Reviews by MathBrush

This was a fun game in a style different than that which I usually play. It's an ADRIFT game that is pretty long, with more than 8 'acts' and 43 rooms, but with puzzles that are locally self-contained and generally well-clued (with a couple of exceptions).

You show up to Sherlock Holmes' apartment determined to prove he is a fraud, only to discover it full of bullet holes and menacing notes. You have to track down Shakespeare and foil a plot by the evil Moriarty!

Much of the game can be completed by examining everything and showing things to people. The game is fortunately almost completely devoid of having to 'look behind' and 'under' everything (although looking under is useful in obvious cases).

I did use the hints a couple of times, and every time was for a window or door. The second to last puzzle (a grill) wasn't hinted and I struggled for a long time. I eventually opened up the game in the ADRIFT 4 coding app and found out that I had the right idea but the wrong direction (full spoiler: (Spoiler - click to show)I was trying to LOCK it but had to CLOSE it.).

Overall, I didn't encounter many bugs (a couple of times the screen just printed a single letter when I doubt that was what was desired; most likely because I was playing online). I had a good time with this game.

This is the only Spring Thing game that has never been reviewed on IFDB. I think I can see why; it's a longer game with a big, nonlinear map, a few different ways to die, and puzzles with difficult timing.

You play as a protestor at a nuclear facility who gets lost and then bitten by a camel. You wake up in a hospital with another protestor chained nearby. The hospital has a lot of floors, each with hallways filled with room. There are myriad keys and you have to do a variety of heroic actions that aren't well-clued.

You also gain the ability to bite hard and spit but the game doesn't spell this out and you almost never use them.

The story is interesting, but I remember an Emily Short blog post about how you should make a nonlinear game designed in a way that it's impossible to progress without encountering the story, and I think that would have benefitted this game a lot. Also, there could be more indication of when puzzles exist, as often there are things you need to do that you don't even know you need to do!

However, I do think people could enjoy this game and hope it gets more reviews.

I learned a lot playing this game.

I was most familiar with Richard Otter as the author of Word of the Day, one of the largest Inform works of all time in terms of wordcount. It did well in IFComp and even picked up a nomination for an XYZZY award. It was about a mystery in space and included tens of thousands of words on alien biology and evolution.

So I was surprised to see this 2009 Adrift 4 game that reference all of his previous games, of which there were a ton. I had no idea! I also didn't know that his username was Delron, which is the name of a website I've seen pop up a lot before. It also seems he had two earlier IFComp games that I had played and just not associated with his name.

This game is pretty big and I had some trouble and didn't know if the webplayer would save, so I used the walkthrough. It was like a guided tour of his games. Basically, there is 1-3 rooms for each game, and each world contains a piece of paper with the name of a game on it and a person who accepts the correct piece of paper for that world. Your goal is to match them up.

The most interesting worlds to me were the robot world of Unauthorized Termination, the world where you're a germ infesting a human, and the world where a decaying but alive Lion is in a room with a statue of King David after an apocalypse.

This is a visual novel entered into Spring Thing about a decade ago.

In it, you play as a young woman torn between two brothers, one who is an evil murderer who is willing to harm you and uses dark magic, and another who is noble and wants to replace monarchy with democracy (this is a really hard choice for you). The setting is in an alternate version of the American Southwest that has a royal kingdom.

The novel is pretty long; I got tired of clicking to the next line (as there are often 50 or more lines between choices) so I decompiled and read it. It has three acts, and includes a surprising transformation partway through.

There is a lot of worldbuilding here, and the characters felt distinct and memorable. I felt like it could have used a bit more interactivity, even if it was just letting us comment on events. But the art was well-done.

Dust is about a man in the Wild West who comes to town looking for his wife when he comes across trouble. It involves a lot of conversation and the use of a lot of tools.

This game was entered in the German IF Gran Prix earlier this year, where I personally found it the best game of the competition. I enjoyed the characters and the western setting.

I love foreign translations and foreign things in general (maybe I’m a xenophile?) so it’s always hard to know when playing a game in another language if it is the language that attracts me or the game itself.

In this case it’s a little bit of both. One reason I liked it in German was its simplicity, with descriptive but mostly non-figurative language and the use of menus in conversation and some actions. While in German it was brilliant for someone with a weak vocabulary in another language, in English I could have enjoyed some more complexity in writing, and perhaps a slightly expanded map.

But there’s a lot here that I loved in the original and now in the translation. I like how you collect various tools and apply them, giving the game a physical feel. I like the social dynamics, with the non-violent but still substantial threat of the sheriff holding onto your papers while you investigate, and the tavernkeeper urging you to grab a cookie. I also enjoyed the townsfolk popping in and out, from mean grandmas to ball-playing kids.

I helped test this game a little by reading through the English transcript looking for any errors (of which I found very few).

I'm going to review all 3 acts here.

