Reviews by MathBrush

This mid-length, fairly difficult parser game took second place in IFComp the year it was entered. You play a voyager who stops to investigate a goblin cave that a peddler wants looted.

The game allows you to make a variety of choices; for instance, you find various pieces of loot that you can trade for magical equipment. Every choice of equipment leads to a different way of beating the game.

The game has a different take on a lot of things; for instance, most characters can choose their gender over time, including a neutral gender. This makes for interesting politics in the gameworld. Also, there is a lot of magic affecting (Spoiler - click to show)memory.

Like many great parser games that are now neglected, I believe that this wonderful game is not noticed now because it is hard, and because the walkthrough only gives you one path, leaving most of the game unexplored, and, because of the difficulty level, perhaps unexplorable.

I recommend this game for everyone, with the walkthrough after a short time (even the hints are not enough for me and some IFComp reviewers).

This game from IFComp 2015 is, in my opinion, one of the best Twine games of all time, and certainly the best outside of the well-developed horror/darkness segment.

In this game, gameplay is split up between a summer camp with a slice-of-life scenario and dreams with an absurdist take on talking birds. As the game progresses, the two halves become more related.

The game takes a stats-based approach, with a twist. You develop statistics at night during your dreams; in the day, it affects what options you have for various activities. At first, I felt like the stats didn't matter, because scene follows scene in the same order regardless of your actions. However, on replay, I found that some of the best material is contained in stats-enabled actions.

This story is long and has several surprising turns. It's split into several days, each of which can be accessed independently in case you can't finish in one sitting. Because stats seem to be reset each night, I don't think you lose anything just skipping ahead.

The game includes some mild summer-camp-normal sexual references near the beginning, and one branch of one scene contains strong profanity.

Recommended for everyone.

Edit: When I played through again, I counted the distinct pages I viewed, and I took 234 choices/pages to complete the game.

This IFComp 2014 Twine game is mid-to-long in length. You wake up with amnesia in a judgment center reminiscent of the Cube movies. You choose to experience four challenges in an order of your choice.

Interestingly, each has its own genre. One is a locked room, one is related to a classic game theory scenario, one revolves around NPC interaction, and the last one ended before I really saw it.

The game has a bit of a prologue and an epilogue, as well.

I don't think it is possible to enter an unwinnable state.

This game was my predicted winner of IFComp 2015. This game is well-written, has great pacing (especially in the first half), a strong narrative voice, and excellent graphics. It is easy enough for people to get into with little IF experience, but provides enough of a challenge later on to be interesting.

You play a teenage girl whose town is overrun by the eponymous Brain Guzzlers. You have a cast of creatively-described friends and acquaintances who help you out. Conversation is menu-based, which allows Cherrywell to express the real flavor of the PC's world (with a lot of 'Jeepers!').

The game has some very creative puzzles, and some more straightforward. Each character of the game (besides yourself) comes with one or more high-quality graphics that show up when talking to them.

Game play is 2-3 hours long, I estimate. I recommend this to everyone; I feel like it will be played for years to come.

I found this game strangely engrossing, perhaps because I'm a fan of Mary Higgins Clark. I say strangely, because I'm usually not a fan of games with limited interactivity, walls of text, and strong profanity, all of which this game contains. However, Orisney's strong storytelling makes this game very memorable.

The game is quite long, and I couldn't find any way to save, so I recommend playing it all in one sitting. It's divided into a prologue and 3 or 4 chapters.

The story is about two sisters lost in the woods who discover increasingly disturbing things in the snow.

The style of the game is a dynamic short story, where you get about a page's worth of story at a time, then a single 'continue' link or a small number of small choices.

One interesting thing in this game is that quite a bit seems to indicate that your sister has her own playable story, yet this never materializes. I wonder if the author intended to add this feature, but never finished it.

The game includes strong violence.

I'm glad I played it, and I recommend it to fans of CSI or Higgins Clark.

Future Boy! was a commercial game from 2004. A large game (it took me about 4 and a half hours, using hints 27 times), it has illustrations with gif-like animations for every room and character, as well as voice-acting for all dialogue.

The game is split into two parts, one with the parser, and one with little windows with graphics, usually one for the room itself, one for each character present, one for the compass rose, and one for effects like rain.

The game starts out fairly linearly, with a succession of challenges that set up the story. I found some of the early puzzles fairly difficult, which is unusual for commercial IF. I resorted to the hints as early as the second scenario.

After the first few scenes, the game opens up considerably. It ends up being reminiscent of Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with a cast of crazy characters and a variety of random locations that you can visit.

One of the highlights of the game is an unusually well developed (Spoiler - click to show)computer system. It's like a miniature game within a game, and gave me fond memories of the 90's.

My winning game was ~1500 turns long.

The plot is fairly intricate. Overall, I enjoyed this game. If it were an iPad app, I would price it at around $5-$10.

I came into possession of the game by contacting the creators using the email on the Future Boy! website.

Full disclosure: I'm a big fan of Banks' games, and I received an advance copy of this game when I told her I wanted to review it.

Clockwork Army is a Choicescript game set in historic Australia, with bits in Britain. The game uses a magic system that the author has developed for some time, including in her gamebook 'It Started When the Flag Fell'. This system is a metal system, a bit reminiscent of the Mistborn system. Different metals have different properties; lead enhances emotions, while the ultra-rare aluminum enhances agility.

The setting is in colonial Australia, with the Australians building up to a revolt against the redcoats. However, this Australia is heavily mechanized in a steampunk fashion. Metal corsets that grant abilities, hybrid animal-machines, and even cloud harvesters abound.

