Reviews by MathBrush

Rarely has a game given me more to think about. For the first time I can remember, I had to keep open a notebook on my thoughts for this review as I was writing, because there was so much I wanted to comment on.

This game felt surreal to me. Caleb Wilson is well-known for his haunting or magical games like Lime Ergot and Starry Seeksorrow. I was definitely looking forward to playing this, and it was one of the games IFDB had most suggested to me over the last few years.

The dreamlike quality pervades this piece. The other works of film or literature I compared it to as I played were Pilgrim's Progress, Dante's Inferno, the film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Amadeus, and the works of Baz Luhrmann. If it were produced as a film I'd expect it to look like The Cabinet of Dr. Calegari, and I wonder if the whole Choicescript game couldn't be reinterpreted as a mental exploration of the subconscious. A major feature of the game is numerous bright stages where you sit alone before a dark and murmuring audience in a towering theatre which features bizarre architecture.

As to the game itself, you are a famed composer and musician. This world is an alternate version of Europe, set after the exile of its version of Napoleon and on the eve of a war between Napoleon and Russia.

In this world, many people are possessed with a parasitic intelligence known as a Genius, which may or may not just be a feature of their subconscious. Your genius has various opposed qualities it can lean towards.

Each chapter is played in a different town, each of which is characterized by an abundance of one thing (and here I think of the works of Kafka [but more cheerful] and Michael Ende, although neither one exactly applies).

There are a cast of distinct characters who shadow you everywhere you go, including a rival, a journalist, several love interests, and quite a few spies.

The text of the game is so interesting. I have a whole file of the most dreamlike and surreal bits, but here is a taste:

(Spoiler - click to show)"You approach a glowing rectangle: the strangely small doorway that must open onto the concert stage. Perhaps it is just the peculiar atmosphere of the castle, but you feel oddly nervous. The room is awash in bright light and for a moment you can't see a thing. When your eyes adjust you find yourself standing at the back of the curiously small stage. The hall stretches away farther than the stage lights allow you to see. There is no applause to greet your appearance: half of the audience is staring at you in silence, while the others—clerks, to judge by appearance—are hard at work, pens scratching at ledgers. It seems that for much of the audience, this is a working lunch. There is a blurry square, lit by dim lights, to the side and high up the wall, which is concave like the inside of a spoon. King Ferenc's box, perhaps?"

and another one:

"An elegant woman dressed in black and purple is standing before a marble mantel. There is no fire, just a hint of ashes; instead she—"May I present," says Peruz, "Countess Zerov, an esteemed visitor from the court of Sclavia!"—is the flame. A dark and liquid flame, like that which smolders unseen, sending up barely a hint of smoke and devouring a building from within."

Why, then, would I give 4 stars to a game that affected me so dramatically instead of 5?

I had some troubles. The enormous multitude of names was overwhelming, and I found the game had no almanac or list of names of places and people. Some kind of accompaniment to remind us might be nice.

I had difficulty knowing when my genius was being changed and when it was being tested. I had spent a great deal of time cultivating a mathematical genius, but then realized I couldn't change it more. A chapter or two later, it had suddenly reversed itself to be as unmathematical as possible. One of my choices must have changed it, but when, and where? Many other challenges were similarly opaque.

Overall, this game is a masterpiece of writing and setting, and I feel it will linger in my mind for many years to come. I had a long, long dream last night and this morning, and when I woke up there was a short time where the dream world felt more real than this one. This game parallels that same feeling, and it was surreal and haunting to play it so soon after that experience.

I received a review copy of this game.

It's interesting playing two criminal Choicescript games in a row, one from years ago and the other recent (The Martian Job).

This game comes from a time before Choice of Games' had firmly established their game philosophy, it seems, because it breaks it in many ways. There are a lot of binary options. There are a lot of choices where there is an obvious 'right answer' (like an early choice where there is only one escape pod and either you can save a little girl or yourself. Knowing that you're in chapter 1 and the chance of you dying is low, and the chance of a future reward is high, there's really no reason for you not to save her).

