Reviews by MathBrush

This is a Star Trek-esque game. After a brief opening sequence with some guess-the-verb stuff, you are woken from cryosleep and have to repair a station.

The station has hallways A through J that are all identical, and minimally described, as well as a variety of other rooms. There are some fun things here, but I found a lot of it frustrating. The centerpiece of the game is a series of several EVA expeditions that realistically model 3d movement without friction. I found this to be tedious.

This is a sort of cross between Zork and arabian nights. You have on the one hand sultan's guards with scimitars and bazaars, and on the other hand you have soda vending machines and currency based on King Mycroft.

I found a few game-killing bugs in Gargoyle (when asking the merchant about a few things), but it might just be my interpreter.

I liked the puzzles, though they were hard to guess at times. A lot of people liked the original way of getting past the dog.

This game actually reminded me of the new game Niney (in 2017), where you 'become' different things for this people.

This game has you perform a task for 26 different people (not related to the alphabet). However, knowing what you need to do is really, really hard, involving a cryptographic puzzle.

Then the game involves color shifting and sorting, with a cool ending.

The code shows a character named Polly, but I didn't find them.

This is an action-heavy game set in medieval times, a sort of romance.

You play a young woman whose leg is damaged at a young age, before being forced to reside with a cruel lord. In several cinematic or conversational scenes, you decide your future, dealing with brigands and romance.

The biggest problem here, and it's a problem with many of Fischer's other well-put-together games, is in the cluing. It's hard to know exactly what you're meant to do. The game could use a great deal of more direction.

In this game, you are trying to catch a cult leader.

You have a number of colored objects, and you have puzzles of the 'explore the complex mechanisms' type.

I found it incredibly obtuse, but some others rated it highly. If you like puzzles like the goat and the fox or towers of hanoi (neither of which appears in this game), you may like this game.

This game is one of those frequent IFComp middle games that are big, fairly well polished, but without the snazzy setting or good cluing that would make it wonderful.

You explore an office with several cubicles, each presenting its own challenge (dealing with an npc, helping a tech repair guy, etc.)

Overall, though, you're unlikely to finish without a walkthrough.

This game has you house-sitting for your friend, but problems begin to show up.

It's bold and innovative: there's a responsive cat NPC, there is a system where you read and study books to memorize them, a slick TV hint delivery system, and so on, but it seems like it never got that last month or weeks of polishing that would have pulled it all together. Like Happy Ever After from this comp, this game seems influenced to a degree by Mulldoon Legacy, with a mysterious friend who has left, leaving their house open with a portal in it to a more rustic world.

I have to make one big admission up front: I played Kaged with a walkthrough almost straight through. I had heard some of the puzzles were unfair, and the story seemed great, and so I just read it as a short story.

This worked surprisingly well. It makes for a great short story. You are a bureaucrat in a complicated futuristic society where everything is tightly regulated and disturbing. You are asked to help stop a menace in this world.

The game deals with the nature of reality and with mind-bending. A pretty crazy game.

Edit: The original version of this game, played on HTML Tads, has great music and graphics. Really worth playing.

This game uses the relatively unknown JACL engine, but it plays pretty well.

This game is a sleeper hit; I hadn't heard of it, but it's well-put-together. You are on a floating scientific base on a small island that has experienced a recent die-off of fish, and a loss of all juvenile population. You are brought in from the outside to what is essentially a military situation.

The game has espionage, science, etc. Some of the puzzles are unfair a bit, but the game responds well to things you attempt to do, and contains a number of action scenes.

This game was withdrawn from IFComp 1997 due to bugginess. It is big and enjoyable, but there is a hunger timer that I believe cannot be stopped.

It was large and ambitious but not beta-tested at all, which explains the problems. Marnie Parker later went on to write the graphics-intensive Carma, about punctuation coming to life.

The ghost house here is impressive, and looking at the decompiled text, it had a deep backstory going back hundreds of years.

Plotwise, it seems to deliberately be copying Hollywood Hijinks plus maybe something else (Casper?).