Reviews by MathBrush

This game does two interesting things: everything is in poetry, and you are in a place where space and time are warped.

This is fun, but the game is really very difficult; it's hard to have any idea at all what to do. Much of what you do is based on paradoxes.

I enjoyed this game with the walkthrough, but I don't know how it would be without it.

Anssi Raisanen has written several Alan games over the years with a certain sort of puzzly style, and I've grown to enjoy them.

This game has you escaping from a wine cellar in a castle, finding and helping a wizard, and rescuing a king.

Anssi's games have a very consistent style, so if you like one, you'll like them all. The Chasing is another good one.

This was an entertaining game from IFcomp 2002.

You explore your house, looking for your notes. As you find notes, you have a sort of flashback or dream of a greek mythological figure.

I enjoyed these vignettes more than the house filled with greek mythology-named cats.

The game was a bit underclued, though, and it was hard to get invested.

This game is one of those frequent IFComp middle games that are big, fairly well polished, but without the snazzy setting or good cluing that would make it wonderful.

You explore an office with several cubicles, each presenting its own challenge (dealing with an npc, helping a tech repair guy, etc.)

Overall, though, you're unlikely to finish without a walkthrough.

In this game, you are trying to catch a cult leader.

You have a number of colored objects, and you have puzzles of the 'explore the complex mechanisms' type.

I found it incredibly obtuse, but some others rated it highly. If you like puzzles like the goat and the fox or towers of hanoi (neither of which appears in this game), you may like this game.

This is an action-heavy game set in medieval times, a sort of romance.

You play a young woman whose leg is damaged at a young age, before being forced to reside with a cruel lord. In several cinematic or conversational scenes, you decide your future, dealing with brigands and romance.

The biggest problem here, and it's a problem with many of Fischer's other well-put-together games, is in the cluing. It's hard to know exactly what you're meant to do. The game could use a great deal of more direction.

This game actually reminded me of the new game Niney (in 2017), where you 'become' different things for this people.

This game has you perform a task for 26 different people (not related to the alphabet). However, knowing what you need to do is really, really hard, involving a cryptographic puzzle.

Then the game involves color shifting and sorting, with a cool ending.

The code shows a character named Polly, but I didn't find them.

This game has you house-sitting for your friend, but problems begin to show up.

It's bold and innovative: there's a responsive cat NPC, there is a system where you read and study books to memorize them, a slick TV hint delivery system, and so on, but it seems like it never got that last month or weeks of polishing that would have pulled it all together. Like Happy Ever After from this comp, this game seems influenced to a degree by Mulldoon Legacy, with a mysterious friend who has left, leaving their house open with a portal in it to a more rustic world.

This is a sort of cross between Zork and arabian nights. You have on the one hand sultan's guards with scimitars and bazaars, and on the other hand you have soda vending machines and currency based on King Mycroft.

I found a few game-killing bugs in Gargoyle (when asking the merchant about a few things), but it might just be my interpreter.

I liked the puzzles, though they were hard to guess at times. A lot of people liked the original way of getting past the dog.

This is a Star Trek-esque game. After a brief opening sequence with some guess-the-verb stuff, you are woken from cryosleep and have to repair a station.

The station has hallways A through J that are all identical, and minimally described, as well as a variety of other rooms. There are some fun things here, but I found a lot of it frustrating. The centerpiece of the game is a series of several EVA expeditions that realistically model 3d movement without friction. I found this to be tedious.