Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

I didn't actually understand this game, so I'll try to summarize it. It's a twine goal filled with surreal, non-sequitur type descriptions.

An artist named Leben is stuck in a dead end job due to losing inspiration. They hire a detective to find it, using a raven to communicate that message.

Hmm, there was also a part at the beginning about a heist. I'm going to go replay that part...

Yeah, replaying it didn't show anything. There's indication of meta-narrative travel, so maybe the different stories will unite at some point.

Honestly, I've really got no clue here. I wasn't able to construct a mental model of the game's structure, intent, or world. I will try to do better in the future.

This game uses a choice-based format I haven't seen before, where clicking on highlighted words opens a pop-up window with both more text (which can have its own highlighted words that open more pop-up windows) as well as action options at the bottom.

This system is genius, and could become a very popular choice if it were easy to write in and implement.

Unfortunately, I think this game was not a good choice to showcase the engine.

The game is about trying to dispose of toxic waste near a creepy forest.

You aren't really told what to do, except to find a manual. But you can't read it since it's dark; there's a flashlight, but it dies after a few turns. So I ended up with no light source before finding the manual.

I got out and explored, and couldn't find anything but an empty forest and a truck, as well as some background things that run away if you look at them. I found a hose, but nothing to attach it to. After a while, I restarted the game and used the flashlight right away on the manual, discovering that there was a valve somewhere.

That's when I found out, by looking around, that the truck is in multiple locations, and which location you're in changes what you see on it. There was no hint of that given in the game, and that behavior is different than the vast majority of parser games I've played. Innovating isn't bad, but I'm not sure how I was supposed to guess that examining the truck in multiple locales gives different responses.

So I eventually figured things out, and was close to doing my job, and then I died. But that's okay, because that's one ending and an achievement.

A lot of the game involves waiting for a long time, but there's no way to just 'wait'. I found out you can just talk to Bill dozens of times.

Overall, I think this system is fantastic, and the author's writing has a lot of highlights, and there aren't any bugs. I just got frustrated with the gameplay style. I would absolutely love to try a wider variety of games using this system and/or written by this author though.

This was a pleasant accompaniment to the last game I played in IFComp, Birding in Pope Lick Park. Both games are outdoorsy, real-life games inspired by a love for nature.

This game, Campfire, is written in Ink and doesn't use images. Instead, it describes a camping trip in words that are often vivid and descriptive, at other times enthusiastic, and at other times merely routine.

You get to buy stuff for your trip, pack, and pick different activities. I enjoyed fishing and fireworks the most.

I ran into a bug where popping popcorn made my game just hit a deadend. But I was very close to the ending and saw the endtext in the game file. Overall, a pleasant, short experience that could be spruced up a bit with more feedback from players.

This game is a murder mystery (one of several in this comp! Which isn't bad, there was one year where the 1st, 2nd, and 4th games were both murder mysteries) written in Twine, and fairly short to finish. It makes use of colored text, with red indicating closed off options, yellow with options to return to, and green for things found.

The idea is that some time ago, a girl disappeared, with her clothes being found in your uncle's basement and her body found eaten by crocodiles. Your uncle is convicted of sexual assault and convicted to death by crocodiles.

The gameplay consists of you searching around various locations in town, gathering clues and talking to individuals. You soon discover that things are far different than you might have been led to believe.

This feels like it might be a first game or a game of a newish author, as it has some classic mistakes new authors make (like having links that you can click over and over that repeat events like finding a key). If it is new, it's actually pretty good.

I didn't like the part where [spoiler]we look under a 12 year old girl's bed and find something undescribed that makes us aroused[/spoiler]. I did like the religious background we learn more about.

This Twine game feels very independent from other Twine traditions, with a gameplay style, styling and structure that seems derived from TTRPGS and gamebooks more than other past IFComp twine games, for instance.

It's a class police procedural murder mystery. Three bodies have been found, and you have to find the suspects! As an FBI agent, it is your job to investigate, interrogate, and accuse.

The game makes use of skills, which are set for you based on archetypes like 'Negotiator' or 'athlete'. This skills boost d20 rolls, which determine whether yo you fail or succeed.

