Reviews by MathBrush

This French game is designed to run on an Amstrad CPC emulator. It comes with pixel art.

This was tough; I often struggle with old-school games, and playing in French wasn't helping! I did find 2 out of 5 endings, and feel satisfied with that.

You are asked by an oracle in your village to explore an old chapel and find a monk named Hermes. You must solve a series of puzzles to figure out how to save your land!

The biggest puzzles revolve around creating potions. I never found amanita mushrooms, one of the ingredients, so I likely missed the best ending. But I managed to brew two of the others.

I enjoy games that have two worlds, and this game does that. The pixel art is interesting. The only thing that was grating was the slow fake 'loading' the emulator does every screen. Yes, I remember playing games in the 90s where the PC would chug and slowly load each screen. It was nostalgic the first 50 times. But as the game goes on it certainly loses its charm!

Apparently there's a way to win the game in one move, which is interesting!

This is a long and complex Twine game with some interesting mechanics.

You come upon an abandoned place with a single resident. Together, you rebuild a mighty city, primarily by telling stories to attract new residents. This lets you build new buildings.

At night, you visit another city, one that is grand. But there is trouble...

The storytelling mechanics have you pick a genre, a format, and some sliders of emotions. You then get what seems like a randomized mini-review from one listener and then an overall critique based on your choices, as well as 15 money.

It was hard to find new genres at first, and money seems to never have any use, despite me building a bank and a marketplace (it said I needed to make an account, but never had a chance). So those parts seemed underdeveloped to me.

Overall, this is a rich story. It uses written French dialect, dropping several vowels, and has some circumlocutory tendencies. So I'm sure I missed a great deal of nuance. As far as I can tell:
(Spoiler - click to show)There was a large town dedicated to immortality through knowledge. They had a library that was a temple to a God, and one day that God and its sibling decided to destroy the city while its leader was out on a trip. They sent a dragon whose flame condemned the city to the dream world. Some of that flame lived on in the house of Luv, who tended it in their fireplace. Due to the flame's continued existence, the dream city was still falling apart, in due measure as the city grows. Luv represents something--maybe a reincarnation of the dream-city's leader, or maybe the dragon, or maybe a god, or something. Eventually you get the choice to extinguish the flame and return the city of old, or keep it).

It's one of the better games of the year I have played so far.

Whew! This game strained my poor Anglophone brain, as it is written in a fancy style of French and a cursive font. There is a very large amount of text as well, so I had to use all my forces to persevere!

But the story itself was interesting enough to carry on. It consists of letters written between two women, although I believe every letter is from the point of view of Isabella, a woman who became a doctor in Paris before being ejected and forced to return to the village of her home. Her lover, Olympia, is left behind. Isabella must face the disapproval and suspicions of the villagers, as well as Olympia's jealousies when the pale, anemic, and beautiful Alice moves in next door.

Gameplay is a bit curious; as at least one other person noted on the forums, it bears some resemblance to The First Draft of the Revolution, where you select different cycling variations before confirming and moving on.

However, there are very large chunks of text between choices (large for me, maybe not for native speaker). These large gaps, and my suspicion that the choices didn't change much of the game, led me to assign a mental score of 4.

However, I had early on, in a separate window, clicked through quickly to see how long the game would be, and received an ending with a clear choice (to (Spoiler - click to show)destroy your letters or not). I was surprised when, in my real playthrough, I never encountered that passage. I used saves and found 2 endings in my own playthrough, and they were quite interesting. So when it became clear that this was actually fairly complex, I upgraded to five stars.

This story is based on classic gamebooks and fantasy tropes. You play as a dwarf in a village of dwarves, and can choose which class to play, which affects your stats. I chose to be a miner with high perception.

This game is already quite large, requiring a couple hours of play, and it's largely unfinished, with only two of three cities available (and, beyond that, there would likely be even more in a full game). There are a lot of randomized checks and things.

