Reviews by MathBrush

In this game, the main character discovers that they have been paralyzed unless someone (the player) types them commands; they have become a sort of puppet.

The game explores the interaction between player and PC, while a mysterious voice gives dark quotes in the background.

The game is very descriptive and the writing is good, but eventually holes start showing up, and the puzzles can be very unintuitive and frustrating.

David Welbourn has an excellent walkthrough for this game.

In this game, you find scrolls and potions and weapons, and you engage in randomized combat with a variety of monsters while trying to prove yourself to an employer.

The randomized combat takes place automatically when you enter a room with a monster. After the first turn, you can make your own choices. Many times, you'll walk in a room and die or someone else will die.

The storyline is fairly standard, but some of the monsters were described in a fun way.

Overall, a frustrating CRPG.

In this short ifcomp game, you run around trying to feed, change, and put your baby to sleep.

The game is spare with uncapitalized room names and stray punctuation. Reasonable solutions to the puzzles are often not accepted and provide no clues as to what would be acceptable.

This 2013 ifcomp game is a short, small game with about a dozen rooms. The game has some atmospheric effects and a context sensitive help system, as well as some clever details.

However, it has many typos and some programming bugs, as well as being very short. Also, for me at least, it was difficult to guess the necessary actions.

In this short Twine game, you are looking for a friend in an airport.

This version of Twine uses unlimited scroll back, a nice feature. Each passage is illustrated with an image from a warning sign or other kind of sign.

There are multiple endings, but the ways to achieve them are not clear. This made me feel frustrated at times.

The writing doesn't sparkle, but it does its job. There's a bit of a fantasy/altered reality element at one point that was interesting.

This is a very large, spare game entered into IFComp. You wander around a large variety of areas, including a library, a secret lab, a castle, and a haunted pyramid.

Gameplay consists of three main mechanics: finding gold rings in odd places, finding keys and later unlocking things, and giving a variety of appropriate ethnic foods to crazed individuals who generally jump out of cabinets, boxes, coffins, and so on. You also have a pirate bird companion whom you can talk to, and a large number of NPCs who lampshade the games incompleteness by saying things like "I would have more powers if I had been implemented correctly!"

Room descriptions are spare, and gameplay can get repetitive.

If you look at the walkthrough for this game, you'll see that it's absolutely huge for an if comp game (perhaps 4+ hours), and that the same commands are repeated over and over.

Much of this starship game consists of walking back and forth between two halves of a navigation system and pushing the same sequence of buttons.

The idea of this game is that you must travel to other worlds to find treasure, which you then take to an android bazaar to sell, to buy new items such as star maps or keys.

The writing is sparse, but the game is creative, especially the stage that is a huge statue of a human. The ending was disappointing, and the game was somewhat repetitive.

In this game, you are in a 3x3 club and must find some dirt on the reigning Yo Momma champion. You have to wander around and try to look at his stuff and talk to his friends to find incriminating things.

This game is really well-polished and descriptive; I didn't find any bugs and everything was good and smooth. The dialogue was clever and witty, the puzzles were fantastic.


This game does contain some kinds of questionable material, since it's based on insulting other people's mothers, and their is some intended (but not completed) violence against women by other people. Overall, though, this was a good game.

East Grove hills tells the story of a group of friends who go through a school bombing/shooting. Like photopia, it is told using non linear time, and it uses Photopias conversation system.

Unlike photopia, it is told through large text dumps, and doesn't provide many natural actions for the protagonist to take.

Overall, a good story.

This game is small, but relatively neat and tidy. You have to go out and get groceries and check on a book before a meeting.

It's fairly typical for a 'My apartment' type game. There are a couple of guess the verb issues, but on the other hand the writing is very good in places, especially crossing the road.

It turns out the game has a hidden aspect to it, described in the ABOUT text, that puts an interesting spin on the action. I took about 10 minutes to play it.