Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This TADS game had many delightful elements to it. You are in a library filled with, well, Forbidden Lore. It belongs to a powerful wizard, a family member, and is essentially a one-room game with enormous amounts of detail, including several NPCs.

Many things are richly implemented, including a large number of bookshelves, a desk, and special gadgets, as well as magic and conversation.

However, much of the game is not spelled out, almost to an extreme. You aren't told what to do. You aren't told how many of certain objects are present. You aren't told how to phrase certain important commands. You aren't told what certain devices are capable of. You aren't guided on what conversation topics work with which NPCs.

This non-spelling out can in some games increase the fun as you delve, but in this game it's so extreme that I think it goes too far. It'd be like introducing a player to chess but not explaining how the pieces move or that the goal is to threaten the king.

I liked the lore, the characters seemed fun, and the whole thing reminded me in a positive way of Andrew Plotkin's room in Cragne Manor.

Even with the lack of information, I still found a lot to do. I managed to find a goal and complete it, and once that was done I really had no clue what to do next. To complete that first goal, I had to look at the walkthrough twice and both times I found that I had the right idea but gotten a misleading response from the game. For instance, before achieving one major goal, I [spoiler]tried PUSH STATUE, but it was fixed in place. The real command was PUSH STATUE INTO CHASM.[/spoiler]

So this game is a hit and a miss for me. Great worldbuilding, fun ideas, but spotty implementation and player motivation. Would definitely play more by this author.

'She has been a solid and your friend for a long time.'

This is a solid opening for a game about your friend turning liquid in a fatal way.

This game has an utterly unique (to me) presentation, with a kind of game-boy looking feel and collapsible menus made with plus signs.

It's very short, and that shortness adds both urgency and futility to the game. What are you going to do in the precious time that you have?

This kind of game to me feels 'right', like someone's using interactive fiction in a way that it's always been meant to be used. This makes so much more sense as a text game than as a text (where the sense of unfinishedness would be absent) or as an illustrated game (I think the mind's eye is so evocative here).

Seeing this game gave me trepidation. Marked 'an hour and a half', parser game, 'Old School', 'Excellent for new players and veterans of the genre', a classic-looking castle on the cover; it had all the markings of some custom-parser windows executable game that is huge and buggy and the author keeps insisting 'The game is easy' or 'You're playing wrong', as has happened in countless past IFComps.

Imagine my relief when:

* The first sentence made me laugh, and
* the game turned out to be fair, well-programmed, and have an adjustable play length.

In this game, you are a reporter assigned to cover a royal wedding. You arrive late (intentionally) to find everyone gone and the castle unusually hot.

This game lets you access the end from the beginning! At any point you can enter the final battle, with a random chance to win based on your overall score. So the game only really lasts as long as you want it.

Gameplay is pretty simple, mostly 'pick up item and use it here'. There are some more complex puzzles; there was one maze I solved halfway but gave up on just because I don't really like mazes. Once I saw the spoilery map, I realized that it wasn't even hard, but such is the fate of weak walkthrough users like myself. The only other hard puzzle was one that I had seen others talking about on here so I knew how to solve.

There were several unimplemented interactions and synonyms.

Overall, the interactions were satisfying and the writing funny. Something felt a bit 'light' about the game, both in puzzles and writing, but what is here seemed good. I do think I ran into a bug or unusual luck, because I was able to beat a luck-based game without rigging it the way the game suggested.

Being alone or in a small group in space is a classic story setup. Even before space people did it with ships, like Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson. Movies like The Martian or Gravity, podcasts like Vast Horizon or Wolf 359 or Girl in Space, and IF games like Protocol or Seedship all deal with isolation in space.

To me, that says that there's something about the experience that satisfies some primal human urge for self-evaluation and discovery, like a spiritual quest to understand yourself. In this game, **Metallic Red**, you float through space, tend a garden, communicate on the internet, order packages, and get into Tarot; a very 2020 kind of life.

The gameplay is split into days, with a typically day consisting of browsing the web, checking your plants, and sleeping with strange dreams. It changes quite a bit by the end of the game.

The tone of the game is melancholic and isolated, with themes of change, loss, and growth. It is well-put together; the only thing that looked like a bug was a possibly repeated conversation.

I'm not sure whether the game was structured around a certain set of themes or if it was built around this character and just imagining what life would be like for a person. I wonder if it's the latter because (Spoiler - click to show)someone being raised religiously then becoming depressed as an adult, leaving the religion, and getting into gardening and tarot is such a universal experience that I know 2 or 3 people personally who have done it and dozens more online. So this could just be a way to take a universal experience and put it into space.

In any case, I liked this story. State isn't really tracked; you can use a chapter select to hop from part to part. I forgot one of the instructions during a cooking segment and couldn't figure out how to get out of it for a while, but I found that part satisfying.

Felicity Banks has entered IFComp many times before with clever Choicescript games that contain themes like magic, alchemy, cats, and Australia (many of which show up in this game as well). Those games often get a post-comp release that is expanded and then put on Hosted Games.

