Reviews by MathBrush

This game uses Unity (and possibly Ink?) to give you a series of choices as you progress on a journey to avenge your master who has died. His spirit now inhabits a sword.

You pass through many interesting situations such as a pirate ship, a minotaur battle, etc.

I found the writing interesting and the concept charming. The text is typed out but fairly quickly, although that still hampered play somewhat The occasional use of graphics worked well.

In structure, this game reminds me of nothing more than Chandler Groover’s game Left/Right. In that game, you can either choose left or right over and over. One direction will kill you or end the game, and you never know which. It’s partially (I think?) a lesson in the inscrutability of that choice structure.

And it’s that way in this game, too. You have to guess the author’s mind on each choice. It’s possible to see the logic in each choice, but usually only after you’ve attempted to go through and die. I think it stems from a desire to make interesting decisions with only binary (or occasionally trinary) choices. But I don’t think having frequent deaths is the best option; it’s much more interesting to have old decisions affect future decisions several turns later and then to add some hinting to the game so that people have a general idea of what’s expected of them. Even better is adding multiple conflicting goals.

Overall, I had to stop at the cat-woman’s den because I was dying too often. But I found this fun.

+Polish: The game runs well and seems generally bug-free.
+Descriptiveness: The use of dialog made the game more interesting to me.
-Interactivity: Not a fan of 'guess which path is life and which one is death'
-Emotional impact: The characters didn't sink into my soul, so to speak.
-Would I play again? Not unless there were a faster way to replay.

This game is written in Quest, and I engage with Quest games differently from Inform and TADS games.

Quest games tend not to come from the culture of ‘implement everything smoothly’ that other systems have, which is both bad and good. Bad because there’s less immersion, but good because you’re less likely to miss important things.

This game uses a lot of fancy features, like the parser voice and the player being separate entities; different worlds; timed text (used sparingly); and some clever writing tricks.

The style of the gameplay was difficult for me, so I went to the walkthrough and followed it all the way through. Overall, the writing is fairly solid; I don’t think I could do better myself; but it could be improved. I didn’t get a lot of the hints behind the big reveals, and the gradual reveals about the narrator flew over my head. I know that’s on me as a reader, but I wonder if we could improve narrative flow.

I do think the whole key thing is pretty neat, and I’d love to work something like that into a game into the future.

+Polish: For a Quest game, this is pretty smooth.
+Descriptiveness: The writing was creative and interesting.
-Interactivity: I struggled to engage with the game as intended.
-Emotional impact: The big reveals didn't land with me.
+Would I play again? I could see me trying another time.

This is a KPop simulation game. You have several stats (such as physical appearance, singing ability, dancing) and different challenges you can meet with your stats.

The game is pretty rough, and needs a lot more testing. The overall storyline seems interesting (reality show + mystery subplot). But this is a good reminder that authors should run through their games right before submitting to check if its completable!

-Polish: Too buggy, several typos
+Descriptiveness: The author has interesting descriptions
-Interactivity: Too many options are 'Do the right thing' vs 'Do the wrong thing'.
-Emotional impact: The choppy writing style and bugs made it hard to enjoy.
-Would I play again? Not until it gets some bug fixes.

If you're interested in seeing more of it, you can get past the first place the game becomes impassable by opening the file in Twinery and going to the passage Song A and deleting the first time it says to display untitled passage 12.

I beta tested this game.

This is a really technically impressive game that uses Vorple for a cool layout, a single graphic and some fun music.

It’s a cyberpunk world where people jack into cyberspace (presenting Wild West/Fantasy and Ancient Japanese settings in this game). You’re asked to infiltrate a base, but chaos ensues.

The game is exceptionally well-polished, with very few bugs. It’s also fairly linear. Most conversations end up with you saying all available options, and most settings are constrained, with the most freedom being late in the game.

This makes the puzzles simpler, aided by the nice keywords, but comes at the expense of freedom. I’ve realized as I study the comp that players value both polish and freedom, so I’m really interested in seeing where this places!

