Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

Stephen Granade is the author of Losing Your Grip, one of my favorite games. So I was excited to try this one.

This was entered in the Jay is Games casual gameplay competition, which produced another favorite game, Plotkin's Dual Transform. In Fragile Shells, you play an astronaut with a concussion in a piece of a space station that is heavily damaged. You have to figure out a way to get out.

The game was fun; there are 8 points to win, and each is a relatively simple task, but requires some lateral thinking. I was able to get about 5-6 points on my own. However, I had some trouble when I knew what I needed to do, but didn't know about certain capabilities of the equipment. (For instance, I didn't know with the panel that you could (Spoiler - click to show)connect two wires together<\spoiiler>).

Overall, a fun, fairly short game. Good for fans of science fiction.

In this game, you are Commissar of the communist party in a capitalist town. You are given a series of tasks to accomplish to promote the cause of the communist party.

The game has several clever puzzles, and the puzzles have multiple solutions, which is fun. However, some of the puzzles seemed unintuitive.

The game is written from the viewpoint of a strongly anti-capitalist communist man, and the reactions to things like Starbucks is pretty amusing.

I didn't find this game as funny as some of the other reviewers did, although the confusion between Karl Marx and Groucho Marx was fun, as was the endgame.

Overall, I recommend that you try the first part; it's a very good representative of the rest of the game, and that way you'll know if you like it.

This is a very good choicescript game where you start a team and then race against 8 other teams. The losing team at each stage is booted out.

I really enjoyed this game, though I only got 1 out of 15 accomplishments when I won. It really feels like a gameshow, and it's always nervewracking trying the puzzles, because you know someone's competing against you.

Puzzles include searching for clues, remembering directions, typing in answers to cryptography, etc.

There is a hidden plotline which I didn't find out enough about.

Would play again, and strongly recommend.

This game made me smile. You crashland on the island of Calembour and have to explore it to find Handsome and give him a bag.

The whole place is full of puns and silly jokes. For instance, you can walk into a bar (ouch!) or talk to a brick wall. The solution to many puzzles made me laugh or groan. When I finally found out what to do with magic marker, I shook my head and giggled.

There is a lot of dumb juvenile humor, with perhaps too many double entendres, especially about breasts. It reminds me of my friends when I was a fourteen year old boy, so that could be a turn off.

Only recommended for fans of puns.

This game is by Andrew Schultz, a noted author of puzzle and wordplay games. You go around a three dimensional city with a list of tasks and addresses to complete them at.

Part of the game is just figuring out what is going on, which I didn't experience, as I already knew the premise.

The puzzles in this game are challenging but fun. Andrew has made it easier by not requiring you to solve every puzzle to beat the game.

A must-play for fans of wordplay.

Bonehead is an enjoyable game based on real life. You play Fred Merkle, a player for the Giants in 1908, who was famous for a mistake he made that year.

You are taught about baseball in the game, including how to catch and how to hit the ball.

There is a lot of simulation-based information in the game (they tell you exactly what to do for different types of pitches), and so I thought that most of the puzzles would be simulation-based. However, at least two of the puzzles are traditional parser puzzles.

I enjoyed the writing and graphics, and it made the game come alive to me. The chatter of the crowd, the words of the people around you, really transport you to the past.

Great for fans of baseball, history, simulation games, or a good story.

This game is written in a custom platform that is visually beautiful and allows for text to be adapted on the fly by clicking on links.

This game centers around a mystical version of France where the nobility have access to magic. This magic system is developed further in the earlier games Savoir Faire and Damnatio Memoriae.

In this games, you write rough drafts of letters, clicking on parts of the texts to rewrite, erase, or expand on your meaning. Different choices presumably lead to different endings. I found the game to be slow to be slow at first and more exciting later.

This games takes about twenty to sixty minutes to play.

This game would work great as a text adventure (which it is), a point-and-click, a sidescroller, and frankly just about anything.

You are stuck with a rat captain and have to get out of sinking ship as fast as possible, grabbing whatever treasure you can. There are some mild puzzles (and probably some harder ones I couldn't figure out), but mostly you just try to figure out what's worth saving.

This is pretty fun. I enjoyed spending a ton of turns trying to get an obscure object only to discover it was completely worthless. Sometimes things are not what they seem (diamonds in the rough) and sometimes they are what they seem (dirt clods in the rough).

Lots of fun, and super short (to maximize replay value). I recommend a few playthroughs for fun.

Changes is a fairly long game, about as long as, say, Spider and Web. It is set on an alien planet with a variety of animals that move about and act independently. There are ten or twenty locations, and not that many items.

The game has a very curious mechanic, which I didn't really figure out without resorting to the walkthrough: (Spoiler - click to show)You have to kill other animals in order to become them. This mechanic means that your abilities are constantly changing, and you have to reevaluate the environment that you are in and what it can do. The ability to see the same environment from multiple perspectives is a real treat, similar to Heroes.

As some have said, the puzzles are fairly frustrating. I didn't complete any protagonist's quest without hints, although I knew exactly what I needed to do for the second one.

The writing is beautiful and evocative. Some have compared it to Avatar, and that is fairly accurate. It is also very similar to the Ender's Game series (specifically, the pequeninos), and uses some of the same terminology.

The game includes cut scenes after every major success. I loved them; they were wonderful. The ending left me wanting a bit more; it felt abrupt and unsatisfying.

Overall, a fun game. Not likely to be completed without a walkthrough; like most such games, the walkthrough tells you shouldn't use it. Authors frequently overestimate readers' abilities to complete games without hints. I recommend this game, with hints, after exploration.

Doctor M is perhaps most famous for being part of the 4-game 'hat puzzle' (involving 3 other games from the IFComp). However, it stands well on its own.

There is a subgenre of IF consisting of games where you reflect on a life through flashbacks, and have to decide if you did the right thing or not. Tapestry, Photograph, and Map are examples.

Doctor M takes this on with panache. You have to revisit the death of three victims of you, a mercy-killing doctor. You then can choose your interpretation of the events.

There are some mild puzzles, including hunt-the-scenery and read-the -descriptions-carefully puzzles. There is one or two problems requiring a leap of intuition.

The writing was good. I believe some people said they didn't like the heavy-handedness of the moral dilemma presented in the game, but it's what's needed for this type of work.

The game has a literal angel and devil, and has 3 endings.

I enjoyed this game. I recommend it for fans of the afterlife genre.