Reviews by MathBrush

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.

Morayati is known for writing polished, inventive games. This game proved to be popular and a big talking point for the comp.

It's a gladiatorial game, where instead of fighting, you write 'hot takes' about your fight. An embedded monitor records how well the audience responds.

The game has a darker metaphorical meaning, and draws a lot of its intensity from that.

A game that, perhaps, everyone should play. There's a lot to talk about here.

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.