Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This game is a clever inversion of usual goals. Playing normally as Dr. bonesaw, this is a short game; you get your vengeance.

The true gameplay, however, is more fun:

(Spoiler - click to show)You find the true ending by sabotaging yourself. It takes a few turns, but it's really pleasing to stop the unstoppable vengeance of Dr.
Bonesaw.

This game spoofs Toiletworld, so you should probably make sure to play that first.

This game just has 3 under-implemented locations with some neat tricks involving Magician's Choice and movement of scenery, but otherwise it's pretty typical for a speed-IF ectocomp game. Not bad, though. This author has a longer, fun game called How to Win at Rock, Paper, Scissors.

IN this game, you're trapped in a mirrored box as part of a Halloween stunt, carrying only a candle and some matches.

I couldn't get the game to do much, but it really had atmosphere. Just the act of lighting the matches, and the candle, and having the descriptions of your reflection described, were subtly creepy.

Most of Andy Phillips games have the same bones with different overlays. In all of the games, you play a protagonist with some sort of special features (in this one, you're an intelligent accountant), a femme fatale, and cinematic scenes with really hard combinatorial puzzles.

The special features of this one are the setting (most of it in an abandoned boarding school), and the gruesomeness of it. It was a bit over the top, even compared to his other games.

If you haven't tried any of the other games, I really liked Heist and Time.

You are a blind woman kidnapped by a sort of serial killer. The writing is pulp-y.

The big idea here is that you FEEL, SMELL, and LISTEN instead of LOOKING.

This concept is actually implemented pretty well, but the puzzles themselves are mostly of the search-everything and perform-uncued-action variety, which makes the game less exciting.

This game was based on a pretty funny quote as described in the readme in the zip file.

This is a conversation based game in 2 rooms, where you talk to an old man about a strange prison with a strange gate.

This had great storybuilding, a strong setting and a vagueness about morality and about your choices.

This game was designed, I believe, to introduce a new audience to IF. It has an intriguing logic puzzle where you research a procedurally generated alien to see what properties it has, look up its homeworld, and send it home.

However, the game is strangely aggravating for an 'outreach' game. Even with all the hints, I had few ideas on what I could do to coerce the alien into the pod except in the easiest of cases.

The biggest problem here is that the game doesn't suggest many courses of action with the alien, but implements many courses of action. This means that I floundered around, exploring the edges of a possibly great game, without ever seeing its core.