Reviews by MathBrush

This is the last game on the IFComp review spreadsheet without a review.

It's a short game, written in texture. It mentions violence, brief nudity and profanity but there's very little of each (so the author is being conscientious).

The concept reminds me a lot of the AI-generated fruit people videos I see popping up on my social media (I don't think this game is AI-generated, just the themes are common). A lot of them begin with things like this game begins with, a hospital room with two women fighting over one man, later kicking to a wedding scene (I don't know why hospitals show up so much in the ai-slop videos). Here, it makes sense, as I think it's drawing on the same tropes, mostly those of soap-operas, telenovelas and some of recent sci-fi.

There are multiple paths, all of which lead to the same general reveals but substantially different results. I thought the twist was interesting.

The game itself has a typo; it's listed as El Ruido (the noise, referring to the noise in the MC's head), but the search bar and title screen calls it El Rudio.

Ruined Temple

This game is exactly what I'd expect from an Alex Crossley game based on the last two. A straightforward fantasy game that promises complex and interesting mechanics but mostly has one main path worked out and is generally underimplemented and under-hinted.

I enjoy DnD quite a bit, and spent years as a kid collecting books for 2nd and 3rd edition and even earlier reading 1st edition in bed late at night. I remember getting the Epic levels book for 3rd edition the same day I rode in a convertible for the first time, and the epic book was the coolest thing that had happened to me for a long time.

This game has all the outward signs of the things I love in DnD, but few of the inward things. I enjoy characters with compelling stories. I love ambient storytelling. There is some of that in this game but it is all kind of generic. There's no personaltiy, no big boss, no spell list. As a parser game, there are many special interactions but none are documented.

I do appreciate having the walkthrough, and the 4 characters having their own rules and roles. The game does have several in-game hints that are quite useful, and the mechanic of 'here is an obstacle, figure out which of these four characters is most likely able to solve it' is fun. I would have enjoyed more plot and more story, more character conversation and expression.

I looked forward to playing this game, as I know Phil Riley tends to make polished, well-written games. I found this game to have all the main ingredients I like in parser games: interesting/systematic puzzles, lots of conversation (including in German (!)), a well-made hint system and lots of descriptions.

You play as an Indiana Jones-type character fighting the Nazis during WWII. Jumping out of a plane, you parachute down to a desert where the ruins of a fascinating civilization jut out of the rocks. Interspersed with your nazi fighting, you have flashbacks to the beautiful woman you left behind.

The game was good, but my brain didn't interface with it properly. I died a lot because I misunderstood what was going on. A couple of times I thought I had locked myself out of victory 50 turns before and reloaded an old save (once I was wrong, but I'm not sure about the other). Even in the opening, I tried a lot of commands that didn't work (X DARK, LOOK FOR SIGNAL, X DESERT), and for some reason I couldn't make a mental map of the opening areas, most of which is empty rooms (though almost all rooms had a purpose in the end). And near the end I used all hints for several things but still didn't understand what I was meant to do due to weird choices I could make.

But, I suspect others will not encounter this. I tend to play by the seat of my pants, not making a map and not taking notes or planning carefully. Those who do such things will likely avoid the pitfalls I found.

Ryan Veeder's Agatha Christie's the Murder on the Orient Express

This is Schroedinger's game to me, an uncollapsed wavefunction of a game that is simultaneously vexatious and amusing.

First the vexatious. I had formed an image in my mind of what this game could be, and this was not it. The game also did some things that I thought games and stories should not do. However, this was a pre-conceived rubric imposed by my own desires that does not respect an author's creative expression; it is as if I had decided what I thought a 'proper adventure' was and yelled at others for not reaching my arbitrary standards.

Let me enumerate my unfounded complaints. The game is a Poirot parody/pastiche, but I've heard it said (and agree) that parodies are most enjoyable when they evince an affection or love for the original material. This game gives me the impression that the author despises Poirot. It focuses on little except his exceptional arrogance and pride, his belittlement of women, his membership in an elite ruling class that he treats with favoritism. His manner of speaking is more Veeder than Christie; it reminds me of a recent X skit I saw where a couple were haunted by the ghost of Michael Jackson, but the ghost wasn't really MJ and didn't know him well so he speaks with a Puerto Rican accent and says "Pingpung" instead of 'hee hee'.

