Reviews by MathBrush

Well, if you enjoy games where you can play as a hard-drinking, cheating professor, stealing artifacts, snorting lines of coke and hitting on students, this is definitely the game for you.

That's not really my style. This is an early choicescript game. In the beginning, they had 3-4 pretty great games in a row, but they didn't really know what worked, and that resulted in a string of very short games with weak use of stats, unfulfilling scenes and hit-or-miss humor that was often miss. After that, they hit their stride with some games that are still awesome to this day (Slammed! and Choice of Kung Fu, for instance).

That said, this game is still well-polished, with few, if any errors, and the interactivity generally worked for me. I had to sweat over a few choices, and they had actual consequences.

At 68,000 words, this game is a tenth of their most recent game (Luminous Underground) and a little less than half of the average game.

The story is about you, an archaeologist, hearing rumors of an ancient Incan city, the 'City Lost in the Clouds'. You have to dodge Columbian militia and ancient spirits to explore the city, and then safely make it back.

This game was recently in the 'Most underrated Choicescript games' poll, and was second to last (before Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck, which I actually like). If you play even 1 or 2 choices of the demo, you'll instantly know if you like it or not.

This chooseyourstory game has a setup that's a lot more complex than most. You have an inventory, stats you can train, etc.

You are an ordinary man in an ordinary job when a mysterious package changes your life. You're taken to a spy agency and given a dangerous mission.

The opening segments have an inventory with clickable links, but later on that seemed to disappear in favor of choice-based inventory (like when choosing what to take out of your trunk).

The pacing is good, with a strong overall narrative arc. Some of the endings happen a lot sooner than others (I think there are at least a couple dozen endings), so it can be worth backing out and trying again, even if you get a good ending on the first try.

Here's my five-point scale:

+Polish: This is a pretty complex game and I didn't run into any bugs/spelling errors.

+Interactivity: I really felt like I could dig in and strategize and try different things. Even with unlimited undo's, you can get so far into some branches that it's hard to cheat the system, which is nice.

+Descriptiveness: Most of the characters are just spy stereotypes, but the level of action was good.

+Emotional impact: I felt interested in the game and enjoyed seeing what came next.

-Would I play again? On the one hand, the game has a lot of endings and different replayable parts. On the other hand, I feel like the whole thing could use just a little bit more 'something' to be completely compelling, like a really cool opponent or a love interest (or someone who's both!). I know that's not very specific, and maybe that already exists in one of the other branches, so this is totally subjective.

This game probably recreates my childhood experiences of reading CYOA books more than any other.

The chooseyourstory format is adapted more to CYOA books. Most Twine and Choicescript games have shorter text and more frequent choices that frequently meet back up later because it allows you to reuse a lot of text and code. Making a game where every branch goes somewhere different is usually too tedious to code, although some people have done it (like the game Animalia or Porpentine's Myriad).

But a lot of chooseyourstory games seem to get over the problem of needing to write a lot of text by just writing a lot of text, ending up with games with hundreds of thousands of words.

This game is meant for kids, I'd say between 10 and 13 or 14. You are sucked into a fantasy world where you meet strange wizards and adventurers.

There are few choices in this game but a ton of text in each one, and each choice branches a lot. Some are dead ends, but the engine lets you go back and retrace your steps quickly, which the game seems to encourage. This makes the small number of choices make sense, since each replay goes quickly, like paging through an old CYOA book.

I enjoyed it overall, and it gave me some ideas for my own writing.

This Adventuron game has more words than any other I've seen. It's firmly in the Wodehousian vein, with a butler named Gieves and hijinks caused by upper-class British misunderstandings.

It was quite clever and parts of it were very funny (including the ending). It suffered from a certain problem that many humorous games have, which is that the author clearly had some very funny solutions in mind, but that requires several leaps of intuition that aren't always fair.

Overall, though, this is a hefty game with good writing and clever puzzles. I think this would have done fairly well in IFComp, placing in the top half.

This is perhaps the most complex Adventuron game I've seen.

You play as a falsely-accused elf who has to find 7 missing presents. There are two main areas (an outside one and an inside one) as well as an endgame area. There are numerous NPCs, as well.

This game has its own share of Sierra-type-logic (such as there being 4 different sharp-bladed instruments, each of which can only be used on one thing) and adventuron implementation issues (the biggest being error messages not disambiguating between default statements for correct commands on non-interesting present items and correct commands with non-present items).

Fortunately, there are helpful hints in every room. Even with that, though, I had to comb through the itch pages (I found three different ones: the regular page, the submission page, and some comments in the community page for the jam) to finish off the game. Art's very good, and fortunately no puzzles require the art, for people who are visually impaired.

This Adventuron game has you using a teleporter to access three different areas with interlocking puzzles.

The story idea is clever: Bigfoot has been implicated in 3 different acts of mischief and is on the naughty list. He asks you to clear his name.

In a world of perfect implementation, this would be a fairly fun puzzle game. It relies on some visual puzzles included in the graphics.

Unfortunately, there are numerous errors. Adventuron doesn't let you know if an object is undescribed or you typed it wrong, so that caused a few issues with things like a vital but undescribed rock show ad. The main verbs necessary for solving two key puzzles are implemented weird (for one, (Spoiler - click to show)PUT something INTO something doesn't work but INSERT something INTO something does, and for the other (Spoiler - click to show)you have to UNSCREW something instead of TURNing or RATCHETing when you have a ratchet).

