Reviews by MathBrush

Pogoman GO! was written by the winners of the 2009 IfComp and the JayIsGames Casual Gameplay competition (one where heavyweights like zarf and Stephen Granade entered).

From any other authors, this would be an impressive game, but I ended up disappointed. This game is intricate, well over 100,000 words of code. It has dozens of locations, an intricate minigame with many characters and a combat system, and a well-thought out plotline. Tons of little fun response are added, and so on and so on.

So what's not to like? First, it's a parody of a flash-in-the-pan social event that was already outdated when the comp started. It's an in-joke that's not 'in'.

Edit from 2025: in light of recent events, this game has renewed relevance.

Second, it parodied the most annoying parts of the original: crashes, grinding, pop-up achievements, etc.

Third, the 'good part' that comes after the parody part is itself somehow dissatisfying, as if the beta testers didn't get to it themselves. There are good puzzles and interesting locations, but the cluing is off.

The cluing and storyline both suffer from the zaniness of the game; it introduces humorous elements, but fails to integrate them into the internal logic of the game. The solution may be funny, but why is that the solution out of all solutions that should work?

This is a lot of complaining, when the truth is that this is mechanically one of the best games of the last few years, and most people should have a good time with it.

This game is a good example of how you can take just any idea and polish it up into something fun.

The idea (playing paper rocks scissors with crazy consequences) is interesting, but so many other comp parser games had interesting ideas and just failed. There were parser games where no exits were listed, games where only one synonym out of 20 were implemented, games where the writing was incomprehensible, games with big text dumps.

This game, however, hit up all of the important points for basic player enjoyment: adaptive in-game hints, synonyms implemented, standard responses changed, consistent puzzles, etc.

My personal favorite bit was:

">eat phone
You take a big bite out of your cell phone and chew thoroughly.

Okay, you don't actually do that, because that would be dumb."

The writing was a bit sparse, and the story was minimal, but this game still was fun and placed high. Why? Because those pieces of basic player enjoyment are the most important part of a parser game, I believe.

Z-machine games are less and less frequent each year, because Inform defaults to glulx. This comp still had several z-machine games though, but I'm not sure why.

Anyway, that means that the author of this game has probably had Inform for a while. Given that that's the case, this is a pretty disappointing troll game. There are only a couple of rooms, few items, etc.

This game has some good graphics, excellent styling and a convenient user interface with saves and achievements. This is a great setup for a Twine game, especially one like this with more 'game'-y features.

The story was a good read, too. You are cast out of a village and left 'to the wolves', but you make a new life for yourself. Your interactions with the villagers and yourself are up to you.

The mechanics were a little opaque, and the endings didn't quite click for me, but overall, Highly recommended.

This game is primarily notable for its extensive use of multimedia with glulx, more than any other previous glulx game.

It's a card game where you take turns playing cards that affect a world. The writing and images are detailed and compelling.

However, I felt that there was just too much going on in this game. The game window has a ton of doodads and images, and the effects were very complicated. I will admit I was in a hurry, though.

Overall, fun as an idle game, and interesting as a tech demo.

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)There's not much to say about this game; it's just an old short story/novella, with all the genders swapped, and implemented in big linear chunks in Twine.

Why not just read the original book? Not much to see here.

This game has a beautiful backdrop of a mirror, and has unusual fonts and styling.

It is a parser conversational game. You type topics (about 1000 are recognized) and thus explore a a conversational thread.

The writing is good, but the biggest issue is the lack of control. I felt like I was just getting random snippets, even though there were threads. The vagueness of the writing contributed to this fact.

As a technical work, though, this is extraordinarily impressive.

This game was written by an established board game maker and writer. Caroline Berg had a forum thread (located at https://videogamegeek.com/thread/1117906/you-are-standing-cave/page/6) where she was narrating an adventure game to the board members.

This game is the implementation of that forum thread. It was written in 2 weeks, after 1 week spent learning Inform.

The current implementation was not beta-tested, so it could really use some fixing up, but the core of it is good. It could do with a walkthrough.

This mid-length TADS game has a strong writing style and uses various colors. It has unique, alien world-building and an interesting map.

It also has puzzles that can be hard to guess. Using the walkthrough is fun, though, to get the whole story. There is one strong profanity, for no real reason, but it won't happen if you follow the walthrough.

I really enjoyed the setting and backstory here, it really is unique.

This game is a long, well-written, and exciting creepy game set in a house.

You are a young child at night, whose family seems to be missing. You explore the house, gathering various objects, and discovering more about the truth of your family's disappearance.

I created a textadventures.co.uk account, but the game interface was still infuriatingly bad. If I typed in a command too fast, the game would freeze, making me need to restore a save. You can only have one save at once.

Also, I followed the walkthrough, but I couldn't get the main opponent to spawn in the game. I still have never finished the game, even though I've started over 8 times.

**Edit** I finally got the game to finish; I realized that the walkthrough didn't say what I thought it did, and there's nothing you need to 'spawn'. This does, though, make the big puzzle unmotivated.