Reviews by MathBrush

This game has a pretty unusual format. It's a .exe file entered into the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, and it features a bar for typing in parser commands as well as hyperlinks to make play easier.

I used just the hyperlinks, as typing was unusual. It may have been just me, but it seemed like I couldn't hit enter and get a response unless it was an acceptable command, which was weird because I couldn't tell if the game was lagging or if I just didn't have the right command.

The links operate by single-clicking for directions, double-clicking to use items or pick them up, and clicking once on one item and once on another to use them together.

The puzzles are fairly simple, mostly exploring and grabbing whatever you command. Finishing one puzzle generally unlocks the next.

I had a couple of frustrations. The text color was similar to the background image, making it hard to read. Text scrolling with a mouse was required, but the mouse wheel doesn't scroll. And there are some text mistakes that make things confusing.

I think this game does exactly what its creator seems to have wanted to do: make a light parser game with intuitive commands in a fun environment with lovely ascii art pictures.

You play as a troll who is lonely. All around you are magical creatures (one per region, each depicted with ASCII art). They all have desires found in a book, and essentially give you a bunch of fetch quests you have to accomplish.

Overall:
+Polish: The game is very smooth and polished.
+Descriptiveness: The characters are vibrant and unique.
+Interactivity: The game is simple, but has enough resistance (through multiple sources of info and several possible targets) to make it fun.
+Emotional impact: I enjoyed the game and art.
+Would I play again?: Yes, and may recommend it to others.

This is a vampire game designed for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam. It's aimed towards beginners, and I think serves its purpose fairly well.

You begin outside a dark castle and have to find a way in. The tutorial will take you all the way through this part, about 1/10-1/5 of the game.

Inside, you have to explore the small castle and figure out a way to stop the vampire. There are quite a few items including red herrings, but everything is logical. I got stuck because I didn't notice one room exit at first.

There's not a ton of tension here. As a tutorial game, that's fine, and I've done the same in my own tutorial games, but I would wish for more in a bigger game. There's some nice atmospheric messages, though.

This is a brief adventuron game entered into the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

In it, you play as a little kobold thrown off a cart in a medieval town, and have to go find your way home.

It is a 'gauntlet'-style game, meaning that you face one challenge at a time and either pass it or die. The game has an instant-rewind feature, but there are numerous ways to die and some are better-signaled than others.

Some of the puzzles require a bit of cleverness to solve, while others require finding the right combination of words. Emily Short once said that once you know mentally how to solve a puzzle, a game should make it easy to get that to happen (without struggling with the right wording). As a converse to that, I'd like to say that a good game should also make it clear when you're on the right track. A lot of puzzles in this game ignore alternate solutions or don't provide helpful feedback (I'm looking at the door puzzle here the most).

Overall, I would have preferred less learning-by-dying and more simultaneous puzzles and more striking text descriptions. The best part for me was the sense of being stealthy.

This game was inspired by The Last Night of Alexisgrad, an IFComp multiplayer twine game where the participants passed codes back and forth to each other.

The author of this game goes further by connecting players through a session ID that allows simultaneous communication in-game through choices. There is even a time portion, although it seems designed in a way that many playthroughs of the timed portion would not need collaboration, which is helpful.

The game is set in a somewhat futuristic setting where genetically engineered animals and cybernetically modified humans exist but are uncommon.

The two players take the role of two adopted/foster children of Ma Tiger, a rich woman entangled in shady business who has asked them to meet together with her after many years.

The MCs are a study in contrasts, one a man who is relatively happy and at peace, and a woman who is dangerous and has much to hide.

The game is fairly brief, which is good for a multiplayer game. The roughly 30 minutes play time advertised is generally accurate.

I played through twice, and your fellow player's choices definitely affect the game. That drew me into the storyline more. The plot arc is necessarily contracted; if anything, this feels like a setup to a longer game in the same universe, not in the sense that it leaves a sequel hook, but just that many plot elements seem like they could be developed much further and there doesn't seem to be a significant emotional resolution for either character.