The art is, I believe, AI art, as zooming in on some scenes revealed oddities like three legs. However, it is unobtrusive and aesthetically worked overall (not discussing here the ethics of AI). Edit: Nightcafe is listed in credits for artwork.

The one currently finished city has a ton of different districts. There is a map, but instead of being used for navigation, it just serves as a visual cue while you actually select from a list of districts adjacent to your current one.

As you walk around, mini-stories fire off, providing you with new encounters like whether to chase down a missing guardsman or not.

Two things I would have preferred to be different: the map takes a while to load, making movement slow. I would have preferred the map to be optimized to load more quickly. Second, every time I entered the front gate a thief stole my purse and fighting it would just kill me, even if I loaded and tried again. It was really frustrating not having any chance to keep my money on me. And I found it difficult to find ways to heal; I thought maybe resting at my quarters could work, but couldn't find any. I eventually healed as the story progressed.

Overall, I thought the mushroom-brain thing was an interesting storyline, and the political aspects gave the game some complexity.

This game is the kind of thing Steph Cherrywell is known for: smooth humor, a large, easily navigable map, genre tropes pursued to their logical end, plenty of polish, and vivid characters.

I found this game's puzzles more logical than some other Cherrywell games, though I had trouble with one particular artist. Looking back, I ignored many, many, hints.

You play as a flapper (with all the 20's lingo) who's desperate for a drink. But it's all been soaked up by ghosts, so you have to hunt them down one by one!

I really enjoyed this game, and I think that it has a great chance of wining this year's comp.

This game was designed to fit into 90 kb, a tiny amount of space even for an interactive fiction game.

It has 6 small games with similar themes in it, each from different time periods or genres of interactive fiction.

I'll put the description of the games in spoilers, as I describe some things you might prefer to find on your own. I'll put the description of the final game in separate spoilers, as it's slightly different and more of a spoiler.

This is a complex game, and while I felt and experienced many things, I had the sense that I hadn't grasped everything, so this review may neglect some core themes or content.

(Spoiler - click to show)First: A choose your own adventure book, which goes a bit beyond pure branching by letting you perform actions through addition of numbers. You are exploring a mostly empty desert, and you must overcome your fears and think cleverly to find your true goal.

Second: An adventure in the style of Scott Adams, set in the same desert (or is it the same?). You have found an oasis city, but you can't get in. Themes include unachievable goals and building your own happiness.

Third: A classic-style text adventure. This one is quite complex, as you are able to enter and explore a large city. The tone is darker here, as you are either constrained to slog for the machine or to be punished for your individuality. The items of key and shovel, which appeared in earlier iterations, take on new meanings in this world, emblems of money/greed and (fruitless) labor.

Fourth: A hyperlink game (but without hyperlinks, requiring you to type instead). You have become powerful and have many people to help you, but none of you can withstand a storm that is withering and destroying your city. Here and in the last game or so, you begin to get glimpses of the real world person behind the games. This story and the last also mention a beautiful male lover.

Fifth: A Quality Based Narrative game, like Dendry or Storynexus. You have stats, and your available stats determine what scenes you view next and what actions you have available. The story is one of a wanderer, as if the ancient emperor in the Ozymandias poem was stuck in the landscape of his ruin. The real world bleeds in explicitly in the end.

Sixth (stronger spoilers):(Spoiler - click to show)This isn't a world, it's just deleting a bunch of files, but you can't since some have unresolved issues. You choose the writing block by block, using text from earlier in the game, almost like Aaron's earlier game 18 Cadence. In the end, you get the option to delete or save the poem you have created.

There is a strong sense of loss in the game, of futility and helplessness, but also of the desire to create something beautiful that doesn't remove the loss but provides comfort. It's almost a Quixotic point of view, which also ties in with the use of mirrors and illusions.

I found it a beautiful game. Like I said, I don't think I grasped it all. I may need to replay. But I also admired its technical work.

This is a compact sci-fi game where you hop between dimensions in order to keep all universes from being destroyed.