This gives a random element to the game, and, according to the walkthrough I read after my playthrough, there are other, hidden random elements as well. This makes the game amenable to replay, but makes it difficult to win on the first try, especially without outside knowledge about the game.

The characters were generally interesting. I liked the family members most, then the suspects. The cops seemed fairly generic. The town and college had a vibrancy to them.

Overall, the game seemed very polished. I didn't agree with every gameplay decision, but I felt like I was playing a quality product while I was in the midst of the game.

This is a Twine game with inventory and world model that has a pretty compact map set in a mine. The idea is that you are a mage who teleports into a collapsed mine with the goal of evacuating everyone inside.

It's a classic low-level dungeon crawl, with spells, treasure, obstacles, commerce, and even the eponymous 'dragon'. All of these ingredients are added in small amounts; most of the game only uses one spell, for instance.

The game doesn't last too long. Much of the plot is about 'just in time' happenings; no matter what thing you need, you just happen to counter exactly that thing.

The game has charming and funny moments, and the text is descriptive. I think I would have liked to have an extra space between paragraphs to more easily distinguish them.

The inventory system was simple to use. I made some mistakes early on, but once I understood how it worked it was great.

It's odd; when I started this review I had in my mind that the game was lacking in some significant way, but I can't really point out anything. It has custom CSS, it had good pacing and interface, it had dangerous and safe moments, it has some Chekhov's guns that go off in satisfying ways. So I'd say it's a pretty good game!

This game's list of author's includes every published Choice of Games author who has been nominated for a Nebula Award, which is pretty neat.

This is a real-timed murder mystery. You are a sentient AI running a ship, named Pearl (both the AI and the ship, who are one). You have blacked out for 10 minutes during a jump into hyperspace, only to discover that your captain is dead.

You are ready to investigate, but there is an issue: hyperspace can cause hallucinations of distorted realities. Without some kind of consensus of the beings on the ship, reality could be stuck forever; with consensus, it could be permanently altered (or at least resolve into one or more paths).

Gameplay consists of moving from room to room, interviewing suspects and picking up pieces of evidence. Almost everyone gets the same set of questions.

You have a murderboard where you can adjust your suspicion of others between Low, Medium, and High. Once you adjust it to high or accuse someone, the game ends and you get an ending.

Here's what I liked and what I struggled with:

**Likes**
-The variety in characters was nice. That's probably the best part of having this many authors. While all characters had different backstories, I liked Primus's story (my first ending), and Ceri's was completely bizarre (does she (Spoiler - click to show)exist in the same reality as anyone else? is she (Spoiler - click to show)real???)
-The interface was smooth, and I found few bugs (only one I can remember is a stray close-bracket at the bottom of one ending)
-The game is relatively short and easy to replay

**Things I struggled with**
-Having the same conversation options with everyone was really hampering, especially as they weren't 'really' choices, in a way. The game said not to anger anyone, but your choices or 'do thing' or 'do thing in a rude way'. It feels like playing a game where the options are 'sword that does 5 damage to enemies' or 'sword that does 5 damage to players'. So it really felt like I had one choice at a time when talking to characters, and those choices were all the same, making them feel less individualistic. Maybe that's the way the writing was done? (sending out a spreadsheet with a list of the same murder-related questions to everyone and asking them to create a character and their responses to those questions), but I think it would have been neater to have questions tailored to those individual characters, especially when they had obviously interesting or suspicious behavior you can't follow up on.
-I'm not sure why we can set Low, Mid, or High suspicion levels, since you can only up a level when you get more evidence and the murderboard already tells you how much evidence you have.
-The nature of the endings means that (Spoiler - click to show)there's not necessarily a cannon (outside of one special ending). I teach a class called Theory of Knowledge, and we do murder mysteries each year that students right, then discuss means of obtaining knowledge, perspective, and ethics. We just performed this year's mysteries today, actually! But the first time we did this, one student wrote a table top murder game where the murderer was chosen by dice roll, but nothing changed about the evidence. The other students were outraged by this (despite liking the rest of the mystery) because it took away agency and made the knowledge obtained earlier unreliable and useless That's kind of how I felt about the alternate endings.
-The timer didn't work well for me. At first I felt rushed to hurry, but I got enough evidence for an ending in 10 minutes, so I felt bad for not giving the game as much attention as it asked for.

