Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

The surreal afterlife exploration game is a popular genre in IF, and one of my favorite.

This game is a fairly typical such game; you have a central hub from which you explore other areas, gathering color coded items and taking them to color coded rooms. In doing so, you experience memories of your past life.

It's spare, and with few items implemented, but this is my favorite genre, so I liked it.

(Caveat: I played a final (non-beta) version of this game without graphics right before it was released).

Wordsmith by Ade McTavish is a very, very good game. In 2014, the author released Fifteen Minutes, which was one of the best difficult puzzle games in a long time, an intricate time travel game involving half a dozen copies of yourself. Then, in 2015, he took 2nd place in IFComp with Map, a mostly puzzle less but big story-based game that was emotionally powerful.

In this game, he's combined his best of story, setting and puzzles. The game has a free version and a commercial version.

In the free version, you create worlds in several stages, like Sim Earth. Your solar system ages over time, making different planetary orbits more or less favorable over time; you can make a planet for each orbit out of different alchemical materials. You then try to create a form of life that fits that planet , and then you teach the life culture and skills until, hopefully, they develop interstellar travel.

I found this thrilling, well-written (with procedural generation) and difficult. Fortunately, with 6 orbits in each solar system, it isn't too hard to get one to interstellar travel.

The game seemed to require a big info dump at first, which put me off, until I just ignored it and experimented. This worked much better; I should have thought of the book you get as a reference guide, not a book to be read back to back but to be consulted.

As for the commercial portion of the game, it's just getting started after the world building ends. You explore an absolutely huge, 7-level space station with a sprawling plot involving a widespread conspiracy and opposing forces.

I found the world building fascinating, although it was hard to keep track of the various locations; this should be a lot easier with the graphics in the finished version. I especially got lost in the ground floor a few times, as the building rotates.

There is a complicated card game in the finished version which I have yet to try, as I found an alternate path around that part of the game.

Overall, I recommend this game, and would rank it around the level of Blue Lacuna or Sorcery!.

Edit: I forgot to mention that this game uses graphics in a way not seen in parser games ever. The graphics respond to commands in this game in an extremely useful way. It's a technical masterpiece in this sense.

In this game, you play as the sole survivor of a frozen outpost in a world where the Internet has been converted into animate objects of ice.

You've been tasked with converting the ice into data to restore the futture. Equipped with a gauntlet that converts material into data. Yo7 have to collect 100TB of data, requiring ten separate trips into a large graphical map of a region.

There seems to be an alternate mission besides the obvious one, with an environmental bent, but I just used the gauntlet to win. The ending was fun, but a bit underwhelming.

Overall, I found the game slow on mobile, and the grinding repetitive. Despite this, I enjoyed the game and will play again.

This is a short parser game about a man named Andrea helping smuggle Galileo's book Two Sciences to a publisher.

The general story is interesting, but there are numerous bugs, and the interaction has some issues. It ended fairly quickly.

Jesse Stavros Doorway is a mid length game about a collection of people with the ability to travel through space and time. There is a good chunk of backstory available in-game.

The game is large, with complex implementation, but it needs more beta testing; there are capitalization errors and "printed name" inform issues.

The setting is interesting, with a bunch of hippies time traveling to a grateful dead concert. The writing is descriptive.

I played with a walkthrough, as many actions were hard to come up with on my own.

This mid-length Twine game has you looking for a solid quicksilver pickaxe enchanted by dwarfs. It's twine, with items and exits implemented in a sequence of rooms.

At several places, there are complicated locks or other mechanisms to fiddle with. I found these to be frustrating. Overqll, the setting was the best part of the game.

This game uses a setting not commonly explored: Pakistan, with a young girl protagonist.

This game uses a branch and bottleneck structure, and is fairly short., with a dozen or so choices on average.

I found the explora5ion of unfamiliar culture and issues fascinating. The game played smoothly, and the writing was descriptive.

This is perhaps paperblurts most compelling story for me, but also the most troublesome content. You play a serial killer who just can't get enough of killing.

The pacing, the graphics and animations, are all excellent, although it drags on to six acts.

It goes into detail about the gore, but it's over the top, silly gore.

The story gets interesting with the addition of a couple of major npc's. Both of them get wrapped up in a somewhat rushed way. Also there is no save feature for this long game with many slow pauses.

This is a short hypertext game about two people, one on a bike and one running. The screen is split into two windows, one for each story.

Each story has a sequence of 8 or so binary choices. You can either play as one character the whole time, with the other character's choices proceeding on its own, or you can play both characters at once (although you still make just one choice each 'second').

I found the story to be really short, and looking back and forth at the two panels detracted from the slice of life style of the story. However, it was well done in a technical way.

Tower was the second game entered by Simon Deimel in ifcomp 2014, and to be honest, I prefer Enigma, a well-written drama.

This game, Tower, leans heavily on classic IF tropes: locked doors and keys, amnesia, a dragon, an unusual combination lock, a generic fantasy setting. The descriptions are spare, but everything runs fairly smoothly.

Still, I wouldn't mind playing this game again. It's fun wandering around and trying everything.