Reviews by MathBrush

This brief Ink game follows two teens, May and Jason, who are graduating soon and preparing to head off to college. They stroll through the woods and discuss their future.

Things start just slightly surreal and go further, but it never seems to shake the protagonists, just like how it is in a dream.

There might be some plot branching, but most of the choices feel like character determination to me, like role-playing, not even necessarily saved as game states.

There was some beautiful imagery in the game, young adults trying to find their place in the world literally represented as a journey through an allegorical world.

It felt a bit disjointed and brief, though. I worried I had skipped a whole chapter when I reached the end of the first act and clicked on a tiny, almost missable 'right arrow' and ended up in a very different place than the last chapter ended. But the table of contents seems to indicate I saw all 3 sections, so I guess the game itself is just a bit smaller than its story could allow.

Overall, a pleasant game to spend time with. According to my rubric, it's polished, descriptive, has good interactivity, and reminded me of pleasant times, but I wouldn't play it again.

This is a brief Twine game about a painful breakup of a relationship.

I have to preface this by saying that I didn't play the actual game. I noticed it had timed, slow text which I found difficult to read as it didn't sync up with my regular speed, so I'd finish fast then wander back above and miss the next part coming in, having to catch up again, etc. So I downloaded the game and opened it up in Notepad++ changing all the (live: 12s) or other such numbers to (live: 0.1s) using regular expressions so it all loaded a lot faster. I noticed one chunk of text was timed to slowly spool out over 156 seconds, while with my normal reading speed it took 31 seconds to read the same material.

Anyway, sorry for digressing about something unrelated to the actual story.

The actual story is heartbreaking and felt familiar to me from events in my own personal life, so I really felt a connection to the situation. The emotions are handled pretty well, as is the internal dialogue; it felt true to life, for me.

Interestingly, (spoilers about the breakup details) (Spoiler - click to show)in my playthrough at least, it doesn't seem there was physical infidelity, or that if there was that it was the main issue. It seems instead that emotional infidelity is the problem, the idea that you were once someone's number 1 and now someone else is.. That really hit home and made this a lot more visceral, to me.

Overall, it lasts just as long as it seems it ought to; it's fairly maudlin but that's what I like. It contains some strong profanity. I think it's a great work; I personally would like no slow/timed text, since reading text naturally paces itself through spacing and paragraph size, etc., but this is of course completely up to the author.

Edit: I saw another review that had a very different take on this, and I realized that different paths must have different endings. I replayed and found a very different path that is actually the opposite of some stuff I said above. That's pretty cool to have that non-linearity.

This is a short, basic Twine game about an aquarium where weird monsters are in a pool and you have to run away.

The game does give you some options; there are several situations where you have to search for items by clicking on a variety of links. There are also some big branches in the story, especially at the end. At least one final choice just lead to a blank page.

The formatting doesn't put blank lines between paragraphs, which I found pretty difficult to read. There are many typos such as no spaces after periods, it's vs its and capitalization. The dialog felt a bit unnatural, but I don't know why.

I found the overall story to be descriptive, but otherwise I think this story needed a bit more work. I think the author is capable of pretty fun stories given more time and more feedback prior to releasing.

I teach computer science at a high school, and we use python (and, in the past, Java). At the end of last year one student really enjoyed making randomized D&D combat scenarios and weapon creation tools, and did that as his final project.

This game is very similar in nature and quality, the same as a final project for an intro python course. It has a randomized character creator that can give you magic abilities, a cat, or neither, among other things. You have the option to walk around, trade for better items, or warp to a new area.

Walking around is the main feature. Often it would describe me finding something and then something happens. The most variable was chests; having a sword and finding a chest, you slash it open, and it can kill you, give you an entity that follows you, or give you money.

Dying has no real effect; you instantly respawn and you keep all your items, so it's the same as nothing happening.

I was able to buy a sword, a shield, a map (which I think helps you pick where to warp), and some magic arrows. The game ends when you get 100 coins.

Overall, if this were a student in my class, I'd give them an A for excellent work. As an IFComp entry, though, I think it lacks polish, is not very descriptive, has somewhat unsatisfying interactivity, and doesn't lend itself to emotional impact. The game achieves, I think, its author's goals, but my personal tastes weren't aligned with them.

