Reviews by MathBrush

I revisited this game after five years. This time I was struck by the enjoyability of playing around with the transformation machines. Nothing is more fun than making an enormous wooden dress and destroying it, or making a spongy key. The total number of possible items you can make it immense.

Emily Short describes on her website that this game was developed in part because she was trying to implement different textures, sizes, etc. to make an extremely customizable game. Thus, like with many of her games, this game tries to push the boundaries of what IF can do, with a story wrapped up around it after the fact.

Other examples of this "new implementation or gameplay technique wrapped up in a story" are Counterfeit Monkey and Galatea. However, for me, story is my first concern with interactive fiction. That's why I love the intricate details of Curses!, Anchorhead, Worlds Apart, Theatre, etc. So this leads to an interesting effect when I play Short's "implementation" games; I have a blast at the time, and then generally forget the game afterwards. Metamorphoses is such a game; it's fun as a tool, but not very memorable as a story. The same is true of "Dreamhold" by Plotkin, which was designed as a tutorial.

As a final note, I love Short's story-heavy games like Glass. Remembering the "smell of blood" ending creeps me out...

That sinister self is a great, linear, short-to-mid length twine game dealing with body image. Like Astrid's other stories, I found my heart racing a bit.

There are multiple endings and some mild language.

The game incorporates some special effects which lend it much of its appeal.

Zork II incorporates my favorite puzzles from MIT Zork: the palantirs, the tea room, the round room, the robot, the volcano, the glacier room. The dragon (a callback to Adventure) was a fun challenge, and the two or three NPCs made the game quite fun. I enjoyed watching the wizard travel around zapping me.

I prefer Zork I's treasure drop off system, however. It was annoying having a huge pile of treasure, not knowing what to do with it.

I used a walkthrough on a few places (especially the oddly-angled room), because I wanted to see the whole game. Having completed MIT Zork before made some of the hardest puzzles trivial.

Until last week, I had no idea that Infocom games were still available on current platforms. After downloading an iPad app, I had the pleasure of trying my first commercial game after 5 years of free interactive fiction.

The manual and feelies were great, and the parser was very smooth, with great runtime. I missed several of Inform's features, especially when killing enemies. Overall, the game felt thoroughly tested, and a large number of the annoying features of MIT Zork were removed. Examples include a better coal maze, some of the smug writing, and better correlation between exits and etrances of nearby rooms.

I thought at first it was silly to split up the game into three, but having started Zork II, I am really enjoying the expanded versions. Very few of the free games I have played rival this kind of polished game, with Curses! and Anchorhead as my main examples of great gameplay.

This game was very enjoyable, chiefly because it took a very different direction than I thought it would. It is a short sci-fi puzzle with some moderately difficult puzzles. It took less than 45 minutes to complete.

As others describe in their reviews, I had some guess-the-verb trouble and got stuck on one puzzle because I was too impatient.

This game has an NPC that I found much more emotionally interesting than just about any other NPC in a game. I found that the Club Floyd transcript had a few helpful comments from the game's author that clarified the ending. Wonderful game.

I enjoy horror games quite a bit, but I like to stick to "white-hat" games, where you overcome evil or learn about yourself, and the final feeling is generally uplifting. This is not one of those games. While you can choose your actions, it is a lot like Vespers, where rushing along will lead you down a path that leaves you feeling uncomfortable and unhappy.

Otherwise, the game is well-made. I just can't recommend it to others; for a game with a similar feel and less squick, I recommend the Twine game Eidolon.

Having recently downloaded a TADS interpreter for the first time, I decided to try out the most popular games. This was the highest on the list. In this game, you play as an amnesiac in a frozen underground base.

While this game had above-average plot, puzzles, and writing, it really shines in its pacing. From the very beginning, the game gave an impression of vast complexity (three bulkheads with three very different locks), but it always left you with a couple of new things to try. Every time, the couple of new things led to another part of the game, and so on. The game is, in fact, complex (look at the map!), but it's arranged so neatly that I never needed to use the map.

Very few games have the great feel that this gives you. I completed it in less than 2 hours.

Zork is the most famous adventure game, although it was not the first. This version contains much of the three Infocom Zork games which were developed later.

Zork is a large puzzle-heavy exploration game. It has inventory limits, a timer of sorts (the light in your lamp), and it has several unfair puzzles (depending on the version you play, some important in-game clues can be omitted). The exits in the rooms work in a non-symmetric way, so going north and then south might bring you back to the wrong place.

I found that mapping out the entire game myself was very helpful. Instead of drawing a map, I just made a numbered list in the notes section of Frotz of all the rooms and their exits. That alone let me get much farther than I did 5 years ago.

I used walkthroughs after getting about half of the points, but the version on IFDB contained a fatal bug preventing me from completing the endgame. I found another version online that ran slower but which allowed me to complete the ending.

The game gets better the further you get. The 'hidden' areas are really fun, and I was surprised how huge this game really is. It makes sense that it was split into 5 games later.

Building is a real gem. I enjoyed playing this game on and off over the course of a few months. It is a medium-large size adventure game like Zork or Curses!, but set in a sort of post-apocalyptic office building.

The game has enormous attention to detail; the game's vocabulary is about 2000 words, and the number of in game messages is about 2000 as well.

This attention to detail becomes a bit too much at times, with descriptions that are over packed with words. Many of the puzzles depend on clues hidden in the middle of large paragraphs.

The game contains more red herrings than any other game I have seen.

In the end, after seeing some of the author's reviews here and his blog (the author is AmberShards), I wonder if the game is partially autobiographical. The author and the PC hate conformity, and fight against perceived oppression.

This Shufflecomp game is about a mayor who encounters a linear sequence of obstacles. Each obstacle has the exact same set of options to use when encountering it. The game's three endings don't depend on any one of the obstacles; instead, the ending you get depends on your overall pattern of choices.

The writing is silly at times (the first few pages include Buttsville and Poop Lake), but this is justified in-game, and in fact the silliness is an inherent part of the games plot.

The scenarios the mayor faces were actually compelling, and on the first play through I really though about the effect it would have on the city. There was a surprising number of scenarios to go through as well. This helps keep the game from getting monotonous, as opposed to The House at the end of Rosewood Street, where a similar list of repetitive tasks was extremely tedious.