Reviews by MathBrush

Hmmm.... this game hit home in several areas. You play as a young man entering graduate school to satisfy his father's wishes. You reflect on your past life scouting as you deal with the drudgery of graduate school.

It wasn't my parents who pushed me, but I did graduate school and also had been a scout. Both parts rang true: boys discussing the forbidden parts of life in tents on trips, graduate school largely consisting of a series of failures aggregating very slowly into a dissertation.

The problem is, and this comes up in so many games: can a simulation of a boring event be fun? And my answer is no. Sure, Farmville and Universal Paperclips simulated boring things, and yet were popular. But they added a social aspect and/or increasing complexity. Just showing the drudgery of graduate school is accurate, but it's just not fun to me.

In fact, the overall structure of the game is pretty dull. Flashbacks are linear, with scattered 'expand' links that sometimes give extra text in-line and sometimes link to another page.

So why do I give it 4 stars? Well, it was just all so relatable. The prose didn't jump out and bite me, but it wormed its way inside of me. The narrator feels like a real person, even though this is a work of fiction. There's just a kind of raw honesty to it all that appeals to my sense of self and my own history.

Writing a mystery IF game is hard, but rewarding. The hardest thing to handle is the deductive process: will the PC find clues before solving the case, or can the player can deduce the answer on their own? Does the player need to link clues themselves, or do they automatically process them?

This is a good game, but I'm not quite sure it nails that deductive process. In this Twine game, you play as a young woman in a sci-fi future renting out an old detective's office for the night. Your father has died, your sister is missing, and you have to search for her.

You have numerous locations you can go to. You have an NPC companion who can examine things for you. You have an inventory where any item can be used with any background link, giving quadratic complexity. You also can deduce things with your companion, linking concepts with, again, quadratic complexity. Dying alters the game subtly.

All in all, it makes for a rich game. But the state space is so large that it's difficult to know where to proceed next. Do you need to deduce in the middle of the game? Is dying essential? Do items need to be examined by your companion, used on NPCs, or ignored? I found myself frequently turning to the walkthrough.

Storywise, it uses some classic sci-fi tropes (techno-cult, do robots have feelings, etc.), but it executes it well. I felt comfortable with this game. The author says 'hire me' at the end, and I would feel comfortable hiring them for a writing project.

Okay, this is a great game in many ways. Pixel art is on point, characters are compelling, the atmosphere at Dan's shady truck dealership is just perfect, and the storyline comes to a great point.

But I found the day by day gameplay a little less compelling. My choice of which job to pick up didn't seem to matter too much, and neither did my driving strategy. It's possible they mattered, but I didn't see it in in-game, unlike my choice of 'side hustle', which strongly affected the game.

So, I liked it, but found parts a bit tedious. This is a trucking simulator where you make money doing increasingly shady jobs, while individuals begin approaching you for help. Your choices of who to help affect the politics not only locally but eventually globally.

This author has become well known for Twine UI work. with many people interested in learning how to make games look the way, for instance, Devotionalia did.

This game has that same rich UI. Buttons instead of hyperlinks, character portraits, rich backdrops, multiple save files in a button in a collapsible menu.

Story-wise, this is heavy stuff, epic fantasy mixed with horror. You are a lone human burying their mother, living on an island filled with huge, sentient insects. You have been offered a controversial position on the island in the religious hierarchy, and life is complicated.

Most choices are about your attitude and response to others (agreeing, disagreeing, deflecting). Others have agency affecting the story. The real replayability factor is in the characters, not all of which you can talk to in one go through.

It's polished, descriptive, interactive, creepiness-inducing, and I would replay, so I'm giving it 5 stars!

This game is a remake of a 1985 Danish game (which explains the two authors).

The game warns you that it comes with randomization, hunger timers, etc. and has a really clever idea: allowing you to turn all of those off. I tried playing with them on at first, and it was actually fun, since the map wasn't too confusing (especially with the automap. And Adrift online makes playing a lot better!). The music and images worked well with the text.

Some parts of the interactivity just seem too farfetched to guess on your own, though. I knew I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)find the key in the jaguar, and I knew that (Spoiler - click to show)I had to eat in the game, but I never thought the two would be combined to solve a puzzle. And some tools seem like they could have many uses (such as the (Spoiler - click to show)dynamite). But a lot of this stems from older game design where it was expected the player would only have a few games available and play each of them off and on for multiple days or weeks.

