Reviews by MathBrush

This game is generally about exploring in a submarine. You catalog new species you find, you can descend, ascend, or go left or right.

Perhaps the best thing about this game to me is the ability to make and execute plans. I had an idea from the beginning of what I wanted to do, and the game let me do it very well. You are constantly presented with choices to explore, to go deeper, to chase something, to return.

You have an air meter that goes down when you make choices. The beginning is more linear than the midge me and endgame.

I only played once, but it seems to be highly branching.

In this commercial game, you are trying to get around the world in 80 Days with Phineas Fogg. It is ostensibly based on the novel, although I haven't read it yet.

This game employs a beautiful map used to select various routes across the world, and has nice, mostly static visuals representing your conveyance, the city you're in, and various NPCs as well as the player and his luggage. However, this game is very much CYOA in beautiful packaging rather than just a text-heavy graphical game.

The usual pattern of the game is that you start each day in your current city with some funds and the chance to get more funds, buy some luggage, sell old luggage, or explore. You then pick a route to travel onto the next city, which may or may not require waiting a few hours or days for.

Each route can cost between a few dozen pounds to 7000 or more pounds. Faster routes generally cost more. Along each route, various events happen such as mutinies, romance, murders, etc. which you have to deal with. Your choices affect what city you are in, how fast you get there, NPC reactions, your amount of money, Phineas' health, and extremely poor choices can lead to death.

The setting is steampunk, a genre which I am on the fence about. Among steampunk games, the writing is very good. Some highlights for me were Haiti (Spoiler - click to show)with organic automata, Agra (Spoiler - click to show)A city that walks on four legs, with the Taj Mahal on top, and Salt Lake City, which provided my first glimpse at an interactive fiction treatment of Mormons, my religion. On their treatment of Mormons, I was pleased to see that they treated it fairly kindly, with any negative reactions being those typical of the day. This is typical of the whole game, in that it seems remarkably well-researched (although never perfectly) for its scope.

I found the game somewhat tedious at times, especially on multiple replays. I frequently found myself skipping filler text or repeatedly tapping on the clock. However, on playthroughs where I focused on exploration over time, I had an enjoyable experience.

Overall, I strongly recommend this game for anyone without a distaste for steampunk. I know several people who would love this game if it had a more realistic flavor. But the steampunk setting allows any historical inaccuracies to be waved away, and provides for some fun pictures, so it's a trade-off.

In this game, you play as an archaeologist through the eyes of their assistant, Aubrey. In the course of the game, you discover a journal, sending you to a first-person flashback, where you play the leader of the secret order of beet mongers.

The game is wacky and fun. The beginning somehow reminded me of Michael Robert's Ditch Day Drifter opening, which is one of my favorites.

The beet monger part has two paths: war and peace. The war part was relatively easy, and I played to both of its endings. The peace ending seemed more difficult.

Overall, recommended for fans of dry, quirky humor.

In this game, you play a young person who wants to be friends with the town's cool kid and his friends. However, to play his game, you need dice. Five dice. As you go on a search for them, things begin to get weird.

This game incorporates a number of concepts in geometry and topology, such as the Klein bottle (a surface with no inside or outside, which also was featured in Trinity); platonic solids (the five solid shapes which are as symmetric as possible); duality (where vertices and faces of a shape are swapped); Hamiltonian circuits (where you walk through every vertex of a graph without repetition); connected sums (which amounts to wormholes in physics); and a few other references such as the equations for quaternions.

A lot of this amounts to an extended in-joke, but otherwise the game is fairly well put-together. I feel that it would have benefited from some more explanations, such as an in-game textbook.

This game is one of the most well-regarded Twine games available, as demonstrated by its listing on the IFDB Top 100 as of 2016.

In this game, you play as a chancellor of a university, brother to a Duke. The setting is not historical England, though there are similarities.

The game is serious, and focuses on your relationship with your brother. You remember your past, learn about his present activities, and make choices about your future.

It's very interesting as a study in relationships, and also as a medieval-esque game.

This is a brief, 5 room game with purposely minimal implementation.You find things like pits of binary numbers, syntax errors, and self referential rooms.

The puzzles are ridiculous, but there's so few items, you can just try everything. The solution to the main puzzle is based off a joke that the author used to tell to their friend.

Many people like this game, including me, because it's absurd and silly but has logical puzzles.

The idea of this game was to make a scoring system that could be incorporated naturally into the game. In this fantasy game, you play a guy in a village where everyone has had a body part changed into an animals body part. You left paw, a wolf's paw, becomes more human as you progress.

The game has several chances to lock yourself out of victory without too much notice. I found the puzzles quite difficult, and sometimes unintuitive. The concept and setting were clever.

I liked the last half better than the first half.

Overall, not my favorite Paul o Brian game. The Earth and Sky games were really very good, and I encourage everyone to check them out.

Mite is by Sara Dee, author of the slice of life game Tough Beans. In this game, you play a green pixie boy who is trying to return a stolen gem to its owner, the fairy prince.

The game is easy to map and simple to play. The map is a V shape, where you start at the vertex and can go down either path (and eventually do both). The puzzles are really very cute (How can you get into an orange tulip? How can you rescue a ladybug in peril?).

I enjoyed this game. It lasted about 30 minutes, with no walkthrough, which is very rare for me.

Jane is a game that is openly influenced by Photopia, yet tells its own story, in this case about domestic abuse.

You play a variety of characters, jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint, but your main character is Jane, a victim of domestic abuse that blames herself and rationalizes her husband's actions.

The writing was good, and several actual abuse victims consulted with the author during the writing process.

Good for fans of alt-games (games that primarily tell the story of a minority or of someone with a particular condition or bad situation).

This game has a mid-sized map and a good number of items and characters. It is not too hard, but it takes quite a bit of time compared to most IFComp games. You are trying to rescue a princess from a dragon, and you have to explore a forest.

You compete with other adventurers, and you have to use magic embodied by water-balloon like spheres that you toss at things. There are several items that you use over and over again.

The game has some sexual innuendos in it that creep up fairly often at the beginning and at the end.

Overall, a game for fans of Zork-style humor.