Reviews by MathBrush

Dual Transform, by Andrew Plotkin, is one game that I think would be great for beginners without being condescending or annoying; it is also great for experienced players.

In this game, you control a console that alters the environment. You stay in the same room with the same item, but the room and item change appearance.

Once you figure out the logic of the game, it is mostly one straightforward move after another, with a couple of little sticking points that provide more satisfaction.

The writing and setting are top-notch, making this a memorable game. Having recently played "So Far", it seems that the author took some ideas from that game and concentrated/refined them into this game.

This is one of my two favorite Emily Short games (the other being Floatpoint). In this game, a re-telling of Cinderella, you play an observer in the trying-on-of-shoes portion of the story. You can take no actions, but you can introduce topics in the conversation to steer you to one of six possible endings.

This game has some memorable moments and strong dialogue. It is fun to replay over and over again, and does not feel tedious in doing so.

Short has provided the source code for this game, which is entertaining in and of itself. If you haven't seen Inform code before, it consists of mostly whole sentences, and is much more understandable than C++, Python, Perl, etc. So even if you are not a programmer, you can understand a lot of it.

Dead Like Ants is indeed about ants. You play an ant in red overalls sent by the queen to appease 5 creatures located on your tree.

The game uses non-standard directions (such as "widdershins") and it provides other surprises that toy with your expectations of interactive fiction.

The numerous NPC's were surprisingly charming. The writer derived inspiration from Hans Christen Andersen, Lewis Carroll, and the musical "Into the woods". The game has an overall fairy-tale feel.

Once you pass the initial surprises, the games puzzles are not very difficult. This is a game to be finished in less than half an hour. I recommend it to everybody, because it has a great effect and doesn't take long to play.

I played "So far" years ago, made it to the bird-animal farm, and never got any further. It was just overwhelming. I don't like games that are so extremely open-ended that you have no idea if what you are doing is helpful or game ending. That's not to say that I dislike non-linear games; a lot of non-linear games have items that suggest what you need to do, and then you find a way to do it.

In "So Far", you are utterly clueless most of the time. So I just gave in after a few years, grabbed a walkthrough, and checked out the game. The worlds I found were fascinating and alien, like many of Porpentine's games.

I was surprised that many of the worlds were connected with abstraction and metaphor; the first two worlds put me off by making me think they would all be well-established alien worlds without any explanation.

Having gone through with a walkthrough once, I plan on playing again, relying on my memory of the last attempt but not referring to the walkthrough. Hopefully, this will let me explore more, and have fun with some puzzles whose solution I didn't understand or can't remember.

For those who want a taste of the abstract worlds, there is a world where (Spoiler - click to show)everything is dark and everything is sound.

I had heard of this game years before I played it. I didn't have a TADS interpreter, and I was only using mobile, so I just read the walkthrough and felt I understood the game.

So when I finally got an interpreter and played the game, I was in the odd position of having known the solution for years but not knowing the game.

The game is much more than its solution.

The variety in the game comes from two sources: the players choice of actions, and a surprising variety of random "reshuffling" of the environment with every restart.

The environmental cues make the games complicated parser much easier to understand. The NPC's will say "so and so said ....", which tells you things you can say, and so on. You discover new characters as you try different directions and options. There is a lot to discover, if you don't focus on just playing the game. There is also a large "amusing" list at the end.

Sunset over Savannah is a relaxing, enjoyable read. You are a vacationer contemplating quitting their job, and looking for a sign or signs that there is more to life.

The writing is sweet and touching. As someone contemplating a career change, this

The game world is small but packed with interactivity. You can do so many things in every area that it is very surprising. It was fun to just play around.

However, this world's interactivity means that it is hard to know what to do with some puzzles. It can be figured out with persistence and logic, but the game is so fun to explore and the text is so fun to read that it felt like a shame to turn off my "reading" brain and turn on my "puzzle" brain. I ended up using a walkthrough, and loved what I found. Will probably play again to read it all again.

The author of "Worlds Apart" cites this as one of her favorite games, which led me to it.

