Reviews by MathBrush

This was the only IFComp game to never be rated at all. It's a german language game in an unusual file format.

It's quite large, and involves exploring ruins to find relics of ancient gods.

The engine could be better, and the game has some tedious puzzles (like opening 30 similar-colored baskets to find which basket an item randomly appears in).

This game reminds me in length and quality of a hosted Choice of Games commercial game. It has similar amounts of text per choice, and has 9 different relationships you can work on.

The main difference between this and choice of games is that there are frequently just 2 choices, while CoG tends to have 3 or more choices.

However, the author did a good job at making the game interesting by not making it clear which, if any, option is the 'right' option. I think this game provided a very clear picture of what a psych ward might be like. I chose to ally with a friend with borderline personality disorder.

This is one of Pacian's best games, which is saying a lot. It is intricate but casual, and lasts 1-2 hours for the main storyline.

You play as a ship captain whose twin brother has been taken and frozen due to your unpaid loans. You must travel to a variety of worlds and systems to get enough cash to free your brother.

The world model is purposely simple. Each world and its orbit constitute a single location. Each location has 1-5 npcs and 0-2 other nouns. The only interaction available with most NPCs is TALK TO, although some can BUY and SELL, and a few other interactions pop up later.

You can't examine anything, and there's no searching or any such thing. You just travel from world to world, building up money until you're done. There's no climactic finale, but it's still rewarding.

This game is one of the best science fiction games I have played.

This is one of my favorite Choice of Games games. You play as Eratosthenes (male or female), a real historical figure who estimated the radius of the earth and advised Ptolemy IV.

In this game, you have to deal with snarky advisors and scholars, reign in ambitious kings, work on engineering, romance a variety of people, or study mathematics. I felt a good deal of flexibility.

The writing is good, as is to be expected of the author of Choice of Robots, one the best Choice of Games of all time.

I enjoyed this game, because I'm a mathematician, and the game allowed me to hang out with with a female Euclid and with Archiemedes.

This game will appeal to fans of the Civilization series of games, and fans of math, classics, history, or engineering. The human emotions investigated are universal.

This game was nominated for an XYZZY for best game, and for best NPCs.

This is one of the larger Choice of Games, with quite an epic storyline. You conceive of a movie using a large amount of customization (how many leads? what genre? what subgenre? What other subgenera? Highbrow or lowbrow? Who directs? Who writes? Who stars?). The number of possibilities here really unlocks the game's potential as a wish-fulfillment device.

But making your movie comes with its own challenges. Getting a studio running, winning financial support, dealing with deadlines and spotty talent. I spent a large amount of money to get Frank Capra to direct my ensemble western.

Overarching everything is the shadow of repressive anti-communism hunters. You have to choose how you interact with Hollywood black listers, and what to say in communism hearings.

All of this makes the games general goal (making a great movie) very difficult; I found it more rewarding to focus on personal goals.

Finally, this game includes some parts quite unlike the standard choice of games format; for instance, there is a large puzzly section that has a well-developed location and object model as you search for a dog. This part feels a lot more like a parser game or like a twine game with strong world model (like Hallowmoor).

Overall, I believe this game deserves the XYZZY nomination, and stands among the best games of 2015.

This game is the best-developed inkle writer game I've seen. I tried it because it won the venerable Grand Prix competition.

This game is centered around a tightly-developed world model. You wake up in a strange white room and have to figure out where you are and what's going on.

This of course is the premise of dozens of IF games (including, most famously, Babel), but where Tag Der Toten shines is in its strong narrative voice. It's full of goofy humor, but it's clever goofy humor, essentially a conversation between the PC and theirself/the narrator through the use of the links.

I found the game very descriptive. Also, inkle writer can be easy to lawnmower in a parser-like world model, but the author has provided several surprises to keep you on your toes.

I give three caveats to my 5-star rating:
1. I love amnesia games.
2. I love German stories.
3. This game is not complete, in that the author plans on extra chapters being added later. That said, it took me about 2 hours to finish. However, I am not a native speaker.

This game actually has a pretty consistent approach of its puzzles. You are an adventurer in a temple in the Everglades, seeking the water of life.

Each room has some sort of death trap. If you wait around too long, you die, but you often get hints right before you die. I only needed a hint for the very last room.

The setting made me smile on numerous occasions, such as the perfectly normal room.

Highly recommended.

This Andrew Schultz game builds and expands on one of my favorite Schultz games, Threediopolis. If you haven't played that game, you should try it out first, as this game contains spoilers for the basic concept of that game.

If you have played threediopolis, (Spoiler - click to show)this is the same sort of game, except some chess-like moves have been added, h,i,j,k. Each of these teleports you 2 spaces away in each direction. For instance, h teleports you n,e, and u, while i teleports you w,s, and u.

This makes the game more difficult. I found it helpful to read some of the documentation on the spring thing website, which will most likely be included on IFDB afterwards. It gives a helpful list of the results of 2- and 3- letter combinations, like hi.


My rating of this game is certainly subjective. The puzzles appeal to me as a mathematician because I love the interplay between freedom and constraint. Emotionally, it draws you into an exploratory/puzzly/celebratory mood. The game is definitely polished, and I plan on playing again (it's a long game, and I've only played through part of it. It's the kind of game I feel I could return to frequently to play around with). I though of taking off one point due to the lack of descriptive text, but I realized that more text would make the game difficult and tedious. The scarcity of text is a necessary part of the design.

Like I said, this game will only appeal to a certain group of people, so I can't recommend it to everyone. But fans of crosswords, cryptograms, and codewords will enjoy this game.

This game was the winner of the Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction. That contest was judged solely by Ryan Veeder, a prominent IF author.

This game takes the nursery rhyme "Little Bunny Foo Foo" and references from Veeder's games and blends them into a truly enjoyable story. The highlight of this story is the dialog, masterfully written and emotionally affecting.

You play the Good Fairy who is trying to help out Foo Foo the rabbit. There's a long street with shops and people to investigate.

It's hard to describe the game more without having you play it. Suffice it to say that this is my favorite game of 2016 (up to mid-April, when I'm rating this).

This game is the second in a series, but I have not played the first. You play a magic-wielding city employee searching for water in a desert, and struggling with an alien race know as the scorpionkind.

Like the best Choice of Games, you can strongly influence your identity, your relationships, and the world environment. It is a lot like the Sims or morality-based games like Fable or Black and White, where you can affect your stats.

As for content warnings, the game has some optional adult content, and violence.

It also has a great mystery subgame.

This game did a good job at making me make tough choices. I felt really invested in my character.