This a Baldur's Gate game. It is possible to play and generally understand it without having played the game (I'm in that scenario) but it generally builds off the associations, motivations, and understood characteristics of that game, which I've only partially absorbed through meme osmosis.

The story is that Astarion (here's where the pre-existing knowledge deficit kicks in) and you have been sucked into a nightmare world by a creature that feeds off of suffering. Astarion who, in the 'real world', has made great progress in escaping from an abusive vampire overlord, has now regressed and in his mind is back where he was at the start, hopeless and alone.

Gameplay in all three acts revolves around a combination of exploration and conversation. All significant actions cost energy, which you only have ten units of at a time. In the first two acts, energy is replenished every night, and you also level 3 skills of manifesting as a dream ghost: Speech, Sight, and Touch. In the third act, energy is replenished by finding secret 'gleams', and you can no longer level your attributes.

In all three days, Astarion has a health bar which, if it goes low enough, will cause him to die. Each day has other important meters as well, such as Astarion's mood, or the attention that can be drawn to you. Basically, this game is an Astarion Tamagachi.

For the first two days, the main goal it to keep him from dying. I discovered after some experimentation that the amount of health he loses or gains each day is based on his mood. I kept dying over and over early on from trying to max my stats first, but in fact there is plenty of time to boost stats with leftover actions. The main goal here is to please this man.

The main difference between the first and second days is that the second day adds more 'special' events with objects and intruders, while the first day just sets up the rhythm of the game as a whole.

The third day is very different, as you are pulled from encounter to encounter, where Astarion talks to people while you explore or interact.

This game is brutally hard (for me!). I died many times trying to complete Act I. There's just almost never enough actions to go around. I found it useful to save every day and reload if I don't achieve my goals. I made over 50 save files through all three acts.

The third act seemed impossibly hard and frustrating until another reviewer pointed out that you can get new actions by finding 'gleams'. I'd spoiler that but I think it's a fundamental part of gameplay and shouldn't be difficult to find in the first place. Finding that, and realizing the 'conversations' often stalled, giving you enough time to explore, helped this section work out better.

Visually and auditorially, the game is beautiful, with nice styling, transitions, fonts, colors, and sound choice.

Conceptually, while this game is symbiotic or even parasitic object, only able to exist in tandem with the resources provided by Baldur's gate, it still (to me) had a generally satisfying plot arc and some nice power progression.

Many ifcomp games are made for ifcomp. This seems like a passion project that just happened to be good enough to enter into Spring Thing and IFComp. I like it.

Felicity Banks has entered IFComp many times before with clever Choicescript games that contain themes like magic, alchemy, cats, and Australia (many of which show up in this game as well). Those games often get a post-comp release that is expanded and then put on Hosted Games.

This game is about a world where magic can be awakened in anyone through unknown means. It's treated like an infection, and society is built around blocking any access to magic-causing things, like using plastic plants instead of natural ones.

When magic awakens in you, the government enforcers come to get you and throw you into a magical prison/school where rival gangs attempt to fight or kill each other and people are sorted into magical categories (like elves, trolls, etc.) based on their abilities (I recommend reading the notes in the stats section).

Speaking of stats, I didn't check them during the game. Some games have really hard stat checks that constantly get in your way, but this game I just roleplayed and I generally did pretty good and only messed up once or twice.

The story and characters were fun, although some things really stretched my suspension of disbelief: (Spoiler - click to show)Are literally all of our friends non-magical people pretending to be magic? To be thrown into a prison? Where it's said that people die?? But they don't really die. Except people are fighting with bladed weapons and pretty much do get close to dying. Also magic has no visible drawbacks whatsoever but is locked down. It's the kind of story where hand-waving makes sense, but sometimes there was so much handwaving I almost thought *I'd* start flying!

I only used magic a couple of times. Besides my awakening, I only had one chance to learn more magic. I thought there'd be more, so I just focused on fiery magic, my strength. But no other chances to learn came up, and I'm not sure I ever actually used my charm. So if this gets a post-comp release, adding more magic-learning and magic-using opportunities and more time spent with friends/relationships would be great. What we have here fits well into the time constraints for the comp well.

I waited to play this until I had more time because I generally enjoy Felicity Banks's games and find them substantia, and I'm glad I did.

**The Den** by Ben Jackson.

It's been interesting tracking Ben Jackson's IF career. *The Kuolema* used Google Forms, a highly unusual format, and was choice-based but required text entry. It had lots of open exploration.

Then we had *Lunium*, a tightly constrained Twine escape room that also featured both choice and text entry, and included several visual puzzles. It kept most puzzles at all time.

Now we have *The Den*. While it keeps the choice and text entry hybrid of previous games, it has (in my mind) a stronger plot arc and better pacing than the other two, and features two protagonists, Aiden and Vee.

