Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game was created by Emily Short as a prize for IFComp, resulting in a game set in Steph Cherrywell's world of Canyonville from Brain Guzzlers From Beyond.

You are Mary Jane, creating a robot for your friend Jenny. You have to train your robot to become just like Jenny. You train it by having it read books in your lab on different topics. However, some books have negative side effects, so it becomes quite the puzzle to figure out what books to read and when.

The major innovation in this game is the use of procedural generation for your conversations with the robot. The robots conversation is affected by numerous variables affecting its emotion, tone, and knowledge. A large corpus is included in the source code, allowing for huge variety. This represents an immense accomplishment, and provides proc gen that is actually fun to read.

This game took me about 45 minutes to finish without hints. I restarted several times, but I don't think you ever need to.

In this entry in the Veeder Exposition, you hear the story of the Veeder, a person with enigmatic power and status.

This game is in Twine with nice graphics. The interactivity comes in by shuffling through a series of replacements for a word or two in a sentence, then moving forward. Sometimes the choice of words influences the story.

The game made me smile, especially with its use and misuse of the word Veeder. And the imagery was poetic and beautiful at times.

Overall, though, it didn't really grab me emotionally, and I wished for more depth in the interaction.

This game is a series of point-and-click multiple choice questions with some branching and/or randomization in the sequence of questions asked.

I found several of the questions to be amusing, such as recalling the correct actions to take in doing CPR and so on. Many of the questions relate to Ryan Veeder himself and the stewards Emily Boegheim and Jenni Polodna who helped organize the Ryan Veeder Exposition. This makes sense, because the competition was to write games just for him.

Overall, I hoped for more feedback on the question answers, and for more of a focus in the story. But it was a fun way to while away the minutes.

This games, an entrant in last year's Spring Thing, is an Undum game (meaning you can click on links to advance the story, graphics are included, and the story can be scrolled back to see what came before.

The story is about a small group of anarchists rebelling against an oppressive hierarchy. While the game uses magic, it feels more like a stand-in for power that allows the author to discuss class struggle in an attention-grabbing way.

I feel like this game has something to say, and does so in a way that deserves attention.

In this game, you pick your gender and characteristics and start building your own little corner of hell.

You have a catalog that you can buy stuff from, including new room types (represented by gemstones). You dig out rooms in any direction you want, then drop a soul in it. You get 1-3 points for each soul you place in a room. To get more points, you might have to buy a torture device or set a demon in charge of the person.

I went up levels pretty quickly, but eventually stalled. Many reviewers (and me) have come to the conclusion that the game is unfinished, and you can't actually play it in the intended way. This same author went on to wrote several more massive games with brilliant systems that ended up not being implemented.

I played the sequel to this game before this one. In both of the games, the details are really attended to; the graphics are well done, the writing is polished, and the game is segmented into nice, easy segments.

This game is about a house with a magic inhabitant. Crazy stuff happens all of the time in this house; lava, magic rooms, moving pictures, etc.

I didn't really get caught up in the game, but it is well done.

In this game, you are part of an anti-smoking ad, and you are supposed to die dramatically. But you keep getting distracted by everything around you.

I enjoyed the variety of deaths and non-deaths, as well as having a main antagonist whom you have a sort of relationship with, rather than a romantic interest.

In this game, you are helped by a ghost to understand a variety of logic puzzles, including a chess puzzle, forming a magic square, and playing the 'Lights Out' game on a 3x5 board.

For puzzle fans, this is a pleasant diversion, with Schultz's usual good implementation.

Honestly, I expected more of Nate Cull, author of games such as the incredible Glowgrass and the polished Frobozz Magic Support and Nevermore.

This game is a poor imitation of Rybread Celsius. Rybread was known as one of the worst IF authors of the late 90s. He had frequent typos, and often withheld critical information from players, and had bizarre, humorous writing.

This parody is essentially limited to the bad spelling and the Adventure references. I felt that the author's could have done much better here.

This game is a classic logic puzzle with a lot of hints or red herrings to its solution.

You wear a spacesuit with a lever that records your movement in a certain way.

The implementation of the surroundings is fun here. Schultz's well developed style shows through.

This same logic puzzle is the main puzzle in another IF game, (Spoiler - click to show)Grounded in Space .