Reviews by MathBrush

This game was written in four days, which is very impressive given how complex it is.

This is a time travel game with 3 different periods you can hop back and forth between. You can also send items to different time periods as well.

Your goal is to go back and say goodbye to a girl you love who died, but in a different timeline.

There are about 6 or 7 different puzzles, and it's engaging, but there are a lot of rough edges. Especially in the graveyard, where I tried tons and tons of words, none of which were implemented. There are typos as well

I think this would be an amazing game if it was tested and polished. As it is, though, it is merely a promise of a future good game.

This game was originally written in Godot and ported to Unity.

You play as a researcher in an Antarctic base. You need to get up, shower, eat, and check out some samples.

Unlike most parser games, there's not much freedom in what you can type. It lists the commands you can use (usually 2-4), and when you type one in, it lists the possible objects/directions. It's highly constrained, so there are usually < 5 possible options at any point.

This kind of takes away the best part of a parser game (freedom) and the best part of a choice game (speed), leaving a bit of frustration.

This game has several typos and is unfinished. I think the core idea is great and fun (I like Antarctic base games) but it just needs more work and more time.

This is the final German IF Grand Prix 2022 game I played. It's a static pdf that's a gamebook.

You keep track of an inventory, health, money, and time. The main gameplay revolves around rolling dice for combat with slimes and kobolds, as well as, later on, some human combatants.

There are several 'grind zones' where you can fight with enemies and gain wealth as long as you like.

I found the game fairly tough to play as intended the first time through, with only 5 health and a lot of enemies that have a 33% chance to beat them per roll, and losing 1 health per loss. But it was fun.

I felt like the setting was often a bit generic, kind of like a random JRPG (you have villages with inns for recovery, slimes are the main enemy, etc.)

Overall, not life-changing but fun for a short time.

In this game, you crash-land near an abandoned arctic station and have to find your way to civilization.

I was worried at first, as playing a commodore 64 game in a foreign language seemed daunting. But the game actually has a great layout emphasizing important items and directions, and had many simple shortcuts to make the game easier.

There could be some improvements overall; the game is fairly short, not a lot is explained, and there's at least one typo I noticed. But I definitely appreciate the simplicity and it had a cute animal NPC.

This game takes place in a small apartment after you have moved in with your wife Laura. Most of the house is filled with packed boxes.

This game is remarkable for what it doesn't tell you, kind of like 9:05 in several ways. I've played several games by this author before that I felt like were rich and vivid. In contrast, this game is stark and minimalistic.

Essentially, you're trying to fall asleep but you feel a bit agitated. You need to find ways to calm yourself. There's a timer before you have to wake up at 7.

In the middle of the night, things change. You're awoken by a disturbance and need to investigate it.

I imagined that this would open up new areas to explore, but it didn't, really. Instead, careful exploration is required and you need to think about what kind of things would work logically for you in this situation.

In the end, the game was very polished, purposely non-descriptive, had interesting interactivity but didn't really connect with me emotionally. I could see myself playing again.

Note: I had to decompile to figure out some actions.

This German game has an English version, Wry, which was entered into Spring Thing and which was well-received.

I actually enjoyed this version a bit more, which I guess, for me, lends credence to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. I really appreciated how the game led you on on what to do, and how responsive it was, in general. In addition, I saw less of the ribald fantasies in this version, as I knew less commands to try out lol.

There were a couple of minor issues; looking at the wall gave a response in English ("On the wall above the sofa hang several pictures"), and X BILDER still lists a young lady being among the pictures even when the canvas has slipped out. But overall, I found this enjoyable and fresh.

This Adventuron game takes full advantage of the system's graphical capabilities. It has excellent pixel art for a multitude of characters and mini-games.

You play as a young sentient animal on a spaceship. You want to be a star, so you go around the ship talking to others and getting advice.

Most interactivity is in the form of riddles or puzzles. There is a language-to-language duolingo-like game for learning languages, a graph theory problem, a logic puzzle, a cryptogram, math problems, etc.

An immense effort has been put into this game. Unfortunately for me, most of it was put into the areas that I am not quite as interested in. As for the main play, there are some frustrations. For instance, typing LOOK won't bring up the room description again, so you have to leave and come back to find out who's there. There is a chicken wing tree, but after you pluck one off and try to eat it it acts like you don't have it. There are occasional typos that distract. Overall, I had fun, but I think the very high production quality of the rest of the game gave me higher expectations for the text-based part.

The art is the best part of the game, with good shading and 3d perspectives.

This game was entered into the 2022 Text Adventure Literacy Jam. It has some lovely illustrations and uses the Adventuron engine.

You've lost your pet dog and have to explore a spooky mansion. A tutorial helps you out to get started. Most puzzles revolve around EXAMINing things and TALKing to people. There are a lot of cute characters, like philosophical skeletons and silly pumpkins.

It's not too long, but some of the puzzles were moderately challenging. One lasted a little bit longer than I would have wished, but overall this is one of the strongest games in the competition.

Garry Francis is a prolific author, specializing in text adventures with a focus on puzzles and core parser gameplay (like GET/DROP/etc.). This game and the other one he released in the same competition (The Carpathian Vampire) show a lot of growth in implementation and puzzle design.

This is one of the smoothest games of the comp. You play as a koala who is also a bushfire warden for the surrounding wildlife. You have to provide for yourself and all those around you.

The main charm in this game is the vivid descriptions of australian wildlife and plants, with background action happening (like skinks crossing your path), a garden area with tons of plants, and puzzles revolving around Australian wildlife.

I think this is pretty great, and was glad to play it. My one desire might be for a couple of additional things to implement for consistency. One puzzle, for instance, was only solved by (Spoiler - click to show)the verb ASK [person] ABOUT [something], while a later puzzle had a character (the owl) who didn't respond to ASK OWL ABOUT [topic] for most topics that mattered; instead, this was a TALK TO puzzle, which was somewhat inconsistent with the earlier puzzles.

This is an Adventuron game written for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam. It's parser based and has you diving into the ocean, exploring for treasure.

Here's my rating:

-Polish: I feel like the game could be brushed up a bit. The tutorial isn't reactive; instead you have to type RUN TUTORIAL separately in two rooms, and in one of those rooms it just lists several turns' worth of info, whereas other tutorials in this comp reacted to your actions. Similarly, more synonyms could be added.
-Descriptive: Many objects weren't described. The descriptions in the game are easy to picture, though.
-Interactivity: This game involves guessing the verb a lot. For instance, opening the chest: (Spoiler - click to show)OPEN CHEST and UNLOCK CHEST don't have meaningful responses, but PLACE GEM does. And after you open it, (Spoiler - click to show)TAKE LIGHT, ENTER LIGHT, LOOK IN LIGHT, SEARCH LIGHT, ENTER CHEST, none of it works, except for TOUCH LIGHT.
-Emotional impact: It was hard to connect with the game, because I was frustrated.
-Would I play again? Same as above.

The game isn't that bad overall, but I wish that more people had tested it and that things the testers tried were implemented. If that had happened, I would definitely give this game a higher score, because it has a lot of good ideas; it's only bug-fixing and adding more responses that I think it could use.