Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

LASH is a long, well-polished game by Paul O Brian. This game predates the Earth and Sky games by a year.

This game has a major twist, so some of this review will be in spoilers.

The first half of the game is a scavenger hunt similar to adventure or Zork but in a near future world. You command a partially organic robot. You collect items for money.

(Spoiler - click to show)This half is a shame. None of the puzzles matter at all besides entering the large steel door. When you do, in the atric you find a realistic simulation of the slavery era, where you take the identity of a young girl. It seems open and difficult, but this part of the game is completely linear with very mild puzzles. Once you complete it, you return to the real world where you and the partially organic robot deal with its future.

This is a psychologically intense game, with some strong profanity, racial slurs, torture and rape, presented in a non-gratuitous way.

This game has some great content, which makes it a real shame that it is covered with an impenetrable shell of obnoxious obstructions.

The first puzzle is a huge issue. Solution: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a quarter shining machine that is completely useless, and a weird box behind the tent where you have to turn off one switch, so that the announcer's criteria for a shiny quarter turns to just shiny or quarter..

Once you get past that hurdles the central conceit of the game is genius. There are 5 mini games that you can get sent to, each with a different concept. They all have one thing in common: (Spoiler - click to show)the word that the wheel landed on is vital to the mini game..

The mini games are varied, with a couple of fantasy games, a few sci fi, and a real life game.

This game is about a young person born in space who wished more than anything else to go to the earth home they've never experienced.

It is keyword based, and in the inform version I played, it had some nice styling. The undum/vorple version has gorgeous UI and sound effects, but it did not display properly for me.

Overall, though, the game was very short with what felt like some missed opportunities for alternative routes. It was a well crafted but small bite.

This isn't really something to try and beat as much as it is a tool to come up with characters. It chooses things like name, sex and appearance, but also personality types, astrological signs, concerns about body image, etc.

There is a message of sorts in what options are generated, but it seemed mostly just like a fun tool rather than a means to a greater end.

Edit:

I've just replayed this, and discovered the black text is links to mini-stories, many of which are really good. I recommend this game now. Some strong profanity. I've increased the rating from 3 stars to 5.

This game was entered in the cover stories competition, where cover art was provided first, and games were developed based on them.

You play as a tiny ninja that lives under a bed. You're job is to go around the room, cheering up your comrades one at a time in a classic linear type puzzle system.

The writing is compact and cute, and the game is short. I recommend it for a light snack. I did get stuck at the very end.

Ryan Veeder is known for tongue-in-cheek, polished games. This game is well polished and paced, but this time it's a creepy ghost story. Like a campfire tile, it is spooky, and dark, but has a vague hint of a smile at times (which may just be my interpretation).

I found the game to be effectively creepy, banking on anticipation, slow changes in writing, and gradual, creepy, realizations.

I strongly recommend this game, especially for fans of campfire tales.

The author of this game has specifically said that they did not intend this work to be a popular game, but that it was intended to provoke thought and discussion, and to be seen by many people.

This work is mostly lielnear, with a sequence of side comment links and a single story progress link at the bottom.l, until the end when you get some binary choices.

The piece is about imposter syndrome, the feeling that you are not competent at what you do, especially in the context of women, trans individuals, and other minorities.

As a description of imposter syndrome, it excels. As a mindless diversion, it is only mildly successful, but that was never it's goal.

This game was a fun take on the surfeit of surreal dream/coma games. The game map is shaped like a nautilus, hence the name.

In this game, you explore symbolic areas, with the symbolism spelled out, you take symbolic keys and put them in symbolic locks, and face your fears, hopes, and your truths.

I liked it, but it didn't draw me in; the game was intended as a quick, fun romp, but it eventually turned into a monotonic hunt, which, while true to the genre, could have been avoided.

Recommended for fans of short, funny games and surreal games.

The surreal afterlife exploration game is a popular genre in IF, and one of my favorite.

This game is a fairly typical such game; you have a central hub from which you explore other areas, gathering color coded items and taking them to color coded rooms. In doing so, you experience memories of your past life.

It's spare, and with few items implemented, but this is my favorite genre, so I liked it.

(Caveat: I played a final (non-beta) version of this game without graphics right before it was released).

Wordsmith by Ade McTavish is a very, very good game. In 2014, the author released Fifteen Minutes, which was one of the best difficult puzzle games in a long time, an intricate time travel game involving half a dozen copies of yourself. Then, in 2015, he took 2nd place in IFComp with Map, a mostly puzzle less but big story-based game that was emotionally powerful.

In this game, he's combined his best of story, setting and puzzles. The game has a free version and a commercial version.

In the free version, you create worlds in several stages, like Sim Earth. Your solar system ages over time, making different planetary orbits more or less favorable over time; you can make a planet for each orbit out of different alchemical materials. You then try to create a form of life that fits that planet , and then you teach the life culture and skills until, hopefully, they develop interstellar travel.

I found this thrilling, well-written (with procedural generation) and difficult. Fortunately, with 6 orbits in each solar system, it isn't too hard to get one to interstellar travel.

The game seemed to require a big info dump at first, which put me off, until I just ignored it and experimented. This worked much better; I should have thought of the book you get as a reference guide, not a book to be read back to back but to be consulted.

As for the commercial portion of the game, it's just getting started after the world building ends. You explore an absolutely huge, 7-level space station with a sprawling plot involving a widespread conspiracy and opposing forces.

I found the world building fascinating, although it was hard to keep track of the various locations; this should be a lot easier with the graphics in the finished version. I especially got lost in the ground floor a few times, as the building rotates.

There is a complicated card game in the finished version which I have yet to try, as I found an alternate path around that part of the game.

Overall, I recommend this game, and would rank it around the level of Blue Lacuna or Sorcery!.

Edit: I forgot to mention that this game uses graphics in a way not seen in parser games ever. The graphics respond to commands in this game in an extremely useful way. It's a technical masterpiece in this sense.