Reviews by MathBrush

The first Manalive game, constituting the first part of the book, did not impress me very much. It was confusing and difficult. I liked the second one much better, as it has better mechanics and wraps up the plot in a pleasant way.

On the other hand, the game is still rather finicky about commands, and has huge, huge text dumps directly from the novel.

If anything, the best parts of this game are those from the novel itself.

This is a short, fast paced game. You are a Roman and a user of magic. The local officials are storming your house, and you must hide all incriminating evidence.

This game uses the linking magic popular from Emily Shorts own Savoir Faire. You can create direct links and reverse links, although I had trouble distinguishing the two.

The game includes the possibility of violence, but it is not necessary. It lasts at most a few dozen turns.

This game is quite large, taking place in 3 acts. The first act is slow, exploring a house full of arcane writings and mystical objects.

The setting turns to horror soon, as you explore a realm of evil.

The writing is uneven, with some very mundane parts and some parts (like the last few commands of part I) of brilliance.

There seemed to be some bugs. I couldn't finish the very last part of the game with the walkthrough.

This is the first Clickventure game I tried. These games are written by the staff of the website Clickhole,, and consist of a couple of choices per page.

The game seems to branch highly, with some later recombining. It is also a bit of a mockery of Oregon Trail, with choices about how to equip yourself and with disasters occurring on your trip.

Overall, it seemed like it had some gross-out humor, and I'm not sure I'm interested in playing their other games.

This game consists of no rooms at all. The author has exploited some set locations in Inform to remove the need for rooms.

Instead, we have some fun responses to standard commands, plus a fairly well known science experiment. It's almost too plain, but then there are clever bits that redeem it.

A short game.

This game has you take on the role of an early psychologist in the time of horses and carriages. You have an unusual patient who has disappeared, and you must use your knowledge of them to find them.

The game has a compelling idea, especially when a major shift happens midway through. But there is little guidance, meagre descriptions, and a general sense of incompleteness.

This game intimidated me. You are a janitor whose job is to clean up after adventurers (i.e. reset the game world after each player). This is an idea that was present in Adventure, the original text adventure, but it has been taken to a fun level here.

The problem is that setup is hard. There are two sets of doorways, one natural (leading about the game world), and one in a grid system (backstage) that is very confusing. Also, it's hard to know how to start using your mimesis disrupting mop.

Once you get into it, this game is fun. You have to use clues to guess how things used to be, and reset them to that state.

A very fun Zorkian game. Unfortunately, it contains ASCII art of a nude woman, but its completely avoidable.

This game is surreal, psychedelic and dreamlike. The author plays freely with punctuation and capitalization. Scenes proceed generally no matter what you do.

The scenes generally center around the phrase "you know what?" along with sexual encounters with an elderly woman, an eighth grader, and a computer-woman hybrid.

I didn't enjoy the tone of the game, and I don't plan to play again. However, it is polished and descriptive, and the interactivity works.

This game has you play as a violent rapist and murderer as you go about your business, as well as playing as someone investigating them.

The writing is free of errors, and unfortunately too descriptive. The game tells you what conversation topics to ask about, but it feels clunky and hard to get right.

The story is not particularly clever, but it has some twists.

In this game, you wander through 6 rooms with duct tape and the corpse of your sidekick.

You can tape various things to each other, and interact in a few ways with the corpse. Many responses are coded, but many other natural things are not coded.

Some people have said this is an IFMud in joke, which would make sense, because the game doesn't make much sense.

Overall, it is descriptive, but not very funny.