Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game was one of the two winners of the very first IF Comp. It is well known for being one of Plotkin's most difficult games, and one of the most difficult well-known games in general.

You play a loner who leaves a picnic/party to look around a secluded woodland area. Puzzles are hard due to:

1. Not knowing what your goal is;

2. Being able to put the game in an unwinnable state without knowing it;

3. Fast-paced timing.

Despite, or possibly because of the difficulty, this has remained a very popular game. Perhaps this is because the game has an inspirational feel. It is easy to identify with the protagonist, and the games understated writing gives you a sense of wonder.

The game was intended to be completed in 2 hours. You will certainly reach an ending within two hours.

This is my favorite Short game. This game is set in the future, when a colony from earth has developed gene-altering technology. The setting is not really important, however. What is important is the negotiation and the recording features.

Negotiation: The main purpose of the game is to work out what will happen between earth and the planet. Your job is to communicate this, but you have to understand the symbolism of the settlers. The bulk of the game is focused on figuring out what to say and how to say it.

Recording: This is actually not even necessary to the completion of the game, so some players have missed it. There are several recordings in the game which can be 'processed' to one of several different modes, such as a cartoon mode, a scientific mode, etc. It was hilariously fun, and unique among games I have played.

One of the great sci-fi games.

In the TADS game To Hell in a Hamper, you play a man in a hot-air balloon headed for immediate danger. Your only hope is to lighten your load, but you are hindered by your companion, Mr. Booby, who is a skillful hoarder.

The puzzles in this game are creative and enjoyable. I laughed out loud several times and showed it to my family. The humor works because it plays off the urgency and the tension between you and Booby.

I do believe it's impossible to get to an unwinning state without dying, but it can make the puzzles much much harder. It can be worth it to restart if you realize you need something, as the game is relatively short.

Chlorophyll felt like a commercial game to me. If Infocom had lived longer, I could see this as being one of their "Beginner" games (which were never very easy, as far as I can tell). It's well-polished, with a strong background story and lots of extra details.

It's a mid-length game set on a distant world. You play a young plant-woman with her plant-woman mother. You must explore a base while also coming to grips with your own coming adulthood and independence.

At times, I stopped playing Chlorophyll for a few weeks because the game seemed too open without much direction, and I felt overwhelmed. As I pressed through, though, I found that you were guided pretty well, and I found the last three areas enjoyable.

The only other sticking point was the long intro where you can't do very much. It made it annoying to restart. Other than that, this is one of the best 'recent' games.

In the Moonlit Tower, you explore a small 3-story tower to help remember who you are and your past. Like Dreamhold, the key to your memory seems to be masks, but much of the game, you don't know what to do with the mask.

The setting is dreamlike and very poetic. It is the game most likely to find its way into a book of poems or an art gallery. The author borrowed its imagery and story from several cultures, including Mongolia and China.

The puzzles are mostly the examine/pick-up-object type until you progress very far, and then they get a bit more difficult. There are multiple endings, some of which are hard to find.

Unlike most games I review, I have never finished Blue Lacuna. The reason I am writing this review anyways is that I don't think I ever will.

I've tried finishing it a few times, and I haven't been stumped by puzzles (especially since I chose story mode). Instead, I just feel overwhelmed by the game every time I play. It just seems that there are so many options; by making the game more open and free, it has moved in the opposite direction of traditional IF, where the parser was restrictive.

I've always thought a more realistic game would be better, but I think in a way I prefer the restrictiveness of traditional IF; I prefer a straighter path or paths, where you have to try and figure out the right step forward.

Blue Lacuna operates as a traditional parser, but also has a keyword system allowing objects, people, and conversational topics to be pursued in depth. It is one of the most non-linear games I have seen, and is large and well-written.

If I finish the game, I will return to add more comments.

*******

I have now finished the game, and boy, was it huge!! I used a walkthrough and it still took me 3-4 days to play through.

The most tedious part was obtaining all of seven certain cutscenes.

The game gives you hints if you get lost or seem bored.

The game lasts forever, and includes four total worlds

I enjoyed the last half much more than the first half.

This is the biggest game I have every played, except possibly for worlds apart.

Spellbreaker must have been the inspiration for games like Mulldoon Legacy, Lydia's Heart, Jigsaw, and other intensely long puzzle fests (I feel like Curses! is slightly easier). This is Infocom's last game of the Enchanter trilogy, which follows the Zork Trilogy.

This game is incredibly long and difficult. I played to about 150 points out of 600 before turning to a walkthrough (eristic's), and most of those points I got because I had played Balances by Graham Nelson, which copied many items from Spellbreaker (to show that Inform could achieve the same results). The game is purposely murderously hard; I suggest that everyone use a walkthrough after reaching a predetermined number of points.

Magic is failing, and you must chase a mysterious figure to learn why. The game is pretty disjointed, but purposely so, much like Jigsaw, where you enter and exit various areas miraculously. It has a very different feel from Sorcerer, and especially from Enchanter, which was very easy to map and simple in its presentation.

Many people have talked about the time travel puzzle in Sorcerer, which I enjoyed, but felt a little down because there was so much hype. Unfortunately, I am now hyping the last big puzzle of Spellbreaker to you. What a puzzle; to me, it was great because it completely ties in with the game's theme of loss and ending. It is a puzzle integrated with the plot.

As a final note, I should really emphasize that this is a LONG game, 2 or 3 times as long as any other Zork or Enchanter game. When using a walkthrough, I finished each of those games in a total recorded time (not counting my numerous restarts) of about 16 minutes; this game, including several restarts to shave off the starting time, took 1 hour and 22 minutes.

I played this game on iOS's Lost Treasures of Infocom.

The first scene(s) in Legion are truly ingenious, one of those "What on earth is going on?" type games. It took me quite a while to figure out what was even possible, but I had fun exploring. There is basically one important verb that you can try on everything, and then reading in-game clues should give you some ideas of what else to do.

Once the game transitions into it's second section (signified by changes in the in-game color), it becomes a bit more standard, similar to Babel and the many games inspired by it. It uses some profane language, which is mostly appropriate for the nature of the person and the situation. The puzzles are still very good, the writing is still good, but the opening is so great that the rest of the game pales in comparison.

Christminster is set in a British University, where you are looking for your lost brother. You encounter a variety of obstacles and discover various ancient secrets.

This game has a host of well-crafted NPC's, timed events, and other difficult-to-implement concepts. The puzzles are logical, and exploring around for long enough is enough to get many of the puzzles. Several of the NPC's are quite funny, and there is a fun cryptographic puzzle.

Even though this game is well-crafted, it didn't really call out to me at first. I have realized that I am prejudiced against upper-class PC's, and against college-related games. I've had similar issues with Savoir-Faire, Violet, and the Lurking Horror. However, when I finally reached the end of the game with a walkthrough, I really enjoyed it.

This game was one of the most popular games in the mid 90's, along with Curses!, Jigsaw, and Theatre.

I first played All Things Devours 5 years ago as one of my first pieces of interactive fiction, and was very confused and felt it was impossible.

All Things Devours is a time travel game, where you must work together with past or future selfs to navigate several puzzles, subject to certain restrictions.

This game can be solved much more easily if you keep a detailed list of where you are and what you are doing at each turn. That way, you'll know where (or when) to be with other incarnations of yourself.

Fortunately, it's not necessary to jump around too much. A similar game called Fifteen minutes involves 8 or more copies of yourself in the same room, and it gets very tedious by that point.

All Things Devours is a classic.