+Polish: Looks great
+Descriptiveness: I liked quite a bit of the worldbuilding
+Interactivity: I found the puzzles enjoyable
-Emotional impact: I found myself at an emotional distance from this game, and don't know why.
+Would I play it again? I've played this game twice, and enjoyed it both times.

Joey Acrimonious has been posting great reviews of other games so I was interested in seeing how this one plays out.

This is an enormously ambitious and complicated game. I thought it would be a relatively mild real-world game, but it includes a ton of worldbuilding and even two different protagonists!

Your goal is to shave some chest hair before a date. There are many things to try, almost all of them ending badly.

Your house is absolutely full of stuff. Stuff in the bathroom, stuff in the bedroom, stuff in the closet, stuff in drawers.

So all of this has the hallmarks of a first (or early) game by a talented author: it models an apartment, has lots of extra things, and has a lot of implementation into tricky things while neglecting a few of the smaller things.

What are the smaller things? Well, the game mentions that you can see the exits by LOOKing, but some rooms have no exits listed at all (like the bathroom as Marigold). Room names are all lowercase, which is a common mistake in Inform (you have to capitalize them the first time they appear in the code, wherever that is). When you use the special device, it doesn't indicate a change in location (by LOOKing), which may be intentional but is kind of confusing.

The game indicates several beta testers, and it is more polished than many games in the comp, but I think that having some more people beta test next year that have comp experience could help, and of course the feedback from this year will be very helpful. This game is well-written, funny, complex, and generally polished; but there are some things that I think would be better left off the next game, especially the large groups of unnecessary but well-implemented items. I definitely think there should be a next game, as I would expect this author to be capable of coming up with several interesting stories and some very fun game mechanics, if this game is any indication.

-Polish: The game could use some touchup for sure.
+Descriptiveness: It can be confusing at times, but this game is definitely descriptive.
-Interactivity: I often felt at a loss what to do, and beat my head on the wall a lot as I got lost moving around (probably because the device mechanic didn't make sense to me early on).
+Emotional impact: I definitely experience a lot of interesting feelings while playing this game.
-Would I play again? Not until there were an update.

This is a weird game but I'm into it. You play as a doppelganger in a bizarre magical world powered by technology and fantasy. I suspect there are deeper secrets to the game, but I enjoyed my ending (1/4, Humanologist).

Gameplay consists of getting several cases in a row. In each case, you can choose what to talk to your client about, then you become them, then you have several choices on how to carry out your tasks. You get paid different amounts of money depending on your performance. You can then invest that in various things.

I liked this quite a bit, although it's different from most games I like. Every year, I come up with theories on what does well in the comp and what doesn't, and this year my theory is that choice games that give you a lot of freedom of action (like a world model you can move in or completely different paths of characterization with tradeoffs like choice of games) do better than those without. On the other hand, longer games tend to do better, and while this is long, it's not huge like some of the games in the comp. So I predict this will do well, probably in the teens. But my predictions are always really wrong each year, so who knows?

+Polish: The game worked smoothly.
+Descriptiveness: I liked the worldbuilding.
+Interactivity: I felt like I could choose my characterization.
+Emotional impact: I really immersed myself in the character.
+Would I play again? I plan on it!

I beta tested this game.

I've played a lot of the Wobbles games by the Marino Family (although apparently there's a Parrot the Pirate episode I never read?) and this one is definitely my favorite.

The Wobbles series are all written in Undum, a system that was like Twine before Twine and is very powerful but requires advanced technical knowledge to use.

Each game in the Wobbles series deals with a magical house full of foster kids where kids with various disabilities or uncomfortable real-life situations or other things that make them marginalized come to groups with themselves.

It's written at a kid or teen level, and written by younger people, too. I have a son with muscular dystrophy, so I'm glad to see representation in these games of various types of disability.

This particular game has the hero go into a world where everyone is transformed into paper on rails. The world is described with startling specificity that provides a lot of the enjoyment of this game. How would paper people eat? Sleep? Go to school? It's all laid out in excellent detail.

