Reviews by MathBrush

This game was entered in IFCOMP in 2005. It's about getting stuck on the highway, and exploring an abandoned motel to get out.

This game has few major flaws; it has a few typos, the puzzles are original, the writing has a lot of clever notes.

But the game never takes off; the descriptions are fairly sparse, and so on.

This is a mid-length ifcomp game about time travel. You go back to your high school so that you can change your boring future.

The game is well-polished, but not very descriptive. You wander about, investigating different rooms. I had some issues with guessing commands.

It lasts about an hour.

This game seems to have been intended as a noke, but it's actually not bad. You are the papa in the poem, and the children, mamma, and stocking are there. And the poem's action just plays out one line at a time.

So, it's not that bad as interactivish poetry.

The bulk of this game consists of attending a party where you need to gather a dozen cupcakes of different kinds. Before this, there is a lengthy prelude involving your friend.

The writing is polished and creative, but somehow it never clicked for me. The game seemed kind of slow.

The puzzles are well-done, letting the PCs motivations lead instead of the player's.

Overall, a pleasant snack.

This twine game consists of several accounts from World War II, some real, some otherwise. Every page has a bunch of blue links. One link is a 'truth', and moves the story forward. One link is a 'lie', and sends you back to the very beginning of the game.

This is very obnoxious, making you have to restart the entire game at various times. Part of this is to reinforce the meaninglessness of propaganda. The text of this game is heavy, and dark.

In this game you are supposed to be taught how to program in Inform. But you have to work for it. After some hard puzzles, you get a device that prints out the inform 6 code of any item you look at.

This is really cool, but you have to do a lot to get to it, and the rest of the game is quite a jumble.

The author compares this game to Lists and Lists, and I think that that's a fair comparison.

This game is very large, and it's not too bad content-wise. There's a number of temples, a town with several shops, a castle with more than 10 rooms, and extensive woodlands, mountains, and so on. This takes several hours to finish.

However, the game has a hard time hinting things. Most rooms are described well, but have few items. It's almost impossible to know how to communicate with individuals.

Laura Knauth went on to write Trapped in a One Room Dilly, which had much better puzzles but only one room. She then wrote Winter Wonderland, a cute, mid-sized game with plenty of rooms but also great puzzles, and it won IFComp. It's interesting to see the author's progress through the different games.

This game has a unique vision and concept, but falls flat in implementation.

You survive an avalanche and end up in a secluded wooded area with 2 npcs. The game becomes a mixture of exploration and conversation: you try to find interesting landmarks and ask both npcs about it several times.

The implementation and writing fall flat; a few rounds of beta testing would have smoothed things over. The tone varies widely, some objects and directions have difficult to guess commands, and so on.

However, the main idea was so fun that I peresevered through bizarre bugs in the hint system to read all the text in the game. I would play it again.

In this game, you are trapped inside a small shop with a grue (a creature from the Zork series). Just any connection with Zork makes a game more silly, but that's not a drawback here.

You have to move through the darkness with limited resources. As you do, you find different sources of light and other surprises. You're just trying to survive.

I had to replay a couple of times to get it right. It has some nice ambient sounds and good use of images and backgrounds.

I really liked it, and recommend it.

This is a mid-length twine game where you a part of a small video game company, hired as the writer.

You go through several conversations with your co-workers, intended to show the plight of game writers and why they are in a tough position. You get blamed for the faults of others, you don't get the resources you need, and so on. It has some twists.

Overall, this didn't really gel for me. I worked for a video game company before in a variety of positions, and pretty much everybody gets the exact same bad treatment. But the twine was well put together.