Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

Gourmet is a fairly well-known game that succeeds in slapstick comedy while having some pretty hard puzzles.

You are a chef having a disaster of a night as a well-known critic comes to your restaurant. You have to pass a linear sequence cell of challenges to have a good review.

The game felt uncomfortably complicated when I started, but then I realized that you should just follow directions at first and not stress about all the stuff. As you go, the game teaches you more about you restaurant and the system.

Then it dumps you into one very hard puzzle that includes a lot of talking and psychological work on both humans and a crustacean. This puzzle is very difficult.

I enjoyed the game. I could not finish, due to the game having a weird error with serving the final course, but I would put this game in the top 20% of all games.

Kathleen Fischer is one of my favorite writers, with the conversation game Redemption and the romance game Masquerade.

The game is a departure for her, consisting of one huge mechanical puzzle. However, it still includes her trademark writing and memory system.

You are alone on a world whose people you saw die 20 years earlier. You roam about, remembering the tragedy, and solving puzzles to get your tool to repair your ship.

The puzzles is fiendish, even on easy mode. Hard mode is well night impossible.

There is no walkthrough, but I found some hints on googles archives of the old rec.games.intfiction site.

I recommend it for fans of big puzzles or haunting atmosphere.

This is one of the weirdest games I have yet played. You are thrust into a room where every single object speaks. After talking to them, you are placed in a puzzle where you can physically manipulate the words in the room description. After that, you enter a bizarre world with doll-like humans you can move around, undress, and interact with. Then a bizarre maze, and finally a nonsensical last world with bizarre symbology.

I honestly have no idea what was going on here, but the puzzles are more or less pretty fun.

Recommended for fans of the bizarre and weird.

This game paints a unique world, where religious hierarchies are structured by the alphabet, and assassination is a good career move.

You are an A, right at the top of the line, but everyone is gunning for you. In this mid length, relatively easy game, you have to dodge multiple assassination attempts while thinking on your feet.

Wonderful for fans of atmosphere, setting, and world-building.

This game has an interesting opening; you are in a movie theatre, watching a giant monster movie. The game is in third person, with the main character's actions being narrated by the observer in the audience.

The actual action has a brief intro, followed by the actual puzzle. You move in 3d on a map with a ton of fake locations and some (labelled) real locations. This puzzle seemed really hard, but it turns out that there are 4 different solutions.

This is the only giant monster attack game I have played, and it was really fun in its sphere.

Atomic heart is a good game at heart, but with an annoying number of missing synonyms, unclear descriptions, and a lot of tedious commands. It prominently features a cable and socket system which reminds me of Jack Witham's later Final Exam.

You play a nanny robot protecting a boy. After a brief introductory segment, you enter a larger and dangerous world. With a fragile companion, you explore a landscape fraught with danger and cables.

A key object in the opening area gave me no indication of what I was able to do with it. One room had no description except for "This is Gary's room", or something like that.

If these flaws were patched up, this game would be pretty sweet. But as it is, it's an exercise in frustration.

In this darkly atmospheric game, you play as two different characters bound on a train. The game allows you to switch back and forth between these characters.

The main gameplay is set in two seemingly disconnected areas: a giant pit of hell, and a vast machine chewing up the earth and feeding it to a horrible beast.

In both areas, you are trying to collect pieces of yourself or your memories. Painful recollections come to mind.

This game is nonintuitive; there are some pretty crazy leaps you have to make to get the game started. The very biggest leap (which you need to know pretty early on) is that (Spoiler - click to show)by destroying something in one world, you can make it appear in another. A much milder spoiler is the command to switch between worlds: (Spoiler - click to show)BE [PERSON].

I got one bad ending and one good ending. I like this kind of story. If you like this game, you may like Sentencing Mr. Liddell.

Frobozz Magic Support is a game that emulates Infocom's Spellbreaker, as well as Zork; you use a white cube to travel to six different locations, where you deal with a pot of gold over a rainbow, a dark room with grues, battery-powered lanterns, scrolls, etc.

It was an enjoyable game. The NPCs are a bit outdated, but the puzzles are fresh and fun.

Zork-based games are not as popular now, though they still come out (Scroll Thief came out in 2015), but as a fan of the Enchanter series, I enjoyed this game.

Contains a hard cryptogram.

Everybody Loves a Parade is a mid-length puzzle game in which you are stopped by a parade. You have to explore and scrounge up a variety of items to be able to escape.

The puzzles are old-school flavor; find items by searching or carefully reading room description, use them in unintuitive ways, and do some unmotivated actions. However, it is pretty fun, and I solved a few puzzles without the walkthrough.

The game is implemented well, with a lot of background character.

Many reviews at the time this came out mentioned a big surprise late in the game. The years since this game came out have significantly softened the surprise here (I thought it was going to be the standard 'this was all a dream' surprise, but it wasn't). This gives an interesting commentary on the changes in interactive fiction in the last couple of decades.

There are some lewd parts (a pornographic magazine, some dirty-minded individuals), but overall mild.

This game reminds me of a mix of Lime Ergot and Lord Bellwater's Secret. As in Lime Ergot, you investigate an object, then examine something in its description, then so on for many levels, discovering information.

Otherwise, the game is a close relative of Lord Bellwater's Secret. In both games, you explore a study looking for secrets. You examine a variety of objects in order to find a code, open a safe, and get out. You have to find every single part of the code, in a tedious affair. I used a walkthrough and never looked back.

This game has a few issues. For instance, other reviewers noted that you can't use the adjective of an object to refer to it, or just the noun if there is a disambiguation; you must use both. Some objects are never mentioned; you just have to assume they are there. You have to look behind stuff in the oddest locations, and interact with objects in unusual ways.

I recommend this only to those who love games like Lime Ergot with incredible levels of detail. The game is very rewarding in this way.