Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This game is similar to Panks' epic Westfront game. It's a very simple basic adventure with a large map. The majority of the code is room descriptions and names of things. The rest of the code seems to be lock-and-key type things.

I found it somewhat frustrating with the insta-deaths and lack of normal verb shortcuts. However, it was generally non-offensive, and actually a fun atmosphere. It was disqualified from IFComp for incorporating Smurfs.

This game has the same sort of superhero tone as the Frenetic Five games. You are a superhero that isn't really that super.

The game had a fun tone, with some fairly silly humor. It's long though, and somewhat buggy. David Whyld's games tend to be fairly similar, so if you like one, you'll like them all-and vice versa.

This is a gory game set in a swamp. It's mostly empty rooms with little scenery (with exactly one or two of those in the whole map being something you need to search or look under). It's punctuated with instant-death combat unless you find items in the right order.

It has an interesting concept, but the execution needed a lot more work and a lot less mazes.