Reviews by MathBrush

This Italian game hasn't had any reviews since it came out 13 years ago, and someone suggested it, so I checked it out.

It's a cute concept although some parts are a little weird. You are headed to ZenSpa, a company that does interactive fiction. But you have to find your way inside, past the secretary, and up to the director himself.

The game highlights the difference between old school and new school IF, although maybe not the way you'd expect. Pamphlets inform you that kissing is all the rage now in IF games (which I don't think is a very strong trend?). Non-consensual kissing is a bit weird, but in most situations you try it in the game, you get firmly reprimanded and arrested. One situation, though...

Overall, the game was short but well put-together and well-clued.

This game is a demo for a new type of parser.

Basically, you type in the first letter or two of a noun on the screen, which brings up some possible words that can autocomplete, which you do by hitting tab; then you hit tab more to cycle through different actions or adjectives for that noun.

This is a clever idea. I did have some trouble navigating the game though. You're basically some kind of goblin entertaining an ogre king, so there were a ton of words that I didn't understand (looking them up, it was stuff like 'burping' or 'somersaulting') and there were some typos that I think were intentional like 'vous être'.

In structure, as far as I played, the game starts with you telling poems to the ogre king, then possibly fighting his executioner guy, then exploring your living quarters, then quoting proverbs, then fighting again.

Interaction was kind of wonky for me. Almost none of the actions have predictable effects; instead, it seems like the author's goal was to come up with funny or nonsensical results for most things. It was amusing, but it was hard to plan what happened. Combat was especially rough, with many actions healing the other opponent. On the itch page, others had complained about this, and the author suggested making sure that you mix up your attacks and not follow any pattern. I couldn't do this, and died during the second duel. There was also a clock that didn't seem to do much besides making you sleep for a while.

Overall the system looks pretty good, and the game is descriptive and amusing, but the actual game mechanics are pretty hard to figure out and could be explained more clearly.

I previously played the English version of this game in Parsercomp.

In it, you type in words like a regular parser game, but the majority of output is in images in a cartoon style. You are the 'guy' on a guys' restroom door, and the lady on the other door is stolen by a photorealistic hand. You have to rescue her!

I wondered if there would be any big differences in the French translation. I didn't find any. I looked and found a long post by the author after the comp had ended, which was very comprehensive. I learned that 1) the author had thought of many deep philosophical things, including Shakespeare, Brecht, Michael Ended, diegetics, etc., 2) the game was written in around 10 days, and, most importantly to this translation, 3) The author specifically refused input of several beta testers and several reviewers, deciding to stay true to an artistic vision rather than listen to the masses.

I generally find that 'being true to yourself' and 'making a well-respected and popular game' are two different goals for games. They don't necessarily contradict each other (Superluminal Vagrant Twin seems like it satisfies both goals!) but it's not usually to pick both and work on them. If you seek your own true vision, that means occasionally disappointing your fans, and if you seek to please fans, you may lose your own vision.

So this game still includes many of the things that made it difficult in the English version. The author states that almost no one has completed it without hints, but that hard games have both poetic value and it is better for players to play games without hints.

These are subjective positions for which there is no real answer. For my thought though, great games aren't great because they are hard, but because they make players feel smart or accomplished. I could make a game with a 10-digit multiplication problem and it would be hard without a hint or a calculator, but that wouldn't necessarily make it fun. Similarly, games like Dark Souls or Elden Ring could be made so hard that no one could complete them at all. So I think that difficulty itself does not create enjoyment.

Overall, this game is identical to the English one, outside of the French. It is polished, descriptive in its own fashion. I did find it amusing, and I have played it again. I gave the English one 3 stars, but I'm giving the French one 4 stars. Why? I think everything looks cooler in French, and playing in a non-native language adds a different level of complexity that I enjoy. I realize that doesn't benefit actual Francophone players, but ratings and reviews are always subjective.

This is a pretty short Inform 7 game in French.

You have been hired as an archivist at a grand library. Coming in, you are welcomed by the Master Archivist, who gives you a grand tour and asks you to demonstrate your capabilities.

The version I played was pretty short, with a lot of size implied (by stairs and locked doors and furniture) but with most of it not open to play (due to being locked or empty, etc.)

It had a cozy feel, like Stardew Valley or something similar. It was fun to look up the recipes and the memories it brought back of using a card catalog were the highlights for me.

Overall, this could be expanded to a larger concept or just serve as a training game for the author to hone their skills. It was written very quickly and not tested much, according to the author, but I like the writing style.

This game was vibrant and full of life but also pretty confusing. I couldn't tell if I was just confused because 'bad french' or because the game was weird.

Once I finished it and saw the attached youtube video it made more sense, and it's kind of a cool idea!

Basically the author played a game of Magic the Gathering: Arena and then wrote a story imagining how all those things could have happened. So, for instance, Ormos the Archivist gets played, so Ormos becomes a character in the story, a beautiful archivist you fall in love with.

Some of this translates well into a story and some doesn't. In many parts of the game, you have a bunch of links with unhelpful names like 'a little chat' or 'call a professional' that don't tie into the story. Clicking them sometimes has no effect, but sometimes has a longer story. Overall they don't seem to affect the main storyline much, as I played a couple of times to see what happened.