More concerning is the inherent colonialism in the game. I ran into this when adapting Sherlock Holmes in to a game; I left in negative references to gypsies, and the feedback I received taught me a lot more about the negative experiences gypsies have had over the years (including in the Holocaust!) This game does something similar, where the natives are portrayed as more or less dumb and associated with alcohol, and there are no moral qualms about entering sacred spaces and stealing artifacts to take back to Europe. This wasn't exactly unusual in 1985 (just look at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom from the year before!), but sticks out now, to me, especially since I've also adapted older works with colonialist views. I don't really have any advice, these are just my thoughts.

Robin Johnson is one of the best IF authors of the last few years, putting out games like Detectiveland and Zeppelin Adventure. These games, and Pirateship, use a parser-hybrid engine based off of Johnson's Versificator parser (used in games like the Xylophoniad).

This game doesn't reach the heights that Detectiveland did (which had 4 separate cases to work on), but it's a solid entry that will please fans of his previous games, and of puzzles in general.

You play as a pirate on an island that has a surprising number of inhabitants. There is a lot of conversation, and several complex mechanics (including a diving apparatus and a kind of pirate prosthetics lab). I used a walkthrough for a few of the trickier puzzles.

This game is polished, descriptive, has good interactivity, and I would definitely replay. It didn't draw me in emotionally, as I didn't really feel any kind of connection to the NPCs, or find an overarching story like Zeppelin Adventure. But this isn't a game looking to be deep; it's looking to entertain, and its succeeding. I debated on whether to give a 4 or a 5, but the primary purpose of my ratings on IFDB is to indicate the quality of a game compared to all other IF, and so I think a 5 is appropriate here. Compared to Johnson's other games alone, I would give this a 4.

I give stars based on five criteria: being polished, being descriptive, emotional impact, interactivity, and if I would play again.

Polish: This game is severely lacking in this area. There are numerous typos (such as 'wet' for 'west' in one room), synonyms aren't implemented, disambiguation needs work (like trying to look at the books in the library while holding the textbooks).

Descriptiveness: This certainly isn't a lushly described game, but some of the images were vivid, especially the doll room. The author did a great job of ambiance, in my opinion.

Emotional impact: I felt the eeriness of the house a bit, and the sadness of the story, but I think both needed more work.

Interactivity: The differences in functionality between trowel, pliers, and mallet were hard for me to grasp. Alternate solutions often didn't work (for instance, why don't (Spoiler - click to show)the shears work for cutting after you weaken the vines?).

Playing again: This game doesn't draw me back in for replay.

So that's a 2/5. I think that all of my concerns could have been resolved by having several playtesters, including ones experienced in playtesting games. I'd love to see a more polished game by this author, and would volunteer for playtesting it!

This game is meant to be contemplated slowly. You wander along a beach, looking at symbolic locations, waiting for the end of day.

The walkthrough is especially entertaining. (It only says (Spoiler - click to show)Don't worry about the puzzles., and I listened). Overall I found it peaceful, if a bit slight.

The timed text, though, was rather aggravating. Other readers may not have the same reaction, but timed text goes against everything I like and find distinctive about parser games, and this game contains sections with timed text that takes over a minute to get out a page's worth of text.

The writing and design is otherwise excellent. The portrayal of a beggar seemed a bit classist at first, but the beggar's home shows that perhaps things are not as they seem at first. A lot to think about here.

This game grew on me over time.

Like Pseudavid's previous work, this game is a highly-polished Twine game that focuses on time, place, and interpersonal relationships.

In The Good People, you play as a person descended from the inhabitants of an ancient village which was covered by a reservoir, and which has now only recently emerged. The exact setting escapes me; it seems like Native Americans in the Southwest due to the reservoir setting, but could also be Irish perhaps (?) or South American.

You've started a relationship with a travel writer who is of a different race from you, and you feel alienated from your past and your people.

This slice-of-life opening is pretty good but a little too 'high art' for me. It takes a sharp turn in the middle, though, that resonated strongly with me.

Uses unusual text placements, graphic images, occasional slow text and text animations.

This game took 4th in the Jay is Games Casual Gameplay Competition #7, a competition which produced more good games than just about any other competition I've seen outside of IFComp.

You play as a woman who has been stuck talking to a bore at a cocktail party for two hours. Once he's out of the way, you have an explicit list of 3 things you have to do to escape.

Conversation plays a vital role in this game, making the characters more fun. Puzzle solutions are off the beaten track. Logical in hindsight, but difficult to come up with. It does, however, have an extensive hint system.