Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is a very large game that you could spend a long time playing. It is slightly shorter than Curses!, and about half as long as Muldoon Legacy.

You play a college student who is immediately sucked into another world, where a renegade befuddled wizard is asking for your help.

The game has a tower that gets bigger and bigger and more complicated as you discover a huge number of chemical ingredients. Then you realize you have only seen less than half of the game. The game is so big, there are 65 AMUSING options at the end.

It has copious hints, and great world details. But it was too hard for me; I just went through the walkthrough. You could play it for a long, long time without hints and still have fun.

If you liked Mulldoon Legacy, you will like this.

My Father's Long, Long Legs is essentially a publishable short story, as good as Stephen King or Dean Koontz.

This doesn't mean that the Twine format feels too confining. The story branches and recombines at various points, and the illusion of choice increases the feeling of powerlessness.

Also, some of the more advanced techniques of Twine are used in the last scene to improve play experience.

I recommend it strongly to subtle horror fans.

Slouching towards Bedlam is one of the most popular IF games of all time. You play in a steampunk world followed by your faithful clockwork cubical robotic assistant to help you analyze various materials and ideas.

You work in an old and decaying asylum, and you are investigating some recent occurrences.

This game is notable for two innovations; one, it plays with If conventions in amazing ways. Two, it does a wonderful job at writing some odd text (such as the robot's output, restricted to an 8x8 grid).

The game has multiple endings, with room for big moral choices (more than one). It's hard to say what's right and what's wrong in the game.

The main thrust of the story turned out to be fun, but was hard for me to grasp at first. Perhaps because of exposure to cheap sci fi, I thought that (Spoiler - click to show)the Logos was a horde of nanobots. This made understanding the game much harder.

The game feels incomplete, like other great games such as Theatre. Some of the later locations seem a bit sparse, as well. It says a lot about the game that the worst I can call it is too short. Great game.

I loved Infidel. You play a jerk adventurer who has alienated everyone he knows as he searches for a hidden pyramid. The game has a long intro sequence in your camp before reaching the actual pyramid.

The game is very Indiana-Jonesish, although there are no NPC's. Every few rooms, there is a death trap waiting to destroy you. Hieroglyphics on the wall tell you how to avoid some traps, but they sometimes describe things far away, and you have to puzzle out the meaning of the hieroglyphics yourself.

This game is advanced, but I got much further between hints than I usually do in an Infocom game (although Emily Short mentioned two guess-the-verb problems in her review that I found helpful before I even played the game).

This game has a great flavor and style, similar to Ballyhoo's dark circus theme. I strongly recommend this game.

The majority of this game consists of delivering newspapers. Over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.

That said, the game is enjoyable. There are somewhere around 8 or 9 NPC's of wildly different personalities, some of which don't pop up until later. You converse with everyone while delivering the newspapers.

There is a villain, but it's hard to know their plan. In fact, it's hard to know anything in the game, until the end.

I had trouble reading the newspapers when I played on Frotz on the iPad. The formatting was off. But most people shouldn't have that issue.

Note that the game lasts about a week in-game.

I don't strongly recommend the game, but it's interesting enough that you should check it out.

This is a mid-to-long game that follows long after the events in Spellbreaker, an Infocom game.

Graham Nelson is my favorite author, because of Curses! and Jigsaw, and for inventing Inform 7. However, I never really liked this game, partially because it takes so long to set it up. The first scene is totally linear, and the next takes a while to get going.

This is a fantasy game, and includes many Infocom themes, such as spell scrolls, complicated devices, etc. Most if not all the spells are spells mentioned in Infocom games.

The game is intricate and has well-developed puzzles, but it doesn't feel like a cohesive whole.

I haven't played this game for a few years, and I hadn't played any Infocom games when I did. If I replay it and enjoy it more with the references, I'll come back and revise my review.

This short, linear game is a supernatural thriller that is a bit spotty and unfinished but raw and interesting.

The next step at each moment is relatively clear, so there are only minor puzzles. You play a fisherman or beach bum with memory problems on a cold, dark shore.

This game is a horror game, so there are some gross moments, including one that made my stomach turn. In its mood, it reminds me of The Warbler's Nest.

This is a game kind of like the stories Ethan Frome or the Yellow Wallpaper, where you have a kind of growing sick feeling in your gut, not from gore or sex or anything like that, but from a disturbing psychological predicament.

This game is set in medieval times, and deals with faeries and the fey. Or does it? It's hard to tell. You are outside gathering eggshells, and soon you discover what purpose they are for.

This game has stuck with me for a very long time. It creeped me out. I don't want to give away too much, so suffice to say that you can make strong moral choices.

If crazy time-travel puzzles and avoiding paradoxes are your cup of tea, then this is the game for you. You must use a time machine to do your homework, but this requires 8 or more copies of yourself.

The initial part of the game is very fun. Trying to figure out how the machine works is great; trying to figure out how to avoid a paradox is fun, in fact the whole first half is fun!

But by the time you get to the last two or three copies, it just gets very overwhelming. It's so hard to keep track of everything, and the very last 'you' is hard to figure out.

Some people may find the idea of such a complicated game very enticing; so for puzzle fiends out there, this is the game for you. For everyone else, you should at least try it until you've time traveled once or twice.

John's Fire Witch is a short, fun collect-the-item and solve-the-puzzle game. The feel reminded me a lot of Enchanter, but without the magic.

I've been more interested in story than puzzles recently, so I used a walkthrough at a couple of points (which made me realize I had forgotten that I dropped some items).

Two big puzzles were very fun; the (Spoiler - click to show)crystal card and the devil's bag. The last puzzle was a bit unfair, I thought.

There are no mind-bending surprises or big innovations here; just well-thought out puzzles. If you like this, you would enjoy Uncle Zebulon's Will.