Reviews by MathBrush

In this relatively short game set inside your house, you wander about trying to deal with your clothing that has come to life. You have to subdue and wear each piece to win.

The clothing acts like NPCs, and are pretty amusing. The puzzles are light and I finished in 15 minutes.

The story is simple, the puzzles are simple, the writing is plain, but the game concept and execution is a lot of fun.

Short fun game.

Edit:
I changed my scoring system after I gave my original 2 star review. My new system uses these criteria:

Polished: I encountered no bugs and only a few whitespace issues.
Descriptiveness: It's a little spare but is packed with jokes.
Emotion: It is funny, if a bit silly.
Interactivity: I found the puzzles satisfying.
Would I play again? Probably not. I didn't think of it until a commenter reminded me.

This beautiful web-based game (made with Vorple) tells the story of an omnipotent being who is alone and comes into contact with ordinary beings, before a more significant encounter.

The text shifts and changes on a white and black screen, with background decorations and smooth panning of screens.

The game, as others have said, seems to save the responses of previous players, and integrates them into the current game.

It's so short that you could play it 2 or 3 times in 15 minutes. Recommended.

In this web-based game, you have a house (whose address is 18 Cadence) with a map with 5 rooms and you have a year that varies from 1900 to 2000. As you change the year, the description of each room varies. You can take portions of the text out (represented as cutting it out with a knife), and lay it on a table below. As you cut out different pieces, you can arrange them all to form a story, even overlapping some to form a new sentence.

I wasn't super impressed with the cutout system as I played, but afterwards, I saw someone's story using 'Browse' and I realized that I hadn't been very creative.

The story of the succession of people and the changing quality of the neighborhood was really interesting. I know a house near where I live that was constructed in the late 1800's, and it has gone through a life cycle very similar to that of 18 Cadence.

If you try it, try browsing some stories.

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.