Reviews by MathBrush

I was surprised this one wasn't reviewed on the spreadsheet yet. Jacic has a history of doing small, well-polished creepy stories, so I was looking forward to playing this one, and I think it worked out well.

This story combines three effective horror tropes: a 'deal with the devil' (although who the deal is with here is up to interpretation), carnivorous plants, and a lottery/voting system in a small town for deciding which citizen to kill.

You play as a citizen in a small desert town that depends on its sustenance for red, bloody fruit. Unfortunately, the red, bloody fruit, gifted to the town by a stranger years ago, can only grow if fed upon the blood of the guilty. Thus it falls upon your community to determine the guilty among yourselves each year and to feed them to the tree.

The problem is that your wife was taken last year, and you and your son are among the top nominees this time. You have to navigate your way through these tumultuous times and find a way to save yourself and the remnants of your family.

I liked the creepy styling on this and though the writing was appropriately dread-filled. I had some real agency, as I took the option at the end to revisit the game from its most important decision points. Both endings were slightly 'off' for me in length; I feel like it could have done with either less denouement and just having an abrupt or implied ending or a longer denouement with more emphasis on the character, but that's just nitpicking since I didn't find any real flaws to talk about. Jacic produces consistently good work and I look forward to more games from this author.

This is the second Lamp Post Projects game that I've played this IFComp. Like the earlier one (The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens), it takes place in a fantasy world with orcs, half-orcs, humans, elves, half-elves, and others, and with scientists like botanists and astronomers.

In this game, a solar eclipse is scheduled to happen soon, and the path of totality will go over a set of standing stones that are holy to an ancient God. Anyone who is there when the eclipse happens will be granted a wish. You can play as a true believer, an adventurer, or an astronomer, with different bonuses and endgames. I played as a true believer.

Along your pilgrimage, you have the opportunity to meet with two sets of two other pilgrims, for a total of four. The first pair are sibling half-orcs, while the second are a halfling man and (eventually) an elf woman.

You can choose to go with the group or not. I ignored the half-orcs at first because I wasn't as interested in them, but I joined up with them later once I saw the halfling.

This is a 'cozy' setting, a particular type I've seen a few times where there's not very high stakes, everyone is nice to each other (introducing with pronouns, asking consent before personal questions), there is no threat of death or severe injury. Just five chill people headed to the stones and some magical creatures out for mischief.

Most of the game is conversation, and most conversation is having a few topics you can explore in any order, and within topics being able to react to NPC questions by generally being kind, neutral, or mean. There are also puzzle segments in the game (some very easy, others more tricky). You can romance any of the four NPCs, although it can feel very fast paced due to the time constraints of the game (true love in two weeks, for instance).

It was a pleasant story, I felt I had agency (I skipped several conversations that didn't seem as interesting and focused more on a couple key characters) and it has replay value.

Retrograding

This is a downloadable visual novel written in Unity. It has an early branch point that essentially gives you two different games. I picked the second dossier, and got the second path.

This is a visually lush VN, with dozens of image credits listed at the end. Most (maybe all?) are realistic, with underground caves, steel factories, etc.

Grasping everything that was going on was a little tricky. I had the feeling that I had been invited to a long-running TTRPG session with a stellar DM and a close-knit group of friends, but without any explanation of what had gone on before or how we got here. So I'll say what I think is going on, which might be wrong (I'll put the opening without spoilers and the rest in spoilers):

We are a member of an intergalactic corporation/military organization/group that deals with trash on planets either by burning them up or by taking things off of them. I suspect it might be a very inefficient process, as we just take a single object every time, and I'm not sure how we choose where to land. We have a commanding officer type person (who was fun to interact with) and there is a digital friend/symbiote of ours that can talk to us, but whom no one else hears.

We aren't super high up in the system but we're working on it. We're given the option of working with two different people: a reckless racer with a death wish and a former top star at the company who's been rebellious and is being reeducated (I think).

I chose the latter.

