Reviews by MathBrush

This game has a mid-sized map and a good number of items and characters. It is not too hard, but it takes quite a bit of time compared to most IFComp games. You are trying to rescue a princess from a dragon, and you have to explore a forest.

You compete with other adventurers, and you have to use magic embodied by water-balloon like spheres that you toss at things. There are several items that you use over and over again.

The game has some sexual innuendos in it that creep up fairly often at the beginning and at the end.

Overall, a game for fans of Zork-style humor.

This game was entered in the very first IFComp in 1995. The competition was originally intended to give sample code for Inform authors. This game uses the z-machine to model games like tic tac toe, dots and boxes, towers of hanoi, etc. using ASCII graphics.

The puzzles are unfair, and you must cheat to beat about half of them.

The game is full of homages to Curses! and Trinity. Several puzzles require explicit knowledge of these two games. Even with this knowledge, some steps near the end are extremely difficult to guess.

This game is interesting as a sample game and for fans of puzzles as described above.

In this game, you are dared by the devil to get out of a mall with the seven deadly sins in it so you can go on a date with a beautiful young woman.

First, the annoying things. This game claims it is too easy to need a walkthrough; like most games with such a claim, it doesn't implement very many alternate solutions to puzzles (in faft, I think there is only one solution for each puzzle), as well as neglecting many synonyms. The goal of the game is to make a passive, desirable girl sleep with you as a reward. Finally, it has some unnecessarily gross parts, such as with Lust.

Beyond that, the setting has some creative touches, a gently vague in-game help system, and some creative depictions of the seven deadly sins.

This is the biggest exploratory Twine game I've seen since the Axolotl Project. Play as a spectre capable of shifting hosts who is seeking a black potion in the bowels of Castle Hallowmoor during a battle between witches and skeletons.

The game has 2-3 times the usual amount of links, with many of them descriptions only, so it is harder to cheat by clicking everything. There is an inventory button allowing you to dynamically use items throughout the game.

It took me about an hour, with some rather tricky pieces. Recommended for everyone.

In this game, you play an interrogator of a terrorism suspect. You can be quite cruel as an interrogator, leading to some interesting moral choices for the player (do you identify with the government, or the terrorists?). After this, the game opens up more into a type of spy thriller.

The version that I played was reasonably well-polished. There were no major bugs that I could find.

It has 9 different endings depending on how your moral choices play out. I only got one real ending and several death endings.

It has some memorable NPC's, and uses the ask/tell system of conversation.

I played the Android app of this game, which is the first parser app I've tried on a smartphone. I had some trouble at first getting used to the interface, but I worked it out eventually. It was nice that the author made the necessary commands quite short.

This game is perfect for Agatha Christie fans. You are a famous French detective, wrapping up your concluding speech after figuring out who the murderer is. Except you have no clue!

This is a conversation game with emphasis on details, much like Toby's Nose, Lime Ergot, or Out of the Study. You look at people, pick out details, and talk about it. This prompts people to spontaneously confess. The details that come out are classic Christie, slightly exaggerated.

The version I played had cartoon illustrations. There are about 6 or 7 NPCs, each with a unique personality.

I enjoyed this game as a Christie fan, right up until the end, when the real murderer confessed out of nowhere. I think it's because I had pressed them before, and forgotten about it, later completing the rest of the tasks. Even though I felt the last challenge was too easy, the steps leading up to it were marvellous.

This game was entered in the 1996 IFComp, where it took 9th place. In this game, you play a backwoods fellow who is convinced that aliens have been messing with his brain, just like they messed with his father.

You are abducted, and forced to pass a sequence of tests. They start abstract, and then become immersive. Some reviewers and I had to use hints frequently, but the story and setting are quite interesting.

The scenery is often unimplemented, which may be frustrating for those used to more recent games.

Interesting for those who'd like to see an alien abduction game.

In this game, you play a reviewer for the Adventurer Consumers Guide. You are asked to review such things as a helmet that makes you a hero and an orb that traps anyone you hit it with. You are trying everything out on a treasure run; your goal is to get one very large treasure.

The game is not set in the Zorkian universe, but the humor and level of fantasy will be familiar to fans of those games. Goblins, monsters with huge teeth, and armadillo-headed people are among the NPCs you will meet. The game has a bit of gallows humor, with quite a bit of comic violence to yourself and those around you.

This game also reminded me a bit of Augmented Fourth, a comedy fantasy about a bad court musician.

This game is recommended for fans of Zorkian worlds and of puzzlefests.

This game is actually quite long, but the provided walkthrough skips most of the material. This makes two different game experiences.

The walkthru steps you through a story of a young space cadet who is alone on a ship that is under attack by pirates. You have to solve a sequence of occasionally timed puzzles to avoid your capture.

The other part of the game involves a mystical religion discovered on an abandoned planet. The more you investigate, the deeper it goes. Bizarre space creatures and strange energies abound.

I've never completed this game with full points, but it really intrigues me. I'd love to finish it someday.

This game was entered in the first IFComp ever, taking 4th place in the TADS division. This was the first year that Stephen Granade had ever written a game, and he is one of my favorite authors.

This game doesn't show the polish of his later games, but it is relatively sturdy. You are on a yacht, and a large variety of time events happen around you, like Deadline. You find locked compartments and safes, you see people walking around, a murder happens (!), you are given a series of commands to fulfill, and then you must discover and stop the murderer before even worse can happen.

The NPCs are the focus of the game, yet they are sparsely implemented. They have one-line responses to most comments, and don't react as much to items that they should react to (although this can be a hint).

Overall, good for fans of murder mysteries. Granada's technical ability and panache for storyline are already evident, but the puzzles and NPC interaction are not yet up to his later standard.