Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

In this game, you are in a single room with a single puzzle. You have to tie two strings together.

This game has about 5 or 6 items. The one puzzle is clever, but it's it. For that one puzzle, the author has made a very polished game, with the responses you'd hope for implemented, and descriptive writing.

If you like brainteaser-type puzzles, this is a good game for you. But it is very, very short.

This game was the first Spring Thing winner. It was the only entrant in its year, but it probably would have won if there were more. This game is one the author worked on for many years.

You play a hopeful hollywood writer, going to deliver your scripts to a producer for evaluation when they are scattered and stolen by a mailboy!

You have to find each of the seven scripts. This is an old, old-school adventure. Timed challenges, complicated machinery with ascii displays, hidden items, leaps of intuition, locks and keys, it has it all.

It also has a lot of Infocom references. There is a movie set that is a faithful reproduction of the Zork house, and quite large. There is a parrot squawking 'Hello sailor', a set for Hades from Zork, and so on.

This is a real treat for puzzle fans, but for everyone else, it could be fun just checking out the map and area and exploring for a while.

This game is set in an unspecified fantasy setting. You play as a poor young woman, who, unlike most poor young women in fantasy stories, is very ugly.

You have been coerced into things that you may not want to participate in, but your actions remain your choice. There are 8 or so endings depending on what course you decide to take.

The writing is well-done, with rich descriptions and a well-conceived plot. The game is polished and smooth, and includes some text effects and images.

Overall, recommended. This was I believe the author's first game, and they have gone on to win several competitions. This first effort was a sign of things to come.

In this game, you play a medieval character who has been dared to spend the night in the house of a deceased nobleman.

This game is divided into a couple of parts, the first of which is figuring out just what is going on. The game has three inventories, including one for things worn and one for memories.

The memory mechanic works well for me, as does the big last puzzle at the end.

Overall, this is a light treat, lasting 15 minutes or less. The writing is very descriptive and gameplay is definitely polished.

This short game was the authors first game. They later went on to create Human Resource Stories, a multiple choice quizzes in Inform that was ahead of its time.

The author himself describes this game as buggy and unfinished. However, reading the other review on ifdb gave me fair warning about the worst problems, so it wasn't too bad, but it is hard to beat this game without a walkthrough due to reasonable commands not being recognized.

The setup is fairly clever, if short. Recommended for those who want to study first games.

This game is meant to serve as an introduction to a longer game. As such, it ends before the story really gets started. It's very similar to an opening village area in Zelda.

The author has done a good job building up an underground civilization, with a variety of npcs and some simple puzzles.

The activities you do are not compelling, but the game is polished and the setting is well done.

John Evans is known for making big, complicated games that often end up being unfinished or buggy.

This game was his first in Choicescript, and the choice of language has greatly improved the game. It is not buggy as far as I can tell, gameplay is smooth, and the game feels complete.

The story is a fun romp on Dr. Who-like themes. You go on 3 training missions and then one real mission. The amount of detail and description varies, but it's overall well done.

Recommended for fans of hard sci-fi.

In this game, you can customize your name, background, goals, etc. You then are let loose in a world where a mutant fungus makes you die if you stress out.

The customization is fun, and a sliding scale of emotions is provided in the corner.

However, this ambitious game falls short in execution with a wide variety of bugs, mainly synonym bugs. This causes frustration.

Overall, recommended for the beginning.

This game is more or less a faithful adaptation of the Paper Bag Princess with some classic puzzles thrown in.

The game is well-polished. Events occur on timers in a smooth way, the plot progresses at a good speed, most appropriate commands are recognized.

The story, taken from the book with permission, is cute. Overall though, the game felt slight and not as involving as it could have.

I loved the beginning of this game. The year is 2080 and you're headed to a base on the moon with a German colleague. You are experiencing strange flashes of light attributed to cosmic rays.

The writing is very descriptive and the setting is believable. The game is polished at first, but near the end I was picking up items that shouldn't be takable, room descriptions conflicted with npc descriptions, etc.

Overall, I would still play this again, but watch out for some bugs.