Reviews by MathBrush

This game is a custom web parser built from UnityGl. It seems to work based on searching for one or more keywords in your text, ignoring extra words.

It's built around the trolley dilemma, which is an ethics puzzle: if you know someone is about to die (due to, say, a trolley crash) and you could stop it by having other people die, what would you do?

In this game, your choice on one trolley puzzle may lead to another and another and another. You have 51 possible outcomes to search for.

It was interesting, but hard to interact with.

This game is a homebrew parser game. It seems expansive at first, intimidatingly so, but it soon settles down to a fairly small, nice-sized map.

Unfortunately, the possibility space of commands is fairly high. In most modern parser games, Inform or TADS take care of common synonyms (LOOK AT vs. X vs. EXAMINE, TAKE vs. GET, etc.), and new verbs are generally hinted at in the text or provided by using items where only one word works (a shovel leads to DIG, for instance), and extensive beta-testing finds all synonyms a general player might use. This fails at times, frequently even, but it is a standard that is widespread among Inform/TADS authors.

Games written in other engines tend not to have this flexibility (with Robin Johnson's Versificator parser games being a notable exception). The standard synonyms in Inform and TADS are the results of hundreds of hours of work and playtesting, and even well-established rival engines like Quest and Adrift fail to come close to their standards. And personally written parsers tend to have even more trouble.

This is a long-winded way of saying that there are a lot of commands I wouldn't have guessed on my own without the walkthrough. Besides that, I adored this game. Crossing the chasm reminded me of The Neverending Story for some reason, finding the island reminded me of the first Zelda game. A fun slice of enjoyment.

Tohu wa Bohu is intentionally poetic, utilizing allegorical language, stream-of-consciousness, and unusual punctuation and capitalization.

It's developed in texture, with a short, skippable intro followed by a 19-part quiz, with each quiz question actually a link to another poem segment, some with images or other enhancements.

I found it well-done and beautiful. The reason for my low score is my scale. I found it:

-polished, and
-descriptive,

but somehow I felt an emotional distance that kept me from fully enjoying the piece. And, occasionally, the sheer length of the piece made the dragging and dropping tedious, leading me to be unlikely to play again.

If you're interested in poetic IF, I'd check this out.

This parser game has an intriguing concept: provide psychological therapy while playing a game.

You play in a metaphorical and dreamlike world, with trolls in houses and random cookware scattered everywhere.

The therapy occurs in the gameplay: you are told relaxation techniques and other tips, asked to exercise them in-game, and generally work on laughter, dance, happiness and fixing things.

This game has a lot of implementation trouble, both with guess-the-verb and unclear instructions. This gets in the way of the relaxation experience, and makes me less likely to play again in the future.

This game was entered in IFComp 2018.

Escape from Dinosaur Island is a homebrew parser game that features nice coloring and styling.

The parser has most of the weaknesses of homebrew parsers in general, mostly a lack of synonyms or responses for things like 'get up' or 'push basket'. However, this is alleviated by generous in-game hinting of the correct verbs.

The plot and gameplay are Scott-Adams-esque: each room has an item or two, the plot is mostly scenery for the fun setting and puzzles, and most of the gameplay is bringing the right item to the right place.

If you like that style of gameplay (like I do), then this will be a fun little nugget of gameplay.

Twine games often fall into two traps: branching too much (so that playthroughs are short and miss almost all content) or branching too little (so that players feel frustrated, as if their choices don't matter). Games with strong writing can make up for this (like Myriad or Polish the Glass), but it's definitely a big problem for this system.

Pseudavid sidesteps this problem neatly by using a unique form of interaction. The player is put into a physical space and allowed to navigate while multiple storylines unfold simultaneously.

The game, then, becomes about being in the right place at the right time. It gives you a real sense of a bigger world, of life and vitality.

I suggest playing this game multiple times to see the different storylines.

The one thing that I had trouble with was, even when I knew exactly what I wanted to do and had some ideas about how to do it, I had trouble carrying it out.

(Note: I helped beta test this game.)

This was one of of my favorite games of the competition. It’s a smooth Twine game that plays well both on desktop and mobile.

You play as a ghost who died, or was murdered, during Thanksgiving. You have to simultaneously learn (as a player) about the neighborhood while gathering (as a ghost) mental clues to find out what happened.

The game is divided into two chunks: exploration and linking. Exploration has you looking through the thoughts of others to gain clues, and linking has you pick two related clues to produce a new one in a complex multi-layered system. I’ve seen mysteries use this technique (and written one), but this is the best implementation of the idea I’ve seen so far, and very satisfying. I got stuck near the end, but I feel like a puzzle game is perfect difficulty if I do well until the end and need a hint then.

Great for mystery fans, and fun for everyone.

This was one of the best and most-talked-about games form IFComp 2018.

I played through this one once during the comp and about 6 or 7 times afterwards.

This game has some of the greatest responsivity I've ever seen in a choice game. You make a choice between several different characters to inhabit 4 regions of a robot-child's body. Each area of the body has 3 choices.

Throughout the game, the character inside a given area will talk, and there are 3 variants every time this happens. In addition, there is a point where any two characters can talk to each other, which gives (I believe) around 90 combinations, some of which are merged but still very impressive. There are multiple pathways through everything.

Basically, this is a combinatorial explosion game, which are usually very short because it's impossible to make them long. This is a long game, though, so that means the author worked incredibly hard.

It also made me laugh a lot at different points, literally laughing out loud (for instance when (Spoiler - click to show)Charlie the robot is standing in the toilet flushing his feet over and over until mom comes in).

I'm giving it 4 stars just because I felt that, although my choices mattered a lot, it was hard for me to make and execute plans. I tried so many times just to get to Martin's house, even with the author's help, and I wish I could have known better how to do that. But this is an incredible achievement of a game.

I helped to beta test this game.

This is a fairly big conversational game set in medieval Scotland. The player must converse with over a dozen characters to figure out who is planning a murder.

The ambitious game design makes this feel epic, and it's exciting to get tangled up in the web of deceit. However, the large number of characters and the many topics makes for a combinatorial explosion, and it becomes easy to get lost in a forest of information.

The author has an Introcomp game that is also set in medieval times that is worth checking out.

This IFComp 2018 game features a professional thief protagonist who is exploring an old, haunted mansion with the intent of finding treasure.

The style is unique to the company, Intudia, with numerical choices listed in the text and buttons with numbers on them lined up below.

The game itself has an intricate backstory, with the mansion having many levels and many ghosts and villains.

There are numerous problems, however. The text is overly long at times, with scattered grammatical errors (like 'to' instead of 'too). The numbers on the bottom are often in a strange pattern with one number far to the side of the others. Instead of tracking state, it seems as if the game relies on you to remember what actions you took in the past.

Still, the story is compelling, and a fun read for fans of horror.