Reviews by MathBrush

This game surprised me with its emotional effect, because it has a slow burn opening. You are a huge fan of theatre actress Mirada Lily, and have come on the opening night of her big show to give her a rose.

This game is relatively short and easy. I wasn't sure what to do with one item, but you just use everything.

Your main goal is to get into the theatre, as you are not dressed well enough to be allowed in.

Strongly recommended.

In this game, you have a manual, a computer, and a genie. The genie gives you a programming task in LISP, which you must then try to complete. The genie then tests your code, and gives you feedback.

I enjoyed the game, getting up to the SUM command before quitting.

A good game for those interested in learning a computer programming language.

In this game, every 'room' is a conversation with a new individual. Topics that you can discuss are highlighted in brackets or by other means depending on the interpreter.

Interestingly, every topic you learn in one location can be used in another. An important command here is 'GOODBYE', which I didn't learn for a while.

The story is intricate and interesting, told only in conversation. You have returned to a city dominated by a new god and his priest, Salyndo. You try to find a way to overthrow it.

Short, but breathtaking in the images it gives you glimpses of. I used 'help' about 5-6 times.

Strongly recommended.

I should say upfront that I probably missed some important subtext in this game, because it just seems like a straight-up resource management game in a porpentine world.

You try to obtain enough currency (in the form of Vespine shards) to keep a crying Eye Moon from flooding your villages. You can hire mercenaries to destroy tears, gamble to get more cash, fire a cannon, or build a boat. The boat is a reasonable way to beat the game.

There are several npcs, including one who tries to worm their way into your life.

Overall, it's an amusing diversion. It is polished and descriptive, but I did not find it emotionally compelling. I enjoyed the sim aspects, and I could see myself playing again.

This Andrew Schultz game builds and expands on one of my favorite Schultz games, Threediopolis. If you haven't played that game, you should try it out first, as this game contains spoilers for the basic concept of that game.

If you have played threediopolis, (Spoiler - click to show)this is the same sort of game, except some chess-like moves have been added, h,i,j,k. Each of these teleports you 2 spaces away in each direction. For instance, h teleports you n,e, and u, while i teleports you w,s, and u.

This makes the game more difficult. I found it helpful to read some of the documentation on the spring thing website, which will most likely be included on IFDB afterwards. It gives a helpful list of the results of 2- and 3- letter combinations, like hi.


My rating of this game is certainly subjective. The puzzles appeal to me as a mathematician because I love the interplay between freedom and constraint. Emotionally, it draws you into an exploratory/puzzly/celebratory mood. The game is definitely polished, and I plan on playing again (it's a long game, and I've only played through part of it. It's the kind of game I feel I could return to frequently to play around with). I though of taking off one point due to the lack of descriptive text, but I realized that more text would make the game difficult and tedious. The scarcity of text is a necessary part of the design.

Like I said, this game will only appeal to a certain group of people, so I can't recommend it to everyone. But fans of crosswords, cryptograms, and codewords will enjoy this game.

This game feels like what I would imagine the 70's would feel like during summer-long drug trip. However, it is set in 2013 and based on a real manic episode one of the authors experienced, during which he thought he was in an interactive fiction game (according to the blurb).

This game belongs to the relatively rare genre of games where you explore a big city and story events have to be searched for one at a time, while the rest of the city serves as decoration. Nick Montfort has done this multiple times (Book and Volume, Winchester's Nightmare) and Adam Cadre did this 3 times over in the branches of his game Narcolepsy. But the authors of this game have managed to avoid the crushing loneliness of Montfort's world as well as the frustration of Cadre's. They do this by filling the world with wonderful, descriptive things, packing in long text sequences and even song numbers downloadable from the author's website. They also do it by keeping the game simple. The first half of the game is just following instructions on where to go, and the second half has a great hint system. Both of these facets keep the game fast-paced and interesting.

The writing is trippy. Crystals, music, sex, co-ops, all give the feel of a hippie documentary. The main idea of the game is that the character has managed to bind reality and fiction together, so that he realizes he is in a game and the two start bleeding together.

The game doesn't have actual explicit sex, but it has several very sensual metaphors of sex, and implies sex at various times. Because I don't enjoy these types of scenes, I am unlikely to replay it.

The game took me about 1500 moves to get about 819/999 points (there are many optional points). It is the longest game of 2016 that I am aware of, and most likely longer than anything in 2015 (it has more text than Scroll Thief, I believe).

In this game, you play a young photographer during acts of terrorism on a campus. Crime is rampant, and people across the world are moving underground.

You have been receiving messages telling you to do various things. As you carry them out, you get closer to finding your way to your family and/or safety.

The game has an odd hook, which is that it's written in first person with all scenery objects included in two lists: "Good" and "bad".

Overall, the story is interesting and fun but didn't make sense to me yet. I'm interested to read other reviews and see what other people thought.

In this mid-length game, you are about to be kicked out of the Thieve's Guild (in a modern town), and have to do one last big heist to impress them and not be kicked out.

The big concept of this game is that the author is sick of boring, unmotivated "That is not important" messages when examining items, so he has included flowery, motivated "That is not important messages". As a professional thief, you automatically know when an item, person, or room is unimportant to you.

Sometimes this is deceptive, as an unimportant thing may conceal an important thing.

This is a hard game, but I finished it without hints or walkthrough, because the versions I played had none (even the original competition version; I wonder if it had time-enabled hints). I had a vague hint from reading if comp reviews of the game on how to solve the soccer puzzle.

The English is a little iffy in places, but otherwise not bad.

Good for fans of heist games.

This Spring Thing entry is a preview of a big mobile friendly game about Robin Hood. Gameplay-wise, it most resembles Choice of Games, with stats and romances and branch and bottleneck gameplay. However, the finished game will have several illustrations, and the game is not constrained by CoG conventions.

Gameplay was exciting, keeping me guessing at what was important but rewarding careful planning. The game is already large, with a great deal of mythology and folklore mixed in.

I recommend this to anyone, especially Robin Hood fans. The one drawback I found was that I did not feel emotionally invested in the story, which of course may vary from player to player.

Dr. Sourpuss is an orangecat that just hates multiple choice games. He works with a man and a woman for Scandron, a multiple choice test grading company.

You have to help find two missing things: the grading machine, and a student named Mark Passingrad.

Gameplay rolls out in three main ways: you are given a series of multiple choice quizzes. Before answering each question, you can click on boxed links to get more detail. Finally, there are three different 'tests' where you have to go to a lab to create new items.

The game is purposefully confusing, and it succeeded in creating this emotion. In the end, much of it is a long discussion about people who hate multiple choice and why. I chose to interpret this as part of the debate about weblink games such as Twine or Raconteur. The game talks about marginalized individuals and those who refuse to validate them or allow them to be part of their world. The game admits many interpretations, however.

I took off one star because the game is very tedious at times, trying to sort out a path through repetitive text. Overall, an interesting and thoughtful game.