Reviews by MathBrush

This game was entered in the First Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition. In this game, you play as one of the last surviving humans after an apocalypse has turned most people into wizards.

The wizards can turn anyone else into a wizard. It's your job to escape! The games is fairly short, but has a well-thought-out notebook and help system. The world has been thought through pretty well, with a variety of spells and effects.

Overall, this is a fun, light snack and is pretty well-polished.

This game is in green text on a black background and is a home-brew web parser. However, it is more polished than most such games.

You play a simple village resident who decides to help some adventurers defeat an evil necromancer. By dealing with some clever puzzles (a color-based code, some animals, a trading game, etc.), you can deal with the necromancer and your adventurer friends.

The puzzles were occasionally too clever for their own good ((Spoiler - click to show)I'm thinking of the mummy solution, or the hellhound), but this should appeal to the game's main target demographic of old school fans.

Strongly recommended for fans of Scott Adam's games.

Ekphrasis is very long and packed with stuff. Every screen has a large background image on which photos of NPCs appear and disappear.

You play a French art history expire who is a mix of Hercules Poirot and Indiana Jones. You chase clues around Europe as you chase an ancient treasure.

I completed the majority of the game before losing my save. This game is so big I just can't imagine going back through all of that, so I doubt I will finish it.

There are a couple of romances, a lot of excitement, and a lot of difficult puzzles.

Strongly recommended for Francophones.

Little Blue Men is a mid-length entry in the genre of 'I absolutely hate my job and office life sucks' genre (other notable examples include Building and Above and Beyond). You have incredibly annoying coworkers and a terrifying boss. As the game progresses, you uncover a deep evil.

This game has strong profanity, most notably at the beginning and at the end.

This game is a classic 90's game difficulty-wise, with some portions very difficult to guess without hints. I had some trouble, as did the Club Floyd team.

The writing, by the author of Anchorhead, is excellent, although I don't plan on playing it again due to the excessive profanity. The game includes some mean-spirited violence which is later justified.

Someone reviewed this game saying it had "Endings for grownups", and that's accurate. This is a mature game, with an older protagonist thinking about life in a bittersweet way.

The focus is on honey, describing it in rich detail, from both scientific and aesthetic viewpoints.

A fun game, especially for foodies. Had one use of yellow font that seemed ill-advised, but only at one point.

In this game, you have a huge inventory of cheeses that you carry into six or seven rooms. Each room has a setup missing one thing; you have to place the correct cheese in the setting to create a pun.

Overall, I found the game to be funny and the puns amusing. Occasionally the puns were strained, so I just tried each cheese in turn. Also, there were occasional bugs (well, I just had one, if you try to give something to the punster).

Overall, a fun snack for fans of wordplay and puns.

Note that this is from Veeder Comp, a competition designed purely to please Ryan Veeder, who organized the competition. This explains the references to Ryan.

This game was created by Emily Short as a prize for IFComp, resulting in a game set in Steph Cherrywell's world of Canyonville from Brain Guzzlers From Beyond.

You are Mary Jane, creating a robot for your friend Jenny. You have to train your robot to become just like Jenny. You train it by having it read books in your lab on different topics. However, some books have negative side effects, so it becomes quite the puzzle to figure out what books to read and when.

The major innovation in this game is the use of procedural generation for your conversations with the robot. The robots conversation is affected by numerous variables affecting its emotion, tone, and knowledge. A large corpus is included in the source code, allowing for huge variety. This represents an immense accomplishment, and provides proc gen that is actually fun to read.

This game took me about 45 minutes to finish without hints. I restarted several times, but I don't think you ever need to.

In this entry in the Veeder Exposition, you hear the story of the Veeder, a person with enigmatic power and status.

This game is in Twine with nice graphics. The interactivity comes in by shuffling through a series of replacements for a word or two in a sentence, then moving forward. Sometimes the choice of words influences the story.

The game made me smile, especially with its use and misuse of the word Veeder. And the imagery was poetic and beautiful at times.

Overall, though, it didn't really grab me emotionally, and I wished for more depth in the interaction.

This game is a series of point-and-click multiple choice questions with some branching and/or randomization in the sequence of questions asked.

I found several of the questions to be amusing, such as recalling the correct actions to take in doing CPR and so on. Many of the questions relate to Ryan Veeder himself and the stewards Emily Boegheim and Jenni Polodna who helped organize the Ryan Veeder Exposition. This makes sense, because the competition was to write games just for him.

Overall, I hoped for more feedback on the question answers, and for more of a focus in the story. But it was a fun way to while away the minutes.

This games, an entrant in last year's Spring Thing, is an Undum game (meaning you can click on links to advance the story, graphics are included, and the story can be scrolled back to see what came before.

The story is about a small group of anarchists rebelling against an oppressive hierarchy. While the game uses magic, it feels more like a stand-in for power that allows the author to discuss class struggle in an attention-grabbing way.

I feel like this game has something to say, and does so in a way that deserves attention.