Reviews by MathBrush

Invisible Parties is the best known shufflecomp game, and an xyzzy nominee for best setting. And what a setting it has!

It is set in a tangle of worlds, which in practice is a 3x3 grid (at first) of scenes, where each scene is a party in a different world. You change as you travel between worlds, and much else does as well. The parties chosen are vivid and varied: miserable office parties, funerals, feasts, and so on.

The inventory system is highly unusual as well: you carry powers, instead of items. The powers are things like Art Critic and troublemaker, and provide some highly amusing or interesting responses depending on the location.

The plot slowly unravels, and this is where I had the most trouble. Knowing what to do next was hard, due to the conventions breaking nature of the game. I quickly reached a bad ending without knowing what to do not get a good one. I looked at the source code a bit, and that gave me some ideas for going back and trying again. I did, and I enjoyed it quite a bit the second time.

As a final note, this game contains an above-average amount of profanity. I stopped playing because of it a few times, and I'm not sure I'll play it again. For those who aren't troubled by profanity, I would strongly recommend this game.

Perhaps the weakest game in a very strong collection. You are the hypnotist of women. With no inventory or items or conversation, you wander about. Examining the Ladies makes your points go up until you win.

There are some typos. Overall, an odd game. But I'm glad the album was completed.

In this game, the doctors are testing to see if you have recovered from a mental illness. They test you by having you rhyme words that they say, but in an odd way and with a timer counting down quickly.

In no way is this an epic or life changing games but it satisfies all of my criteria for 5 stars, which is why I'm giving it that score.

This game is another Apollo 18 Tribute album game. You had a horrible accident and land in a hall of heads in your own blood.

The game gives you hints and nudges throughout to help you along. There is one real puzzle to solve.

The atmosphere here is good, but the game teases on more possibilities that it can't really deliver on.

This game is built up directly out of the lyrics of the corresponding They might be giants song.

In this game, you alternate between a lion man in charge of a space ship and a kids' garage band.

The game is very buggy, with typos in procedurally generated text. It is often confusing knowing what to do, the hints are not really hints, and the consoles in the spaceship do not give hints on what to do.

For me, much of the gameplay was waiting until the game prompted me on what to do.

I enjoyed the game's story, which is why I gave it a star (I know you can't give 0 stars on ifdb, but if you could, I would not have done it). But it's unpolished and didn't really affect me.

I feel like a lot of this could be improved if one of the authors went back and patched things up.

In this game, you are taken to a secret government lab where you must destroy some spiders and a gun. The spiders are destroyed in conventional IF ways, but the guns require you to position mirrors, considering angle of incidence and so on, and must be destroyed in a certain order.

I played to an okay ending, getting 83 out of 100. I couldn't figure out what I did wrong; then I tried again, and got 100.

The writing is classic Schultz, with a kind of easy-going chatter with self-consciousness about intelligence.

The puzzle was fun; recommended for geometry fans.

In this mid length if comp game, you play as someone who just met a cute girl at a party. As you walk home, a strange man lets out a bunch of lions to have them attack you, and then follows you, reciting poetry.

The game was free of typos and grammar mistakes, as far as I can tell, and was written fairly well sentence by sentence, although the overall effect was way over the top, especially the sex-and-violence filled finale.

The interactivity left a lot to be desired. And many have commented on the difficulty of figuring out the final sequence.

This game is similar to Dinner Bell, and appear in the same collection. You have to gather 14 kinds of mammal dna (like Dinner Bell, the list comes from a They Might Be Giants song).

You have to do this because your lizard-people overlords are forcing you to. So there is a genocidal aspect to the game.

I found this game to be somewhat difficult near the end because I didn't realize how many items had additional uses.

I used the Club Floyd transcript for the last two puzzles.

I found it enjoyable, but sometimes wonky (hidden items aren't listed in the room description even after you discover them, you can wind things you really oughtn't be able to wind, and so on).

This my second Muckenhoupt game after Gostak, and I found it compelling. You have an evil twin who is always out to get you, and you him. You go out to try and stop him from hurting others.

There is another world out there, his world, a mirror world of evil. The main mechanic of the game is travelling between the worlds and using their transformative properties.

The plot has a few surprises to pull out, and their are some tricky (but no too tricky) puzzles.

I love this game, but I'm a big fan of dual-world games.

In this game, you play a young man with a huge crush on a girl. You clean up your room to make it ready for when she comes over. You frequently try think about a dream you had about her.

Then you play the girl, who is mysteriously huge. Somehow, your actions in the first half affect what happens to you in the second, and you have to figure out how.

The pattern took me a while, but then the game tries to point it out to you in multiple ways.

I found the story amusing. There was strong profanity on the first page, but not after.