Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is one of my favorite Choice of Games games. You play as Eratosthenes (male or female), a real historical figure who estimated the radius of the earth and advised Ptolemy IV.

In this game, you have to deal with snarky advisors and scholars, reign in ambitious kings, work on engineering, romance a variety of people, or study mathematics. I felt a good deal of flexibility.

The writing is good, as is to be expected of the author of Choice of Robots, one the best Choice of Games of all time.

I enjoyed this game, because I'm a mathematician, and the game allowed me to hang out with with a female Euclid and with Archiemedes.

This game will appeal to fans of the Civilization series of games, and fans of math, classics, history, or engineering. The human emotions investigated are universal.

This game placed in the lower half of IFCOMP the year it came out. Unlike many lower placing games, it has a sincerity and a good overall plan that made it enjoyable for me to play, though I skipped out on the 3 mazes.

You are searching for the tomb of an ancient warrior king. You have to explore an abandoned, rotting town, a tower, and a cave. There are some silly instant-death puzzles that undo solves nicely, but what I found nice about this game was the underlying story concept.

This game is written in Javascript using a homemade parser. In the game, you wander through areas with minimal descriptions gathering items. The parser doesn't have default messages, so if you use a correct verb with the wrong noun, it treats it lime you've written nonsense.

The game itself isn't too bad, but it's very spare. The author must have put a lot of work into this gane, but in the end, it seems that the parser needed more work.

This game is not terrible. You are in a 3x3 grid of rooms with various objects. Your goal is to break a stone slab.

This is the whole puzzle of the game. There is helpful writing in the four corners.

As David notes in his walkthrough (which gives away the solution up front), he notes that the game is a bit underimplemented, and many responses are misleading.

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.