Reviews by MathBrush

This game was the earliest big horror hit after the Lurking Horror. It was made by Adventions, who were the most influential group between the end of Infocom and the rise of Inform.

Rylvania is one of their better games, with The Legend Lives!, because it eschews the horrible puns and bad humor of earlier games (except for one item which is an ad for Unnkulia 0). However, it is still all over the map with tone.

It has some of the feel of Bram Smoker's original Dracula, with a trip through Europe, wolves, a fearful village, an abandoned castle, the torment of a loved one.

Like all Adventions games, it is a bit unfair or tedious at times, but overall not bad for fans of old school games.

It has some gratuitous violence at some points which made the PCs characterization hard to figure out.

This game is a Twine review of all the 2014 IFComp games, portrayed as a conversation with the author's 2004 self. The old self is surprised to hear about Twine, Inform 7, Dr Who, etc.

It's all fairly amusing, but it also has great value as a snapshot of a changing IF landscape.

There is some strong profanity, but the reviews are generally benign, with some real moments of pathos as they discuss their response to games that touched them.

Life on Mars? was an experimental IFCOMP game that included an email system with simulated typing and so on.

This review goes into depth about things good and bad in the game. It presents some criticism of the typing system and shows a proposed alternative. Overall it leaves a favorable impression of both itself and the game it reviews.

This game can be overwhelming at first, with a large map (including a building with almost 300 rooms), an extensive time span (measured in days and hours), and a lack of strong direction. However, approached correctly, this is an enjoyable detective game.

You are paid to exonerate Jessica Kincaid from the charge of running over her husband. You take to the streets, examining items, talking to people, and generally investigating.

There are only about 4 or 5 things you have to do, and each of them are in obvious locations. However, it's hard to know what actions to take. Going to the movie theatre gives you a hint without telling you how to do it.

Even thrn, some things are hard. I thought the way to deal with the cop was disingeneous.

Overall, a solid game, and one of the better mystery games.

Note that part of the game takes place in a strip club.

This game is the best-developed inkle writer game I've seen. I tried it because it won the venerable Grand Prix competition.

This game is centered around a tightly-developed world model. You wake up in a strange white room and have to figure out where you are and what's going on.

This of course is the premise of dozens of IF games (including, most famously, Babel), but where Tag Der Toten shines is in its strong narrative voice. It's full of goofy humor, but it's clever goofy humor, essentially a conversation between the PC and theirself/the narrator through the use of the links.

I found the game very descriptive. Also, inkle writer can be easy to lawnmower in a parser-like world model, but the author has provided several surprises to keep you on your toes.

I give three caveats to my 5-star rating:
1. I love amnesia games.
2. I love German stories.
3. This game is not complete, in that the author plans on extra chapters being added later. That said, it took me about 2 hours to finish. However, I am not a native speaker.

Rybread Celsius has been called the worst author in IF (as stated in this game). His games, such as Symetry, are poorly coded and misspelled and often laughably bad.

This game is more polished in programming, but with the same style of writing and gameplay. You go through a series of disconnected scenes, which include numerous pieces of a hilarious interview with Celsius.

The game contains some profanity, some lewdness. If you like absurd games or learning more about the IF community, you may enjoy this game. It references all of his previous games, Graham Nelson and his games, Unnkulia, Spider and Web, and many more.

Edit: Since I wrote this article, Johanna De Niro has written a very interesting article on Rybread Celsius that has made me appreciate their work much more. It is available at Sub-Q magazine.

I've rarely been as confused playing a game as I was starting this one. You wander through a house, gathering traditional adventure items (a light source, a key, etc.), but also hidden letters of the alphabet. When you find eachone, you read a letter from around WWII that has no real plot or connection to other letters. I felt frustrated.

Eventually, I began to understood. Each letter is hidden in a weird way. For instance, you might find a railroad crossing sign and take the X in it, or find a line of people and take the queue (Q). There is no real rhyme or reason to the puzzles.

There is also a cryptic crossword, which I love, although it was a little weaker than some cryptic crosswords I've seen.

Overall, a well done but flawed game.

This game claims to contain "dissociation, dysphoria and disassembled discourse", which is pretty accurate. You play as a character going to a bureau of some sorts to get a new name. You first get to pick how to travel there; once you get there, there are a few different methods of getting in; and once in, you are ambushed by a series of groups of three that you have to deal with, before confronting the narrator (in some endings).

This game is about gender identity (one speaker says they remember you as an active boy, and now you are a beautiful woman). So there are a lot of metaphors about social acceptance, feelings of loss or renewal, predatory friends or judgmental family members.

The level of detail in the purposely scattered writing and the variety of choices giving a feeling of agency really make this game effective at communicating the author's feelings.

This game is set many, many years after the other Unnkulia games, when everything has become a legend and space travel is more common.

The ACME company has survived as AKMI, and there is a whole world called Kuhl where Dudhists live, but fortunately most of the dumb humor seems to have died off.

Instead, we have a sci fi world more similar to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game of Leather Goddesses of Phobos. You teleport from location to location based off of RGB values for different colors.

The game has you trying to stop a virus that has been unleashed throughout the internet (or AKnet for AKMEnet).

While this game was much more mature, I also didn't find it especially exciting. This game came right after Curses, before Theatre and Christminster, and the same time as Jigsaw. The time of Adventions was coming to an end before the onslaught of theses z-machine games (TADS would experience a resurgence just a few years later). The game even references this; when you try to play the first two Unnkulia games on a computer, you are told that the z-machine does not support their formats.

This game was entered in the IF Art Show, a competition over the years that asked participants to create portraits, still lives, or landscapes using Interactive Fiction.

This is a still life of an electric guitar. Rather than playing specific chords, you have an amp and a patch cord and knobs affecting treble, bass, tremolo, pick up, and so on.

Not knowing much about guitars, I just fiddled around, but it was a lot of fun. My favorite moment was when the parser recognized "PLAY STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN".

Recommended for fans of other art show pieces like Galatea or the Fire Tower.