Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

In this game, you are trapped inside a small shop with a grue (a creature from the Zork series). Just any connection with Zork makes a game more silly, but that's not a drawback here.

You have to move through the darkness with limited resources. As you do, you find different sources of light and other surprises. You're just trying to survive.

I had to replay a couple of times to get it right. It has some nice ambient sounds and good use of images and backgrounds.

I really liked it, and recommend it.

This is a mid-length twine game where you a part of a small video game company, hired as the writer.

You go through several conversations with your co-workers, intended to show the plight of game writers and why they are in a tough position. You get blamed for the faults of others, you don't get the resources you need, and so on. It has some twists.

Overall, this didn't really gel for me. I worked for a video game company before in a variety of positions, and pretty much everybody gets the exact same bad treatment. But the twine was well put together.

In this first entrant of the Choice of the Deathless series, you play as a young Craftsmen (i.e. magic user) in a law firm run by a lich and two sorcerers, and you have to work with demons, etc.

This game gives you quite a bit of freedom, letting you pick between a few romances, choose to be a fisticuffs type or magic-using type on a sliding scale, and letting you choose what factions you support.

Many people have enjoyed the simple touches like having to pay off your student loans, or the excellent descriptions of the non-humans.

Somehow this game didn't appeal to me as much as the sequel, The City's Thirst. The sequel is not strongly connected to the first, so you could play that one first.

This game is a sequel to Mulldoon Legacy, and is smaller.

In an interesting take on the sequel concept, you arrive after the events of the first game, and the effects of your predecessor's actions are everywhere. Items they dropped, doors they opened, things they moved.

Everything is slightly different in the museum, though; a sort of darker version of things. This game expands on the mythology a bit, while still being confusing.

If you liked the first game, you should try this one for sure.

In this game, you find a crashed alien ship and have to repair it.

It was submitted to IFComp many years ago, and it was the author's first game. In it, they apologize for not including more puzzles.

There are numerous typos. Also, the most important, winning command involves a scenery object that was never described.

This game uses many full-color illustrations and background music to tell the story of a young inuit child, her relationship with outsiders, and an inuit legend.

The music and sound effects are well-chosen to establish the atmosphere. The illustrations are nice, too, with a couple of cool tricks with them.

The pacing of the twine story was effective for me, with appropriate use of fade-ins and repeated links.

Overall, a nice short creepy story.

This game is a spoof of Infidel by a teenage Andrew Plotkin, written in Basic and ported to Inform.

The opening part is a much easier version of Infidels opening story. Once you are in the tomb, though, you have to prove how bad of an adventurer you are by dying in 9 traps.

The traps are fairly simple, mostly just exploring each area and trying everything. They are very clever, however; the glue pit really kept me guessing.

The commentary is enjoyable. The game itself is spare, and not completely compelling, but it is valuable for historic purposes.

This game is truly epic. I felt like I was reading a novel as I played. It lasted long; longer than any of the other choicescript games I played.

I had trouble putting it down. A game about professional wrestling seemed so silly, but it's cinematic, almost like Rocky. There's a lot about second chances, betrayals, seeing the truth. It's so much better than it seemed from the blurb and art.

Subplots include a variety of romances, long term relationships with a rival, and so on. You can choose to be a face or a heel, and seeing the psychology about being a heel was very interesting.

Strongest recommendation.

In this game, you okay a shark like creature who learns the story of two humans through an unusual mechanic.

This is an Ectocomp game, and that means it was written in 3 hours or less. The author made excellent design decisions here by severely restricting the scope of your actions and then implementing the remaining actions with a high degree of polish.

This is a gory game, but I didn't really notice the gore. You have only a few basic actions, but they allow you to slowly develop the story of the two humans in an interesting way. I liked it.

This game was the winner of the 'Landscape' portion of the 2000 IF art show, the same art show where Galatea won the 'Portrait' segment.

You play as a woman who has second thoughts about her engagement, visiting a cove to be alone with her memories. Points are given based on memories remembered and animals examined, as well as for exploration.

The writing is peaceful and beautiful.

The game has a very small puzzle aspect that didn't really work for me.

Overall, I recommend this for fans of the IF art show. If you haven't tried any IF art show games, you should.