Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

Shrapnel messes with your head and with IF conventions in very creative ways. It starts out in typical Zorkian fashion (standing west of a white house) and quickly degenerates into bizarreness.

It has perhaps the most creative implementation I have ever seen. It is completely linear, and just pushes you through a story. It presents scenes out of sequence and you have to piece everything together, and it may take more than one playthrough to understand.

Unfortunately, it contains just about everything that could be considered as inappropriate content. Sexual abuse, violence, racism, and strong profanity. Not recommended for everyone. I felt uncomfortable playing it, but I think I am glad I tried it.

In this one-room, complicated game that upends IF conventions, you must extinguish all of your many lightsources to let a grue eat the troll blocking your way.

Adventurers may recognize the lantern from Adventure and Infocom games, the elvish sword from the Zork games, and the amulet from Spellbreaker. There are several other lightsources to deal with. Other items from Infocom games include the stock certificate from Zork III (I think), the grue repellent from Zork II, Zork III, and Sorcerer; the screwdriver from Zork I; and many others.

This game is hard. Like many others, I played for over a half hour without extinguishing a single light source. But once you start to get a feel for the game, it gets better and better. Because of an early experiment, I got the wrong idea about one item and never solved one of the harder puzzles on my own.

I recommed trying to get half of the points before using a walkthrough.

Blue Chairs is (literally) trippy. After an interesting transaction at a college party, you take a surreal journey through this world and variants of it. Something like an adaptation of Dante's Inferno by James Joyce.

The game contains drug references and strong profanity.

The puzzles are mostly reasonable, although I needed a walkthrough in the convenience store.

As a literary work, it is well written and well done. As a game, the puzzles are interesting and well-connected with the story.

However, I don't really recommend the game. I didn't like the atmosphere and feeling of the game. Everyone's tastes are different, and many people will enjoy this game, but I felt uncomfortable with parts of it.

Porpentine is currently the best writer of Twine fiction out there. Howling dogs is perhaps her best work. This branching, non-linear long game is a far cry from most twine games, and in fact better than most parser games.

In howling dogs, you are imprisoned in some sort of futuristic cell. You alternate between boring, daily life and brief trips in a VR machine. The trips become more and more complex, and have deep underriding themes about inevitability and restraint.

I only got the bad ending at first; I didn't realize there was a good ending until I read the reviews. To get the ending:(Spoiler - click to show)On the page with tons of links, one link will give you the good ending. It isn't random, but plot related.

I recommend this game for everyone.

Photopia is often cited as the best interactive fiction of all time. It has won numerous awards, inspired a shift to story-centered Interactive Fiction, and so on.

It really is a great game. Despite all the hype, sitting down and playing through it is fun. The meta-puzzle of trying to understand what's going on keeps you going through different scenes. The different scenes give you the impression that you're playing a hard puzzle game while actually simplifying things without you knowing.

The colors are a good part of the game; if your interpreter doesn't support or if you are unable to distinguish between colors, you should use your imagination.

Is this really the best IF of all time? I honestly would have to say that nothing is really better than it. I don't replay it because it makes me sad. I like to stick to puzzle games or big crazy worlds. But this game has substance and meaning.

Beyond struck a good chord with me. In this game, you play a sort of spirit that is aiding a detective to investigate the death of someone close to you.

The game is completable in one day. It is divided into 3 or 4 acts, usually with a spirit part and a real-world part.

This game has great puzzles; in fact, it won an award for best puzzle of the year. The plotline is interesting and exciting as well.

However, although the game has several interesting NPC's, scripted events, and other well-done factors, the game feels sparse. Rooms have small descriptions and few items in them. It gives the game a kind of minimalist feel.

I enjoyed the game. There are some PG-13 parts, with both violence and unwanted sensuality, but both are portrayed as negative things.

Rameses is like 'Ulysses' by Joyce; a well-known classic that is uncomfortable at times and neither of which I can really recommend as enjoyable.

Rameses is a young college student who is dealing with loneliness, loss, and ennui. The main idea of the game is that you cannot always, or even often, overcome your character's desires to accomplish your own.

The character is accurately portrayed a shallow young man of his age, leading to a lot of profanity but worse, to the player becoming a partner in small despicable acts. Not things like murder or assault, but petty and mean things that he feels are not his fault.

Within its sphere, the writing is good and the implementation is excellent. A mid length game.

This program generates fake Buzzfeed titles, which participants are supposed to use to write articles, which are then judged by a judge.

The titles are supposed to be darkly humorous.

Many of Soda51's games are similar, short, one message games, often one-screen games.

Broken Wand is a short Twine game with multiple endings, text input, and some non-trivial puzzles.

In the game, you discover a broken wand under the playground slide that you must repair. You encounter a few villains and some nontrivial puzzles, including some math.

The atmosphere is goofy and silly, like a story a kid on the playground would tell. Events in the game are often illogical and disconnected. If you like goofy games, you will like this.

In this game, you go through years worth of trying to talk to people about being transsexual. You have some control, but things tend to happen whether you like them or not.

This results in a fairly linear narrative, but the choices make you feel like you are participating.

You either like this type of game or you don't. The author did a good job of making you feel like you understand the pc.