Reviews by MathBrush

Like all of his other games, this Andy Phillips game is extremely long. Typing in and reading the output of the walkthrough took me several days of playing.

You have an beginning area that is longer than most games, and then you can teleport to 6 different sub-areas. Each sub-area is fairly long, about as long as an IFComp game but with high difficulty.

The idea is that in the first area, you become a thief, and then in each subarea, you pull off a heist. Every kind of theft is represented: (Spoiler - click to show) housebreaking, military espionage, a booby-trapped pirate cave, a ritzy ocean liner, a museum, and the crown jewels. Each area has its own inventory separate from the others.

As always, the writing is evocative and beautiful, and the puzzles are vastly and deeply unfair. If you don't do exactly the right thing, you will die. Unusually for these games, however, is a large randomized element, so that even those using the walkthrough will have to experiment for some time. This was fun.

Overall, you really have to have a taste for this type of game to enjoy it. Without a walkthrough, don't expect to see more than 10% of the game.

I really enjoyed this game. It starts in a mall with a few stores and the Death Machine, and later branches into three possible narratives.

The message seems to be about fate and free will. The big idea is that there is a machine that prints out how you will die, and most people have tried it.

The genius of this game is that the author has thought through how the world would react to this development to a very high degree, so that the game is rich and believable.

Short but fun. Very infrequent strong profanity.

This is CYOA at it's best: incredible writing powered by a long sequence of choices whose effects multiply so rapidly that lawnmowering (repeatedly trying every option) becomes or seems difficult.

This game presents two stories; the first is a play that is being rehearsed, while the second is the mental dialog of the director. There are three actors and a stage manager you work with, and you keep track of their moods.

I avoided this game for some time because it seemed really long and complicated, but each playthrough has just the right amount of choice (about 8-12 big options). Your choices are usually to help the play or help the performers, but it's more nuanced than that.

All of the paths include discussion of sexism. Several of the paths feature it very prominently, and develop a big backstory for the protagonist.

I loved this game. Amomg the best of CYOA, and of IF in general.

Chancellor is a game that got a bit overlooked in the IFcomp for being long, of moderately hard difficulty, and not having a walkthrough. Later, it got more attention, being nominated for Best Game, Best Story, Best Writing, and Best Individual Puzzle in the XYZZY awards.

You play in two different worlds. The first is a fantasy world, where you must leave your father to undertake a quest. The second is (Spoiler - click to show)the real world, where you are a chancellor (like a resident aide) in an abandoned dormitory.

Both have a grim and brooding atmosphere, but also one of wonder at the world around you. The two worlds are interconnected.

The writing is excellent. The game is excellent. The author has a hints guide up somewhere that got me through a few tricky points, although the guide is very very minimal.

Strongly recommended.

This game was involved in a huge dispute beginning in 2014, a dispute later known as Gamergate.

But I'd like to focus on the game itself. It is a Twine CYOA game that simulates depression. It is very long; there are about 20 or more choices, each with a full page of text, and several non-choices with their own text.

You play a depressed individual, and have to choose how to deal with work, your girlfriend, your family, your real friends and internet friends. The best option is always struck out and in red, while the actual options are in blue.

You have three meters: depression level, therapy level, and medication level.

The game has very high production values, among the highest in CYOA games.

Stationfall was interesting; in some ways, I liked it better than Planetfall, although it might just be that there was so much hype about Planetfall that I found it disappointing.

Stationfall has you flying with Floyd to a space station to pick up some forms. When you arrive, the station is deserted... mostly.

The map is interesting. There is a main sphere with 8 or 9 levels. The top and bottom levels are one room each, while the middle level has fifteen or so. In addition, there are three sub-modules attached to the middle level, two of which are joined together in a big space village.

This all reminded me a lot of Starcross with its huge cylindrical map and space village. But Stationfall's map had more flavor, I feel. Meretzky has plenty of references to Planetfall, including leaving bedistors and other computer equipment laying about, as well as similarities in recorded equipment about. There is an alien code whose solution reminds me a bit of HitchHikers' Guide to the Galaxy, which is explicitly mentioned several times in the game through footnotes.

The story starts slowly, but picks up. I really enjoyed the ending sequence, and felt it provided a little more closure than most Infocom endings.

The hunger/thirst and sleep timers seemed a little easier than in the original Planetfall, although many have mentioned the tight time constraints in the game.

This game came in second in the 2006 IfComp, and was nominated for best game in the XYZZY awards.

I didn't play it for a while, because it seemed like it would be a LONG game, but it actually was shockingly short. Shorter than Photopia, for instance.

You play a middle-aged woman whose neighbor and on/off love interest is shot by his mother. You have to teleport, time travel, and explore to discover a way to fix things,

The protagonist, near he end, is conscious of the player, and so some endings are best for her, some for you, some for neither or both.

It's a fun game. Most people need hints (I used one hint in the middle, and one at the end). I recommend this game, especially due to its length.

This game is by the author of Infidels, plus Jerry Wolper. To a greater extent than most Infocom games, this game is full of small, tiny choices that will keep you from winning much, much later.

The game at first is fairly straightforward. You are a diver on an island who discovers the existence of sunken treasure (in one version of the game, it's in the Titanic; in the other, it's in a pirate ship). You're given a sequence of instructions telling you to go to different places at different times, and you just have to follow them.

Eventually, you dive, and search the wreck, finding treasure.

So where can you go wrong? You can be carrying the wrong things around the wrong people, shutting you out of victory. I think you can have stuff stolen. You can buy the wrong equipment. You can guess the wrong wreck. You can neglect to do certain activities when everyone else is busy.

So this game must be replayed over and over, following the same directions each time.

I enjoyed the story. I ended up using eristic's walk through.

You play a captain whose ship has been conquered by pirates, and yourself thrown in the brig.

After a brief, linear opening sequence, the game opens up into a large map, on a ship (the feelies include a diagram of the ship). Random encounters happen, but I saw no timers at work. You have a dozen or more options for overcoming the Pirates, and you can basically select completely different routes each time.

I wasn't completely into the game, so after exploring every room and checking things out, I went to the walkthrough for one possible solution (of which there are many). I enjoyed it. This is a game requiring a lot of exploration and experimentation if you want to solve it on your own.

I recommend the beginning to everyone, and then that you decide on your own if you want to continue.

Andy Phillips games are basically movie plots where you have to guess the exactly right actions. They are extremely long, and so difficult that I doubt anyone has completed them singlehandedly without hints.

This one is about a superhero name the Golden Crusader in Atlantic city. After an opening that is longer than most games, you are given a tutorial on how to become the next Golden Crusader and use her four big powers, you then are given five locations to visit to stop evil henchmen. The villains are memorable. One is unnecessarily sexual, killing people with sex and attraction perfume. She is the most encountered villain. The others include an evil toy maker, a pirate captain with a laser sword, a cult leader, and a magician with deadly tricks.

There's really no way to beat this without hints, but it can be fun to play with the walkthrough until you get to a cool part, play around for a bit, then continue with the walkthrough.