Our two heroes live in The Den, an underground area controlled tightly by Father. My first impression of the game was that it was similar to 10 Cloverfield Lane, where a tyrannical man imprisons others, and in this case was abducting children for experiments. I later decided that (Spoiler - click to show)this was some kind of lab with artificial beings and near the end it was clear that this was (Spoiler - click to show) a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve.

This game gave me big Subnautica vibes, with regards to storyline.

Puzzles in this game are the classic type you see in two-person games like Fire Boy and Water Girl, where one player opens passages for another or one player finds passwords for another.

There is also a Wordle mini-game, which I thought was amusing. I also found it a bit contrived, but that is later resolved.

The game is long, a bit more than 2 hours for me. I found the writing good; the two main characters manage to be neither cloying nor obnoxious, and the character of Father grew on me throughout the game.

The only things that I didn't much like during the game was how many options were 'Continue the story' or 'stop right now'. I usually didn't try the 'stop right now' choices, but once when I did the game ended (near the end) and another time it just ignored my choice, essentially (near the beginning). I understand the need to both move forward the plot and also maintain agency, but we usually reached those points by player commands in the first place, so I don't think we need additional confirmation so often. On the other hand, I'm not sure what the fix would be, as it's nice to have a little more interactivity like that. This is just a minor quibble; I think this game is great, and has the same high quality that proved popular in the author's earlier games.

Finally, I liked the use of all sense in the descriptions. There are a lot of smells and temperatures, along with the feel of wind, the hum of fans, the taste of food, and these sense come into play with the puzzles. I like that quite a bit and would like to incorporate that more into my own games.

Well, this was a pleasure. It’s rare (to me) to find a long, well-paced, polished Twine game with nice presentation, few bugs, good characters and a satisfying story arc. Usually games have both significant strengths and significant flaws, but I really didn’t find any major flaws in this game, which was very pleasant. (Of course this might just be to my tastes, of course; other people may have a different reaction)

You play as a chef who has been hired on to cook every 5 days at a community canteen in a magical village. There are several characters you can interact with, each of which is going through their own issues and having their own successes. Your goal is to be able to stay as a chef permanently, with side goals of improving relations with others.

The majority of the game is part of a 4-action daily cycle, where you can choose to cook things to sell at the market and then to buy things at the market (probably the most common option), interact with your friends, make special meals for the community, buy seeds and books (useful early on), go foraging (useful later on, etc.).

Every 5 days you make a special meal which gets judged. Despite my best efforts, my first meal got 1 star, so I worked hard to get better. I ended up getting exactly the amount of stars I needed to ‘stay’ (having only played once, I don’t know if it’s designed always to play out that way or if it was due to my eggs-and-cheese heavy strategies of making deluxe meals).

Overall, the tone is pleasant. There are some stresses, especially with friends, but the tone is one of peace and warmth. It’s not overly cloying to me, when it could easily have been so, and the game doesn’t force you into specific actions of reproach or forgiveness, instead allowing you to chart your own path.

Overall, a great game for someone looking to relax and cook.

This is a longish parser game set in a time with horses, wagons, and captains but not electricity. In it, you play as a soldier who is ordered on a special mission involving the Triskelion, a powerful weapon.

The game is divided into two parts. First, there is a long linear opening sequence which the author has designated as 'training', and that's a good description, as it gets you used to basic verbs and actions. Then there is a longer exploration part in a graveyard.

The puzzles can be tricky at times but not too bad. I used the walkthrough a couple of times, but only one puzzle would, I think have been really hard without it (finding a certain key).

There are a lot of red herrings. I found numerous items that presaged more puzzles and adventures but which were ultimately useless. It did add to the worldbuilding, so that's a tradeoff.

Some of those items could be implemented a bit more. I had this exchange in one late part of the game:

What do you do? x cannister
The green cannister is three feet tall, six inches in diameter, and made of heavy metal. On the side of the cannister is a red warning label. The cannister has a turn-valve on its top but the handle is missing. The valve cannot be opened without the handle.

>
> What do you do? read label
> That is not something to read. Try examining it instead.
>
>
> What do you do? x it
> A bright red square with a picture of a yellow flame on it. Beneath that is the wording "Hazard: Extremely Flammable"
>
>
> What do you do? take it
> That's hardly portable.

Somethings can only be EXAMINEd while some can only be READ.

The '>' prompt has been changed to 'What do you do?', presumably to help new players, and I thought that was neat. Many error responses have been changed, most of which I liked. The one I didn't so much was the error for when you type something that's not there; the game says things like Seriously?? and You must be joking! which is mildly funny the first time, but wears thin over time.

The game did a good job with pacing the puzzles, as I didn't usually feel overwhelmed or not having anything to do. The exits bar at the top is key; many puzzles can be solved by exploring all exits.

I thought the ending was a little anticlimactic, but maybe there will be more Triskelion in the future; I'd like to see it.