Reviews by MathBrush

This game is similar to the first Frenetic Five game. In both games, you have to complete a sequence of tedious tasks using super powers. You are improv man, who uses random items in random ways; there is Clapper, who can find nearby objects by clapping (good for clues); Lexicon, who can find new words (and new commands for you to use); newsboy, who can telepathically read the news and other printed sources; and pastiche, who can do whatever the situation demands (including phasing through material).

Like the last game, the puzzles suffer from having to guess exactly the real thing to do. Out of 20 possible solutions, only 2 or 3 will be implemented. For instance, to (Spoiler - click to show)get a quarter, why can't pastiche help grab one out of someone's purse?.

This game was nominated for Best NPC's and Best Individual Puzzle in the XYZZY Awards.

In this game, you walk around a literal "small world". You are a giant that can grab things from space, get shot at by missiles and not care, and do other giant things. The world is not spinning, so some parts are perpetually hot, some perpetually cold and dark.

The game is packed with tiny details, and a blending of big and small. The writing is plain but descriptive.

The puzzles are a mixed bag. It's mostly "guess the author's brain", which is easy to do some of the time and hard other times. The world is so small that you can just try everything on everyone and it will work out.

This game was nominated for many XYZZY's, and won best setting.

This game contains six or so cycling scenes that all tell the story of a single moment in a war. That moment is when an Islamic man rushes towards a soldier.

The voices all have their own ideas about what you should do; your buddies, your uncle, your diversity trainer.

As you play, you unlock some more verbs you can use. Each page has a picture from a FPS in the Middle East, with a red or green bar. You can change all bars to green eventually, but I wasn't able to unlock anything.

This game has strong profanity, and depicts a PTSD-inducing type scenario. I'm told there is audio, but I haven't tried it.

In this relatively short game set inside your house, you wander about trying to deal with your clothing that has come to life. You have to subdue and wear each piece to win.

The clothing acts like NPCs, and are pretty amusing. The puzzles are light and I finished in 15 minutes.

The story is simple, the puzzles are simple, the writing is plain, but the game concept and execution is a lot of fun.

Short fun game.

Edit:
I changed my scoring system after I gave my original 2 star review. My new system uses these criteria:

Polished: I encountered no bugs and only a few whitespace issues.
Descriptiveness: It's a little spare but is packed with jokes.
Emotion: It is funny, if a bit silly.
Interactivity: I found the puzzles satisfying.
Would I play again? Probably not. I didn't think of it until a commenter reminded me.

This beautiful web-based game (made with Vorple) tells the story of an omnipotent being who is alone and comes into contact with ordinary beings, before a more significant encounter.

The text shifts and changes on a white and black screen, with background decorations and smooth panning of screens.

The game, as others have said, seems to save the responses of previous players, and integrates them into the current game.

It's so short that you could play it 2 or 3 times in 15 minutes. Recommended.

In this web-based game, you have a house (whose address is 18 Cadence) with a map with 5 rooms and you have a year that varies from 1900 to 2000. As you change the year, the description of each room varies. You can take portions of the text out (represented as cutting it out with a knife), and lay it on a table below. As you cut out different pieces, you can arrange them all to form a story, even overlapping some to form a new sentence.

I wasn't super impressed with the cutout system as I played, but afterwards, I saw someone's story using 'Browse' and I realized that I hadn't been very creative.

The story of the succession of people and the changing quality of the neighborhood was really interesting. I know a house near where I live that was constructed in the late 1800's, and it has gone through a life cycle very similar to that of 18 Cadence.

If you try it, try browsing some stories.

This game is a fun experiment in ultra-short parser games. Unlike the other reviewers, I was not able to read Aaron Reed's commentary on the game, but I still found it very enjoyable. It was part of a competition to create a game whose code could be tweeted.

There is one item, one NPC, and one meaningful interaction.

Overall, a fun experiment in minimalism. Mirrored by the later Twiny Jam games, which had Twine games with <300 words of text.

In this mid-length, well-polished parser game, you play a young boy who is stuck inside on a nice summers day with his maiden aunt and boring reverend uncle.

You have to escape using a series of clever moves, such as emotional manipulation and standard search, take, combine/use.

The walkthrough is short, but the atmosphere and parser messages are nice.

The game has a hidden framing story, generally worked in with Easter eggs. This framing story added some poignancy to the game that really improved it.

In this game, you play a wizard commanding a crow familiar. It is one of many long games set in a Zork/Enchanter-like world with light-hearted but increasingly difficult puzzles (such as Frobozz Magic Support, Augmented Fourth and Risorgimento Represso). In these games, I usually start out delighted, and solve some puzzles, then slowly get weary of it and give up, turning to the walkthrough and enjoying the ride. I think that one reason they lack the magic of Zork or Enchanter is that those old games had a real sense of decay and loss around them, and of personal growth. It's like the difference between milk chocolate and semi-sweet chocolate: a little bitterness goes a long way.

Anyways, this game is great for having its own magic system, for for allowing you to beat the game with only having solved 4 out of the big puzzles, and for making the first four easy. I smiled at the first bank puzzle. The last 3 puzzles and the endgame involve the old standbys of alchemy and complicated machinery that you have to experiment with.

Overall, this game is better-written and more funny than Frobozz magic support, and its two-tiered puzzle structure makes it more accessible and likely to be beaten than most such games, so I think this will be my go-to game to suggest to people in this sub-genre.

This game was the very first winner of the XYZZY for best NPCs. Your roommate John is studying, and four of his buddies come over. You have to eliminate them one or two at a time, and quiet down your environment, until John can study.

The PCs are well-written and entertaining. The puzzles are early-90's standard: a series of events that seem logical afterwards, but which ignore many alternative solutions (for instance, you can't (Spoiler - click to show)tape the wrapper or the towel across the hole in the window).

Good for fans of busy, interactive rooms of NPCs.