Reviews by MathBrush

This well-researched difficult game takes characters on a tour through the history of New York, much like A Mind Forever Voyaging took players through a fictional city's history.

Unlike Voyaging,this is a very hard puzzle game. I've been playing many early XYZZY awards, and this is a classic late 90's game. Excellent writing, clever puzzles, but no way on earth you'll get them. Multi-object puzzles involving creative uses of items from every area of the game, bizarre required actions, etc. This is not bad, it's just the period's ideal. I used a walkthrough the whole time.

I loved the writing, and the obvious love of the author for New York and its history. The various ranks you get correspond to real historical New York mayors.

This is a speedcomp game (entered in Ludum Dare) about an old west cowboy who is being pursued by a mysterious figure. You can remember advice, choose something to help you, and choose where to hide.

Every page has 8-bit style graphics, which reminded me a lot of Oregon Trail.

The game invites you to replay it several times. I went through three rounds of playing through the game.

The twist is not really my cup of tea, but overall, this is a strong game.

Best of Three is a menu-driven conversation game by Emily Short set entirely in the real world.

The game is a vast labyrinth of twisting conversation and topics. The characters are classic Short characters; young, independent, world-wise woman and slightly older, cynical and slightly dissipated man.

The game has a grey and 'ending' feeling. I have only played to one ending so far, and I assume there is a better one, but no matter what, there is no black-and-white happy ending in this game. But I still enjoyed it.

I put off this game for a long time because of the profanity in the opening scene; often. Once I started it, I was pleased to see that it had disappeared.

One playthrough took around 15 minutes.

This time travel game has been compared to many other such games, including ones before it (like Sorceror's and Spellbreaker's puzzles) and those after it (such as Fifteen Minutes). It works, and it is simpler than many, but the story is a bit weak.

You are a member of the Galactic Marines investigating a lab. The rest of the review is in spoilers, though it doesn't give away more than the first ten or twenty turns.

(Spoiler - click to show)You soon find yourself stuck in a time loop, where a critical event sends you back in time every few turns. You see the previous version of yourself, performing your last set of actions. You have to figure out how to stop the explosions, and how to interact with you doppleganger, and the interactions can occur in strange ways.

I recommend it, but not for everyone. Mostly those who enjoy puzzles.

Axolotl is a fantastic sci fi Twine game with a large map, big inventory, multiple NPC's with menu-driven conversation, and so on.

You play a researcher of alien salamanders on the moon. The corporation you are working for is breathing down your neck, and things start to go wrong. A mystery develops, a surprisingly deep mystery, that I found extremely satisfying.

Also, this is a surprisingly fresh Twine game, as it avoids many of the overused Twine tropes: world-weariness, body horror, and psychological metaphor are all avoided for a better sci fi story.

One of the best Twine games ever.

Scroll Thief was an Introcomp game that was received well and is now finished. In this game, you are a student who is trying to steal some magic as you deal with the events occurring in the game Spellbreaker.

The game is split into two parts, Act I and Act II. In Act I, you are searching a magical library for enough spells to make it worth your while. As you do so, you begin to get the sense of a larger storyline, and Act II ties into this.

Act I plays out almost like a large escape-the-room puzzle, like Suveh Nux. You are mostly on your own, investigating a variety of enchantments and magical objects, and tinkering with them until you are ready to leave.

I preferred Act II, which reminded me more of the original Enchanter games. You are tasked with discovering more about a mysterious and threatening situation, and you enter some darker and more dangerous regions. It is a bit shorter than Act I, which keeps the game from dragging.

Overall, the game is well-polished, with many testers listed and no errors I found. I had trouble finding topics to discuss with the NPCs, but I may just have tried the wrong topics. The game has implemented some unusual things with difficult-to-code objects and situations (involving long-distance communication and rope, among other things).

The game references Enchanter a lot, but you should be able to play without any previous knowledge of Enchanter (I recall that I was able to play Balances, a small game in the same world, without having played Enchanter). The author also includes references to his testers and Club Floyd players, which I think is nice.

The hints are progressive-style, and purposely don't tell you everything. So even with the hints, you have to make some small leaps of intuition. I enjoyed that, as I play most games with the walkthrough from the get-go, and it was nice to experience those jumps again.

Overall, I recommend it, and strongly recommend it to fans of the Enchanter trilogy.

I played this Hugo game on Gargoyle. This game was nominated for a Best Game XYZZY award in 2005. You play a woman who just crashed on a strange planet and must survive. It feels like a shipwreck story, in a good way.

The game is very constrained. WAIT is disabled as a command! There are only ten locations, and only 4 of them have anything interesting; out of those four, two have exactly one item and one action you need to do.

I didn't like this game at first, for those reasons, but after I played it, the story stuck in my mind. The writing is descriptive and evocative, the items are well-described and creative. It is a game much better than the sum of its parts.

Planetfall is many people's favorite IF of all time, so I knew it would be hard for it to live up to the hype. However, I think I just don't like Meretzky's style (e.g. Sorceror, the puzzles in Hitchhiker's Guide, etc.). He tends to favor big, mostly-empty complexes with many useless items thrown in to make it hard to find the real puzzles.

This worked for me in A Mind Forever Voyaging, but in Planetfall, I felt like I was just walking through an abandoned warehouse. I much prefer Moriarity's tightly-interlocking puzzle style, or Lebling and Blank's rich puzzle variety.

In planetfall, you play a lowly ensign in space who crash lands on a deserted planet, meeting a friendly robot named Floyd and trying to discover what happened. The resolution of the puzzles and storyline is satisfying, and the writing has several high points.

I recommend this game, but not as high as the Enchanter trilogy, Moriarity's games, or even Ballyhoo, which I loved.

I loved Deadline. I didn't get too far on my own in solving the mystery, but I spent a long time exploring and having fun.

This is a mystery game, where a man has been found dead, and you have to investigate the house and people in it. Everyone walks around, has scripted events, etc. I asked everyone about everyone else, examined the crime scene, etc.

I missed an important verb which is listed in the manual, and which you are supposed to know from the beginning; typing ANALYZE or ANALYZE [SOMETHING] FOR [SOMETHING] sends someone to analyze stuff for you.

Now so many other games make sense. For instance, Jon Ingold's Make It Good really borrows a lot from this game, and now I realize it must have been an intentional homage, meant to help and mislead the experienced gamer (which I wasn't when I played it).

Deadline was an early experiment in timed and scripted events, as well as extensive conversation.. Games like Varicella or Pytho's Mask may not have existed without this one.

It' s also very hard, in unfair ways. I recommend eventually settling on a walkthrough. Like the great novels of the 1600's-1800's, it was designed to last for a long period of time in the absence of other material.

This is one of Emily Short's best plots, which is saying a lot. You are a daring member of a secret group infiltrating a party, with a vibe like the Scarlet Pimpernel and plot with pleasant similarities to Shakespeare (masked figures, cross dressing women, court intrigue, etc.)

The game features a menu-driven conversation system where you can change the topic using 'TOPIC [SOMETHING]'.

I found the many characters interesting and intriguing. It took me a while to warm up to Short's typical character types in her games, but it's hard not to be a fan when you play so many very-high-quality games by the author.

Everyone mentioned some hiccups. I had to peek at a walkthrough once to get through a confusing area. But I find that highly polished, perfect games are often less enjoyable than the raw games where an author pushed boundaries (like this game) or poured out their heart (like Worlds Apart). Not that these aren't polished, but they contain some flaws. Great literature is similar; the long, boring setup in an Agatha Christie novel is what sets up the great conclusion, and often the boring part is where the best conversations and set pieces are.