Reviews by MathBrush

I recently heard a theater teacher give advice on how to play drunk people. She told students not to act drunk, but to act like a drunk person trying to act sober; otherwise, it will come off as over the top.

This game is written as a romance pretending to be a supernatural police procedural. Almost all interactions, plot points, choices, and scenes are designed to progress your romances with a variety of options.

The base story isn't bad; it's mostly unresolved by the end, as the game is part 1 of 7 intended games in a series, with 3 completed so far. Still, the 'substory' is fairly resolved.

The idea is that you are a recently-promoted detective who discovers a series of grisly murders by persons unknown. Simultaneously, a team of four vampires move into town (not a spoiler, as the game uses dramatic irony; while our protagonist doesn't know what's going on, we generally do). The four vampires happen to all be described as extremely attractive (and customizable as to gender), from the intense and brooding captain A (except names depend on gender selection) to the gregarious N or aggressive M.

I was pondering Choicescript games recently and realized how much better the system is at romance than almost anything else, the way parser games are better at object manipulation puzzles than most other things. Romance naturally lends itself to choices both on who to spend time with and on how to roleplay your interactions with them. This game has much less of an emphasis on powers and win/loss scenarios than most choice-based games (though some of both exists). Instead, the vast majority of options are role-play that affects your stats, and instead of those stats determining what you're capable of, they determine the way people react to you. If you are positive and happy about the supernatural, people comment about how relieved it was easy for you to accept; if tense and fearful, they are worried too.

The game is a romance power fantasy, where multiple beautiful people care about you, are impressed by you, and are excited about you, while you are simultaneously very important and powerful but also very fragile and needing protecting.

Outside of the romantic options, the game is not quite as exciting as, say, Night Road, another vampire game with investigations, but with them it's a solid game option. It makes sense that this would be one of the most popular Hosted Games of all time. I look forward to part II.

I'm going through and finding which games are on my 'played' list but not reviewed, and this is one of them.

AI Dungeon was a novelty when it came out 5 years ago. It was a large language model trained on the Chooseyourstory website's CYOA games. Due to the early days of ChatGPT, it frequently would go off on ludicrous tangents.

Nowadays it's been rewritten several times, and I'm not sure it can be said to have been one product over the years, which makes it distinctly hard to review.

Trying out the newest version, I played a couple of the main storylines. I first checked to see if it still has a lot of weird junk in its training data (it did; it knows who Harry Potter's friends are) and if it can obey commands (kind of; it resisted me trying to summon demons and summoned an animal instead, but when I said all of my wishes eventually came true, it allowed the original summoning to take effect).

The storyline just wanders off. In one scenario where there was an AI called Persephone ruling the land, I asked to be taken to see her and they took me into a temple. Then the tapestries started writhing and a guy in them called the Marquise started calling me out and wanting to talk to me, not mentioning Persephone at all. I ordered the game to ignore him and walk in to see Persephone, then I ordered it to let me win immediately. It got more and more resistant until it just said 'error, you need to pay to continue'.

The interactivity is 'soft': you can do mostly anything, and the game will remember it for a moment. The real interactivity isn't discovering what world awaits you; its trying to respond to or outthink or encourage the language model. It's less of a game with a real world setting and more of a conversation between two people.

Checking the AI Dungeon subreddit, it looks like many people just use it for pornography.

Overall, I think the audience for this and the audience for most IFComp-style parser games are pretty different. The joy for me for IFComp games is seeing what the author has come up with, while the joy in this game is mostly seeing what the player can come up with; but when I come up with a game, I like to just actually write one.

So, this game is not for me, but I can understand why people would enjoy it.

This game is a twine game that was designed to mock a genre of misogynistic ‘girls games’ that were once prevalent where you are presented with an ugly girl with stubble, pimples, bad haircut, etc. and must apply the correct makeup or brush to each object to fix them. So, this game has multiple beauty products, of which you can apply any three you want (repeats allowed). A magical fairy and magic mirror provide commentary. The products are magical and not very safe. Once you make the choices, you are sorted into one of six or seven stories, each of which is quite long, making this a very verbose Twine game. The stories are generally modern takes on fairy tales that feature friendship over romance and magic and drama over bliss. This game features heavy reading and a self-critical look at self worth in a magical world.

