Reviews by MathBrush

This game is a fairly traditional RPG, where you find better and better weapons/armor and equip them, and gain gold. It's framed as a VR story in a casino to better explain why items disappear in a puff of smoke and why all treasures get converted to their cash values.

I found the game enjoyable, and fairly long, although I bug kept me from going from the novice half to the expert half. I would recommend it for fans of RPGs.

This game is by Luke Jones, who also wrote the interesting Bony King of Nowhere for Spring Thing in 2017.

This game is a treasure hunt puzzle fest type game, but it's kind of spare and with some hard-to-guess puzzles. The puzzles mostly revolve around finding the item or items that will induce NPCs to do things for you.

The game has a large cast of characters, many of which have multiple versions of themselves over 3 time periods. It has also has many rooms over the same time period. But much of it is under implemented. A porter is present in each time period, but has very little description or conversation in any, except for one short paragraph once. However, the author was explicitly inspired by Robin Johnson's minimalist games, so it is likely intentional.

The game has good bones, though, with a pleasant run through campus history and future. If the author switched to Inform 7, like Steph Cherrywell did, and budgeted more time for beta testing and polishing, they could build on the success they already have.

This is a very funny, long limited parser game about being a pig. A hero follows you, and believes you to be able to smell a polymorphing wizard. Anything you sniff, he smashes.

The first part of the game plays out in the tradition established by Arthur DiBianca, where a few key verbs are used in unusual ways to accomplish your goals. Later on, the game branches out, allowing you to switch between certain 'tools' to accomplish various goals.

This game is unusual among limited parser games in that it has quite a few large text dumps, often spanning more than a screen on a laptop computer with maximized window. The writing is good, the story is strong, but it can be a bit much, especially on a second playthrough.

This game also touches on several social issues (not least the annoying habit of young men singing Wonderwall).

This game kind of threw me off at first; I used the walkthrough, which seemed super unmotivated, and some large pieces of occasionally-awkward text made me not like it as much.

But then lglasser said she loved it on her twitch stream, as did an Italian IFComp judge, so I gave it another shot, walkthrough-free.

This time around, I liked it. All reasonable commands seemed to be accepted. The game allowed a great deal of flexible exploration and a money system that worked. Exploration was all that was needed to trigger the story, and the hint system was just strong enough to get me through and just vague enough to make it a challenge.

It seemed oddly fixated an alien mating systems, but it was more National Geographic than anything else.

This is the most-illustrated IFComp game I've played, and one of the least appealing. Your girlfriend broke up with you, and you have to manipulate a dozen or so women into sharing their phone numbers.

The game is deeply misogynistic, and the art is in a style somewhere between simpsons and family guy in style and content.

This game is big, and full of little easter eggs. It's one of those games that is created with love and creative, but seemingly based on things in the author's life and somewhat underclued.

Typical puzzles in this game include finding keys and operating semi-complicated machinery.

This game casts you as the vampire Martin Voigt, travelling through a hellish landscape to retrieve three talismans of power and find the three priestesses who can help him.

The setting is imaginative and well-defined. Generally, each room contains a challenge, which at first can be solved with a basic power, and later requires you to fetch items from the other parts of the (small) map.

It was a bit gorey and not for young children. Some of the interactivity was off, in the sense that actions were underclued. But the overall level of polish was high.

This game casts you as a demon in the bureaucracy of hell. You decide to make a break for it and get out.

This game has several NPCs, most of whom respond to just a few topics/activities. It has well-coded puzzles involving searching and manipulation.

But much of it just feels underclued, especially the second half of the game. This makes it somewhat difficult to finish.

This game has you waking up in a club, needing to go around solving a number of unclued and unmotivated puzzles, some of which are unfinishable due to bugs.

It implements a number of complicated things, including a car with ignition, an apartment intercom, a hose that needs to be taken/dropped and turned off/on, a sink to wash dishes in. Unfortunately, all the least interesting things are the things that are implemented in the most detail.

This is a Zorkian game that has you travelling to Viking times to search for various items in order to join a society of time travellers.

The score is lower than the work going into the game deserves; but according to my system, it is fairly unpolished, the rooms aren't descriptive, it didn't inspire any strong emotions, and the interactivity was frustrating.

But in general, this is an inoffensive game, wandering around a large landscape looking for treasures. Includes a light puzzle.