So I think the polish and interactivity of the game are a little weird, but I did play more than once and found the MTG idea amusing.

I've never read the Spooks series before (called The Last Apprentice in US), but this story makes it seem really cool.

This game is set in the Spooks universe, and follows Tom and Alice, the main characters from the series. You play as Alice, a young woman raised to be a witch who escaped before you became completely evil. However, your actions can increase your connection to the darkness, so you have to be careful.

There is a cool font and some nice coloring on the links. The writing is descriptive as well, and is friendly for people like me who aren't familiar with the book series.

There were two slight disappointments for me: one is that the story was cool, but the ending I found was anticlimactic (it was a 'happy' ending and just ending right after a quote from her father, which sounds like a great ending but it just kinds of cuts off). The other weird thing was that the moon image sometimes cut off the text.

Overall, I was glad to have some real choices; there's at least one choice that splits the game into two very different branches. It does feel a bit unfinished with the endings, though, and has potential for a much larger game.

Honestly I was surprised to see this game was entered in the Jay is Games Casual Gameplay Design Competition #7, since I associated that with one room games (like the excellent Dual Transform by Zarf or Fragile Shells by Sargent). This game isn't a one-room game at all, but has a large manor to explore.

I love Lovecraftian horror games, so I enjoyed the storyline of this one. You have a cousin that has passed away, so you go to his house in order for his mother, your aunt, to bequeath various possessions upon you.

The horror in the game leans heavily on fossils, a feature I haven't seen as much before, as well as some more normal archaeological finds. Also, fire-building takes a prominent place in the game.

The game is very buggy. Most items mentioned in room descriptions don't exist at all. Four items with similar names cannot be disambiguated one from another. Items often can be read or examined but not both. There are odd spacing issues. I reached an ending and the game didn't end, just a statement indicating an ending and nothing more. I reached things in the wrong order, like reading a letter before opening an envelope or putting things in a slot and then later revealing the slot.

Because of this, I resorted to the (very nice) walkthrough early on.

The highlights to me were the fossil stuff and the cool map you find. The drawbacks were the bugs, which were so prevalent that I didn't feel like replaying to try for a better ending.

This game has been on my wishlist for years, as it was constantly recommended to me by IFDB's old algorithm. But it's in German, and pretty complex german at that, which my high-school-german brain can't handle well. I also had to use DOSBOX to play it.

But I'm glad I did! The story in this is actually one of the best I've read in a while, not even just in IF, although it is very short.

The game has some worldbuilding you can read up on in a txt file attached to the Zip. It talks about the Boronois, a group of people that live far away that are (I think???) short, non-religious, and with traditions about marriage and competitions, and some relationship with magic.

You're in love with a girl, but to win her heart you have to have the biggest chicken in the competition tomorrow! So of course you break into your rival's house to poison his fat chicken. Unfortunately, you aren't the only one who's broken in...

Beyond one puzzle early on and a basic puzzle later (that is on a timer), most of this game is menu-based conversation, with an interesting cast of characters, including your love, your rival, and his family.

Overall, I really enjoyed this. It was definitely worth the wait. As a non-native speaker of German, the very complex language (for me!) was mitigated by the shortness and the multiple choice aspect.

This game is a sequel to The Little Match Girl, a game that was about hopping through various fantasies to solve problems in each of them.

This game is a bit different, with a different premise (you are an assassin) and a different configuration of dreams (nested, rather than interconnected).

Like the Castle Balderstone games, this give the impression of being a grab-bag of passion projects, where some idea or thread was worked on in great detail and then the rest of a game scaffolded around it and polished till smooth.

The first few visions are pretty light and easy, just follow directions and look around. This can be fun, especially in shorter games, and the worldbuilding was nice with fun fake-outs, and there was animation and title sequences and colors, but by the end of the second one I felt like I could use a little more to dig into. The next world had more involved puzzles (with another fun fake-out), and the one after that was incredibly dense, filled with puzzles of all kind, which contrasted nicely with earlier material.

Overall:
+Polish: The game was smooth and worked well.
+Descriptiveness: The settings were very vivid, especially the second and last, and I could picture everything.
+Interactivity: Like I said above, there was a good overall balance of streamlined playthrough and puzzles.
+Emotional impact: I was entertained. At one point I took out my plans for my next game and took down some notes.
+Would I play it again? Yeah, I'll probably go through all the games in order when the others come out.

One of the old tropes in reviewing IF was to complain about how many people put the Towers of Hanoi in the game, since it was an old puzzle that had a well-known but tedious solution and there wasn't really any mental thought in solving it.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen many towers of Hanoi games recently, so I've lost my privilege of complaining about them.

That's why I'm glad I found this game. It's a perfectly implemented and otherwise completely straightforward implementation of Tower of Hanoi. The only implementation problem I did find was that it was a bit hard to find the instructions (typing HELP is how to start).

Now that I've played this game, I can complain about Towers of Hanoi for several more years. Thanks, author, for your contributions!