A few other things added up to make it a frustrating experience. If the game were polished a bit more, it would be more enjoyable. Still, it had many charming moments.

This is an Adventuron Christmas game that is quite large. You have to find out what 9 kids want for Christmas and make their toys after finding all the ingredients necessary. There is a large system of free shops and recipes for toys.

There are many locations and as of this writing all but one of them has art.

The puzzles range from fairly easy to the very obscure. The hardest puzzles were those involving guessing-the-verb or lack of in-game responses to incorrect actions.

This is large and complicated and I enjoyed it overall.

This is the final game I’m playing for IFComp, and was pretty good to leave off on.

In this game, you play as the inheritor (with the rest of your family) to the estate of your Great Uncle. This uncle cared a great deal about commas and had feelings about them that were entangled with Christian religion and Greek mythology.

The game has several puzzles (accessed more or less in order) and all are based on commas. It’s hard to write this review without overthinking my comma use. I’ve already removed two, and now I’m scared.

The idea is clever, the puzzles aren’t too bad, but the implementation is very thin. A lot of empty rooms are implemented, most descriptions aren’t written in. There is conversation, which is good, and some complicated things have been implemented. But overall this would benefit a great deal from custom responses (you can see all possible responses you can change when in the IDE by typing RESPONSES ALL). The locations could also be cut down or made more vibrant and interesting.

Overall, though, this was a fun game to end up on. Thanks for making it!

-Polish: Could use a lot more custom responses and descriptions.
-Descriptiveness: Most of the writing is bare-bones.
+Interactivity: I enjoyed the puzzles.
+Emotional impact: Fun from puzzles.
+Would I play again? Yes, maybe next time I'm going to be working on long-form fiction.

Ryan Veeder has been one of my biggest influences in game design. His games are generally the model I use for quality and ease of play.

One thing I’ve always admired about his work is how he makes the most trivial parts of his games as elaborate as possible and simplifies the important parts. In the first review I ever wrote of one of his games, I said:

"The game gives you explicit directions on what to do at first. I love ignoring directions in parser games; in some games, like Bronze, the game just doesn’t move forward at all if you ignore the directions. In this game, ignoring the directions gives you a lot of different, fun results.
[…]
The conversation system seemed at first incredible, and then very annoying, especially with the main favorable NPC. You have a lot to say, but 95% of it is completely irrelevant."

I no longer really see that as annoying, because now it’s something I look forward to. And those two quotes above could easily describe this game as well.

This game is a multi-perspective look at a sidewalk chalk contest in 2011. Given Ryan’s predilection for going whole-hog into fictional backstories for his game, I think it’s likely this is entirely fictional, but there is a great deal of worldbuilding behind the scenes included in an epilogue. It’s especially interesting that the intent of the epilogue is to construct in the player an image of Ryan and his personal life, giving the game a pseudo-autobiographical nature.

The actual gameplay is walking through a sidewalk chalk contest multiple times as different people, together with some flashbacks and some flashweirds where things go bizarre. The game is abstract enough at times that you could put any personal interpretation on it, and I enjoy the interpretation where the sidewalk chalk contest represents IFComp. Funnily enough, it represents this comp very well, with games with heavy worldbuilding, a game that is entirely a political statement/slogan, games that are mostly decorative, games based almost entirely on other media by other creators, and sexy games that some judges feel are too sexy (guess that judge is me!).

So I enjoyed the game, it had exactly the kind of things I look for in a Ryan Veeder game. It’s always a pleasure to see the directions his mind takes him. If you liked this game, I could recommend Winter Storm Draco for a generally similar style. If you want more puzzles, I’d recommend Taco Fiction, The Lurking Horror II: The Lurkening, the Crocodracula games or Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder.

+++++Polish, Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional Impact, Would I play again?: All 5 categories are satisfied here.

This game falls in the middle of the comp’s parser games for me. It’s reasonably well-polished, has a nice slow trickle of information, and has a well-defined progression. On the other hand, it’s fairly linear and could use some more emotional impact. So it was better than many other comp games for me, but it could use more to rise to the top.

In this game, you play as an academic moving into an office. You have a bunch of boxes stacked on top of each other. As you open them one at a time, you have to find a place to put everything. But there’s only a finite amount of room in the office, and a lot has to go into the trash and storage.

The idea of taking things out of boxes one by one and thinking about them while you decorate an office isn’t all that bad, but it’s not exactly action-packed (I say this as someone who wrote a game where you put things -into- a box while thinking about them while moving -out- of an office). The best parts are where you slowly learn more about the character’s background. In that sense, it becomes a mystery puzzle, and that’s completely up my alley.

The one thing that I think could be improved with the parser is near the end when you’re trying to wrap up. The game frequently told me I wasn’t done unpacking when I tried to leave, but all the boxes were gone (when I tried to leave the room). LOOKing usually gave me a hint, so I think if I could ask for anything it’s that the message for going WEST would change after the boxes are gone to give you more hints.

I was happy to play this, overall, and the name makes a lot of sense by the end of the game!

+Polish: The game was generally well-polished.
+Descriptiveness: The writing had a distinctive voice.
+Interactivity: I was able to make plans and execute them, which is nice.
-Emotional impact: The game's big moments didn't land for me.
+Would I play again? Yeah, it's pretty fun!