Overall, a solid concept. It was a bit hard to find people to match up with; perhaps one day there will be a massive online server of people just waiting to sign up to play co-op twines, but it hasn't happened yet!

This game has a great deal of potential but unfortunately doesn't pan out yet in many areas. From reading about the game, I wonder if a lot of time was spent trying out different interactive fiction engines.

You play as a young high school student who goes to school and gets stuck in a time loop. You have to replay over and over to progress.

I had a bit of trouble with figuring out how the game worked. A lot of options seem to send you to a fake-death the first time you go to them, but then they are important later.

The formatting uses centered text and no paragraph breaks. I think it would have been a bit easier to read with left-aligned text and paragraph breaks, and using a serif font and colors with less contrast than pure black and pure white.

The writing has grammar that sounds off, especially with comma use or punctuation around quotations.

Overall, I think the underlying idea is solid and there are some funny moments, but I felt unsatisfied.

This is a story about cleaning out your mother's house after she died. As you explore the house, you discover little secrets and memories here and there, piecing together a larger puzzle.

It's a melancholy game, and has some nice voice acting. The pacing of the voice acting is interesting; only the text in quotes is read out loud, but if there is narrative text between quotes then there is a space in the audio, which I can only presume is to give people a time to catch up. So it kind of presupposes the reader's reading speed, but it worked generally well for me.

The story is sad, overall, but in some ways bittersweet. One of the scenes hints at the MC being trans, but I don't believe that's related to the overall sadness.

I don't use headphones and play IF around others, usually, so I had to schedule special times to play this, but I do feel the audio effects were positive and contributed to the story.

It includes a puzzly element at the end that provided some good interaction, and exploring worked well earlier on.

I helped beta-test this game.

This game uses a custom parser first developed in Kidney Kwest, but with a twist: it's intended to be played entirely vocally.

The parser encourages you to use full sentences (so 'open door' might throw a warning that it's better to say 'open the door'). It also is designed from the ground up and seems to involve a lot of built-in systems. So, for instance, asking about the location of a thing will usually tell you what room it's in, what region it's in, etc. Due to this systematic nature, sometimes the game will omit capitalization or punctuation, but this usually not detectable in the voice version. A final issue is saying 'put Time on [anything]' (a phrase I said a lot because in my accent Time sounds like Tom to the computer), the parser says 'a bottom is not on a time'.

The game itself is simple, and gives you a lovely tutorial that shows you how the whole system works. The tutorial is, itself, a small game. The larger game is mostly interacting with things: doors, keys, containers.

When I beta tested, I completed the game, although it seems to have been expanded since then. This time I believe I got locked in an unwinnable state since I (Spoiler - click to show)left the baby in the car and went inside, and the car took off without me. Overall, I think this technology is interesting and must have been very complex to program.

This is a mid-length Twine game where you play as a visitor to some standing stones who is sucked into the ground and deposited in a strange room.

Gameplay is mostly based on exploration, inventory and examination. There is a bizarre, alien world to explore.

Overall, the concept was interesting, but I had friction in random places. There was a ton of profanity for no real reason (the game starts with a few screens of just the F-word over and over again), each page had an animation before the next page which was cool at first but slowly wore out its welcome, and a lot of choices were hard to strategize with (like choosing left or right in a featureless corridor, or only having one option)).

I definitely felt some atmosphere from the writing, and that was to me the biggest success in this story. It gave me Brian David Gilbert vibes so I start listening to some of his songs while playing.

This is a story intended for beginners, and I believe may be the author's first published game.

It's a brief parser game with a dog protagonist. You have been hurried away from your regular home and, in the tussle lost the ball.

There is a larger overarching plot, where (very early spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)the reason you are shuttered away is because bombs are dropping in Ukraine. This makes for a dramatic storyline, and what started as a personal search for a ball becomes something more selfless, urgent and important.

The game uses a fun mechanic where 'smell' is as important as 'look'.

There are some errors, mostly things that are difficult to deal with in Inform (like extra punctuation and capitalization). Other than that, this is a surprisingly smooth game with a story that ended up feeling nice.