Reviews by MathBrush

This game is the best-developed inkle writer game I've seen. I tried it because it won the venerable Grand Prix competition.

This game is centered around a tightly-developed world model. You wake up in a strange white room and have to figure out where you are and what's going on.

This of course is the premise of dozens of IF games (including, most famously, Babel), but where Tag Der Toten shines is in its strong narrative voice. It's full of goofy humor, but it's clever goofy humor, essentially a conversation between the PC and theirself/the narrator through the use of the links.

I found the game very descriptive. Also, inkle writer can be easy to lawnmower in a parser-like world model, but the author has provided several surprises to keep you on your toes.

I give three caveats to my 5-star rating:
1. I love amnesia games.
2. I love German stories.
3. This game is not complete, in that the author plans on extra chapters being added later. That said, it took me about 2 hours to finish. However, I am not a native speaker.

This is one of Pacian's best games, which is saying a lot. It is intricate but casual, and lasts 1-2 hours for the main storyline.

You play as a ship captain whose twin brother has been taken and frozen due to your unpaid loans. You must travel to a variety of worlds and systems to get enough cash to free your brother.

The world model is purposely simple. Each world and its orbit constitute a single location. Each location has 1-5 npcs and 0-2 other nouns. The only interaction available with most NPCs is TALK TO, although some can BUY and SELL, and a few other interactions pop up later.

You can't examine anything, and there's no searching or any such thing. You just travel from world to world, building up money until you're done. There's no climactic finale, but it's still rewarding.

This game is one of the best science fiction games I have played.

This Andrew Schultz game builds and expands on one of my favorite Schultz games, Threediopolis. If you haven't played that game, you should try it out first, as this game contains spoilers for the basic concept of that game.

If you have played threediopolis, (Spoiler - click to show)this is the same sort of game, except some chess-like moves have been added, h,i,j,k. Each of these teleports you 2 spaces away in each direction. For instance, h teleports you n,e, and u, while i teleports you w,s, and u.

This makes the game more difficult. I found it helpful to read some of the documentation on the spring thing website, which will most likely be included on IFDB afterwards. It gives a helpful list of the results of 2- and 3- letter combinations, like hi.


My rating of this game is certainly subjective. The puzzles appeal to me as a mathematician because I love the interplay between freedom and constraint. Emotionally, it draws you into an exploratory/puzzly/celebratory mood. The game is definitely polished, and I plan on playing again (it's a long game, and I've only played through part of it. It's the kind of game I feel I could return to frequently to play around with). I though of taking off one point due to the lack of descriptive text, but I realized that more text would make the game difficult and tedious. The scarcity of text is a necessary part of the design.

Like I said, this game will only appeal to a certain group of people, so I can't recommend it to everyone. But fans of crosswords, cryptograms, and codewords will enjoy this game.

This game was the winner of the Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction. That contest was judged solely by Ryan Veeder, a prominent IF author.

This game takes the nursery rhyme "Little Bunny Foo Foo" and references from Veeder's games and blends them into a truly enjoyable story. The highlight of this story is the dialog, masterfully written and emotionally affecting.

You play the Good Fairy who is trying to help out Foo Foo the rabbit. There's a long street with shops and people to investigate.

It's hard to describe the game more without having you play it. Suffice it to say that this is my favorite game of 2016 (up to mid-April, when I'm rating this).

This is one of my favorites. You play as one of four characters who stole a gem from a dragon, and then lost it. You want to get it back. You can also be the dragon.

There is the adventurer, who plays as a Zork-type PC, gathering items and chatting with guards; the thief, who remains hidden and has special tools; the wizard, who can use spells; and the royal, who can command everyone and has an entourage. The dragon does, you know, dragon things.

The game is hard, but you can switch between characters at any time, and one character can see things that will help another.

Location and object descriptions are different with each character, giving the game a really varied feel.

By far, this game is the closest to a straight-up D&D type setting, which I love.

Many people seem put off by the homey charm of this Christmas game, perhaps more interested in gore or adult content. But this ASCII-art using winter game is deep and well-polished, and on the longer end for an IFComp game. It won the comp for a good reason.

First, it is beautiful. Visually, the ASCII art and color scheme help the immersion (I loved the snowflakes in the status bar). And the descriptions and responses of the text are all well-crafted and contribute to the atmosphere significantly.

Second, the puzzles are ingenious, though some reasonable alternatives are not implemented. The majority of the game centers on magical creatures, and working with them. NPC interaction is present, though limited, as is usual in games of this time period.

The story starts out extraordinarily over sweetly, but I enjoyed it, and it soon became a magic-themed puzzle fest. This game drew me in, and I would love to see more games with a fun family atmosphere instead of gritty dystopias or gruesome underground labs.

Chlorophyll felt like a commercial game to me. If Infocom had lived longer, I could see this as being one of their "Beginner" games (which were never very easy, as far as I can tell). It's well-polished, with a strong background story and lots of extra details.

It's a mid-length game set on a distant world. You play a young plant-woman with her plant-woman mother. You must explore a base while also coming to grips with your own coming adulthood and independence.

At times, I stopped playing Chlorophyll for a few weeks because the game seemed too open without much direction, and I felt overwhelmed. As I pressed through, though, I found that you were guided pretty well, and I found the last three areas enjoyable.

The only other sticking point was the long intro where you can't do very much. It made it annoying to restart. Other than that, this is one of the best 'recent' games.

Hunter, in Darkness has some of the best pacing of any IF game out there. You are hunting, in the darkness, and you must follow your prey through a cave. Things quickly go from bad to worse, and your injuries and fears come to the front.

In this game, you usually know exactly what you need to do, but may not know how to do it. The final big puzzle in particular took me a long time to get, but the writing was good enough that the game didn't feel stagnant while I was experimenting to solve it.

If you enjoyed Gun Mute or even Attack of the Robot Yeti Zombies, but wanted a more serious experience, this game is for you.

This game actually has a pretty consistent approach of its puzzles. You are an adventurer in a temple in the Everglades, seeking the water of life.

Each room has some sort of death trap. If you wait around too long, you die, but you often get hints right before you die. I only needed a hint for the very last room.

The setting made me smile on numerous occasions, such as the perfectly normal room.

Highly recommended.

This game is the second in a series, but I have not played the first. You play a magic-wielding city employee searching for water in a desert, and struggling with an alien race know as the scorpionkind.

Like the best Choice of Games, you can strongly influence your identity, your relationships, and the world environment. It is a lot like the Sims or morality-based games like Fable or Black and White, where you can affect your stats.

As for content warnings, the game has some optional adult content, and violence.

It also has a great mystery subgame.

This game did a good job at making me make tough choices. I felt really invested in my character.