Reviews by MathBrush

I tried to play this game years ago on the iPad but failed. I'm very glad I have now finished it. It is a very interesting take on Snow White, mixed with other legends. It was a collaboration among many authors, and has eighteen different endings.

It works very well. The story is engrossing, and perhaps due to the large number of authors, it feels like most topics and commands have good responses.

This is a one room game, where you as the huntsman are with Snow White and a dead Hart in the forest.

This is perhaps the most unique Lovecraftian story I have played from IFDB. Jon Ingold, one of the great writers of interactive fiction, has put together a fairly odd game here.

First of all, the game tells you what you should type each turn. This was off-putting at first, but gave me a bit of a start when it stopped right when I would actually need it. Also, on replays, there are very significant areas of the game that you can't access if you follow the cues.

Next, there are odd pencil sketches that appear in every room.

Third, your inventory always shows up. I liked this.

Noone seems to know if they got the right ending or not, because the game is somewhat anticlimactic. However, reading the author's notes, you see that one of the requirements of the game was that it has a 'dubious ending' (or 'doubtful ending' or something like that).

The game is about an old man with a precious book collection. There are no tentacles, no cult, no fog, no slime or sacrifices in this game. It does manage to be fairly creepy, however.

It is short. I recommend it to everyone just to try it out, as it is fairly unusual and not at all like The Lurking Horror/Anchorhead and their imitators.

You are a chef! is a short and purposely dumb game. The game has bad spelling and grammar, poorly defined locations, and mainly consists of picking up ingredients falling from the sky.

The humor is that of Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die: make a minimalist game with dumb puzzles. Some people don't like it; I admit, I chuckled the first time I played it.

I came up with an interesting hypothesis as I played the game. Everytime you put an item in the pot, the game says:

"Good work Chef!!! But you must find more!! Ingrredients!!"

This game came out in 2000. Savoir-Faire came out in 2002. I suspect Emily Short found this message amusing and incorporated it into her game, as the cooking device in that game says almost the same thing with similar punctuation. In fact, I have to wonder if a lot of the food puzzle in Savoir-Faire was somehow born out of an attempt to make this game into something with more substance, in which case, she succeeded. It is also possible that they are both referencing something earlier; I don't know.

This is my first Andy Phillips game. It felt longer than any other game I have played, but it was about 200 turns shorter than Once and Future, and I suppose that Blue Lacuna or Worlds Apart might be longer.

The game is absolutely linear, consisting of 40 or more scenes. In each scene, you must do exactly the right things in a small number of turns or die horribly. You often have to grab items long before you need them, and manipulate them in unexpected ways.

The story and writing is actually quite interesting, but it seems to decay over time. The writing becomes less fresh and more repetitive in the middle (like others have said, everything is described as 'evil' for 20 or more scenes), and typos creep up in the last third.

I only recommend this with a walkthrough. The difficulty is frequently just from poor puzzle design, and not from hard puzzles.

I only recently played this game, and it quickly became my favorite Emily Short game. I have seen in her notes that she often works ideas that she has into games as a proof of concept; for instance, Metamorphoses and Galatea were both intended as trial-of-concepts for ideas for a massive game that never took off.

I wonder if this game was a proof-of-concept for the city and npcs in Counterfeit Monkey. The idea of a sidebar, a map, numerous npcs with complicated conversation systems, and a large city seem very familiar between the two games.

This game is about a balance between two forces, but it is difficult to categorize the two. This is more of a story game than a puzzle game. There are some puzzles that are oddly difficult to solve, so I occasionally resorted to Victor Gisjber's hints. However, the game has many ways of hinting things to you if you look for them.

Like Counterfeit Monkey, this was a laggy game. Gargoyle had trouble with both of them, as have every other system I have used. I believe the refreshing graphics causes it.

Wonderful storyline and worldbuilding. Loved the final sequences, especially.

Edit:I found the reason the game felt weaker to me in another review:

The room descriptions are in the feelies!

This explains why the game felt so lame. Random objects seemed to appear out of nowhere, and major rooms seemed to have no description at all. But the feelies seemed rich and interesting. I didn't realize that you were supposed to constantly refer to the feelies as you go.

I wonder if this was a way to make the game fit on a smaller disk with four variants.

This makes the game SO much better. Thanks for the tip, Victor!

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For those who have access to the feelies (such as in the iPad Lost Treasures of Infocom app), the backstories in the manual for this game were very enjoyable, much more than the game itself. I thought I should throw that out there.

This game is similar to An Act of Murder, where there are numerous possible suspects, multiple clues, and a variety of possible variations determined at the beginning of the game.

