Reviews by MathBrush

**Tombs and Mummies by Matthew Warner**

People named Matt W have been doing good work in the math world for a while, including Matt Weiner (mod for this website) and Matt Wigdahl (author of IFComp-winning Aotearoa); so I was looking forward to this game.

This is a quest game and is online-only (you might be able to download an offline copy from textadventures.co.uk, but the download button on the ifcomp page just links to the website). It does not allow undo, has timed events, and if you leave it alone for 5 minutes, it will kick you out and lose your progress.

Fortunately, the game map is compact and the actual solution requires about 20 moves (mostly directions), so if you lose everything you're not set too far behind.

About half of the things you see in the games are traps, and unhelpful, and the rest are useful. Some are both (like the hint machine that hurts you while hinting).

The images, taken from ancient Egyptian art, were lovely, and the puzzles weren't unfairly difficult. I'm glad I'm played it.

+Polish: Nice images, well-thought out design and item placement and responses
+Descriptiveness: The game was very vivid to me.
-Interactivity: The above mentioned troubles with timing out and active events weren't too bad but enough that it impacted my enjoyablity
+Emotional impact: I felt a sense of adventure
+Would I play again: Maybe I would.

I beta tested this game briefly.

I usually think of Ectocomp games as being quick and simple, but the Grand Guignol games have been pretty intense the last few years.

This game has several innovative/amazing features:
1. It's in a custom parser that's brand new but so good that it felt like Dialog or Inform for me
2. It has excellent javascript integration with smooth scrolling image sidebars
3. It has an optimization puzzle that requires in-depth strategy and a lot of spatial thinking.

So it's pretty cool. You're breaking into a tomb (like Infidel) and need to grab a scarab amulet as well as as much treasure as you can carry (which is rough, given you can only carry 4 things at a time in your hands).

The puzzles are harder than most optimization games I've seen. Just getting a successful ending at all will likely take several tries. There's enough complexity here that I probably saw <1/2 of the game when I beta tested it and still there are things I don't understand (like the purpose of the (Spoiler - click to show)map and cursed disk).

The only drawback I found is, like the other optimization games, the puzzle itself detracted somewhat from the emotional impact of the story, as the story is mostly a frame for the puzzles and is repeated over and over each time. Otherwise, for fans of optimised treasure runs, this is a great game.

Ryan Veeder's playing a completely different ball game than most authors. It's almost like he just has fun making up things with weird ideas and then polishing them intensely before releasing them. Who does that?

There are four mini-games that I encountered, like the other Balderstone games (with each game serving just fine as a release on their own). They are:

-A complex combat game (Spoiler - click to show)This one reminded me of Kerkerkruip. You have a large map filled to the brim with weapons. You have to fight a lot of different people, but each weapon is destroyed upon use. This was fun but difficult, it took me a while to solve some of the cool sub-puzzles.
-A small game that is more interactive than most interactive fiction. (Spoiler - click to show)This is a mad-lib game where you are asked for a series of words, then you play a game involving that series of words, and it's implemented very well.
-A story told by children.(Spoiler - click to show)This has some surprises in design. Like usual. Ryan seems to think 'What if the players tried something weird and I just ran with it?
-A more traditional game at an abandoned gas station with some narrative surprises.

I thought as I played these games is that one thing Ryan does well is making sure the player encounters every story beat on every playthrough. It's so easy, due to the non-linear nature of games, for players to miss important backstory or details, but all of these games incorporate that into the gameplay itself, which is wonderful.

So this game has you play as an ancient jinn trying to get back some cash from a hustler.

This is a pretty long Twine game, with interesting styling and good sentence-by-sentence writing and also excellent worldbuilding. It also features romance of several kinds and stories within stories.

I found the story and the interactivity fairly good, but I feel like they could go further. There are different layers to games: if they're buggy or full of typos, nothing else really matters, the game's just too weird to play. If it's not buggy but the interactivity is really frustrating or the text is boring, then it just makes you want to stop.

This game clears all of those hurdles (which is a real feat in and of itself), but I think it misses the last one, which consists of things like emotional depth and compelling gameplay.

The characterization of the player and NPCs are all over the place. Sometimes we want to murder everyone, sometimes we're lonely. Sometimes we want things for years, and then a second later we don't. Our main ally goes from assertive to passive to aggressive to loving.

And the interactivity often seems like 'Do things this way or do things the same way but with different phrasing'. I feel like it missed some chances to let you consistently characterize yourself or provide long-lasting effects. There are some choices to do such things though (I especially enjoyed (Spoiler - click to show)the effects of buying a leopard-print shirt.)

