Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

First Things First was nominated for an XYZZY award for Best Game, and won Best Puzzles, among others.

In this game that starts out very slowly, you quickly progress to an interesting situation similar to A Mind Forever Voyaging or Lost New York, where you can investigate a mid-size map over 50 years using a time machine. Your actions in certain time periods strongly affect the future in interesting ways.

This is definitely the best long-form time travel I have played, as I felt Lost New York (which explores New York over a century or two) and Time: All Things Come to an End (which explores many epochs in a linear fashion) had relatively unfair puzzles.

IFDB has version 3.0, but the walkthrough is for 1.1, so it didn't work in places. I am a walkthrough junkie, so it was hard for me to beat it, but I was able to guess from the walkthrough what I should try next, and eventually worked my way through it.

The game has good characters, beautiful settings, and a bit of a confused plot, which is natural given the main gameplay mechanic.

For simulation fans, it has an interesting money/bank account/investment system.

Strongly recommended for everyone. (Note: the first area seems incredibly boring, but it gets better and better. I started to like the game as soon as I made it into (Spoiler - click to show)the garage.)

This is a hidden gem. This game was nominated for 4 xyzzy awards, including Best Game. The author also wrote two other Best Game nominees, Distress and Tales of the Travelling Swordsman.

This game is not played often because it is a homebrew parser game, written in QBasic, only playable in a DOS emulator. It was not hard for me at all to get this, though, as described below.

(The following discussion describes how to play the game. It is under spoilers to save space):(Spoiler - click to show)

Lunatix can only be played on a DOS emulator, as far as I can tell. Several people recommended I use DOSbox, which is a well-known, easy to use emulator. The game played great! I followed instructions by Juhana

type the following commands once DOSbox is started:
"mount c path/to/" (where path/to/ is the directory on your computer where you unzipped the game. For instance, I had it in a folder called temporary, so I typed "mount c C:\temporary")

"c:" (this changes the current folder to the one you defined as c: earlier)

"lunatix" (this runs the game. I recommend doing "lunatix /t /m" to play in pure text mode without it locking your mouse. The game has great graphics, but I'm used to just text. I loved the picture of the squid, though)

The game is about exploring a large asylum as the director, one who has lost control of the asylum to the insane, who force you to take a drug trip.

The game is pretty humorous, like a less-profane version of Blue Chairs with slightly more reality. The building is like the hospital in One Eye Open without any gore.

The puzzles include a mix of searching (the hidden locations follow patterns, so once you get used to hit, you can find everything), and passwords/codes, which also aren't too hard. It's definitely a 90's game, with some puzzles just for the sake of puzzles. I really enjoy games from this era.

The setting is great; the inmates have their own language, money, economy, etc.

The parser is not as bad as I was led to believe; however, I had a walkthrough, so I knew when to guess the verb and when not to. I would rate it above Infocom and below a customized set of Inform responses.

The game is mid-length.

This game was written as part of a competition to extend the universe of Andromeda Awakening and Andromeda Apocalypse, two of the best sci fi games out there.

This game plays with constraints in a very effective way. As the game opens, you are strapped into a bunk, unable to move. The setting will make much more sense for those who have played the first Andromeda game.

The game is mostly conversation based. It has a Gostak or For a Change feel, where you have to try and decipher what other people are saying. This part was a lot of fun, developing a new slang.

The game is quite short; I finished without a walkthrough in less than twenty minutes. However, it is very well crafted. There are supposedly many endings, but I have only reached one, and it was a good one,

This possibly has the highest fun-to-time ratio of any game I have played, so I recommend it to everyone..

This Porpentine game was published in Sub-Q magazine, which is filling the void many people have felt for a venue for IF publication.

Neon Haze is about someone in the future who is going through a rehab program for (Spoiler - click to show)Vessel Syndrome, which makes you feel like you are just a vessel for others, and have no identity.

You have very little interaction with other beings, and you like it that way. There is one main NPC and a few others.

Like all Porpentine games, this game is highly symbolic. The clickable words are made to look like neon lights, and there is a bright neon background. I found both of these things distracting.

Overall, this was not my favorite Porpentine game; there was a good storyline, but the visuals were highly distracting. It's worth a try, though.

Contains some strong language, violence, sexual references, etc. Nothing is very graphic, however; much less than Cyberqueen, a little more than With Those We Love Alive.

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.