Both games were weaker, I feel, because they had to be adapted to work with multiple endings. For instance, in Moonmist, you find 'clues' that are just called 'clues'. Not scraps of paper, shreds of fabric, cards, etc. Just 'clues'. I assume they are different in each of the variations when you examine them (I only felt like playing through the 'green' version).

Moonmist is a kids game. This makes the game a bit harder at time; for instance, the room descriptions and directions get annoying at times.

The game is on a tight schedule, so you may have to restart before some characters leave.

The game has a cute idea where it calls you by your first name, and also by your title and last name when appropriate.

You play in a large castle with seven guests, investigating a supposed ghost that haunts the castle. Several mysterious deaths have occurred recently, and your friend is marrying the new Lord of the castle.

I don't recommend this game. I do recommend the manual.

I discovered Once and Future when looking at old XYZZY awards. The author of this game worked on it for 5 years in the 90's, frequently posting on forums about it, building everyone up to a huge excitement. It was released as the first big commercial game in years, and a whole issue of SPAG magazine was dedicated to it.

How does it fare? It is a fun, well-polished Arthurian game. An American soldier dies in Vietnam, and is taken to Avalon, being charged with a mission by Arthur to stop a terrible event in America's history.

Many reviewers noted that the writing is uneven, with the author having written it over 5 years and improving it in that time. Parts of it, like those with the (Spoiler - click to show)Straw King, are stirring and powerful. Others just seem like the author gave up; for instance, at one point your character openly complains about the endless scavenger hunts, and it is just laughed off.

This is a puzzle-heavy game, with two exceptionally hard puzzles. Fans of Mulldoon Legacy will get a kick out of this.

It is very long; following the walkthrough, I beat it in 1338 turns.

I believe I actually prefer Eric Eve's Arthurian epic, Blighted Isle, to this game. Eric Eve has more and better NPC's, more optional quests, lighter puzzles, and a better (though similar) backstory. My only quibble with Blighted Isle was its treatment of women, but Once and Future suffers from similar issues at times. However, Once and Future is more poetic/trippy than the prosaic Blighted Isle.

This all sounds negative, but I recommend this game to everyone. There is scattered strong profanity (mostly by soldiers in life-or-death situations), as well as a few mild sexual references.

This fantasy game was a lot of fun. You are washed up on an island after a big storm, and you slowly have to piece what happened together. The game purposely leads you to thinking one thing, then gives you a bit of a fakeout (or doesn't, depending on your point of view).

There are a dozen or more NPCs, and there are a great deal of sidequests. Most of the game can be skipped on a good walkthrough (or at least a good chunk of it).

The weird part was the fact that all single woman in the game are written as gorgeous and interested in your character, with you getting the pick of them. Now, dating simulation in general isn't a horrible idea, but one when character's description is that "The word 'buxom' was invented for her', it gets pretty lame. Fortunately, you can avoid anything you don't like.

This is a big, rich world, with a very large map. I only needed hints 2 or 3 times. On one puzzle, though, the whole puzzle revolved around examining an item only mentioned once in the middle of a room description that was one of dozens of room descriptions of no importance, so I don't think I would ever have solved it on my own, because I was skimming the descriptions by then.

I had mixed reactions to Bee by Emily Short, most of which were favorable. I compared this game in my mind to Bigger Than You Think by Plotkin, which is another choice game by a famous parser author.

The game is in a completely real-life setting. You play a homeschooled child over three years or more as they prepare for the national spelling bee. Time is organized in months. Each month, you can choose from a variety of activities usually three), and within each activity, you can control your reactions to events and sometimes some big choices.

The game allows quite a variety of choices; the first time I played, I practiced my butt off for the finals. The second time I played, I goofed off as much as possible.

The game was enjoyable; as someone who entered competitions like this as a kid, it was fun to study for the test and get competitive. The interactions with neighbors were fun, too.

But the game got pretty monotonous, perhaps because I tried to be so focused each time. 36 months, with multiple actions a month, makes for a long game, and there was not enough material to fill it all up. Instead, many scenarios were repeated five times or more.

This game was part of an experiment in IF inspired by a challenge to create a work of art with the title "The space under the window". In this game, you see a window, but you can't do anything to it directly. Instead, you type nouns or adjectives you see, and it changes the world to something different, related to that noun or adjective.

I found this game to be pretty short; altogether I think there were less than 40 keywords I could type. Many obvious words were not implemented, but this makes sense for an experimental game.

This kind of concept, whether inspired by this game or not, was further developed by Aisle and then Galatea, both games where the gameplay focuses on typing keywords in a room or a conversation, and text adapts around the words you type. I distinguish this from games like Blue Lacuna, where typing keywords just has you interact with the object.