[spoiler]We went on several missions together, where she talked about how she was special and hoped I was too. This might be referring to the AI that's with me, who seems to be both a god and a former person who was converted into digital matter. I picked material that was religious or ancient, and at the end the person I was with said she loved me and that she was kind of obsessed with me and we kissed.[/spoiler]

While I didn't always know what is going on, the vibes were immaculate, in the sense that the game felt polished, scenes had tension, characters were interesting, etc. I didn't feel compelled to try the other path, but would be interested in hearing from others who did.

Edit: As a side note, when screens are black you have to hit enter again, so keep an eye out for that!

There's a tradition in IF running through Anna Anthropy and Porpentine and carried on by others of writing body horror symbolic of the trans experience. This game is firmly and intentionally in that vein; the author explicitly says:

"Like many transgender artists, I tend to gravitate towards body horror as a reflection of my trans lived experience. For transgender players, I suspect the allegories present in PURE may resonate with personal experience."

In this parser story, you are accompanied by an heir (whom I saw as representative of wealth and power and possible romance) and two guards (who were often cruel or rough and who could represent society, police, the implied threat of violence) into a underground area of unspoken significance. You are filled with dread.

And well you should be. Like the progression of disturbing and dramatic rooms in the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, each room you go through presents you with some horror or dread, as well as symbolism. You perform symbolic acts like matching statues or solving riddles using items while simultaneously dealing with horrific bodily injuries to both you and those around you. Wording is intense and strong, but the text treats the violence in almost a holy light; this is not violence for violence's sake, but violence as a means of communicating the strength of someone's feeling.

Or, I could just be making it all up.

The game ends at a dramatic point, setting us up for part 1. It works as a standalone, though; if the author had written a few paragraphs of ending text, I would have seen this as a complete work.

There are some bugs and typos in the work, and I would definitely raise my rating if they were fixed. The errors I saw were things like default text printed after custom text (a common thing in Inform 7 when doing a 'before' rule but not putting 'instead' at the end of the last line) and typos like 'scone' for 'sconce'. There are some programming things the game does very well, like colored text, so I know the author must be good at coding.

This is a good work, and it's exactly the kind of thing that I think makes IFComp worth playing: personal, raw work that the author cares about and which tries to communicate something.

This is the author's first parser game, but lacks many of the bugs and rough edges that first games tend to have. I don't recall running into any errors during gameplay.

In this game, you're a warrior/poet who is visiting a coastal desert city. You have to sell your camel and find out where your enemy has fled, a professor with something called the mantablasphere.

The game has combat, with different items you can equip. Unlike some recent combat RPG games I've played recently that were extremely difficult with almost no room for error and few opportunities to heal, the combat in this game was fairly mild but still interesting, with a few opponents and multiple opportunities to heal. You can fight with weapons or use poetry to hurt others (this functions as a weapon but with humorous descriptions of the fight).

The world felt really big at first, but once I explored I saw it was manageable. The map accompanying the game helped. A couple of times I got stuck because I did examine room descriptions and people carefully enough.

The game ends before anything super exciting happens. And the world seems a fairly generic representative of fantasy. It varies from goofy (like having food named after tv and movie creatures like the mogwai) to serious (a guard asks you to report crimes for money). Creatures like goblins and elves inhabit the world without any real exploration of what their presence means. An inn is just an inn; a castle just a castle; a merchant is just a merchant; a church is just a reason to have a cemetery; pirates and thieves work together but there's no hint of why or their purpose. Each part of the game locally makes sense and work, but if you step back globally it's hard to see a bigger picture.

Because of the smooth programming, I'm glad I played the game. For the next installment, it would be fun to see more of what makes this world unique.

In this game, you play as a severed hand that has regained the sentience and motility its owner once had, due perhaps to the experiments of Dr Frankenstein and his assistant Igor. As a hand, you have low mobility and can only carry one item at a time.

Your goals are to explore and to try to figure out how you returned and what to do now. Along the way, the map opens up a bit and you're able to explore more of your world.