This game is about a world where magic can be awakened in anyone through unknown means. It's treated like an infection, and society is built around blocking any access to magic-causing things, like using plastic plants instead of natural ones.

When magic awakens in you, the government enforcers come to get you and throw you into a magical prison/school where rival gangs attempt to fight or kill each other and people are sorted into magical categories (like elves, trolls, etc.) based on their abilities (I recommend reading the notes in the stats section).

Speaking of stats, I didn't check them during the game. Some games have really hard stat checks that constantly get in your way, but this game I just roleplayed and I generally did pretty good and only messed up once or twice.

The story and characters were fun, although some things really stretched my suspension of disbelief: (Spoiler - click to show)Are literally all of our friends non-magical people pretending to be magic? To be thrown into a prison? Where it's said that people die?? But they don't really die. Except people are fighting with bladed weapons and pretty much do get close to dying. Also magic has no visible drawbacks whatsoever but is locked down. It's the kind of story where hand-waving makes sense, but sometimes there was so much handwaving I almost thought *I'd* start flying!

I only used magic a couple of times. Besides my awakening, I only had one chance to learn more magic. I thought there'd be more, so I just focused on fiery magic, my strength. But no other chances to learn came up, and I'm not sure I ever actually used my charm. So if this gets a post-comp release, adding more magic-learning and magic-using opportunities and more time spent with friends/relationships would be great. What we have here fits well into the time constraints for the comp well.

I waited to play this until I had more time because I generally enjoy Felicity Banks's games and find them substantia, and I'm glad I did.

**The Den** by Ben Jackson.

It's been interesting tracking Ben Jackson's IF career. *The Kuolema* used Google Forms, a highly unusual format, and was choice-based but required text entry. It had lots of open exploration.

Then we had *Lunium*, a tightly constrained Twine escape room that also featured both choice and text entry, and included several visual puzzles. It kept most puzzles at all time.

Now we have *The Den*. While it keeps the choice and text entry hybrid of previous games, it has (in my mind) a stronger plot arc and better pacing than the other two, and features two protagonists, Aiden and Vee.

Our two heroes live in The Den, an underground area controlled tightly by Father. My first impression of the game was that it was similar to 10 Cloverfield Lane, where a tyrannical man imprisons others, and in this case was abducting children for experiments. I later decided that (Spoiler - click to show)this was some kind of lab with artificial beings and near the end it was clear that this was (Spoiler - click to show) a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve.

This game gave me big Subnautica vibes, with regards to storyline.

Puzzles in this game are the classic type you see in two-person games like Fire Boy and Water Girl, where one player opens passages for another or one player finds passwords for another.

There is also a Wordle mini-game, which I thought was amusing. I also found it a bit contrived, but that is later resolved.

The game is long, a bit more than 2 hours for me. I found the writing good; the two main characters manage to be neither cloying nor obnoxious, and the character of Father grew on me throughout the game.

The only things that I didn't much like during the game was how many options were 'Continue the story' or 'stop right now'. I usually didn't try the 'stop right now' choices, but once when I did the game ended (near the end) and another time it just ignored my choice, essentially (near the beginning). I understand the need to both move forward the plot and also maintain agency, but we usually reached those points by player commands in the first place, so I don't think we need additional confirmation so often. On the other hand, I'm not sure what the fix would be, as it's nice to have a little more interactivity like that. This is just a minor quibble; I think this game is great, and has the same high quality that proved popular in the author's earlier games.

Finally, I liked the use of all sense in the descriptions. There are a lot of smells and temperatures, along with the feel of wind, the hum of fans, the taste of food, and these sense come into play with the puzzles. I like that quite a bit and would like to incorporate that more into my own games.

This is a parser game set entirely in real life. You are an Italian man on a weekend vacation with a beautiful young woman. Your goal is to check into a hotel and eat breakfast. And that's the game!

The game is both polished and unpolished. On one hand, many things are implemented smoothly, and there is quite a large number of background objects in different containers and so on that work right. The screen has some color to it, and special characters are used to show good and bad reactions to things.

On the other hand, I had a runtime error (moving 'nothing' into a bin). Several important objects were not in the descriptions and had to be guessed that they are present. So it's a mixed bag.

The girlfriend is highly interactive. She will constantly comment on what you do, and will suggest what you should do next. If you are not fast enough to please her or do behavior that she dislikes, she will chastise you and you will receive a negative symbol (represented by a spade). If you do what she wishes she will praise you and give you a heart symbol.

Just as in real life relationships, I find myself constantly on the hook for many faults, such as leaving a bathroom door open or not sitting while eating. My day was a series of never-ending criticisms, which only multiplied as I fumbled around trying to satisfy her unending list of demands. Perhaps the genre of the game should be 'social horror'!