If not for its recent creation and platform choice, this would probably be one of the most popular games on all of IFDB. It is part sim game and part thriller game. It reminds me of the best parts of "Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies", "You will select a decision", "Jigsaw", and the hologram sequence in "Mulldoon Legacy".

You play a test subject under the supervision of the evil Dr. Sliss, a lizard-human. You begin in a mini-base that you explore non-linearly with no real puzzles to speak of, and continue on to a second half of the game that is completely linear and a real thrill ride.

I can't express how much I enjoyed this game. But everyone has a different sense of what they are looking for in a game. This game is for people who like memorable characters, heart-racing action scenes, romance, and over-the-top humor.

P.S. As Danielle noted, there is a completely unnecessary F-bomb.

There is an old story about a man who dreamed of a giant statue with feet made of clay mingled with iron, symbolizing strength mixed with weakness. This game really made me think of that image.

First, the iron: It is a mid-length game with three large portions to explore (though you can always return to a previous area). The implementation is good, and the story is pretty fun; I was excited when I first began to plan because I enjoy a good action game.

The puzzles seem overwhelming at first, but experimentation soon shows that the gameworld is more limited than it seems, which makes it easier to solve the puzzles.

The puzzles include a variety that I have never really seen in other games, especially in the introductory section.

Second, the clay: The game falls short in several areas. One is in length and size; the game feels unnecessarily small in the last two big areas. You almost expect an area about the size of Babel, but you end up with something a lot smaller.

As others have noted, the NPC implementation feels sparse after playing more modern games. Compared to Infocom games, this game does pretty good; however, having a travelling companion that has about one line for every 50-100 moves gets discouraging after a while.

I was stuck near the end, and used the walkthrough to make sure I had done everything up to that point, but somehow couldn't trigger a cutscene. I had to manually enter the walkthrough using the @ sign to get to the ending, which may have soured my reaction.

Thus, overall, I can only partially recommend this game. The first half made me ready to recommend this is another great hidden treasure, but the second half left me wondering.

Savoir-Faire is a longish game set in an alternate-world version of France. The game prominently features a magic system involving linking items together so that they share certain properties.

The puzzles are brilliant and the game is well-implemented. You can experiment to your hearts content, and most reasonable solutions to problems work. The writing is excellent, and the storyline well-thought out.

I finished the game years ago. Every time I try to replay it though, I lose interest. Why would anyone lose interest in such a technical marvel? Because I really don't care about the PC's situation. He's a wishy-washy wimp; he can't decide if he's investigating his adoptive family's disappearance or looting their house; he can't decide if he's a rake with a million love interests or a romantic with one woman at heart; he can't decide if he's a member of the royalty-hating lower class or a priviliged upper-class man; and he can't decide if he's starving or picky.

Short hasn't written him poorly; she's just very accurately portrayed a disagreeable man. I wish I could have him slap himself, remove his silly white feather, and tell him to just eat the andouilletes plain or stop whining. I don't care about finishing the game because I don't want to go through all that trouble just so his aristocratic palate won't have to endure stale bread and unseasoned lentils. The ending helps a bit, but it is too little, too late. If he really cared about his family, why is he stealing everything?

Others may not have the same reaction.

Edit: I recently replayed it during a long fight, after having replayed a lot of other highly rated games in a row. It really stood out with its craftmanship, so I'm revising its rating to 5 stars instead of the 4 I had before.

The finale in the Zork series is a big change from the first two games. The game is smaller as to puzzles and map, but much bigger on ambiance. This game feels like a refining purgatory, with a chance to demonstrate your courage, mercy, trust, and bravery. The setting is dreamlike and thoughtful. The puzzles are very difficult. For all of them, it is easy to try to solve them, get part way through, and have no idea if you succeeded or failed. Almost all of them are time-based, requiring you to wait, do several actions in succession, or to return frequently to a given place. Some places (like the land of shadow or the viewing table) will stay in my mind for a long time.

The Royal Puzzle breaks up the gameplay a bit, but I loved it. I first solved it in MIT Zork; as a mathematician that is terrible at most IF puzzles, it was fun to have a puzzle that I could finally solve on my own. I literally used a walkthrough on every other puzzle in this game.