Reviews by MathBrush

This game, which won the Golden Banana of Discord in IFComp, is a story-focused game. Despite a few searching puzzles, most of the game consists of cutscenes. You go back and forth between two worlds, reenacting a horrible tragedy, and your guilt in it.

I found it to be heavy-handed; I feel like games such as Map and Euydice deal with similar feelings of regret in a more nuanced way.

Also, the Christian theme seems underutilized; the cross is heavily referenced, and a bit of guilt and repentance, but much of the atmosphere seems like a new synthesis of thought that doesn't mesh well with preexisting Christian themes.

Escape from Summerland is a highly unusual and innovative game that doesn't overstay it's welcome but could be a bit more.

In this game, you are trying to escape a damaged circus tent. You can switch between a ghost (a traditional PC but unable to interact with anything), a monkey (agile but weak and a bit dim), and a robot (strong, with a light source, but bulky and uninformative).

The monkeys responses all include an ASCII art picture of the monkey and it's emotions. The robots responses are all in the former of status updates.

The game works very well, as it seems overly complicated at first, but then gels together. It seemed a bit disappointingly small, but this makes sense for IFComp.

The Gostak is one of those games that everyone hears about eventually. Some play it, some stay far away. I didn't get past the first room when I first played it, felt scared, and put it off for five years.

I finally completed it with the in-game hints and some of David Wellbourns dictionary.

So what is this game? It is based off of an old sentence a professor came up with, showing that you can guess a lot about words and their relationships just by their position in a sentence. That sentence was "The Gostak distims the doshes".

In this game, you are the Gostak, and you do have to distim the doshes. You have to learn how to navigate, to examine, to take and drop, and so forth. The help menu, also written in nonsense, is vital in understanding the language.

The hints were actually very helpful, although it might be possible to beat the game without them. The last hint is purposely vague.

The game has two npcs, one who is quite helpful, and one who is not. There are a variety of other objects, though.

After finally beating it, I love this game, but it sure was hard, even with all hints and a dictionary.

This game won the first ever unrestrained section of Ectocomp, which was traditionally a speed-IF until 2015, when it was split into a speed-if section and an unconstrained section.

It is a sort of psychological thriller, when 6 friends (or former friends) visit a cabin to carry out the wishes of a dead friend. Everyone has something to hide. One of the highlights of the game is a drinking game about truth, where you decide how to play.

The game has violence and strong profanity, which is not something I generally recommend, but I enjoyed this story, and I have to admit it. It set a high bar for future Ectocomp games.

Draculaland gave me several hours of playtime, even though I resorted to hints near the end of my playing time. It uses an innovative system where it is a parser, but all commands are chosen by clicking buttons instead of typing them in.

This is definitely a parser with some web UI thrown in as opposed to games such as Hallowmoor or the Axolotl Project which were Twine games but with heavy parser elements.

The parser effect is achieved by having an actual parser on half of the screen, with commands passed to it when you click on the buttons on the right-side (which consists of an inventory and room description).

The big worry here of course is that the button system might detract from the freedom of the parser, and that was my experience at first. It was difficult going back and forth between the two interfaces, and I felt like I was just trying every button in every situation.

However, as the game progressed, the dual interface became more natural, and as the inventory and its options grew, I was no longer able to get anyway by random button presses. I had to resort to the hallmark of the parser system, which is planning and carrying out a complex sequence of events.

Overall, I found the writing charming when the game wasn't being frustrating. That ended up being the one drawback of the game; I felt that many of the puzzle solutions, even in hindsight, didn't make sense or didn't allow for reasonable alternatives. (Spoiler - click to show)For instance, I felt like you should be able to distract the magpie with shiny objects or hide the keys in the box or bury them or kill the bird in its nest, or that you could slow the flies down by having them get drunk just like you did with the Magpie, etc. However, I would still rank the puzzles in the top half of all adventure games, especially for a patient player.

Overall, I recommend it; as an experiment, it's worth spending some time with, and as a game, it should appeal to the minimalist Scott Adams fans (which includes me).

This game is styled fairly well for an Ectocomp game (I wonder if this is a second release?); there is green goo in the background and a spooky font.

The game's story was really odd and not too spooky. You travel around the city before a Halloween party, buying food or alcohol or cigarettes, and interacting with two different women, whom you can follow, talk to, buy stuff from, etc. You then go to a party where a variety of things can happen.

The language is off frequently; for instance, one line says "Here is Marianne, and Beatrice, but you are now too drunk the things like this." I thought it could be a deliberate choice to represent inebriation, but the text is like this throughout.

This Ectocomp game (which had to be written in two hours) feels like the author ran out of time. It is set in a dark and brooding office of a physiognomist who is not present. It puts off a real abandoned hospital sort of vibe, like Mariel or One Eye Open.

Nothing much happens, though. There is just about one puzzle, and that puzzle is escaping. Once you do, the game is over. There were no NPCs as far as I can tell.

In a normal game, this would be off-putting, but SpeedIF is different. Taking your 2 hours to build a compelling setting is not a bad thing.

In this Ectocomp 2015 game, you have to get out of a haunted ship to make it to freedom.

As a speedIF, it is ambitious, and I enjoyed it. You have to escape a series of locked rooms or gauntlets, and often the wrong choices will kill you.

Like most puzzle SpeedIF, the puzzles are underclued, but the game is small enough to allow you to experiment with it.

Fun for SpeedIF fans.

This game was entered in EctoComp 2015. It was written in two hours or less. The author is good at writing a lot of text quickly, and so this is quite a large game.

It is written in Choicescript, with many choices per turn, but I believe the story plays out roughly the same whatever you do.

The story is set in Australia, and is a goofy game about a girl who gets a variety of new roommates, one of which has left a bizarre and nasty experiment in the refrigerator.

References a lot of wildlife, like axolotls,kangaroos, maggots, etc.

This was my favorite game of Ectocomp 2015, a SpeedIF competition where games were written in 2 hours or less. You play a tiny little ninja wandering around a small landscape with big pumpkins and friendly creatures.

The game just has a cute atmosphere. The puzzles are easy, and I solved them within 10 minutes.

Recommended as a good introduction to SpeedIf.