Also, all static descriptions are written in poem form, while varying text (such as for dropped items) and conversations are written in prose. The poetry often as ABAB structure and sometimes ABCB, and a few times has some internal rhymes as well, I think. I think that it was done pretty well, and that it (perhaps unintentionally) helps to highlight most important items (excluding some scenery), kind of like how in old 2d animation, objects that would move later in a scene were a different color from objects that were always part of the background.

Most of the puzzles are well-clued and smooth. There were a few instances of small bugs that caused me problems, and I ended up being locked out of victory due to a timer on an item, but I messaged the author about the bugs. I do recommend saving often just in case.

I couldn't really figure out the tone of the game, as it varies from mildly comedic or slightly dark humor to fairly gruesome to heartfelt. I felt like the overall plot arc was narratively satisfying and that overall it was a good story.

Adaptations are a fraught area of interactive fiction. How close do you stay to the original? Do you introduce choices by allowing people to select from previously existing scenes, or do you vary between the 'canon' story and your own selections?

This is a cyberpunk adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. It takes selected events from the book and replaces references to farm and country life to references to web connectivity, corporations, devices, and hacking.

In structure, it has long pages of text, usually with a 'next' button at the button, with larger choices happening a few times per chapter. The text per choice is much larger than is usual for Twine or Choicescript; for me, it was reminiscent of Chooseyourstory games, which often have the same 'several pages followed by a weighty choice' format.

I read Anne of Green Gables and watched shows about it a bit as a kid, but at the time I thought it was meant for even younger kids than me, so I didn't pay it much attention.

So, with vague memories of Anne of Green Gables, I read this interactive fiction game. At several points I thought, "How close is this to the original?" and looked up the Project Gutenberg copy. Reading through passages of it was a real delight. It's clear why this book has endured so long; the characterization and dialogue writing are exceptional, a generational talent. For my personal tastes, my favorite writer for voice and style has been Arthur Conan Doyle, but Anne of Green Gables compares very well with that. Other authors can have some mediocre 'local' writing that is supported by great global plot structure, but these two are great at the line by line writing.

This became a problem while playing the game, because while Brett is actually a good author (you should check out his other games!) I began comparing all of his additions directly to the real story, and they suffered by comparison. It's like having the star player of your local college play against MJ, or being tasked with adding a flying saucer and aliens to Van Gogh's Starry Night.

One example is when Anne meets Diana. In both versions, she declares that the two of them should be bosom friends and should declare their affection to each other by swearing an oath (all this after having exchanged less than five sentences with each other).

In this version, Anne says:
"We ought to make this vow over running water. I assume under the ground here are some water pipes. That'll do."

In the original, Anne says:
“We must join hands—so,” said Anne gravely. “It ought to be over running water. We’ll just imagine this path is running water."

The first one is amusing; taking a serious vow requirement and just halfway-ignoring it. The second is extremely amusing to me: Anne has just met this brand-new girl, instantly declared herself best friends, concocted a very elaborate oath, and then instantly says it's okay to ignore reality by using their imagination. This connects to the overall theme of a lot of the book, of Anne living in a realm of imagination and fantasy, being brought down to earth by Marilla. So this scene fulfills one useful narrative role in the game, but many roles in the book.

Similarly, other great passages from their book lose their weight in this world. Anne's flights of fancy in the original contrast with her mundane world; in this version, she's surrounded by the bizarre and fanciful at all times, with endless amounts of entertainment. In the original, Matthew's fate is a solemn capstone on the whole book, something that immediately and inescapably focuses Anne's life on reality. In this version, it's a somber event that is then succeeded by the 'true' finale, which is perhaps the most fanciful event of the story and teaches a different moral, that Anne does have agency against tragic events in life, that trying hard enough can overcome any obstacle, and that living in her fanciful realm is the true path.

When reading the directly adapted parts, I preferred looking up the original and reading that. When reading the newly-minted parts, I enjoyed learning more about the world and trying out the mechanics.