Perhaps most unusually, every relationship is an 'opposed stat', which in Choicescript is a pair of stats that sum up to 100%, so raising one lowers the other.

This puts some of the odder choices of the game in perspective. There are many, many options which are just 'be a jerk'. But in this opposed system, being a jerk to one crew member is the very best way to befriend their 'opposite'.

I found this bizarre. Another early facet really put me off. Your first encounter with the crew is with a blue-skinned alien from a 'race of slaves'. When meeting him, he asks you about slavery and three options are how you think it's fine and only one is against it. It's really odd.

As a representative for house-style Choice of Games stories, this is pretty poor. But if I had randomly found this game (such as in IFComp), I would have rated it fairly well. I can compare it the recent '4x4 Galaxy', with which it shares some similarities. This game has a fairly robust money and inventory system. It invites numerous strategies on replay, and despite its small word count, manages to feel pretty large.

I think I'd give this a 4. In a way, though, I'd be more likely to recommend this to people who don't like the Choice of Games housestyle and less likely to recommend it to fans of their other games.

I received a review copy of this game.

This is the one of the darker Choicescript games I have played. In a world where virtual reality can hijack another's senses, people use the technology to live through others: cliff diving, gorging on food, and darker things.

This game includes references to drug use, self-harm, suicide, and more. I didn't experience sexual content on my run-throughs. Each chapter has optional content warnings.

As a detective story, this is top-notch. It was nominated for a Nebula award, and its easy to see why. I've replayed it a few times and it's always fresh.

This Scott Adams game was designed with the retro format in mind. The download includes source code with design notes, and it's fascinating to see the discussion of how many lines of text will fit where and what needs to be removed.

This game is a shortish text adventure using the Scott Adams format (short in the sense of 7 treasures and about 16 rooms; it takes a good hour or more to finish without hints, longer if you get stuck like I did). It's based off of Hamlet and contains many joking references to it.

This is a hard game. Much of the ease of modern parser games comes from adaptive hints or helpful responses to incorrect actions. This game has some of that, but only so much can fit into the constrained format. I had to request help and then discovered the (well-commented and organized) source code provided in the download.

While I appreciate the craftsmanship in the game, it definitely is the type to be solved by careful exploration of the state space and deliberative thinking, as opposed to my general play style of 'charge ahead recklessly and see where the story takes me'.

I will say that I think this is much more successful as a game than Graham Nelson's adaptation of The Tempest or my own Sherlock Holmes adaptations.

This game is one of the most difficult to rate that I've had in a long time. Not to play, but to rate adequately.

What does a good rating mean? Is it an endorsement? Is it a message that says, 'Hey, I'm sure you'll like this game?" Is it an objective measure of technical skill?

This game is very long, 11 chapters of text that took me over an hour to play. In it, you play one of Trump's campaign staff as you aid him (with an in-game alias of Truman Glass) in getting elected, and the aftermath.

There's been a lot of talk on Twitter in the last weeks about authors appropriating others' stories. As a white able-bodied man, I have written protagonists as female, or disabled, or hispanic, without really thinking about it.

This game goes a bit further, in that the author writes the experience of a queer woman in America with a minority second-generation immigrant background. And these facets are essential to the story. I see in the credits that others were consulted, so it's possible that this is what they were consulted on.

The minority you are is an option, and Polish ancestry is oddly listed along with Hispanic, Black and Indian ancestry. Is this saying that Polish people have similar experiences with POC? Or is it saying that it's immaterial which one you pick? Other details are off; the twin towers attack is described as happening at sunset, when I remember it happening during early hours at school in the West.

What is the story? It portrays the protagonist as divided against herself, constantly experiencing ill effects that are contrary to the ideals of the campaign she works for. It's not a straight-up retelling of Trump, but it's close enough. It veers between painting Trump as a hideous cartoon and glamorizing him as a tough-guy mob boss.

Politics have belonged in Interactive Fiction for decades, almost since the beginning. Infocom even had a game that was just a big anti-Reagan message (A Mind Forever Voyaging). It's a medium especially well suited to political messages.