The story revolves around a family that has been scattered across the earth, who are trying to get back together. Like most Choicescript games, you have a choice of gender, name/ethnicity, and romantic interests.

The only other review I've seen of the game so far is on an app store and says it's the worst choice of games game they've ever seen. I suspect that they've only tried the first two (free) chapters, because these mostly consist of setting up the backstory and the magic system. The convolutedness of the magic system ends up requiring a lot of 'As you know...' exposition at the beginning.

But the later chapters are where things really take off. Having just finished The Shadow in The Cathedral by Jon Ingold and Ian Finley, I was hungry for more steampunk/clockwork creatures, and I wasn't disappointed. (Actually, thinking about it now, this game has the same kind of story that I was hoping for in the never-finished sequel to that game).

Anyways, things get heated, and the clockwork creations grow more and more complicated. I think it's impossible to really lose (in the sense of not getting a complete ending), but I did not achieve my character's original goals.

That was one area that I had trouble with: roleplaying the character. I had a sort of pacifist in mind that would always prefer thinking and spying over direct combat, but I found that the game penalized this behavior a few times. Also, my preferred love interest turned out to be taken, but I quickly mended my broken heart and moved on.

The last thing I should mention is that this game and Banks' gamebook contain a great deal of detail about historic Australia. Some people are turned off by this, but I enjoyed it.

Anyways, if you want to get a feel for the game before buying, try the first two chapters, but also see her gamebook I mentioned above to get more of a taste of this setting and magic system.

Here is some of the pop culture referenced in this game:
(Spoiler - click to show)Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Song of the South, Peter Pan, Waiting For Godot, the play Rhinoceros, a knot theory joke, the ten-inch pianist joke, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Star Trek: Voyager, Zen koans (is that pop culture)?, famous mathematicians like Archimedes and Fibonacci, Duck Tales, etc.

And that's just the ones I could remember off the top of my head!

This game joins the list of ultra-long games such as Blue Lacuna, King of Shreds and Patches, Mulldoon Legacy, and Time: All Things Come to an End.

In gameplay, it resembles Mulldoon Legacy a lot; both are supersized versions of Curses!. You explore a huge structure, manipulating a variety of magical or technological systems, with a variety of hint systems.

Finding Martin has smooth implementation, including several very long time travel sequences interacting with multiple copies of yourself. This forms the last third of the game, and is the most technically competent time travel I have seen. Imagine All Things Devours as a subgame, 4 times.

Finding Martin has a tendency for very long text dumps. As I enjoy reading, this wasn't an issue, but there are probably 20+ cutscenes of 2-4 pages of text each.

As others have noted, Finding Martin is spottiest when it comes to hints. Some things are hinted well; in particular, there are several systems of providing hints, and if you get further in some puzzles, you'll unlock long cutscenes containing hints for other puzzles.

However, so many puzzles require leaps of intuition that you are bound to fail multiple times. For this, a walkthrough is essential. I've tried to upload a walkthrough to IFWiki that I found on web.archive.org, but it didn't seem to go through. The link is https://web.archive.org/web/20080516223332/http://www.qrivy.net/~gayla/fm_walk.txt

This game, as with Mulldoon Legacy, should be more played and more discussed. However, both games suffer from information overload. I get stressed playing Blue Lacuna, which can be played puzzlelessly, and even Counterfeit Monkey, where puzzles are well-clued. These games (Mulldoon and Martin) are just too darn hard to be solved by anyone without clues.

However, my strategy for such games is to play through with a walkthrough, then come back months or years later and try to play without a walkthrough. I've done Curses! 3 times now this way, and I hope to do it without a walkthrough. I hope to replay Finding Martin one day.

D.B.T has written 42 games since August of 2014; only one of these has a real review on IFDB, and most have one or fewer ratings. They are written in QBasic, I believe, although some are available as downloadable executable files.

I decided to try one of these games. When I started up the game, I was entertained to see two skulls made with ascii art. The game has a countdown timer of 8 or 9 minutes, and I finished it in 5 or 6.

The game is a maze with two items you can pick up. HELP lists all verbs that you need.

The one real review of a DBT game is pretty harsh; and I have to admit, by the standards of the type of parser games most popular right now, it is not well put together.

However, the game isn't TRYING to be a current, modern parser game or even a throwback to classic games. It is trying to be it's own thing. The game cites Maniac Mansion, Darkseed (which I haven't played), and Scott Adams. In a way that I really can't explain, it reminded me of early versions of Oregon Trail.

Most of the game consists of just wandering around an easily navigable maze absorbing atmospheric room descriptions in green text on black background. The material is over the top, but it's meant to be that way. You are exploring a dreamscape, and trying to find the source of the evil in the dreamscape. Note that you have to refer to items by their full name to use them or pick them up.

All in all, it reminded me of my creepypasta reading phase. Stuff like Jeff the Killer or anything involving Herobrine. Or like Sci-Fi channel movies. I can see how someone could get into D.B.T.'s games and look forward to each release.

So, for standard IF games, this is not that great. But in it's own category, it is enjoyable.

This is a Sub-Q magazine game, and the high production values show. Excellent use of images and imagery abound.

The setting is unique among IF that I have played: a west african city, where legends still exist.

Your character (written in the first person) is a person of unknown abilities whose job is to 'fix' cheating husbands.

It was an interesting story. I'm not a big fan of explicit content, and there were some fairly explicit sexual references, but violence and profanity were low.

The culture was very interesting.