I think this is a good game, but I think this author is capable of making an entirely awesome game, and that's why I pointed out those specific things. Your mileage may vary!

+Polish: No bugs in my playthrough, nice styling
+Descriptiveness: Writing was vivid and funny.
-Interactivity: I felt like the choices weren't very effective.
-Emotional impact: I couldn't get a read on people's motivations and characteristics.
+Would I play again? Yes, this game was pretty fun!

I'm a big fan of 'Lovecraftian' horror, (although I generally like the genre referred to that more than Lovecraft's work himself; I especially like The Willows, which I think was before him).

Lovecraftian horror is a major genre for parser games, including XYZZY- and IFComp-winning games: Anchorhead, Coloratura, Hunger Daemon, The King of Shreds and Patches, Cragne Manor, Theatre, Strange Geometries, The Lurking Horror, Slouching Towards Bedlam, Lydia's Heart. Outside of parser it still does well; I especially like Heart of the House and Fhtagn! - Tales of the Creeping Madness, Anya DeNiros' Feu de Joie series, and the Failbetter oeuvre.

So I approached this Lovecraftian Twine game with eager interest, especially given the extended length.

In this game, you are commissioned as a private detective to investigate the disappearance of her son. The missing young man has been spending too much time at Innsmouth, a city inhabited by strangely fishy people.

As I write this review, I looked up Innsmouth, and realized that most of the story elements of this game are borrowed from the story The Shadow Over Innsmouth (and I now see that was mentioned in the blurb). This actually relieves me, because I felt like parts of the game were echoing the worst part of Lovecraft. The man whom the adjective Lovecraftian was named after is not the best author in his own genre.

This game has a lot of great elements in it; it's smooth, looks good, the writing flows well line by line. But I have problems with the pacing and the interactivity.

First, the pacing. As the opening quote of the game makes clear, fear of the unknown is one of humanity's most primal fears. That's why Lovecraftian games thrive off of slow burn. Outside of maybe one initial bizarre event, most great Lovecraftian stories start with mundane but disturbing situations. Slowly, over time, more frightening (but still plausible) events occur until by the end you are confronted with horrifying unknowing realities.

This game spills the beans really early on, though. An intelligent, sane man explains all of the game's mysteries very early on, with no skepticism, and shows you an impossible artifact. There are no major revelations after that; everything in the game follows directly from his pronouncements.

Despite this, the game follows the usual tropes of the protagonist refusing to believe in the supernatural. Here's some text soon after those revelations:

Despite the professor explicitly saying (Spoiler - click to show)the townspeople breed with fish demons, the protagonist is stymied by a genealogy chart:

My second issue is the narrative structure. It's what Sam Kabo Ashwell calls the Gauntlet is his very good article on shapes of narrative games. Every optional choice is either wrong and leads to death (with an undo, thankfully) or right and progresses the story. There are usually few clues as to which one is the right answer, making it somewhat an exercise in frustration.

I think both of these issues come from adhering to closely to the original story. By having a plot that 'must happen' to match the story, it forces the gauntlet structure. To make sure the stories are connected, the author doles out information at weird times. I had the exact same issues when I adapted some Sherlock Holmes stories.

The very best parts are when the author goes out on his own. I would love to see a game that has a lot more of the author in it and a lot less Lovecraft. The whole story revolves around a sub-species of human that is less than human and is characterized by bulging eyes and flat noses, which definitely stems from Lovecraft's obsession with racial panic; and Lovecraft's treatment of the homeless man and his thick accent isn't my favorite.

So I definitely think this is an amazing author and programmer who made this, I just would prefer an original story and structure next time (and I hope there is a next time)!

+Polish: The game looks great, no bugs that I saw.
+Descriptiveness: The game goes into significant detail about objects and people.
-Interactivity: The gauntlet structure didn't really work for me.
-Emotional impact: The early reveals spoiled a lot of the emotional oomph for me.
-Would I play again? Since there's only one main path, I don't think there's a lot of replay value.

This game was announced as uploaded to the IF Archive on February 15, 2000, before Galatea. You play as a pilgrim who falls through some leaves into an ancient shrine. There are three rooms.

It was a proof of concept game. As such, it has some details implemented amazingly well, and others not implemented at all.

For instance, every object is marked as flammable or not; as cuttable or not; etc. but many objects listed in room descriptions are not implemented and reasonable synonyms (such as 'cookies' for 'packet of cookies') are not implemented.

