Reviews by MathBrush

This game was quite different from most IF games I've played.

It's a slice of life game about a man and his girlfriend/wife who live in a cheap flat. He works nights, she works days, and today, on the eve of a new millenium, he is sick.

I was surprised when at the end of the day, (Spoiler - click to show)I found my wife dead at work. I was even more surprised when (Spoiler - click to show)there was a bright flash and I woke up at what I thought was the next day, only to see my wife still alive. That's when I realized this game was (Spoiler - click to show)a time loop. (all these spoilers are for things that happen in the first day only).

Gameplay consists primarily of interacting with others through menu-based conversation, collecting items (all of which (Spoiler - click to show)persist through the time loop) and trying to think of ways to help your wife.

There are a couple of small bugs and typos, which I've notified the author about and which should be easy to fix, although I had an issue where after I restarted the game I couldn't load any saves, which might have been an HTML TADS issue. Fortunately, the game is the kind where if you know what you're doing you can get from the beginning to end in very few moves.

I loved some of the characters in this, like Vincent, and enjoyed the multiple endings. A few times I really couldn't figure out what to do; I used hints once, I think. But overall this game was a good time and really a clever idea that was executed well.

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.

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!

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)This Twine game was much more substantial than I expected and much less.

You play as a spirit summoned by a woman called Baba, a fortuneteller, as you are ripped from nonexistence into existence.

You have the power to hop from vessel to vessel, both non-living and living, and it gives you the opportunity to learn gossip.

And such gossip you learn! A cold princess loves a dashing, straightforward man who may hold a dark secret. A monk does not believe all she says she believes. And so on. You gather secrets like scores in games.

Eventually, you also gain the ability to make dialogue choices, allowing you to wreak havoc in others' lives.

In the end, before plot threads resolve, [spoiler]you become one with everything, and then nothing[/spoiler].

I would like to see the rest of the threads. I did recently teach a class on Hinduism for a few weeks as part of a World Religions course; I didn't know too much about Hinduism before (besides reading the Bhagavad Gita), but why don't I try to apply a superficial understanding of Hinduism to this game that may not actually be influenced by it at all?

We can see this game as a representation of the karmic cycle. Existence is suffering, and the endless cycle of new vessels and their attachments, both the good and the evil, and the happy and the bad, are not good. Only true detachment from everything allows us to exit the karmic cycle and escape the cycle of rebirth.

(My apologies for the limited understanding of Hinduism and the game).

Overall, I'm reminded of the game Riverside, which similarly starts out as a normal, promising game and then is abruptly derailed in a shocking, out of world fashion. You can peek at the walkthrough or reviews to see.

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.

This is a Twine game with inventory and world model that has a pretty compact map set in a mine. The idea is that you are a mage who teleports into a collapsed mine with the goal of evacuating everyone inside.

It's a classic low-level dungeon crawl, with spells, treasure, obstacles, commerce, and even the eponymous 'dragon'. All of these ingredients are added in small amounts; most of the game only uses one spell, for instance.

The game doesn't last too long. Much of the plot is about 'just in time' happenings; no matter what thing you need, you just happen to counter exactly that thing.

The game has charming and funny moments, and the text is descriptive. I think I would have liked to have an extra space between paragraphs to more easily distinguish them.

The inventory system was simple to use. I made some mistakes early on, but once I understood how it worked it was great.

It's odd; when I started this review I had in my mind that the game was lacking in some significant way, but I can't really point out anything. It has custom CSS, it had good pacing and interface, it had dangerous and safe moments, it has some Chekhov's guns that go off in satisfying ways. So I'd say it's a pretty good game!

Alas, upon starting this game and solving the starting puzzle, I saw the following room description:

> A small room with nothing but your Cryotube in it. You see the release mainframe to your right and the Port door to the west. The mainframe's tacky lights and fixtures blink erratically. Captain Kirk would be proud. The Port Door has a red light above it indicating it is locked.
>
> The vastness of space can be seen from this room. Thousands of stars surround you, planets streaming slowly across the sky go in all different directions.
>
> You can see Port door, Cryotube (empty), Hunting Knife and Bloody Note here.

