Reviews by MathBrush

This game is a linear, story-driven game about a group of friends and their thoughts on suicide.

You talk to people several times, follow their directions, and then the game quickly wraps up.

The writing was descriptive and brought out the desired emotion. However, the interactivity felt off, especially when it required long amounts of waiting. The melodrama may not work for some.

This game is a bad parody of bad games. It's most stuff like "haha u moron I putt a lot of bua,gs in dis game!". As parody it falls very short.

I don't really see much of anything of worth in this game other than historical interest. (Spoiler - click to show)If you get stuck in the secret room, examine the door.

This game was a coding exercise designed to show the house of the author's aunt.

Many things are modelled, including a working TV and vcr combi, drinks and cups, an electric train. However, descriptions are sparse and the implementation is spotty.

The best part of this game is the melancholy feel. Nothing tells you how you should feel, but the sadness and nostalgia is palpable.

This game was nominated for an XYZZY for best game, and for best NPCs.

This is one of the larger Choice of Games, with quite an epic storyline. You conceive of a movie using a large amount of customization (how many leads? what genre? what subgenre? What other subgenera? Highbrow or lowbrow? Who directs? Who writes? Who stars?). The number of possibilities here really unlocks the game's potential as a wish-fulfillment device.

But making your movie comes with its own challenges. Getting a studio running, winning financial support, dealing with deadlines and spotty talent. I spent a large amount of money to get Frank Capra to direct my ensemble western.

Overarching everything is the shadow of repressive anti-communism hunters. You have to choose how you interact with Hollywood black listers, and what to say in communism hearings.

All of this makes the games general goal (making a great movie) very difficult; I found it more rewarding to focus on personal goals.

Finally, this game includes some parts quite unlike the standard choice of games format; for instance, there is a large puzzly section that has a well-developed location and object model as you search for a dog. This part feels a lot more like a parser game or like a twine game with strong world model (like Hallowmoor).

Overall, I believe this game deserves the XYZZY nomination, and stands among the best games of 2015.

This game has grammar and spelling trouble, illogical puzzles and a tendency to switch colors randomly while playing in parchment (including to all back).

This is a shame, because the story concept and writing are a lot of fun. After a brief opening scene or two, the game picks up and changes direction.

You might as well use the walkthrough, as the games puzzles don't make much sense without it. This is yet another early game that shows the need for tools like Twine that let people write interactive stories without worrying about implementing a lot of background or freedom.

This game was intended to recall Scott Adams' early adventured, which were spare due to space limitations. However, they also used evocative and unexpected descriptions given the space. This game just cuts down room descriptions, with no evocativeness.

The puzzles include getting a kitchen down from a tree and a large maze with no redeeming qualities.

Where this game shines is its implementation of the sliding 15 puzzles where you have tiles numbered 1-15 on a 4x4 board and must get them in the correct order. The puzzle is shuffled randomly each game, but the author let's you opt out.

This game was inspired by So Far, and written in 3-4 weeks in 1996.

You play a college student who travels to three different worlds. The game was originally intended to have deep psychological meaning, but the author ran out of time.

The highlight of the game is the descriptive writing and setting. The puzzles are more or less unmotivated and revolve around levers and dials. In addition, the author expects many actions that are not typically allowed in interactive fiction.

In this game built using the javascript-fueled Bloom engine, you play as a time traveller trying to stop an assassination using knowledge from several loops.

Like Axolotl Project or Hallowmoor, this is an exploration and inventory based game driven by links.

I found the engine to be polished on both mobile and PC, and the writing to be descriptive. But I felt distant from the narrator and overall, vaguely unsatisfied.

Recommended for time travel fans.

This placed below every other game in 2013's IFComp. Much of that was due to the fact that it was a web game that only worked on Internet explorer.

However, by inspecting the page source, it's easy to figure out how the game would go otherwise. After a brief introduction, this game leads to a sequence of 8 math and history questions. You type the answer in a box, and in Internet Explorer, you can check your answer and move on. In all other browsers, you can't.

Overall, the questions are interesting, and the commentary is descriptive, but overall I didn't feel that this was a compelling game.

The Lift is the first last-place IFComp game to be written in Twine. In this game, you are in underground bunker of sorts and have to choose from four weapons. You then have the choice to use pornography or not, then you choose from four rooms of monsters. If your weapon works out, you win! If not, you die.

So there are 16 possibilities, 3 of which are winning ones. Theres not really any rhyme or reason to which ones work, so its just bare experimentation. Also, the pornography just seems thrown in.

Overall, this game is somewhat memorable in a B-movie way, but doesn't take advantage of Twine's power.