Things this game models include:
-breakability
-flammability
-visibility/lighting and taking pictures
-shaking
-wearing a variety of things

I've played this game a few times over the years, and never got as far as I did today. For posterity, here are a few things that are interesting to do (spoils everything I found):

(Spoiler - click to show)
-SHOOT something (takes a pictures)
-BURN something WITH LIGHTER
-TURN ON LIGHTER before going into other rooms
-WEAR SKULL
-BREAK DEMIJOHN WITH METAL BOX
-CUT CHEST WITH SAW
-BREAK JAR (and look at your inventory!)
-CUT things WITH SHEARS (and repeating it)
-LOOK UNDER ALTAR
-X PANELS in altar room
-BREAK PANEL WITH METAL BOX
-ENTER PANEL or HOLE (can't remember which)


Things I haven't done:
-unlocked the metal box
-found the crayon

As for a rating:
-Polish: Half polished perfectly, half terribly.
+Descriptiveness: Lots of nice extra details. Very vivid, similar to later work.
-Interactivity: Very janky. This was created to demonstrate simulations of various physical attributes, and not to be a smooth game.
+Emotional impact: Despite its numerous frustrations, or perhaps because of it, the game has always held a certain mystery for me. There's just so much to find, and its rewarding. Kind of like So Far, which had a similar impression of there always being one more thing to find.
+Would I play again? I've visited this game several times over a few years' span.

This game is completely off the rails. It started out as weird, segued to somewhat offensive, and then just took off into a bizarre void that somehow improved it.

The main character in this game is perhaps the most despicable MC in any Choice of Games entry I've played. You are a 'headcrusher', a violent enforcer for a local mob boss, and you're famous for torturing and killing people with a jagged, rusty knife. You are in love with your boss's wife and have been given a suicide mission to rescue her within 6 hours.

Now, I have no problem with aggressive protagonists. I've enjoyed taking over Alaska with a robot horde in Choice of Robots and being a slaughtering warrior hero for the Gods in Champion of the Gods.

But both of those games motivated the evil or violence. Before I played NOLA is Burning, I started compiling a list of what I think works and doesn't in Choicescript games, and having a motive for violence is one of them.

This game just kind of throws you out there. I don't know, it didn't really work for me.

Each chapter is a different step on your way to your final confrontation. You pass through an area with friends who practice Vodou, the turf of an Asian gang led by 'The Dragon', the local police precinct, and a strip club.

The game heavily uses slang, such as 'juice' for money and 'large' for (I think?) lump sums of $10,000 each. It uses phrases like 'Let's blow this popsicle stand' and 'hip to my jive'.

No other Choicescript game treats its main character so bad. You're constantly being betrayed or degraded or having body parts deeply injured or removed or having weird stuff shoved down your throat.

It's last few chapters took all this bizarre confusion and made it almost sublimely ridiculous. I had the honor of (Spoiler - click to show)losing my right arm, being possess by a Vodou loa and gaining a bionic bone-shooting arm, confronting the mob boss who was naked and wearing a baby's bonnet in a bathtub full of money before being lured by him into a room filled with robotic spiders.

The only game I've ever seen that can compare with the circus this puts on is Bolivia By Night, which has a memorable segment where you drive an armored hottub that is powered by a DVD from a South American knockoff of the Olsen Twins.

Ooh, boy. I told myself I'd never rate a Choice of Games article below four stars because 1. I love choice of games titles, 2. I wrote one and know how it feels to spend months or years of your life on these things, and 3. they've all gone through a lengthy review process and are generally polished.

So I'm just going to go through my rating system blindly and see where I end up.
+Polish. This game felt completely smooth mechanics-wise. No problems here, no typos.
+Descriptiveness. It had it in spades, often to my regret.
+Emotional impact. Yes, again by the above.
-Interactivity. I felt like the stats were confusing and didn't add up quite right.
+Would I play again? From seeing some others' comments, there's parts I definitely would want to see.

So 4 stars. You know, I almost gave it a point for interactivity anyway because I felt like I had real agency, but I honestly can't recommend this game to people in general, which is what I believe a 5 star review represents. I did not enjoy this game in the sense that its scenes filled me with delight. But as a critic I find it fascinating. I would recommend it to people who are into seeing the weird corners of company back catalogs and other obscure things.

The writer is definitely talented, they just use that talent in ways that give me discomfort, much like the opening scene of this game where I had to chug a bottle of Pepto Bismol after waking up in a dumpster.

I received a review copy of this game.