In any case, the game is good at several things that many other games are not good at, like providing a realistic and detailed hotel setting. On the other hand, I found myself at odds with both the parser and my girlfriend. So some good, some bad. Overall it wasn't long and not too difficult; I used the walkthrough once in order to find the newsletter.

This game might be described as "Weird Urban Fantasy". After a brief prologue, it starts off with a classic 'my apartment' game that models different rooms of a fairly mundane apartment before digging into some of the strangeness.

Gameplay consists of crossing a map and discovering unusual individuals, each of which is far from baseline reality. Unlike much of fantasy and sci fi, most of the people are normal, physically, but inside is something different. There are of course some exceptional cases.

While there are many different threads running through the game, they feel like they all have thematic similarities. One constant refrain is (Spoiler - click to show)fear of nothing happening, stuck in eternity balanced against (Spoiler - click to show)the fear of something changing or finally happening after so long.

Implementation is iffy. One really tough issue is that pronouns aren't set right for women so X HER doesn't work, and for both men and women you can't X MAN or X WOMAN, you have to instead type out the full name of the person you want to speak with. Many objects listed in the description can't be interacted with in-game and many that you can't interact with don't give responses. TAKE SHOWER uses Inform's default response of 'That's hardly portable'. So it could use some polishing up. I didn't see typos or bugs, though.

I liked the game. It gives me the same kind of feel as Deadline Enchanter, one of my favorite games. I also have some major phobias associated to some of the things in this game, but the way it handled them made me feel less tense rather than more, which is nice.

The opening of the game made no sense to me, but after replaying it all clicked, so I recommend trying that afterwards.

In this game, Kronos has imprisoned the Gods, and you must rescue them two by two.

This game acknowledges it was written with ChatGPT, so I won't spend much time (if any) discussing that, as it seems the purpose was to make sure descriptions were descriptive, and they generally were. I knew that it would hallucinate, so I ignored most of what the text said except for objects that were easily interactable with (and a command INVESTIGATE let me know what those were, most of the time).

The map is several different cities, each of which can be moved between fairly easily. Sometimes the exits list were incorrect (like S vs SW) and one, the Necromanteion, isn't listed (you have to ENTER when you're north of the city that is near it).

Puzzles are generally complex code-type puzzles. I used decompiling to figure out rules for some of them. Players will need to know they can ROTATE something COUNTERCLOCKWISE or the game is impossible to beat. Player's should a know that you might be able to put things on a statue's head when you can't put things on the statue itself or the shelf that is on the head. A certain YES/NO question glitches if you type YES, but you can just type YES then NO and it treats it like a YES.

The HELP command here is useful, because if players don't know they can WAIT 11 HOURS, they might have to type Z dozens of times.

Overall, some of the puzzles were fun. I liked the one with flowers. What this game needs, in my opinion, is more careful puzzle testing and more bug-fixing in general. Having one dedicated gametester or several less dedicated testers who report bugs and an author who has time to fix those bugs could make this game a lot of fun. The puzzles are the main draw here, and the overall story idea, with everything else as set dressing, so I'd love to see them shine even more.

(I do have a better impression of this game because the author was open about using ChatGPT rather than hiding it. It is often clear that an author used ChatGPT, and if they do that and don't disclose it, it gives me a much more negative view of the game).

**Why Pout?** by Andrew Schultz

Andrew Schultz has a long history of making wordplay games which all follow the same general pattern (typing words based on an overarching wordplay theme using words that appear in the location) as well as a large repertoire of other games (like chess games and even a baseball game).

His longest running series, called 'Prime Pro-Rhyme Row', involves rhyming pairs of words. While fun, I had the feeling it was getting mined out.

This game takes on a fresh mechanic that still involves two-word pairs. Unlike the rhyming games, which could be slowly brute-forced by trying each letter of the alphabet and then adding multi-consonant starters, this puzzle type (which I won't spoil just in case) can be solved through multiple means, including auditory and mechanical, but with much less possible lawnmowering.

That's not to say it's trivial. I did use hints a couple of times. It turned out one puzzle was there that I didn't even realize was a puzzle that was gating all the others.

Anyway, the story here is mostly surreal, with a sequence of random, fantastical things that don't exactly fit a coherent narrative, but the overarching plot is heartwarming and fun: you're collecting friends. In different areas you find people that need help, and, in return, they help you solve more of your puzzles, and can give you pep talks as well.

This is a lot of fun. The pep talks can be nice, too. Some are more general and vague:

> The ________ discusses ways to identify people or situations that justneed a bit of help, and how to do so without making them feel
> hopeless or in need of help, or that they got themselves in this
> position in the first place.

while others are more concrete:

> You think up a ________ you mumble under your breath. The
> merchant finds it a bit weird you like THAT as a way to keep positive.
> It doesn’t seem like that sort of thing helps the economy. Their
> cheeriness slips slightly, with impressively-balanced potshots at
> people more and less successful than they are.

I prefer the more concrete ones, as they have a lot of character.

Overall, this was fun. Recommended for fans of wordplay parser games.