Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

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.

You are a computer repairman in this game, set in a big city with dozens of buildings and a time-date system.

You are assigned various tasks, such as resetting servers or helping people with passwords. As you do so, you immediately see that the city is bizarre and strange.

If you follow your instructions to the later, you have a good chance of finding something unusual, getting pretty far, and getting stuck. To finish the game, there are 2 or 3 nondescript places you should visit, as indicated in the 'spoiler' version of the map.

There is a club floyd transcript of this game, if that helps.

Odd game, something like A Mind Forever Voyaging mixed with an Andrew Schultz game.

Adventureland was the first commercial adventure game, written by Scott Adams. It was all caps, with short, simple sentences and basic verbs.

This game is a homage to that, a Speed-IF with 7 treasures, an interesting map, and several enemies.

The game is actually very appealing; people haven't changed in the last 40 years, and there is a reason that adventureland was appealing back then. Pure minimalism really stokes the imagination. I got the same sort of feel I have talking to characters in the original Zelda game.

It's short, but difficult. With the small number of combinations possible, however, it should be possible to beat it. Pretty fun!

I've played through this game around a dozen without beating it, but it's just a lot fun. Once you've played through once, you can play through it super fast.

You are in a house with about six other people, all of whom have been invited to search for some lost treasure. Murders start happening, and you have to find the treasure and the killer.

The house has a ton of hiding places, with randomized stuff inside; there are around 4 different kinds of tools that you can use to open special hiding locations. At first, I kept restarting to get these tools, until I realized that you don't need to restart to get one of each tool.

There's a surprising backstory going on involving magic in the background. As usual for Emily Short, the story is intriguing, and involves a unique sort of magic.

It has overall a rogue-like feel. Good for fans of mystery or Rogue-likes.

In this game, you play a machine in a sort of factory that is malfunctioning. I assume the eventual goal is to escape; even with the walkthrough, I ended up dying at the second-to-last move.

The game is written bizarrely. Here is an example of it at it's worst, when going west at the beginning:

?w
Dir ALT{ER}DDDisplace-: 2 [west -> south]
(self.travelTo(loc) = nil && m$ve(her@) FAILED

At the best, it is pretty understandable; here's LOOK's output in the first room:

?l
Reclamation Sector (2)
Cleared area amongst to-be-reforged bodies; gap(s) movement(allow) west, north; other exits apparent lacking.
To the north you see salvager-class machine.

So you see now what type of game this is. There are enemies that will harm you, there are other units whose parts you can scavenge. It's all bizarre.

A unique experience.

This game purports to be a parody of escape-the-room puzzles, but it really ends up being a fairly standard version of the game, using the 'parody' aspect as an excuse for silly plot points or obscure puzzles.

The main difference between this and a standard game is scoring; you get no points for actions that lead to you winning. Instead, you get points for finding easter eggs.

At least one of the puzzles in the game is pretty clever, though, and not completely trivial to code.

Recommended for fans of one-room escape games.

This shortish HTML TADS game was the first to use that platform, incorporating images into the text. The images are crayon drawings and playdough photographs. These worked in HTML TADS on my Windows machine, but something was wrong with the text formatting and status line, and the game crashed. I finished on Gargoyle with no images.

The story and puzzles are simple; aliens land in your backyard and demand some items; you have to investigate them and deal with your parents, too.

Some of the puzzles were a bit obscure, but there aren't too many to go through. The writing was fun.

I was frustrated by the interpreter issues, and so I didn't enjoy it as much as I would have if it worked perfectly. This reinforces my thoughts that pure text without effects is the best for long-term use.