Text-based games are so interesting because they get reinvented and renewed and spring up in different communities over time. Some groups have been making Inform-like games ever since Inform went out of business, while some have recently reconstructed and reimagined Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 style games for nostalgia's sakes, and others still have made text adventures based off of popular culture's depiction of text adventures in TV, webcomics and film.

So this Adventuron game seems firmly in the retro/nostalgia camp, with chunk text and old-style cursor together with beautiful pixel art. Unlike the Inform 5/6/7 stream of games, the emphasis here is less on exhaustive smoothness or synonyms and more on having a small set of commands to work with.

In particular, the main commands you use are LOOK and GET. While there aren't traditional puzzles, there are puzzles similar to those in Lime Ergot and other games where you have to examine something then a detail of something. It also tracks state from room to room, so LOOKing in one room can affect a LOOK in another room.

The story is about gathering mushrooms for a stew of differing amounts of lethality. There are 10 mushrooms to find. Before getting hints, I had only found 4 mushrooms and had no clue how to get more.

Here's my rating:

+Polish: For what it's trying to be (a speed-jam retro adventure) it is very well polished, with perfectly-fitting graphics and a lot of hidden nuggets.
+Descriptiveness: The mental images the game gives are very vivid, especially of the mushrooms, which aren't pictured in the art. The smells were described very well, too.
-Interactivity. The play style didn't gel well with me. Most of my experience involved error messages, and the central puzzle for unlocking more content (finding (Spoiler - click to show)the shears) was a puzzle where I definitely knew what I had to do but didn't know how to type it/bring it about.
+Would I play it again? I've already played it several times.
+Emotional impact: I've gone back and forth on this. I can confidently say, though, that it is charming, and that's a good emotion.

This game has been nominated in the XYZZY awards for Best Use of Multimedia.

This one is an interesting game that shows a lot of promise, but has a lot of little details that can make for a frustrating experience. With a few tweaks, it could work pretty well. I'd love to see a longer game from this author with a long period of testing entered into IFComp or Spring Thing one year.

You play as a plant geneticist who has survived an apocalypse. You must keep your little garden of food safe, feed yourself and create hybrid plants. There are 4-5 days of gameplay with time tracked.

The programming here is impressive, from the time tracking to the puzzles involving three nouns at once. But a lot of ground level work is missing, the kind of thing that generally comes with experience or exhaustive beta testing.

Here are my scoring criteria:
+Polish. The game is technologically impressive, with complicated puzzles, active animals, a time system, etc.
-Interactivity. The game lacked exit descriptions in important areas, and some interactions were 'fiddly'. (For instance, to drink water, you must 'drink canteen'. DRINK WATER instead results in 'The Canteen is not open.', since the water is modeled as an object inside the closed canteen.'
+Descriptiveness. The writing is spare at times, but so is the setting. And the author put a lot of effort into backstory and thoughts in 'the wilderness'. I think the writing is good for a parser game, and will only improve with time.
-Emotional impact. The fiddliness of the interactions kept me at a distance from the game. Had the background actions been smoother, I think the feelings would be stronger.
-Would I play again? It was fun to see everything possible, but the difficulties made me loathe to return and tinker around.

The author's other game (The Gateway of the Ferrets) has the same kind of complicated game techniques but adds some cute ferrets that amplify my enjoyment of the game. It's worth checking out!

Edit: The interactivity and polish have increased since I wrote this, so I've revised my score accordingly!

This parser game was made as part of last year's advent calendar.

It centers around a mysterious sort of room, inspired by Planescape and Land of the Lost but also reminiscent of Myst-like games and machines.

You have a pedestal with all sorts of doodads and contraptions. To get them to work, you need the help of two ferrets of varying talents.

The overall puzzle took me a while to puzzle out, and I was very happy to get the solution in a flash, but I was stumped before that.

The ferrets are cute and have nice little narrative touches, one of the highlights of the game.

The game only needs polishing to be great. A few things that could use improvement:

-The game starts with a wide open state space but only one thing advances the puzzle. I didn't notice that thing because (Spoiler - click to show)it requires examining the gateway and I had spent my first minutes exploring the device and trying to play with ferrets.
-Some actions can be difficult to phrase. In particular, instructing the ferrets to go to specific platforms was quite tricky for me to get (I tried climb to platform, go to platform, go up, etc. before hitting on the correct (Spoiler - click to show)climb mesh and (Spoiler - click to show)jump to w/e commands)

Those frustrations are mostly what made me feel the interactivity and polish could use some tweaking. But as a 'figure out this device puzzle', which I enjoy and I know quite a few others do, I would recommend this.