Reviews by MathBrush

This Twine game feels very independent from other Twine traditions, with a gameplay style, styling and structure that seems derived from TTRPGS and gamebooks more than other past IFComp twine games, for instance.

It's a class police procedural murder mystery. Three bodies have been found, and you have to find the suspects! As an FBI agent, it is your job to investigate, interrogate, and accuse.

The game makes use of skills, which are set for you based on archetypes like 'Negotiator' or 'athlete'. This skills boost d20 rolls, which determine whether yo you fail or succeed.

This gives a random element to the game, and, according to the walkthrough I read after my playthrough, there are other, hidden random elements as well. This makes the game amenable to replay, but makes it difficult to win on the first try, especially without outside knowledge about the game.

The characters were generally interesting. I liked the family members most, then the suspects. The cops seemed fairly generic. The town and college had a vibrancy to them.

Overall, the game seemed very polished. I didn't agree with every gameplay decision, but I felt like I was playing a quality product while I was in the midst of the game.

I've played three games now by Fred Snyder over the years, all written in his custom parser engine and all involving compact maps with suspenseful plots. I like this game the most out of them so far.

You play in a Cyberpunk-type world where you have an implant in your brain to let you identify and hack objects. Your mission is to retrieve information from the vault of a corporation.

The world model and implementation is completely lean, only implementing exactly what the world requires and nothing else. Every company in the building, every room, every person, is something designed to serve a purpose in the game (outside of one specific room). This has pros and cons; it lets the author do deep implementation and keeps the player from getting lost in a sea of red herrings. On the other hand, it makes suspension of disbelief harder when a corporate office has only 3 rooms. In my book though, I'd rather have a thin, lean, well-implemented game than an overstuffed poorly implemented game.

Besides a variety of NPCs (which I thought were pretty well done), the game includes two kinds of puzzles. I thought the first one was Wordle, but is wasn't, and the second one had me really confused for a second or two before I got it. For me, they hit a sweet spot of 'non-trivial' but 'not punishingly hard'.

**Why Pout?** by Andrew Schultz

Andrew Schultz has a long history of making wordplay games which all follow the same general pattern (typing words based on an overarching wordplay theme using words that appear in the location) as well as a large repertoire of other games (like chess games and even a baseball game).

His longest running series, called 'Prime Pro-Rhyme Row', involves rhyming pairs of words. While fun, I had the feeling it was getting mined out.

This game takes on a fresh mechanic that still involves two-word pairs. Unlike the rhyming games, which could be slowly brute-forced by trying each letter of the alphabet and then adding multi-consonant starters, this puzzle type (which I won't spoil just in case) can be solved through multiple means, including auditory and mechanical, but with much less possible lawnmowering.

That's not to say it's trivial. I did use hints a couple of times. It turned out one puzzle was there that I didn't even realize was a puzzle that was gating all the others.

Anyway, the story here is mostly surreal, with a sequence of random, fantastical things that don't exactly fit a coherent narrative, but the overarching plot is heartwarming and fun: you're collecting friends. In different areas you find people that need help, and, in return, they help you solve more of your puzzles, and can give you pep talks as well.

This is a lot of fun. The pep talks can be nice, too. Some are more general and vague:

> The ________ discusses ways to identify people or situations that justneed a bit of help, and how to do so without making them feel
> hopeless or in need of help, or that they got themselves in this
> position in the first place.

while others are more concrete:

> You think up a ________ you mumble under your breath. The
> merchant finds it a bit weird you like THAT as a way to keep positive.
> It doesn’t seem like that sort of thing helps the economy. Their
> cheeriness slips slightly, with impressively-balanced potshots at
> people more and less successful than they are.

I prefer the more concrete ones, as they have a lot of character.

Overall, this was fun. Recommended for fans of wordplay parser games.

I beta tested this game.

This is a murder mystery set on an Antarctic ice station. A murder has been discovered, and you are highly motivated to solve it. Unfortunately, without any real authority, all you can do is gather evidence and hope people find it.

The game is set out on a time-based system. You have a certain number of days until the real authorities are available. Each day is split up into 4 time periods (I think). During each time period you can interview someone, bond with someone, or do a couple special activities. Sometimes timed events come your way.

Conversation can be down just by clicking each link, but sometimes a new piece of evidence can add new topics, which adds complexity to the game.

Some actions require a closer relationship with someone or extended time, which means you may have to replay if you make poor choices early on.

I found the mystery intriguing and the clues logical. It's in the format where the player amasses enough evidence to satisfy themselves, and then you select a murderer to accuse (like Toby's Nose, for instance), but the game can prompt you when you have enough evidence.

Overall, I liked this mystery. The time and stress meters add some extra complexity, and the Notes system helped me stay organized and not have to worry I was going to forget something important. I think this will do pretty well in the competition, although there are many good games this year to compete against!

This was a cute game, written in Twine with lots of exploration and some puzzles.

You are given an invitation to a beautiful and magical house filled with enchanted objects and creatures. Almost everything has positive and wholesome undertones, although there are some disruptive or angry behaviors.

The house is full of animated things, like skulls or piles of clothes. Everything you meet has requests, from helping deal with a friend to basic needs like food. The puzzles have variety; even though the map is compact (with only 4 big locations and 2 smaller connecting rooms) the number of different tasks you can do and secrets you can find is surprising. New links pop up in one area based on actions in others, and there is some searching (like a big library bookshelf).