This was the highest-rated non-commercial game on IFDB that I hadn't played (outside of Superstition Season 2), so I definitely wanted to try it out, especially after trying this author's game Eikas in IFComp.

Like Eikas, this is a daily life simulator in a small community with an opportunity to befriend NPCs, search for items, go wandering, and grow food. Both game are well-implemented and provide a variety of activities for the player to experience each day so that they don't become tedious.

Unlike Eikas, there is more of an edge to this game. Even from the beginning, you can find sadness or heartache in many places. Many deaths are discussed in the game, and blood and violence can occur. Some forest scenes are notably dark, and there is an overarching mystery that can be intense. Overall, it reminds me of things like Princess Mononoke, which can be both cozy and violent.

There are four different people to get to know, and whom you can romance (but only one per game!). I found the character storylines well-written. A gender option for characters could have been fun, as I found the storylines for the men more appealing than the stories for the woman; it would have been fun to romance a forest witch-like woman Jonah.

The writing in the game was excellent, and I enjoyed the various mysteries. The ending has parts that are very solid but overall some things feel up in the air, since the game doesn't truly end. Very fun overall.

In this game, made for Neo Twiny Jam and the Intentionally Bad IF jam, you play as what seems to be a woman obsessed with a man, with stream of consciousness thoughts flying around the screen as events progress to the breaking point.

The main innovation here (and I believe this was meant to be intentionally bad, given where the game was entered) is having the text and links be haphazard: some words tilted, others flickering, posting sentences out of order, links slowly fading in, etc.

The words are disjointed and hard to follow at times, which gives the effect of showing obsession.

My usual scoring system doesn't work too well here. On the one hand, the author has achieved his goals of being obtuse and intentionally bad, and has put a lot of work into it in a polished way. On the other hand, I believe others may not enjoy playing for the exact same reasons.

So, I will put a 2 here on the 'official' score, but a 4.5/5 for the author for the work put into this game.

This game is very unusual. It changes based on the calendar day.

The idea is that you are helping out at a shop in a fantasy setting and are paid in acorns. Each calendar day you can earn acorns by completing a task (usually selecting between two pictures based on a description), solve some cryptic crossword clues, and talk to the shop owner. Then there is nothing else you are allowed to do, so you can just wait until the next day.

I had struggled before with completing Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing, a game with similar mechanics. Before, I couldn't put a finger on why.

Now I think I know. The issue is that every day I choose for myself the most important things I need to get done. During IFComp, playing a new game is one of those tasks. Finishing a game I'm in the middle of is important, too. But doing a small amount of work in an ongoing task somehow feels less important than starting or finishing, so I shelve it.

Then, days later, I come back to it, not remembering anything. When I play a game all at once or over several days, I immerse myself in it and focus on it, holding all the plot in my head as well as I can. Then I mentally summarize it to myself and let all the rest leak out of my brain, leaving only the summary, and whenever I think of the game, that's what I think of.

With this game and Fly Fishing, I never had a chance to digest the whole game. Because I played out of context each day, I didn't know what was important to remember. So I honestly have no clue how the game started or what the setting exactly is. I think we're in a magical fairy forest and the shopkeeper is a kind of animal, and there was a page given us at one point. But I couldn't say more than that.

Of course I could have looked it up for this review, but I wanted the author to get a glimpse into my deranged mind to see what one player's experience was like.

The cryptic crossword clues were fun, albeit hard (like most such to me). Upon my request, the author made a very helpful visual crossword that made it a bit easier. I also used some online crossword dictionaries, but didn't look at others' hints. The thing that got me most stuck early on was that I was convinced that the clue (Spoiler - click to show)small demon would certainly have (Spoiler - click to show)a different solution each time, and was shocked as I realized today (after two weeks of thinking about it) that that wasn't so.