This says a few things to me. One, that this game has Star Trek references and an enthusiastic author who loves space (good); two, that I'm in a class science fiction spaceship game (could be good or bad); and three, that the author is fairly new to Inform and its rules about capitalization and initial appearance rules (not something that I look forward to).

The rest of the game bears these ideas out. You are awoken from cryosleep to find most of your crew slaughtered. Your goal is to search through the ship to find out what happened and to make sure you live.

The game is pretty grim, lots of blood and bodies. Gameplay isn't too bad, with SEARCH and EXAMINE being pretty useful on multiple occassions. Make sure to type ABOUT to get instructions on one key puzzle!

Overall, I think the game had a neat idea that was hampered a bit by inexperience with Inform 7, and the writing could have had a little more description and detail. For instance an early room says: "Nothing of
interest is here. It looks like any old ship hallway that you’ve seen
millions of times." If that's the case, why include the room at all? Why have a room that even you, the author, don't like writing about?

The nice thing is the game had several fun moments and the author will only get better with Inform over time if they continue to learn, so I would definitely play more games by this author in the future.

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'.

This TADS game had many delightful elements to it. You are in a library filled with, well, Forbidden Lore. It belongs to a powerful wizard, a family member, and is essentially a one-room game with enormous amounts of detail, including several NPCs.

Many things are richly implemented, including a large number of bookshelves, a desk, and special gadgets, as well as magic and conversation.

However, much of the game is not spelled out, almost to an extreme. You aren't told what to do. You aren't told how many of certain objects are present. You aren't told how to phrase certain important commands. You aren't told what certain devices are capable of. You aren't guided on what conversation topics work with which NPCs.

This non-spelling out can in some games increase the fun as you delve, but in this game it's so extreme that I think it goes too far. It'd be like introducing a player to chess but not explaining how the pieces move or that the goal is to threaten the king.

I liked the lore, the characters seemed fun, and the whole thing reminded me in a positive way of Andrew Plotkin's room in Cragne Manor.

Even with the lack of information, I still found a lot to do. I managed to find a goal and complete it, and once that was done I really had no clue what to do next. To complete that first goal, I had to look at the walkthrough twice and both times I found that I had the right idea but gotten a misleading response from the game. For instance, before achieving one major goal, I [spoiler]tried PUSH STATUE, but it was fixed in place. The real command was PUSH STATUE INTO CHASM.[/spoiler]

So this game is a hit and a miss for me. Great worldbuilding, fun ideas, but spotty implementation and player motivation. Would definitely play more by this author.

Seeing this game gave me trepidation. Marked 'an hour and a half', parser game, 'Old School', 'Excellent for new players and veterans of the genre', a classic-looking castle on the cover; it had all the markings of some custom-parser windows executable game that is huge and buggy and the author keeps insisting 'The game is easy' or 'You're playing wrong', as has happened in countless past IFComps.

Imagine my relief when:

* The first sentence made me laugh, and
* the game turned out to be fair, well-programmed, and have an adjustable play length.

In this game, you are a reporter assigned to cover a royal wedding. You arrive late (intentionally) to find everyone gone and the castle unusually hot.

This game lets you access the end from the beginning! At any point you can enter the final battle, with a random chance to win based on your overall score. So the game only really lasts as long as you want it.

Gameplay is pretty simple, mostly 'pick up item and use it here'. There are some more complex puzzles; there was one maze I solved halfway but gave up on just because I don't really like mazes. Once I saw the spoilery map, I realized that it wasn't even hard, but such is the fate of weak walkthrough users like myself. The only other hard puzzle was one that I had seen others talking about on here so I knew how to solve.

There were several unimplemented interactions and synonyms.

Overall, the interactions were satisfying and the writing funny. Something felt a bit 'light' about the game, both in puzzles and writing, but what is here seemed good. I do think I ran into a bug or unusual luck, because I was able to beat a luck-based game without rigging it the way the game suggested.