I think I liked the bedroom the best, because it had a combination of creepy and fun, or negative and positive emotions.

At times I wished for a little higher stakes, but the ending resonated with me emotionally. Similarly a few too many of the puzzles involved mechanical searching through a list of things, but at least the writing was interesting in each item and the other puzzles had more variety.

Overall, definitely a fun game to play. The reason I like playing IFComp games more than a lot of other IF is that you can tell the IFComp games have a lot of work put into them and were carefully nurtured and worked on until they’re a real gem. The love put into this game is reflected in its quality.

This game isn’t really complete. It’s described as setting up a larger game, and that makes sense. Looking at the code, there are several blank spots and dead ends.

This is a fighting simulator where you train, spar and fight to win money and advance your career. Eventually you can retire and start over.

This game definitely suffers from maximalism. Every choice has a dozen options, and there are tons of stats and a lot of info flying around. Most things seemed conceived on a grand scale but not fully implemented. I had negative stats for several portions of the game.

There’s also several side things that are a bit odd (like an oracle that costs ‘only a little money’ costing $100,000). As it is, the game is like a store in an old Western, with a huge front designed to look like a two-story building but just a little general store behind.

It’s probably combinatorial explosion that prevented the author from finishing everything. I’d recommend starting a game with a simple model that has the entire process from beginning to end (so, one fighter, one school of fighting, one possible fight, etc) and then once that’s working perfectly move on to adding more options at each level. Then you can replay it over and over as you program to make sure the core experience works.

This game was the only game entered in Spring Thing 2020's Late Harvest, designed to accomodate designers who were unable to complete their games in time for Spring Thing due to Covid.

It's a parser game with a long sequence of almost-identical rooms, each with different puzzles in them. The puzzles can repeat, and I believe in the long run that all of the rooms are procedurally generated in some way with common elements in them.

There is a bit of a twist, which I saw in the Club Floyd transcript and which was hinted. Explicitly, (Spoiler - click to show)You can TOUCH WALLS to go through them and end up in a story segment that you have little control over.

Overall, the plot was interesting, as were the puzzles, but both were a bit threadbare. Not bad at all for a first game, though.

This game has been on my 'to play' list for several years. It was one of the earliest Spring Thing games, in fact one of 4 games in the first year that Spring Thing had more than one entrant.

I've made a Sherlock Holmes parser game before and for me it was really hard to keep it from being 'type exactly what sherlock did in the story to progress'. I don't think I really succeeded.

And I don't think this game does either, although it had different goals than mine. It begins with an extended sequence of giving yourself cocaine, and then becomes a 'guess the next part of the book' sequence, with large chunks of text directly from the book (just like I did).

But after some point, it becomes very different. Sherlock burns with anger; an assassin is sent after him. And Sherlock decides to (Spoiler - click to show)blow up a ship.

I don't think this game is really possible without a walkthrough. The help menu gives many detailed ways to talk to people but you actually have to do very different things (like (Spoiler - click to show)hire willis instead of using ASK ABOUT or TALK TO or TELL.

It was a wild story in the end, but it makes a lot more sense than the original story, which was one of the duller Sherlock Holmes stories.

This game uses a similar engine to the author’s last game, Steal 10 Treasures to Win This Game, with some differences. Both only allow a set collection of inputs; nothing else can even be entered. So, error messages are replaced by just not allowing you to type things. However, the older game only uses single letters for inputs. This game lets you type longer words, and does have little responses explaining why you can’t do some things.

The game is set in the fictional land of Yurf, where a royal conflict has divided the world and four gems have been lost. You need to explore the world, which has a surreal Alice in Wonderland/Phantom Tollbooth feel.

The parser is one-word only. This makes the game simpler but also harder. I appreciated the reduced number of actions I had to try. On the other hand, I was frustrated by simple things like trying to look at one person in a group of three, checking my inventory or interacting with individual background items.

The one-word parser has been stretched to its limits here, and that means one thing: riddles. Around half or more of the games puzzles are intuition-based or ‘aha’ type riddles, where instead of manipulating physical objects or learning a system you have to sit and puzzle it out. I ended up having to use hints twice. While I typically enjoy riddles less than other styles of gameplay, they made sense both storywise and given the input constraints.

Overall, a polished and good-looking game, well-written and mostly bug-free (I passed on a typo and a sequence-breaking bug to the author).

This game was written in the mainframe language Rexx, designed to be played on an emulator.

It features ASCII art, used to make 12 playing cards. The point of the game is to collect the cards. It’s based on the story The Garden Behind the Moon by Howard Pyle, with a Moon House and a Moon Man and Moon Angel.

Gameplay is primarily menu based, with some menu options giving you a word you can type out.

There are only 6 things you can do:
-Buy cards from the moon man (from $5 to $120)
-Sleep
-Visit the moon angel (in the code, this is supposed to make him more friendly, but the code that does that never actually runs, locking you out of part of the game)
-Look out the window
-polish stars (this gives you $5_
-visit the garden (only open once a week, gives random text).

So, the only way to make money is $5 at a time, with sleep in between each money-making event, and a little animation that plays when you polish the stars, and you have to do that 64 times to get all cards. Furthermore, you have to wait another 20 days or so to actually beat the game.

I didn’t finish the game all the way through, opting to read the code instead. The ascii art is lovely, but I don’t want to just repeat the same text over and over again for the cards; the gameplay is just too simple, I think.