Reviews by MathBrush

Escape the Wumpus

The original Hunt the Wumpus game had you chasing a creature across a dodecahedral map, with a complex web of rooms.

This game doesn't feature the wumpus itself until the very end, where it plays a very minor role in one room. It has a complex map, but I don't think it's a dodecahedron.

Instead, you mainly enter one room at a time and get a list of interesting items in the room (some of which have fun effects not necessary for progression) along with a list of rooms you can go to.

Several rooms have 'collectors' that want items which are found in other rooms, making a fetch quest of sorts. I got stuck on the last one (which is okay, it's okay to get stuck in games) because the room I needed to go to was one I had long avoided.

Overall, the game was interesting. It seems to be a custom engine, and if so it worked great. Like others mentioned, I didn't enjoy the frequent timed text but did enjoy that the author sped it up each time. The game had some connections and story about the Wumpus and the ecosystem; I think even more of that story and more characters or more details about the characters would be fun.

Dreamteller

This is a relatively short mostly-linear Twine game all on one screen (for the most part) with two types of links, those that provide more info and those that move the game along.

Before the ending, there were no choices I saw outside of one text box, where the answer had been printed immediately beforehand. The ending has some branches and a great feature to let you go back and try again.

The story is about a detective investigating a series of ritualistic deaths. The best part of the game is the vividness of the imagery regarding the murders, with red blankets in white, empty houses.

The game is interspersed with dreams, which I interpreted as lucid daydreams.

Overall, there is a lot of symbolism and an overarching answer to why this is all happening, with a couple of different branches for you to decide how you want to deal with the answers you find.

I think it could have been interesting to have a little bit more options in playing, a little more freedom. Storywise, sometimes in my foolish brain I had difficulty following along, and there seemed like there were a couple of plot threads that went nowhere or were discarded. Other than that, it was a worthwhile read and interesting.

This game reminded me of I Am Prey, a bit, since you have to avoid a monster (in this case, a boss) that is hunting you do systemetically.

But, this game is unique. You play as an office worker who would rather attend a pretty boring work party than finish a spreadsheet, but is forced to go into the office and find a work laptop to log into to finish it.

Gameplay involves a looping space of 16 rooms, some with a computer. You have to log in to a computer and work on the spreadsheet until it is done. Obstacles increase, though, including the creepy boss, power outage, computer malfunctions and annoying screensavers.

At first I felt like it didn't have a lot of coherence, but over time I began to enjoy its goofy humor.

Then I checked the walkthrough. It's amazing! Detailed pen and pencil drawings, handwritten notes, extra info, full code. It was so cool.

I finished the game, though I ran into trouble at one point trying to deal with a goat. Overall, implementation was smooth. I did have one little bug (I used UNDO and made a transcript of it to give the author).

New Captain

This Twine game has a lot of complex systems together with some fun story snippets, but perhaps could have used more of its extensive setup.

This is an homage to Star Trek, with communicators, teleporters, science officers, peaceful missions, etc. You play as a brand new captain who inherits a ship and a crew after the past captain quickly resigned.

You are immediately given tons of rooms to visit, people to speak to, communications, a computer access, and so on. Almost all of these things do nothing, at least at first.

You have two missions: negotiate a treaty, and check on a pulsar. The most complicated part of the game (besides figuring out which button let me talk to the Admiral) was establishing a Gantt chart of the various pre-treaty negotiation tasks.

I was worried at some point that all of my negotiations would fall through, but I ended up with 250/300. My stats all remained the same at 0, except for 1 curiosity point. I have to wonder if there are ways to move the other 5 or so stats, or if they had planned content that would cut.

The final treaty and pulsar viewing were extremely anticlimactic, both finished in a line or two with no description.

Overall, it's a cool concept, and I did find a secret in the captain's cabin, but I would have loved more descriptions.

Forensic Necromancy: A Murder in Nineveh

This game fits in with the author's other games this comp, being a Dialog game with clickable nouns and verbs and an ASCII map at the top.

In this one, you are an archaeology student checking out a dig at night to do drugs and use necromancy in order to view the mind palaces of dead people.

It tells a semi-historical tale of an emperor of Assyria and his two sons, one strong and one weak, fighting over sucession.

