Reviews by MathBrush

This game won Spring Thing in 2014. This game is written using ChooseYourStory, which focuses on half-pages full of text with a few small choices that then affect your stats, like Choice of Games mechanics-wise but a bit different stye-wise.

You play one of two brothers betrayed into slavery. You enter a slave ship and train in Rome. You might a variety of people whom you have relationships with, and you have a few skills like strength and speed.

The writing was okay, but the story was interesting. It does suffer from some stereotypes; there are african slaves who speak in broken english, and are all strong and athletic, while the white slaves are praised for being intelligent and good at strategy despite their weakness. A fair, blue-eyed redheaded girl is a main love interest, and so on.

This game is a large and ambitious fantasy adventure with a lengthy prologue, a lot of dialogue, scenery changes, colored text, etc.

However, the game was translated from italian, and the translation has many problems. Fortunately, a walkthrough was provided, but at one point it becomes useless, and no amount of wandering could help me find the exit.

This game exists in an Italian version; given the promise of this game in english, I can only assume that this game is quite good in italian. I don't know if the other bugs still exist in that version.

This is a game in 3 parts that would reasonably take a couple of hours to complete or more.

It starts out with good programming and a good concept: you receive a package with a device that gives you mysterious instructions. Following it gives you the ride of your life.

However, it quickly devolves into impossible situations where you have to guess what the author was tbinking, and the writing quality goes down.

I recommend the first scene or two.

John Evans creates games that are very ambitious but generally not thoroughly tested. This gane, though, I really enjoyed.

You are a spirit summoned to a floating magic castle island. You can create anything! Well, actually, you can create whatever the author implemented. You are presented with six challenges, and have to guess what to create. I beat about 3 and a half on my own. At least one depends on you seeing something not in the room descriotion, which I thought was unfair.

This ifcomp game was a demo for what was apparently a beta parser system (version 0.75).

In this game, you are a cat who helps their owner get dressed and go out, and nothing much else.

The parser is okay, but not equal to inform, tads, or Robin Johnson's parsers. An interesting artefact for those interested in various parser systems.

This game was entered in a 24-hour speed if competition. For a speed if, it is surprisingly detailed and polished, on the order of Emily Short's Lavender or better.

In this game, you play three different characters. To do so, you use various props in many ways.

The writing is descriptive. The puzzles are tricky but fair; when I resorted to the hints, it turned out that my next idea would have worked, so I just should have tried a bit longer.

My one caveat is that the difficulty of the puzzles and the frequent motion on and off stage drew me out of the story of the play itself.

This game has a framing story about visiting the house of a friendly old man who you knew as a kid who recently passed away. You explore a treehouse and his house, with some weird happenings going on.

Once inside, you experience two strange episodes based off of classic television shows.

The puzzles are a bit odd, with mechanics that mostly involve trying everything.

Somehow, though, the game had something appealing in the descriptive writing which would make me play again.

Stone is a beautiful, short, ambiguous game. Its blurb says its about aromanticism, but it could have many interpretations standing on its own.

It's a very short game, more of a poem than a story. A sentence is presented, and clicking on the few highlighted words will shuffle the text around, frequently leaving blank spaces to present staggered words in an unusual effect.

The tale presented is surprising, and, like I said, ambiguous, making it easy to apply it to yourself.

Very successful in what it attempts to be, a short poetic experience.

In this game, there are two cats, a camera, and a device in a box. Moving around changes what you see, and you can take pictures.

The game is small, and it has no ending. The author poses it as a challenge; once you understand it, you win.

I played with it enough to get some basic ideas, but I did not find it inspiring.

This game is apparently a big in-joke about ifmud, an online forum/interactive multiplayer world that many IF authors and players once used.

In ifmud, there were many monkey jokes, and people would pass 'bananas' made from text to each other. It includes a parser that allows people to play games together known as Floyd, modeled on the robot in Planetfall. It's main area is an adventurers lounge, with maps and a trophy case.

This game takes those elements and makes a tiny game out of it. That's really all there is to it.