Marco Vallarino is an author who has entered several complex and well-regarded games in previous IFComps, including the fun Darkiss series.

So it comes as a surprise that this game is very basic. It has a simple map; each room in the map has a sparse description and one or two items to interact with. The game is a series of fetch quests that tell you what to find next after depositing the most recent item.

I got stuck at one point because I didn't think to (late game spoiler about bypassing robot)(Spoiler - click to show)search the junk in the closet, and there was a key response that misled me: (Spoiler - click to show)Trying to unscrew the mirror when you don't have the screwdriver says 'you need to unscrew the mirror' instead of 'you don't have anything to unscrew it with' or something similar,, so I just assumed it was bugged till I looked at the walkthrough.

+Polish: The game has some missing punctuation and some misleading responses. But it works generally smoothly, with most the problems falling under the next criteria.
-Descriptiveness: The descriptions are very plain.
+Interactivity: Basic fetch quests are more or less the bread and butter of parser games, and this was short.
-Emotional response: I didn't feel a strong reaction to this game.
-Would I play again? No, it was pretty clear the first time through.

2 stars is pretty harsh, but I know this author is capable of making very fun parser games. This one was just not as fun as Darkiss to me.

This is a somewhat brief Twine game with at least 3 endings.

In it, you are a woman who is set to be married to a man you barely know, wearing a wedding dress you don't even like. You actually are deeply in love with a woman, but in your small, religious town everyone is violently opposed to lesbian relationships.

You are driving away from it all, but feel like you never get anywhere.

There are at least 3 endings I saw; most of the game is linear, with a couple of branch-and-return points and two major choice points that I found.

Here are my thoughts:
-Polish: The game's formatting was a bit all over. It often switches from a prose-mode to a more poetical-mode by putting a line break after each line, but it was little cluttered and might look better with more spacing.
+Descriptiveness: The writing is vivid and imaginative, often visceral, like when describing the death of an animal or the horrific aftereffects of (Spoiler - click to show)a car crash. The vivid writing is the main selling point.
+Interactivity: While its mostly linear, the choices available do allow for you to characterize yourself and it feels like your choices have understandable and clear consequences.
+Emotional impact: I felt a lot of sympathy for the protagonist.
+Would I play again? Yeah, I enjoyed this game personally and replayed it a few times.

In this Ink game, you are a spirit or something similar in the physically manifested version of a witch's mind. Or rather, the witch is in the 'mind cave' and you give her directions while she describes them.

There are several puzzly elements. I never died or got locked out, so its possible that you can't lost, but I'm not sure. I found things like a maze, a giant that attacks you, and then a wide, branching area with different doors, where one 'ultimate door' was unlocked by all the others, as well as alchemy puzzles, a whole city street, etc.

Sometimes things seemed like they had to be done exactly 1 way, but I got by anyway (for instance, I used one ingredient wrong in a potion). A lot of the game seems more about roleplaying than about getting things right, and I'm okay with that).

Overall:
-Polish: The game could be more polished. There were a few occasional but noticeable grammar problems, and the storyline feels a bit incoherent.
-Descriptiveness: Things are often assigned interesting names, but few details are given about them. We know nothing about a 'window with a yellow frame' except it's a window with a yellow frame. We know nothing about a giant except that he's giant; a cat is just a cat. Minimalism can work, but for me here it didn't.
-Interactivity: I just forged forward because I've seen this type of game before and figured almost any choices could work, but I wished there was more feedback.
+Emotional impact: I found the game actually fun; surreal stuff like this is one of my favorite types of writing.
+Would I play again? Yes, it would be fun to explore.

This is the latest in Schultz's series of chess puzzles, some of which have a series of increasingly difficult simple puzzles, some of which focus on one or two challenging problems.

This focuses on a single endgame position. I struggled with it a bit; not being a chess person myself, some of the rules involved were a bit arcane to me (like the stalemate rules). And perhaps my biggest problem with the game is that the author assumes familiarity with how endgames run, making seemingly useful moves end instantly without much explanation (most were generally well explained, I'm just salty because I don't see how pc7 kc5 where the rook goes to d1 is a stalemate; I wish that particular one was either better explained or if it let the player make the move and try for a turn or two more before shutting it down). So I just had to rely on random guessing for the first few moves.

