Reviews by MathBrush

Arthur DiBianca has made several popular limited parser games, including Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box, Inside the Facility and The Wand.

Excelsior was their first attempt, and its player respons/reviews influenced the later games.

Excelsior restricts all action verbs to movement and 'USE'. Your goal is to reach the top of a tall tower.

I thought I had played through this whole game before, but I played through with the walkthrough, and I was surprised at how much there was. I think this game does not measure up to DiBianca's later games, as there is a great deal of "something changes somewhere that you can't see" devices here, that makes the game very complicated.

This is a mid-length IFComp game from 2006. It's a surreal afterlife/coma type game where you've been in a car crash and must travel through your mind to escape back to reality, hopefully with your wife.

It has a maze of rooms, inaccessible at first due to the fact that doors and archways are placed on ceilings and high walls, willy-nilly. You eventually learn to control the maze.

Much of the game revolves around smells. There is a Nim game and also a difficult cryptographic puzzle. I found it under-clued and somewhat unfair.

I beta tested this game.

This is an intense puzzle game, and it has some small graphics, background sounds/music, and timed responses.

This is a tricky, tricky puzzle game. You have to redeem yourself after destroying your father's pocket watch. The game sends you on a journey with several axes: time, space, size, etc.

I like it quite a bit, even writing down a walkthrough for it.

I only give it 4 stars because timed text delays drive me crazy. But not everyone may feel that way.

There should be a name for the genre of 'biting commentary on society that is self-aware and occasionally dips to crudity, with hints of cheerful ideals always tinged by irony, using an overload of text as literary device.' Such games include Spy Intrigue and Dr. Sourpuss Is Not A Choice-Based Game. It seems increasingly common.

Charlie the Robot is gorgeous visually, and is innovative in its sheer variety of input methods and looks. There are 5 chapters accessible at any time, like Birdland.

The themes include surface themes of humans vs. robots, a lower layer of the mindlessness of modern office life, a lower layer of individualism, and so on.

But it was just too much filler for me to enjoy. The packing on and on and on of text is a literary device that doesn't work for me. I appreciate the themes in the game, and its cleverness, but the overall feel is just overwhelming.

I really enjoyed this game. I had a few technical difficulties wrangling with Quest.

You play as a cockney-speaking orphan who has penned up in a penitentiary-orphanage. Your goal is to go from Public Enemy Number 2 to Number 1.

The map is large, but pleasingly symmetrical. You solve a puzzle in each room until the game is over.

Some of the puzzles were fairly nonsensical, and I had difficulty with them, but overall, I was impressed.

I enjoyed this game from IFComp 2017. You choose from one of three character classes, and you can take a variety of characters with you, including a sonomancer (something like that) who integrates music with magic.

There is a power creep issue that several judges noticed, where pretty much anyone who makes it to the endgame can one-shot the boss, but besides that, the core concepts worked well for me. I feel like it needs more polish; combat has several blank lines requiring you to scroll, for instance.

I was glad I played this one, because I'm a fan of D&D and this reminded me of trying out someone's home-brew campaign. Your mileage may vary.

I enjoyed this 2017 IFComp game. You play as a consultant for super villains who answers their questions for money. The parser becomes a phone line, of which you have 2, and your commands are commands to the villains themselves.

Each villain has unique powers. The writing for the radioactive man grated on me a bit, but overall I found it clever. This game had the most traditional gameplay of the top games of the competition, with no limited parser commands.

I recommend it, and hope that everyone reading this will take the time to try it.

This game uses the obscure Floo text system. It has a 2-hour timer (that resets once it finishes). As you push any key, characters show up one at a time, revealing some text that seems procedurally generated, but not by the Floo engine; it seems like it was pre-generated and put into the floo interpreter, ready to be revealed one character at a time.

This game is written in PDF form, and you read along yourself, jumping to different pages.

I can't help but compare this game to Trapped in Time, another PDF gamebook entered into IFComp in a previous year. In that game, you had a tight series of events that were played over and over, and it allowed 'parser-like' actions where you would add 10 or 20 to an entry's number to do things like examining or using a card.

This game, however, relies more on randomized combat, and the largest parts of the game are two mazes.

It has some interesting storyline near the end, but I feel like it could have been tested out more by some experienced beta testers to help find out what works and what doesn't.

I beta tested this game.

This is an interesting concept: a Java game (just like minecraft!) which is a parser game with a real-time timer.

You find resources, and craft materials with them.

As it is, the game is difficult; however, a Wiki is provided that is especially helpful.

However, the difficulty was tuned just a bit too hard for me, and that made it hard for me to get sucked in.