Reviews by MathBrush

Asgard is a game that I deeply enjoyed. The first part is not like the rest of the game; you play a deeply ticked-off repairman that has to fix a hole in a roof. This is an odd segment; there are dozens of items, a mood counter, and some small puzzles. But it turns out that you don't need to worry too much, you don't have to get everything right... yet.

But as the game suggests, you pass on to an afterlife that is a blend of Norse, Greek, and Judeochristian mythology. You have access to several areas, and an opportunity to revisit them on multiple occasions to get them right.

I had fun with this, getting 2 of the areas right on my own. After checking the walkthrough, I made it to another area with 8 subareas. By then, though, I was stuck using the walkthrough.

Overall, this game is pretty hard, and the best part is stuck after a less interesting intro. But I just loved it.

This game was intimidating before I played it, but I was able to complete it to 3-4 endings before going to the walkthrough for the best ending.

You are in a jeffries tube in a ship that had an explosion. Your job is to get systems working and then transfer oxygen to various parts of the ship, deciding who should get what.

The game has an in-game reference manual that is helpful on several occasions. There is also an NPC whom you can converse with after some work (as the ABOUT section of the game hints).

I've had an opinion recently that hard puzzles aren't as fun as puzzles that make you feel smart. Even though I didn't get the best ending on my own, getting any ending at all made me feel smart. I recommend the game for that reason.

I swear I remember playing this game from years back, but I only finished it in 2015.

It was originally in adrift, but now in Choicescript. You are a young man (?) offered a cursed ascot, and embroiled in a quest to find a hidden treasure. This sounds like a big game, but there are less than 15 choices in a typical playthrough. The only options are yes/no (and, in choicescript, ?).

It turns out, on multiple playthroughs, that there is more to the game than it seems, making many people rate this game highly.

This game (which is a play-die-repeat game) is the combination of three themes that were suggested to the author (mild spoilers):(Spoiler - click to show)zombie pirates in space.

You are in a single enclosed room in a space station with a variety of buttons that control video (including recording and playback), temperature, self-destruct, and so on.

Each playthrough is short, but it will take a lot of work to get it right.

The game is funny and enjoyable.

On a side note, I always thought the cover art was a hunched monster with its head on backwards, but I think it's actually a brain-like monster on an asteroid.

This is one of the more unusual interactive fiction games out there. The story at first is generally Lovecraftian; horrors from beyond, a dark, mostly deserted old town, madness, etc.

You play a newspaper reporter who lives in a town on the edge of civilization. You are investigating a number of disappearances. Things get weird.

I had some trouble even getting out of the first room, but after that, things sped up. You spend a lot of time wandering around the smallish map, trying to see what happens next.

The game is definitely unpolished. For instance, opening a certain box said that "you see Filled_Right". There are typos and other issues.

Overall, the story is fun. There is a mind-blowing twist in the middle of the game that really took me by surprise, making this game worthwhile to play for that reason alone.

In this game, you go through a series of 7 rooms, each of which require you to complete a classic IF puzzle style. Rooms include a light source puzzle, a puzzleless puzzle, an NPC, and so on.

I found it to be hit or miss. I enjoyed the puzzles overall, though. I did use all of the hints, but the walkthrough was disabled, and so it was fun to try and make the intuitive leaps.

And the leaps are fun. I really recommend this for puzzle fans.

Above and Beyond is a pretty large and well-polished game. You play a programmer on their first day of work; the first third consists of getting into work after losing your card, the second third consists of getting a form signed by jumping through exhausting hoops, and the third is an endgame dealing with a conspiracy.

The feel is a mixture of spy stuff and extreme tedium of work. The walkthrough is 600 moves or so.

I was pretty impressed with this game. It's linear and hard, but it's fun walking through a dozen rooms with 2-4 offices each and meet all of the workers.

In this game, you awake a genie who can tell you about chess, its history and rules. You then play chess, with a graphic display.

That's pretty much it. I didn't finish a game; the computer seems to use some kind of machine learning algorithm (with a bunch of nodes mentioned).

I'd like to come back to this at some point. It belongs to the same class as Textfire Golf and Lists and Lists, a category separate from most IF, but still interesting.

This game is very long and puzzly. You play a spy who has a flashback to a scene taken from Ingold's earlier Mulldoon Legacy. Then you have to break into a house, then are transported to a fantasy land.

The game has a lot of spotty implementation issues, so if you don't type the right thing, you might get stuck (just try opening the crackers!)

The hints leaves huge gaps as well, but perhaps that is for the better, as it makes you think.

Only for hardcore puzzle fans.

This game heavily references early interactive fiction and the usenet groups. I was not involved in the community in the 90's or even the aught's, but the ifwiki page for this game has a little bit of background. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this game in the same way one enjoys Gulliver's Travels or Don Quijote without familiarity with the things they are parodying.

You have a mimesis plant (a joke explained in the game), and you have to commmit the seven deadly sins with it. Once you do, you progress to two more areas, encountering foes and friends.

The game heavily references the following:

-John's Fire Witch. An early puzzle game where you have to collect seven sins to get by a devil.
-Curses! The game contains three of the most important objects in Curses! and spoils the game a bit.
-So Far. The game mimics the ending of So Far, spoiling that ending.
-Jigsaw. The game is framed in terms of the main NPC from Jigsaw having abandoned you. It references some activities in Jigsaw.

In addition, it names 7 games to represent the seven sins, and contains one room each from games such as Adventure, So Far, Zork I, and so on.

I like works about the genre they are part of (like The Book with No Pictures for children's books). If you like self-referential work, I recommend this game.