I thought about searching for help, and I did look on the forums, which reminded me to read the documentation, which helped me grasp things. In the end, it was satisfying. And I think that this was the most emotionally poignant of the chess games; while my main attraction to this game was the puzzle, the emotional aspects were a nice touch and well-integrated.

I do think there is a mistake in the verbs section (correct me if I'm wrong):
It says (Spoiler - click to show)"You can also say N to set (or re-set) the default piece to promote to, say, the knight. In this case, although K is usually the king in algebraic notation, K is referred to as the knight, since you can't have two kings on the board," but typing N just moves the king up a square. To actually change the promotion you have to type the letter of the piece you want to promote to after the move, like c8b for bishop. As written, the text implies that typing N lets you select what you promote into.

This game was entered in Parsercomp, and I'll admit I didn't finish it (though I got pretty far!)

You play as someone in a fairly secluded area that sees lightning hit a radiotower, and then strange things happening. I ended up exploring a very large house filled with bizarre tech.

The game is written in Godot, which I think is an open-source alternative to Unity (maybe I'm wrong?). The game loaded quickly and looked nice, with several animations and a map that updated frequently, and also some visual puzzles.

I struggled mightily at first to even see the game, as it was taller and wider than my laptop screen and didn't seem to have dynamic resizing. I tried fullscreening the browser, then I tried shrinking and fullsizing, and only then did I realize there was a 'fullscreen' button at the bottom. One itch option actually lets you make the game fullscreen from the beginning, I think.

Instead of having the player guess the commands or remember a commonly used set, like most traditional parsers, this game has a specific list of commands which can be used, about 6 on average. These commands don't admit any abbreviations, and while there are clickable links for each command, the links don't enter the commands for you; instead they tell you how to use them.

Text is split in three areas: the room description, the outcome of non-important action below that, and your input even further below, similar to Scott Adams games.

The game branches into several endings, some early, some later, and includes a lot of weapons of various efficacy and different monsters that randomly pop out to get you.

I encountered a game crashing bug early on (don't inspect the truck seat!) but I got around it. I got much further, until I found (Spoiler - click to show)a still figure watching the wall in a basement that took 3 weapons.. After I defeated it, with just a sliver of health left, the game said I needed to type NEXT to continue, but NEXT didn't work. Having encountered at least two game-locking bugs, and having heard that it ends on a cliffhanger, and having seem much of the game, I decided not to continue.

I get the impression that the author isn't heavily involved in a lot of current interactive fiction, and so just went with their own direction and imagination on what a parser game should look like, based on old memories (this is all wild assumptions). I find it nice to see what directions people would go in if not constrained by a wider society or community, and this seems pretty neat, kind of reminiscent of Adventuron, which seems to have had a similar development pipeline.

I give the game 2 stars for descriptiveness and emotional impact but bugs make it harder to give more. If fixed (along with typos and quality of life improvements), this would be a 4 or 5 star game.

This game was entered in Parsercomp, then taken out, then put back in.

I had a hard time engaging with this game. It's written for an online format that forces the focus onto text boxes. You are supposed to type words into the box that the game recognizes.

At first, I tried to put whatever words I thought fit good, but then I tried the boundaries. It recognized 'felicitation' but not 'felications', for instance. I later learned that it doesn't sentiment analysis, which is pretty neat!

The main part of the story is a sci-fi story, which I felt was oddly watered down and non-descriptive. I tried to copy a paragraph of the text to pick at it and analyze it, but that's when I realized the game forced the focus so you couldn't highlight anything. I was surprised to find later that this story wasn't new to the author, but borrowed from a 1950's publication, which I seemed to have not noticed when it was mentioned. I liked the author's original text better.

Between snippets of this text, there are two characters having a conversation about the text, with blank boxes for you to fill in like mad-libs. These conversations are mostly analyzing the text.

Overall, the game was polished and very complex, but I bounced off of the main story and the side story. I think it has an appeal, definitely to other people, but for me the whole thing felt a little bloodless.

From a technical standpoint it seems very impressive, overall!