Reviews by MathBrush

Mite is by Sara Dee, author of the slice of life game Tough Beans. In this game, you play a green pixie boy who is trying to return a stolen gem to its owner, the fairy prince.

The game is easy to map and simple to play. The map is a V shape, where you start at the vertex and can go down either path (and eventually do both). The puzzles are really very cute (How can you get into an orange tulip? How can you rescue a ladybug in peril?).

I enjoyed this game. It lasted about 30 minutes, with no walkthrough, which is very rare for me.

Jane is a game that is openly influenced by Photopia, yet tells its own story, in this case about domestic abuse.

You play a variety of characters, jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint, but your main character is Jane, a victim of domestic abuse that blames herself and rationalizes her husband's actions.

The writing was good, and several actual abuse victims consulted with the author during the writing process.

Good for fans of alt-games (games that primarily tell the story of a minority or of someone with a particular condition or bad situation).

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.