Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This game came in second in the 2006 IfComp, and was nominated for best game in the XYZZY awards.

I didn't play it for a while, because it seemed like it would be a LONG game, but it actually was shockingly short. Shorter than Photopia, for instance.

You play a middle-aged woman whose neighbor and on/off love interest is shot by his mother. You have to teleport, time travel, and explore to discover a way to fix things,

The protagonist, near he end, is conscious of the player, and so some endings are best for her, some for you, some for neither or both.

It's a fun game. Most people need hints (I used one hint in the middle, and one at the end). I recommend this game, especially due to its length.

This game is by the author of Infidels, plus Jerry Wolper. To a greater extent than most Infocom games, this game is full of small, tiny choices that will keep you from winning much, much later.

The game at first is fairly straightforward. You are a diver on an island who discovers the existence of sunken treasure (in one version of the game, it's in the Titanic; in the other, it's in a pirate ship). You're given a sequence of instructions telling you to go to different places at different times, and you just have to follow them.

Eventually, you dive, and search the wreck, finding treasure.

So where can you go wrong? You can be carrying the wrong things around the wrong people, shutting you out of victory. I think you can have stuff stolen. You can buy the wrong equipment. You can guess the wrong wreck. You can neglect to do certain activities when everyone else is busy.

So this game must be replayed over and over, following the same directions each time.

I enjoyed the story. I ended up using eristic's walk through.

You play a captain whose ship has been conquered by pirates, and yourself thrown in the brig.

After a brief, linear opening sequence, the game opens up into a large map, on a ship (the feelies include a diagram of the ship). Random encounters happen, but I saw no timers at work. You have a dozen or more options for overcoming the Pirates, and you can basically select completely different routes each time.

I wasn't completely into the game, so after exploring every room and checking things out, I went to the walkthrough for one possible solution (of which there are many). I enjoyed it. This is a game requiring a lot of exploration and experimentation if you want to solve it on your own.

I recommend the beginning to everyone, and then that you decide on your own if you want to continue.

Andy Phillips games are basically movie plots where you have to guess the exactly right actions. They are extremely long, and so difficult that I doubt anyone has completed them singlehandedly without hints.

This one is about a superhero name the Golden Crusader in Atlantic city. After an opening that is longer than most games, you are given a tutorial on how to become the next Golden Crusader and use her four big powers, you then are given five locations to visit to stop evil henchmen. The villains are memorable. One is unnecessarily sexual, killing people with sex and attraction perfume. She is the most encountered villain. The others include an evil toy maker, a pirate captain with a laser sword, a cult leader, and a magician with deadly tricks.

There's really no way to beat this without hints, but it can be fun to play with the walkthrough until you get to a cool part, play around for a bit, then continue with the walkthrough.

This is an IFComp 2015 game, and was written to be a clear and simple example for middle school students to learn about writing games. In this game, you wash up on an island after a pirate attack, and need to find treasure on your own, without the guide of your professor.

You have frequent humorous memories about your time with the professor, providing much of the humor of the game.

You have two main goals in the game:(Spoiler - click to show)find the treasure, and get off the island. Both goals are fairly simple; if you get stuck, what to do next is fairly well-clued, although I did forget to examine the scenery at one point, getting stuck for a while.

Hopefully, the author will release the source code at some point, as it was specifically meant to help people learn to write in Inform.

This is an IFComp 2015 game. Many people seem to have played this for a couple of minutes, grinded a few enemies or beaten the boss, and quit, giving it a bad review. The game is so much more than that.

It is a retro-style RPG game, in the vein of old DnD adventures. It's stated purpose is to be a game about killing monsters. But as you go about the dungeon, things change. The rest is in spoilers:

(Spoiler - click to show)You begin to learn more about the monsters in the dungeon and their pasts. You can befriend many of them; you can heal them; the game in the ultimate ending proclaims that it is about love.

I recommend this game to everyone; but if you play it, play it for a while to see what lies beneath.

Unbeknown is one of those games that is hard to discuss without spoiling it. It is mostly a sci-fi game, mid-length, with two significant endings. It was created for IFComp 2015.

Alan De Niro has produced some incredible writing before, with Solarium and Deadline Enchanter being my favorites. So I entered into this game with high hopes.

However, it draws most of its imagery and setting from a place that I don't really identify with:(Spoiler - click to show)an MMORPG, a genre I tried one summer, but didn't really get into. This impacts my experience, but will probably enhance the game for those with more familiarity with that area.

The game offered a couple of choices that were especially interesting, and which were the highlights of the game to me: (Spoiler - click to show)the choice of name was especially significant to me; I chose the love interest's name once, and I let Able name me once, too. The other big choice is whether the past keeps up with you or not.

Overall, something didn't click for me, keeping this game from being perfect. But it is a good game, and I still recommend it to everyone.