The other main feature I appreciate for this game is the overall. I have to say, I think this has some of the best choice structure in this competition. When I first played this game as a tester, I thought it was somewhat on rails (haha) but on my playthrough today I was able to take significantly different actions and still have it seem like the 'intended story'. That's really hard to pull off, and increases my admiration for this game.

For the detailed worldbuilding and intricate choice structure, this is my favorite of the Wobbles games. If you're going to play, make sure you realize that it is designed with specific morals (although you can go against them), a specific audience, and a distinct narrative voice (that of a talking book). Since most of the games ever entered in IFComp are either adult-targeted genre fiction or avant-garde exercises, this good-natured and marginalization-conscious series is definitely unique.

+Polish: These games are always smooth.
+Descriptiveness: Love the worldbuilding.
+Interactivity: Feels like choices matter
+Emotional impact: The parts with the King and the Queen struck home after my recent divorce.
+Would I play again? Yeah, would like to see different paths.

**Last House on the Block by Jason Olson**

This game seems like a classic first-attempt at parser programming by a reasonably talented individual.

It has a house implemented in minute detail, including multiple bathrooms, several empty closets, a tackle box with many different kinds of tackle in it, etc.

The most complex part of the game is an NPC that follows you everywhere, interacting with you and doing independent actions, very much like Floyd the robot in the ways you interact with it.

The main puzzles require some very specific actions that I'm not sure are easy to discover on your own, and the language is fairly plain. While a solid game for a first-time author, I think the next game could use less extra objects and more of the fun NPCs, as well as a more vibrant setting.

-Polish: The game could use some more work, especially in talking with your friend.
-Descriptiveness: The setting and objects are plain and plainly described.
-Interactivity: There are so many objects that the state space of possible actions is just too big.
+Emotional impact: I liked the whole 'view of an older man's life' story.
-Would I play again? I don't think so.

This is a medium-length Twine game with one overarching, fairly difficult puzzle.

You are a spirit, and have been imprisoned in a mage's tower. Your goal is to possess one of two people and escape. But the tower you're in is protected in several ways, and your quest will be difficult.

The writer of this game is a freelance author, and I found the game as a story fairly satisfying. The characters were interesting and there were several subplots.

Mechanically, it's a little bit rougher. There are usually two choices at a time, and it's usually 'guess the right action', although thankfully you can usually back out of a wrong course the first time. There are clues to the right actions, so it's better in that regards than some of the other games, but I believe it could have been improved by going beyond binary choices more often.

The writing was interesting enough for me to look up his website and see some other work. He's done a lot of advertising copy, and it reads really well. Happy to see more work from this author.

+Polish: The game is smooth and bug free
+Descriptiveness: Lovely writing, great characters.
-Interactivity: The puzzle structure didn't appeal to me as much as it could.
+Emotional impact: I was shocked when one of the guards (Spoiler - click to show)ripped up my permission slip.
-Would I play again? The story was satisfying on its first run, but I wasn't invested enough to go through and try another round.

This is a game about horrible people. It reminds me of a lot of depressing literature, like Six Characters in Search of an Author or Ethan Frome or other books about a collection of bad people gone wrong.

This game is about a family of four, all of which you take turn controlling, and their house and its environs, a map that stays static throughout the game. Each of you has your vices: the father likes lusty young boys, the mother as well; the son spends time with violent anarchists, while the daughter is a haunted by a ghost from the past.

I like hope in my reading, and that’s one reason why Verdi was never my favorite composer. He once said that he wrote operas to convince others of the impossibility of human happiness.

Narratively, this game is strong. The storylines weave together well and the writing is coherent and vivid. Visually, I found the game pretty hard to look at, like tomato soup with basil floating in it.

The game reminds me quite a bit of Pseudavid’s popular The Master of the Land.

In any case, this is an impressive piece of work and good writing. It was interesting to meet Marcel Proust, even if it was in rather indecent circumstances.

+Polish: Very smooth.
+Descriptiveness: The writing was very clear and descriptive.
+Interactivity: I felt like my choices had strong consequences.
+Emotional impact: It was good at making me feel bad, I suppose.
-Would I play again? Not my cup of tea.