The mind palaces include classic IF puzzles like darkness and opening a locked door without the key (though there's no newspaper here!). Solving these puzzles gives access to new areas which unlocks new memories, which unlock new mind palace items.

The historical setting is interesting, especially as I've Sennacherib pop up in the old testament several times, including Isaiah, which is a highly valued book in my religion (and one of the few books I've done machine learning authorship analysis on, mostly by accident). There he's an external threat and his god is pitted against ours.

That god, Marduk, is referred to frequently here. We visit the temple of Marduk and find a statue.

There's a lot of dialog but not much conversation, if that makes sense. (I always accidentally mispell dialogue when playing these games). There are many cutscenes, but no talking to people. That, combined with the small map and classic puzzles, makes this a game that is fairly simple to get through and hard to fail at (though I was in a rush early on, skipped messages, and ended up not opening the backpack and being very confused for a while).

I could nitpick. The cutscenes being more than a page big and replaying every time you enter a room was somewhat obnoxious. The tutorial was kind of intrusive and big (though obviously ignoring it was a bad move, so that's on me). But neither of these things were big enough to decrease enjoyment. This game had a good concept and executed it well. It's nice to see people write on things they are passionate about, and which teach real-life facts.

Shadow and Ink

This game was well-balanced. At first I thought it might be overwhelming, with options for fast travel and separate screens for inventory.

Instead, its fairly well balanced, and moderately more linear than it might appear. It's a Japanese setting with references to Borges, the American West, and other non-Japanesisms. You encounter a fairly magical land with talking trees, magical shadows, and rivers of ink.

In this world, you are tasked with creating magical books using recipes requiring a sheet of paper, a bottle of ink, and 1 or more magical items (kind of like witch hat atelier, which I haven't played but I have played a ripoff of). Then you find the person who needs the book.

There's a lot of game here, but it's not too hard to lawnmower through options when you get stuck. More fun is finding the person who needs help. Like many such combination games, the possibilities grow larger and larger until you reach a turning point and they start dwindling until only one option remains.

I feel like it's almost slightly overtuned, a great deal of apparatus (images, music, helpful UI, checks for your progress) for a plot and premise that is perhaps 20% thinner than it ought to be, like David wearing Saul's armor. But in a competition filled with long games, I appreciated a smooth and pleasant experience with a fun variety of characters and a large number of satisfying resolutions.

The Rat

This game isn't really what I'm expecting. Which can be a danger with these 'writing a sequel game as a prize' games! One of the 2-star ratings I got for Magpie Takes the Train was by someone who gave 5 stars to the original Alias: The Magpie game just a few days earlier. I can only imagine they loved the first game, an expansive puzzler, and, looking for more, was disappointed by my one-room game.

This game is an authorized sequel to The Bat by Chandler Groover, a game where you play as a butler to a deranged version of Bruce Wayne. In the course of that game, you gain and lose varying amounts, direct other people using a compass, and manage guests. You can only ATTEND to things. Its mostly a dark comedy, setting up goofy situations that you participate in as the butler.

This game is a combination of multi-character optimization puzzles plus a stream of dialogue in the background, almost like a mixture of Suspended and Violet (which reminds me, I should replay Suspended, I've never tried it without the walkthrough). As in Suspended, you control a variety of characters that each have their own attributes and qualities. Here, we have one person whose role is movement and sabotage, one that acts independently to steal things, and one who narrates and waits and moves the plot forward. More join later, with the capability to walk the mansion openly.

The stream of dialogue includes banter between our characters and rich people smoozing, one of whom runs an AI company and uses AI-based language.

I'll admit that I didn't always catch what was going on in the dialogue. While in Violet, the constant stream of background action took place as the backdrop of a one-room game, this game is mostly movement-based, almost like Arthur DiBianca's games. There is a great deal of experimentation, repetition, and retreading the same paths. This felt almost counter to or at odds to with the stream of text, as I just wanted to type N, W, W, W, Sabotage, etc. but had to be careful to try and tell what was new background text and what was not. The leads me to suspect I didn't piece together the secret identities of all the characters, especially Rat.

As an optimization puzzle, it was enjoyable, a nice balance between difficulty and progression.

