of kinetic links.

In this game, you play a fake psychic who discovers their true powers after being roped into a murder investigation.

The gameplay resolves around big chunks of text with little choices that change some flavor text. I usually don't like this style, but the concept of a psychic\detective trying to prove himself is great for this style; it makes you hunt the text for clues, trying to figure out what angle to approach a person, to guess what item to use next. It reminds me of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, with a strong attention to gathering clues from clothing, appearance, and clues.

The styling is gorgeous, the machinery runs smooth, the graphics are good. Does this mean Parser is dead? No, it just means that there's twice as many games to enjoy.

In this game, you play as a zookeeper for a queen.

This is a texture game, which is good for mobile and desktop. You grab a few nouns at the bottom, and drag them above; in this story, they nouns are mainly keys and food.

Your job is to feed the animals. This game is about exploration of the universe; your choices matter, making replay enjoyable.

The game is visually well-developed as well.

Highly recommended.

This game reminds me somehow of the old electronic devices you could get around the time of the NES that would play just one game, like Snake or other games. There were little, limited buttons, but they really did a lot with them.

This is the text version of that; you can just move N, E, S, W and Z. But this huge game exploits all of that. It can be finished in 2 hours with the walkthrough, but if you want to do it on your own, you need to do some exhaustive searching. Some of the truly unfair puzzles seem to be solvable if you just keep searching everything over and over again.

If you like this game, you should like DiBianca's other games. This was the number one game in the author's vote.

This game is Hanon Ondricek at his best. There's a million moving pieces: a book-selling minigame, events on a timer, mobile NPCs, in-depth conversational trees, easter eggs, crowds, a million little easter eggs, non-standard parser responses. It's a great game.

It's fairly short, but I think it was designed that way intentionally to allow all players to reach an ending. You just wander around, looking at everything, talking to the kids and parents, selling books, and then you pick a winner.

Highly recommended.

This game is pretty short, with 4 minor scenes. It reminds me a lot of last year's The King and the Crown, where there was a lot of easter eggs and goofy content.

It can be hard to figure out what to do, and a lot of the game is sketchy, with extra line breaks or misunderstood synonyms.

It has a certain type of humor that some people like. If you liked this, you'd probably like Pogoman Go!.

It has a deeper meaning in some branches, again like the King and the Crown.

Pogoman GO! was written by the winners of the 2009 IfComp and the JayIsGames Casual Gameplay competition (one where heavyweights like zarf and Stephen Granade entered).

From any other authors, this would be an impressive game, but I ended up disappointed. This game is intricate, well over 100,000 words of code. It has dozens of locations, an intricate minigame with many characters and a combat system, and a well-thought out plotline. Tons of little fun response are added, and so on and so on.

So what's not to like? First, it's a parody of a flash-in-the-pan social event that was already outdated when the comp started. It's an in-joke that's not 'in'.

Edit from 2025: in light of recent events, this game has renewed relevance.

Second, it parodied the most annoying parts of the original: crashes, grinding, pop-up achievements, etc.

Third, the 'good part' that comes after the parody part is itself somehow dissatisfying, as if the beta testers didn't get to it themselves. There are good puzzles and interesting locations, but the cluing is off.

The cluing and storyline both suffer from the zaniness of the game; it introduces humorous elements, but fails to integrate them into the internal logic of the game. The solution may be funny, but why is that the solution out of all solutions that should work?

This is a lot of complaining, when the truth is that this is mechanically one of the best games of the last few years, and most people should have a good time with it.

This game is a good example of how you can take just any idea and polish it up into something fun.

The idea (playing paper rocks scissors with crazy consequences) is interesting, but so many other comp parser games had interesting ideas and just failed. There were parser games where no exits were listed, games where only one synonym out of 20 were implemented, games where the writing was incomprehensible, games with big text dumps.

This game, however, hit up all of the important points for basic player enjoyment: adaptive in-game hints, synonyms implemented, standard responses changed, consistent puzzles, etc.

My personal favorite bit was:

">eat phone
You take a big bite out of your cell phone and chew thoroughly.

Okay, you don't actually do that, because that would be dumb."

The writing was a bit sparse, and the story was minimal, but this game still was fun and placed high. Why? Because those pieces of basic player enjoyment are the most important part of a parser game, I believe.

Z-machine games are less and less frequent each year, because Inform defaults to glulx. This comp still had several z-machine games though, but I'm not sure why.

Anyway, that means that the author of this game has probably had Inform for a while. Given that that's the case, this is a pretty disappointing troll game. There are only a couple of rooms, few items, etc.

This game has some good graphics, excellent styling and a convenient user interface with saves and achievements. This is a great setup for a Twine game, especially one like this with more 'game'-y features.

The story was a good read, too. You are cast out of a village and left 'to the wolves', but you make a new life for yourself. Your interactions with the villagers and yourself are up to you.

The mechanics were a little opaque, and the endings didn't quite click for me, but overall, Highly recommended.

This game is primarily notable for its extensive use of multimedia with glulx, more than any other previous glulx game.

It's a card game where you take turns playing cards that affect a world. The writing and images are detailed and compelling.

However, I felt that there was just too much going on in this game. The game window has a ton of doodads and images, and the effects were very complicated. I will admit I was in a hurry, though.

Overall, fun as an idle game, and interesting as a tech demo.