The gameplay is classic Inform 7 style: wander a mostly empty building and pick up different objects on the way, unlock a safe, operate a machine, meet an NPC or two, etc.

The story is that you have been newly hired at a tech company when an explosion goes off. Going in to investigate, you soon learn that the company has quite a bit of unusual history...

The game makes references to the (Spoiler - click to show)Mandela effect, with famous examples like the (Spoiler - click to show)Berenstein vs Berenstain bears.

It's fairly polished, even including images and sound. There are occasional punctuation errors, like quotes being left off at the end of dialogue.

The overall gameplay is pretty satisfying. A few puzzles I thought were underclued, especially (Spoiler - click to show)opening the research door. That one I had to string dump the game for, discovering I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)use the magnet to open it.

The game has multiple levels of ending success. There are several ways you can lock yourself out of victory, but those are well-clued. Getting a perfect ending is a little underclued, though, and may require a few attempts.

Overall, I'd recommend this game to fans of classic-style parser puzzlers or to fans of time travel games.

This game is a participatory game, an MMO masquerading as an MMO.

The conceit is that you are playing an old, defunct MMO which you discover is (Spoiler - click to show)connected to multiple universes. As you play, you find messages left by others. You have the option to leave a message, and doing so lets other people really see it.

I saw messages from real people I know, but they all soon disappeared. I wandered through an empty maze, seeing messages by people that could be real or fake. I left a message everywhere I went. Overkill, maybe? Shouting into the void? It's hard to know.

Very fun concept. Large game.

This large and multi-faceted game has you start off trapped in a closet in a motel room--not an auspicious beginning for a game of great mystical power.

The idea here is that you are someone possessed of magical powers. This power can be exercised through the use of amulets representing different animals; however, the amulets are not enough. You also need gemstones to power them.

And that's where the game really opens up. There are a lot of amulets; there are a lot of gemstones. Each combination gives you different powers, and each power can be used in different places. This gives essentially cubic complexity to the game!

Which means you may want to experiment a lot and take notes. The game is kind, giving you a lot of leeway and plenty of optional paths.

I first played this as part of Castle Balderstone, and then played the newer version. While it was probably in the original, I didn't realize the first time that you can (spoilers for very end) (Spoiler - click to show)open portals to tons of different dimensions. I thought it was pretty cool, to be honest. Really loved this game.

This game is an Inform murder mystery by thesleuthacademy, who has written numerous reviews for mysteries on IFDB in the last year or so. It’s nice to see a game by them!

Mysteries are one of my favorite genres of game, so I was interested to see how it plays out here. There are several standard ways to run a mystery in interactive fiction:
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This game is a mix of 3 and 4. You have to collect enough physical evidence to proceed to a quiz, and then pass the quiz to beat the game.

The storyline is simple. A man was found alone in his room in a pool of blood with no visible wounds. You must examine this single room to discover the clues.

This game boasts a large number of beta testers, which is nice. I struggled with some of the setup, however. Many of the ‘standard responses’ for Inform were not helpful. For instance, there were some ear plugs that I tried to take and it said ‘That is not portable’. Some commands that might have had useful responses didn’t work; for instance, TALK TO didn’t have any message like ‘Conversation in this game is handled by ASKING’ (although that was mentioned in the help system!) and PLAY PIANO had no response.

There are some very helpful responses, though, like SEARCH and LOOK UNDER saying you only need to ‘examine’.

At the quiz at the end, I really struggled with the third question. I guessed it but then decompiled the game to see how I could have gotten there. It seems that the conversation system is a lot larger than I had expected. I had gotten stuck since SHOW (something) TO (someone) often didn’t have a response, so I assumed asking about those things wouldn’t be helpful.

There is one puzzle of a type I haven’t seen before in a parser mystery, involving a grid. I thought that was pretty clever.

Overall, I felt like tightening up some of the standard responses and adding more synonyms and actions like TALK TO and PLAY PIANO would make this an excellent short mystery adventure.