A couple of times I felt befuddled, both when starting (trying to understand how Jackdaw works) and with final act (due to not noticing the map change). I solved the first by experiment and the second by hints.

Overall, I fell like this game is a lot like Boruto. I don't think Boruto really works as a spiritual sequel to Naruto, even though it's a literal sequel; the themes and drawing style are just so different. But I think Boruto is a good manga, better than most. Similarly, I don't think this game will be what people are looking for as a sequel to the Bat, despite the recurrence of people, themes, and mechanics; however, I do believe it is a good game, and better than most.

Pegasus Crew

This is a relatively brief Twine game where you play as the captain of a starship who is also a formerly mind-controlled soldier. You two compatriots are Locke, who is a kind of gambler/rogue, and Chicken, a sentient mushroom.

To get back your stolen memories, you go to a pleasure planet where everyone's feelings are shared and feeling bad is banned.

There is some music and there is custom styling, including character reactions that load a second or two after making choices.

The concepts and characters are interesting. The plot and writing are fairly straightforward; exactly the kind of things you'd think would happen happen (the collector guy running the place is bad, we have to choose between pleasing the mind control collective and pleasing out teammates, etc.)

I liked the whole backstory with Chicken's name origin. Some of the plot didn't gel with me as well. On a planet where everyone shares emotion, it seems reasonable to me that people would try to minimize unpleasant feelings in others. Their psychology and society would be very different than ours.

Some of the text left me scratching my head. When we flashback to Chicken, for instance, we're told that 'her spores are filling the room' but also that she is 'behind glass'.

A few other things were odd:

She offers me a metal canteen. I drink as if I am an abused pet that was forgotten and my owner finally came back from vacation.

This makes sense at first glance, but if the pet was abused, wouldn't it not want to be around its owner? Maybe it was kidnapped, I suppose. Also I don't associate drinking water with reunification celebrations.

One last example is

Every instinct she drilled into me screams to finish the mission.

Aren't instincts the opposite of things that are drilled into us?

This is all really nitpicky, for which I apologize. But I've ran into similar things with a couple of games, so I thought it might be helpful to point out some examples in case authors plan on making improvements in future games.

I expect many readers will enjoy this game. It has a real guardians of the galaxy/Flash Gordon vibe and has the traditional 'choosing friends over personal benefit' narrative.

Ultraviolent Unicorn Deathmatch of Destiny 4

This was a great compact easy-playing game with fun consequences.

It's a parser game but each keystroke automatically takes action. Many of those actions cause immediate destruction and death. You're a deathmatch violent unicorn at an office job, so its very easy to chainsaw a janitor in half or trample your boss to death.

You have a list of tasks that you can see with Q. Most are reasonable; I had to get help with 1 or 2. I think there might be a bug with the help system, as I asked for help in the cans room at one point and it said there was nothing to help with, but decompiling I saw some can hints.

The writing is funny. The office space isn't super well-described but that's part of the joke, that you're an intense violent mythical creature causing havoc while existing in a very spartan and mundane office environment (outside of a lone chupacabra).

Everything was coded well, there was a time period of learning a system and implementing it. I don't think I'll revisit it (felt like a complete one-time experience) but I'd definitely recommend it if I had friends who asked 'what's ifcomp?' and I wanted to show them something amusing.

Wild Ride to Earth

This is a choicescript game with a cool space map. You basically get abducted by aliens and only have a year to return to earth to pick up your lottery winnings. So you hop from planet to planet working odd jobs to build up money to buy things to become better at other jobs to make more money to either pay for a ride or hitch a ride with friends back to earth.

I missed my deadline to get back to earth, but I had a good time with the different planets. Jobs range from professional scyophant to terrorist in training. You can get hurt, but you can also heal. Money feels both hard to get and bountiful at the same time, since you can get a good chunk from different jobs but have to spend a lot on planet hopping and items.

I was never quite sure how TUs mapped to days since sometimes I'd take a 3 TU job and a whole month would go by. Possibly I was skimming over in-game events that took up extra time.

Overall, it felt like a fun game, kind of reminded me of Roald Dahl-age books (not of Roald Dahl himself, but just that combination of reader age groups).

I don't know why, but this line made me laugh:

Her smell is part caramel apple, part..no, on renewed sniff, she's all caramel apple.