Reviews by MathBrush

Star cross was fun to try on my own without a walkthrough, at first. You are a miner in space, looking for an asteroid, when you encounter an unusual object.

This game plays out on a large cylindrical map, with dynamics similar to those described in Ender's Game. You encounter a wide variety of creatures. The map eventually overwhelmed me; it is a huge map, and hard to draw out yourself (just look at the official maps!).

I used a lot of hints, eventually (including one near the beginning).

The main gameplay mechanic is a lock-and-key type puzzle, where you find about a dozen color-coded objects and corresponding places to put them.

I actually preferred this to Planetfall; that game's 4 timers (hunger, sleep, (Spoiler - click to show)disease, flood), combined with an empty map and red herrings, left me frustrated (Enchanter's three similar timers were compensated for by a simple map and dense useful object placement). Star cross was fun, even though I mostly used a walkthrough. The deaths were all fun, too.

Having just played Deadline for the first time, Witness was not as good, but still very polished. As others have noted, the solution to whodunnit isn't that hard. How they did it is harder.

Again, Sergeant Duffy is here to analyze everything for you . Again, there is a death you must investigate, and a (this time smaller) cast of characters you can interrogate.

You witness the death of a man, and you must uncover the mystery behind his death (thus the name of the game).

This was Infocom's second mystery game, and (I believe) the only one by Stu Galley.

This game is a demo, showing what TADS can do (back in 1990, before the many updates it has experienced). In that sense, it's somewhat similar to Graham Nelson's Deja Vu and/or Balances, which were meant to show off Inform.

The writing is fairly spare, and most rooms have only one item. Many things are shown off: ability to tie things and thus change exits; chutes leading from one area to another; putting things in an object; NPCs that follow you around; a money system; a funnel; etc.

The storyline was only thinly sketched; you walk around collecting a random series of objects on a college campus for Ditch Day, when seniors pose problems to freshmen.

I haven't played the sequels yet, but I intend to. Deep Space Drifter was an immediate sequel, which had mixed reception. But Return to Ditch Day, written over a decade later to show off TADS 3, was good enough to get a Best Game XYZZY nomination, so I look forward to playing it.

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.