Overall, the game is creative and polished, and provides interactivity that's engaging. Due to its format, I struggled to hold onto a summary of the plot in my mind.

The game also had a charity donation segment, but I'm not including that in my score, as I wouldn't want it to become a trend for games to get upvoted based on financial donations the author makes (or to get downvoted for not doing so). I don't think it's bad, I just think it should be separate from the scoring system.

This game isn’t really complete. It’s described as setting up a larger game, and that makes sense. Looking at the code, there are several blank spots and dead ends.

This is a fighting simulator where you train, spar and fight to win money and advance your career. Eventually you can retire and start over.

This game definitely suffers from maximalism. Every choice has a dozen options, and there are tons of stats and a lot of info flying around. Most things seemed conceived on a grand scale but not fully implemented. I had negative stats for several portions of the game.

There’s also several side things that are a bit odd (like an oracle that costs ‘only a little money’ costing $100,000). As it is, the game is like a store in an old Western, with a huge front designed to look like a two-story building but just a little general store behind.

It’s probably combinatorial explosion that prevented the author from finishing everything. I’d recommend starting a game with a simple model that has the entire process from beginning to end (so, one fighter, one school of fighting, one possible fight, etc) and then once that’s working perfectly move on to adding more options at each level. Then you can replay it over and over as you program to make sure the core experience works.

This game is odd. It’s a fairly short Twine game that boldly announces its lack of interactivity. And yet it has a lot of type-in messages in the game, offering you more freedom in input than most games. You end up at the same place in the end, true, but that’s true of almost all parser games, which tend to have very static plots despite the non-static puzzles.

The inputs require specific formats. At one point, I was asked to give an ordinal number (like ‘5th’) but instead typed 1, a cardinal number, and the game threw an error message.

It all seemed like a blank slate input-wise but with strangely specific messages in-game that offset the benefits of the blank slate without providing its own characterization. An interesting experiment, but not one that I felt a connection with.

This game was quite different from most IF games I've played.

It's a slice of life game about a man and his girlfriend/wife who live in a cheap flat. He works nights, she works days, and today, on the eve of a new millenium, he is sick.

I was surprised when at the end of the day, (Spoiler - click to show)I found my wife dead at work. I was even more surprised when (Spoiler - click to show)there was a bright flash and I woke up at what I thought was the next day, only to see my wife still alive. That's when I realized this game was (Spoiler - click to show)a time loop. (all these spoilers are for things that happen in the first day only).

Gameplay consists primarily of interacting with others through menu-based conversation, collecting items (all of which (Spoiler - click to show)persist through the time loop) and trying to think of ways to help your wife.

There are a couple of small bugs and typos, which I've notified the author about and which should be easy to fix, although I had an issue where after I restarted the game I couldn't load any saves, which might have been an HTML TADS issue. Fortunately, the game is the kind where if you know what you're doing you can get from the beginning to end in very few moves.

I loved some of the characters in this, like Vincent, and enjoyed the multiple endings. A few times I really couldn't figure out what to do; I used hints once, I think. But overall this game was a good time and really a clever idea that was executed well.

This was a short, lovely game. Your deceased father was a prolific painter, and he left you a choice of 7 paintings in his will. You can sift through the paintings and choose the 7 you want the most.

Each painting has a different style and emotion. The game intuits what you’re going for in your collection, and a segment at the end is based on that, with a series of illustrations (but not of the seven paintings you choose).

This game is like an eclair to me: small, simple, but exquisite in taste. The CSS was nice, the background music pleasant, and the writing such that I enjoyed each sentence.

There’s not much to do outside of selecting the paintings, but this is the kind of game that I don’t think would be served well by expansion; it seems complete in itself. I had a good time (maybe because I chose the happier paintings and it reminded me of good times with both my father and son, and because I’ve gotten into art this year and loved getting new ideas). I do think it would be neat to have the drawings of the paintings in-game, but I understand why they’re not there (hard to make, especially since they’re described as high-quality, and our imagination can perhaps produce a stronger effect).