Overall, this game was fun. I noticed the download was just a redirect; I hope some version of it is stored in the IFarchive, because it would be nice to preserve it for future generations (and also because IFComp is about making games that are freely available forever); and there's nothing preventing it from being downloadable from the site it's hosted on, I was able to save a local copy and run it just fine.

The thing I'll probably remember longest is Ceri, as she's still a mystery to me.

I had mixed feelings seeing this game's blurb and name. On the one hand, I've enjoyed all of Vivienne's games, which tend to focus on historical settings and have excellent implementation. On the other hand, I've played many games that start in pubs that weren't very good (I think there was a pub-based jam once that may account for some of those memories?).

Fortunately, this was a well-made, charming, short game that has a tight focus and a nice message. You are at a bar, but all the beer has gone bad. You're asked to investigate, and soon you find out more about the bar and its history.

This game has one puzzle that I struggled with for a bit, but once I realized the solution it was actually quite elegant. I found two different endings. While short, I liked the characters in it, who seemed so believable that I could easily imagine them being real.

Has a high content-to-length ratio, so I definitely think people should check it out.

Alas, upon starting this game and solving the starting puzzle, I saw the following room description:

> A small room with nothing but your Cryotube in it. You see the release mainframe to your right and the Port door to the west. The mainframe's tacky lights and fixtures blink erratically. Captain Kirk would be proud. The Port Door has a red light above it indicating it is locked.
>
> The vastness of space can be seen from this room. Thousands of stars surround you, planets streaming slowly across the sky go in all different directions.
>
> You can see Port door, Cryotube (empty), Hunting Knife and Bloody Note here.

This says a few things to me. One, that this game has Star Trek references and an enthusiastic author who loves space (good); two, that I'm in a class science fiction spaceship game (could be good or bad); and three, that the author is fairly new to Inform and its rules about capitalization and initial appearance rules (not something that I look forward to).

The rest of the game bears these ideas out. You are awoken from cryosleep to find most of your crew slaughtered. Your goal is to search through the ship to find out what happened and to make sure you live.

The game is pretty grim, lots of blood and bodies. Gameplay isn't too bad, with SEARCH and EXAMINE being pretty useful on multiple occassions. Make sure to type ABOUT to get instructions on one key puzzle!

Overall, I think the game had a neat idea that was hampered a bit by inexperience with Inform 7, and the writing could have had a little more description and detail. For instance an early room says: "Nothing of
interest is here. It looks like any old ship hallway that you’ve seen
millions of times." If that's the case, why include the room at all? Why have a room that even you, the author, don't like writing about?

The nice thing is the game had several fun moments and the author will only get better with Inform over time if they continue to learn, so I would definitely play more games by this author in the future.

I've played three games now by Fred Snyder over the years, all written in his custom parser engine and all involving compact maps with suspenseful plots. I like this game the most out of them so far.

You play in a Cyberpunk-type world where you have an implant in your brain to let you identify and hack objects. Your mission is to retrieve information from the vault of a corporation.

The world model and implementation is completely lean, only implementing exactly what the world requires and nothing else. Every company in the building, every room, every person, is something designed to serve a purpose in the game (outside of one specific room). This has pros and cons; it lets the author do deep implementation and keeps the player from getting lost in a sea of red herrings. On the other hand, it makes suspension of disbelief harder when a corporate office has only 3 rooms. In my book though, I'd rather have a thin, lean, well-implemented game than an overstuffed poorly implemented game.

Besides a variety of NPCs (which I thought were pretty well done), the game includes two kinds of puzzles. I thought the first one was Wordle, but is wasn't, and the second one had me really confused for a second or two before I got it. For me, they hit a sweet spot of 'non-trivial' but 'not punishingly hard'.