Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This mid-length game is a story-focused Zorkian type game, where you explore the Beast's castle, trying to understand his history and take action.

The game features a magical system focused on (Spoiler - click to show)bells. Different bells have different properties, which you must decipher by experimentation and by searching records.

The game is a more cynical version of the fairy tale (or more world-weary).

This game is intended to be accesible to beginners, with a tutorial mode and ways to access hints. I found the game frustrating when I tried to treat it as an open, nonlinear game. When I did what the game told me to do, it was much more enjoyable.

Missive is clever and fun, but is a bit of a mismatch. It has a gripping and interesting story about a man who just went through a breakup interacting with both his ex girlfriend and a mysterious present.

These form two fairly distinct stories that are both good. The true relationship between you and your ex slowly comes out in a very clever way. The present story involves sifting through old letters and deciphering puzzles. If you get the puzzles right, you pick the correct next letter to read. It doesn't tell you if you were right till the end, making lawnmowering hard. You can have a great experience without solving all the puzzles.

The game has some scattered profanity and frequent alcohol use. These usually turn me off of a game, but the PC was painted as a (to me) lovable guy going through a hard time, so I had sympathy for him. Good game.

This game seemed huge at first, so I was worried, but it got fastee over time. Altogether about 2 hours play time at most.

You 'sign up' to work with a company who investigates subversives. Yojreadreports and make recommendations. Weird stuff creeps in.

My ending was funny and enjoyable. The game is a good satire of office life.

Replay value seems low, as you can't save anywhere, so you have to replay a lot.

I enjoyed this game.

Before I played it, Six was recommended by many, many people. It was nominated for Best Game in the XYZZY awards, it did very well in IFComp, reviewers said it was the best game ever. But I wasn't very interested.

Having tried it, I see now why all the hype was there. This is a very fun game. You have to play hide and seek tag/tip with your six friends in a park. The game uses children, but the writing isn't childish. Each friend presents a unique challenge in catching them. After winning the game, you can unlock additional material.

The game features a wide assortment of sounds, which were never necessary except for one part of the additional material. The graphics are also fun but unnecessary (the map can be helpful, but the layout of the park is not hard).

This game is not very difficult. I use hints/walkthroughs on just about every game I play, but I manage to work my way through this one relying on in-game nudges only. Great game.

Delphina's House uses one of my favorite gameplay mechanics, parallel worlds where actions in one world affect the other.

In this short ParserComp game, you play a young girl who is moving, and who wants to explore her worlds one last time with here transporter box (like Calvin's cardboard boxes in Calvin and Hobbes). There are three main puzzles, but each puzzle can be solved in any of the three possible worlds available to you. This gives the game high replay value; you can play through 3 different times and solve completely new puzzles every time.

There are two sound-based puzzles, but they are not bad, and (like all other puzzles) they can be bypassed by doing other puzzles.

If you liked this game, you might like the author's other game, Molly and the Butter Thieves.

This is a short, fun thriller-type detective game by the author of Gun Mute and Rogue of the Multiverse.

Like those games, this game has a delightful romance. The game is linear, with only a few different decisions at different times. You can play as multiple characters, but which character you play is dictated by the scene.

There are a few scenarios where it is easy to miss a clue on what to do. If you just want to move forward, type 'hint' to get a fairly easy hint on what to do.

If you liked this game, check out Pacian's other excellent games.

I have to make one big admission up front: I played Kaged with a walkthrough almost straight through. I had heard some of the puzzles were unfair, and the story seemed great, and so I just read it as a short story.

This worked surprisingly well. It makes for a great short story. You are a bureaucrat in a complicated futuristic society where everything is tightly regulated and disturbing. You are asked to help stop a menace in this world.

The game deals with the nature of reality and with mind-bending. A pretty crazy game.

Edit: The original version of this game, played on HTML Tads, has great music and graphics. Really worth playing.

This long sci-fi game was nominated for the very first XYZZY award for Best Game in 1996. It is a sequel to former games, as far as I can tell.

This game seems to have been forgotten, with only 3 ratings and no reviews on IFDB. It is a very large game, about as long as Spellbreaker.

The plot concerns a young apprentice scientist who isn't doing as good as they should working on scientific research working in a slightly different universe (with a sort of C. E. J. Pacian feel). Many things show up here before other games; you explore a complicated set of labs the year before Babel came out, and you explore a creepy lighthouse two years before Anchorhead.

The tone is mildly dark and mildly humorous. Some parts of the game near the end are pretty silly. I still don't understand (Spoiler - click to show)the transvestite squid and the yellow submarine full of blue rodents. I have no idea why the tone changed so much there.

This is an old-school game, where they were still incorporating Infocom tricks like search-everywhere puzzles and hidden timers that were only designed to increase the length of small-size games. In a large game like this, it is frankly unfair. Many of the puzzles have difficult solutions, and many items are under-implemented.

I loved the story, as much as I understood it. I just took a walkthrough and ran with it.

This game is set in old London. The first act is amazing; you play a magician in the middle of an act. The level of detail in the opening is astonishing, and is a must-play for every IF fan.

Sadly, the game goes downhill from there. It is still a very good game, but nothing can compare to the opening. You spend the rest of the game trying to understand more of your background and visiting various mundane or mysterious locales.

The game takes less than an hour to play. Some of the puzzles are very hard, and getting the 'best' solution requires that you bring some objects with you from one area to another, with no chance to backtrack if you missed them.

Rover's Day Out is centered on a brilliant idea, which you discover the instant you start playing. Ostensibly, this game is about a morning routine and a cute dog called Rover. However, you soon learn more about what is really going on.

I finished playing this game on parchment, which caused problems with the status bar (which adds a lot of information). Also on parchment, I had a bug where an essential item (Spoiler - click to show)(dog food) disappeared, rendering the game unwinnable. The bug did not appear again when I played through the second time, some months later.

It can be a little hard at times to figure out what is going on, but that is part of the appeal of the game. The game gets progressively more intense, with the later game being especially intense. Plenty of surprises occur as the game progresses.

This game has been ranked in the Top 50 IF of all time, and it deserves its place.