I don't know if I felt comfortable with this game's messages. Like Trump itself, it stated controversial things (like saying being anti-vaxx and pro-choice have to go together) and then played it off as satire.

I don't endorse this game, except for players who are interested in seeing a take on American politics. I do give it a 4 star rating on my scale, knowing that this will be effectively seen as an endorsement, as it will be fed into the overall average.

My scale:
-Polish. The game is thoroughly polished, with text transitions, styling, illustrations, and music.
-Interactivity. I am definitely anti-slow text but this was better than most, with fast-forwarding enabled by clicking and a fairly fast speed to begin with. Choices were sometimes clearly not important/not offering real choice, but in general I felt like my choices mattered and they were brought up again in the future.
-Emotion. Well, I felt a large range of emotions playing.
-Descriptiveness. The writing made me feel like I was there.
-Would I play again? This is the star I'm not awarding. I don't really agree with this game, and don't feel like playing again.

I helped beta test this Spring Thing 2020 game.

In it, you play as a someone trying to rob a house for an organization of thieves.

Like DiBianca's other games, you have limited parser options here. All interactions are performed by typing the name of the object you are interacting with.

The puzzles are interesting, with puzzles involving far-flung parts of the house, searching puzzles, combination locks, etc.

The owner can come back at any time, and discerning the patterns of his visits is one of the biggest puzzles of the game, one which I didn't see for a long time and which really surprised me. I'm not sure it worked for me completely, but I enjoyed this game well. If you're a parser fan, this is one of the best parser games released this year, and definitely worth checking out!

I beta tested this game.

Napier's Cache is in an unusual niche of historical fiction, and is based on a family story of the author.

It is fairly linear in story with nonlinear interactions in each 'phase'. You first have a small treasure hunt, followed by a dinner scene, then another treasure hunt and a simple maze.

In design it reminds me quite a bit of Christminster, an early (pre-IFComp) inform game that was well-regarded at the time, that also had you doing things like eating at a dinner with scholars and discovering the history of old alchemists.

Overall, the quality is well-done, and most reasonable interactions are coded for. I enjoyed each iteration of this better than the previous, and I believe this is something to be proud of.

This is game that is hard for me to review, in many ways.

First, it was difficult to play. It is in French, not my native language, but it also is written in a very allegorical and elusive style. It is very long, with at least four chapters each with a dozen or more pieces. I encountered a bug while looking at my objects list at the very end of Ch. 3 where the link to return to the main story disappeared.

Also, it's hard to say what score to assign. According to my rubric, I give 1 point for being polished (it is), 1 point for being descriptive (which it also is), and 1 point for interactivity (despite the fact it's linear, giving me a choice to see the objects page or not was in fact useful). But I didn't feel an emotional impact as the scenes were too disconnected, and I was too exhausted by it to play again. I believe that many of these problems would be mitigated for a Francophone.

Like the original Balderstone (which you don't have to play to understand this), you are at a gathering of horror writers who tell 'stories' which are minigames. The order of the stories is randomised.

The games are coded well, and the tone varies a lot, sometimes dramatic, sometimes silly, sometimes frightening, all sort of tongue in cheek. Many of them have twists, whether geographical or as a meta-narrative etc.

I came, I saw, I had fun, the stories aren't really related, so why don't you just go try it out and see for yourself?

I beta tested this game.

Visually, this game is nice and polished, and the text is free from typos and bugs.

You play as a man blinded by the government and sent to work. While at work, you encounter a cast of characters entangled in a web of intrigue, and must make your own decisions and what to investigate and who to help. There are 6 different endings, some of which can happen unexpectedly, which makes this game pretty difficult (especially with no undo feature I saw.)

The first chapter's text is incredibly dense, with a lot of big words and long sentences. Once other characters are thrown into the mix, the pace picks up, and the dialogue especially is fresh and well-written.

I would love to see a dialogue-only game by this author (like the very popular games Birdland and Hana Feels). As for this game, I was interested enough to play to several different endings, and felt satisfaction at reaching a good one.