With all of this said, I still think this is one of the better adaptations of pre-existing text I've seen. All adaptations run into the issues I've mentioned; I wrote a Sherlock Holmes game with text from Arthur Conan Doyle, and I had the same issue of my own text contrasting poorly with Doyle's, and struggling to balance linearity/faithfulness with branching/new material. I think that Anne of Green Cables succeeds better than my own game, or than Graham Nelson's The Tempest. But its greatest effect on me was making me want to read through the whole book (or listen to audiobook; it seems like it would be great in that format).

Andrew Schultz's wordplay games can be presented on a spectrum between "the wordplay puzzles are extremely hard to guess without automated tools and/or lawnmowering" and "the entire game is trivial". This game is one of several that hit a sweet spot in the middle, closer to (but not on!) the easier side.

The mechanic here (which I won't reveal for spoilers) has small complexity and can be sounded out most of the time, making it not too bad. Another of this author's games, Wipe Out, is his third-highest rated game on IFDB, and I expect this one to end up high on that list as well.

I happily plowed through much of the early game and got about 35 out of 64 points on my own. After that, I had to consult the guide about 3-4 times. The main times I had to consult it were for puzzles that went beyond wordplay and required leaps of insight or finding patterns. I think those extra puzzles were interesting, and I wonder if I could have worked them out if I had been more diligent.

The plot is mostly held together by a common food-based theme. I enjoyed the help system and found it easier to use than some other games by this author, and I thought the ending was fun, though.

This was a longer, thoughtful Twine game with a clickable world map and heavy inventory use. The inventory occupies a side bar, and different elements light up in red and become clickable when in the appropriate location, allowing for some complexity.

The story is about a future where carbon dioxide is so prevalent that the air is poisonous to humans. Everyone lives underground while above-ground scientists work to purify the air. The purification plant has stopped working, though, and so you, a young girl, have been sent to the above-ground lands to try to get it working again.

The writing is melancholic and wistful. Simultaneously, I was excited by the writing style but found it hard to focus on. You have to click to make each line appear for some pages, which wasn’t too bad, but the slightly slower pace and the desolation of each passage made it easier for my mind to drift away from the game.

Mechanically, you basically plow through the map (I love being able to click directly on the map to skip to a room I’d been in before), and there are rooms with obstacles and rooms with obstacle removers (like locks and keys, for instance). There is a timer of sorts (your oxygen tank) but I think it’s cued to story beats and not to your actions, which is great. Near the end there are some trickier puzzles, but the puzzles in general aren’t too hard, allowing the story to take center stage.

I think this game nailed the atmosphere it was going for (no pun intended). The design UI is great. Something about the whole project didn’t draw me in fully, but that’s a completely subjective experience, and I did find it above-average for an IF-game.

This is my third game I've played by Mr Hoffmann. I've had essentially the same experience with all three: I encountered them in a German competition, where they are by far the largest game. However, since they use drop down menus, I can often get far even without knowing a lot of verbs. However, after an hour or three of gameplay, I realized I only have 100 points out of 1000 or 2000 or 3000. So I give up, then later find the game in an English competition, where I can complete it. The only one that didn't follow that pattern is Phoney Island, a german-only game about Trump being evil that I finished in German.

This game has you investigating a store after its owner has mysteriously disappeared. There is a lot of merchandise, junk, and random stuff in the shop, all of which you can investigate and put together.

The multiple choice menus help here a lot, just like before. There are a lot of specific verbs we need, like 'unscrew' and 'wedge' and so on, and the menus help with that. There are also three levels of hints for many puzzles, which is nice.

However, sometimes these systems fall apart. There are times when the multiple choice menu has the right verb but using it puts the noun in the wrong part of the sentence, causing it to fail. Sometimes the right word doesn't appear in the menu at all, so you need to type it, and often there are two places the word can be (the object being used and the object it's being used on) and you have to look at both objects to find it. Similarly, many of the puzzles have many conceivable solutions but you are forced into only one.

Overall, I think people will enjoy this who enjoy parser games for their ability to let you wander around a large space, tinkering with things, getting funny messages, and just existing in a parser world.