The other main issue is that the game discards traditional elements of mysteries. Instead of finding clues we find 'clues', which, like Fallen London, have no real description and just serve as a virtual currency. Also, there is no true ending to the game, as we can (Spoiler - click to show)simply accuse anyone we want of murder and have it be true, robbing us of real agency and showing the game never had a real plot.

BUT!

What if my norms didn't matter? What if I had never heard of this author, and I had played very few adventure games or read much Christie, and I saw this game. What would I think?

The game is very well polished. At one point I tried talking to myself and it had a great custom response, and I realized how many actions it had covered. The numerous endings are all individually well done. The thought that went into the transportation and movement system is also apparent.

Yes, the game Poirot is very little like the real one, but that makes it like Little Match Girl, which bears essentially no resemblance to the Hans Christian Andersen original. We even have a similar mechanic whereby we teleport to different locations depending on which train car we leave from. This game then becomes more like Agatha Christie La Croix, with the original serving as a vague guiding direction for the story. This makes the ending mechanism a clever twist on the ending of the original game.

The 'clue' system becomes a funny way of implementing a kind of clicker game/metroidvania (okay, it's not like either of those, but still I needed something involving plain numbers and gated doors) where you just make number go up to go through locked gates.

I enjoyed the variety of puzzles and the running gags such as the corpse-related clues. I appreciate how the author was able to make 'high class socialite that is Poirot's dearest friend' into so many distinct and interesting characters. I loved the writing and the map structure.

So I could either stick to my desired ideal form of 'game' and think of this game as flawed, or abandon my preconceptions and enjoy the game. I'm reminded by a quote from the song Giorgio by Daft Punk:

Once you free your mind about a concept of
Harmony and of music being "correct"
You can do whatever you want
So, nobody told me what to do
And there was no preconception of what to do

Edit: I did find one more ending that could be considered true, but it doesn't substantially change my feelings above.

Epistemophilia

This game feels like something made by someone who has inherent skill but little contact with the worlds of interactive fiction with which I'm most familiar. It displays creativity and exuberance along with some of the features of newcomers to choice-based IF (tons of options that branch in wildly different ways resulting in very inconsistent experiences, along with a couple bugs and a lack of styling).

You wake up with basically amnesia and wander around. Everywhere you go you find robotic or alien type things. Experimenting with them either kills you or gives you a good ending or unlocks more of the story.

I played to 4 endings, soft-locked myself for a fifth (I chose the same option twice in a room, Remove the Tarp, and it just ended the game accidentally), and then read some of the code for more background.

The world is interesting, kind of reminding me of things like the manga Psyren with strange human-like creatures in a futurish world. There's a lot of fun worldbuilding here like a Badger Boy mascot that helps you get around and some of the 'humanity is special among aliens' trope.

The writing varies from very cool to a little vague. I liked the creature descriptions a lot. Here's an interesting early one:

The cable hums softly as the man stares at you with blank eyes. You identify his face as a human face. Yet, it's also a very alien face in its uncanny blandness. For starters, this face has no lines. It's as smooth as a newborn baby's. Sure, there's a normal mouth, a regular nose and two whole eyes on it. But neither of these give you any hints about their owner. They look real but they "feel" like medical book illustrations.

Some of the writing is vague. Here's some of the vagueness:

You have nothing planned but nosing around, poking, tinkering and ruminating in your schedule. Not knowing anything might be bad for the psyche for a few hours, but once you get over the initial shock, it's truly freeing.

You're a nobody here. And here is...nowhere. So, there's nothing but discovery in your mind A pure, whimsical and experimental approach in learning. Sure, you may get hungry, sick or hurt. You may even die. So what? You don't know what you'll be leaving behind. So, all is good. You've got the whole time you need.

So overall, I see the effort, I had fun exploring, ran into a few bugs, liked some of the writing, didn't enjoy 100% of it. The game felt substantial and I do feel like I had fun overall. If I were the author, I would consider this game fun/successful.

I always look forward to Arthur DiBianca's games, which tend to be tightly organized around a single concept and to be minimalistic in verb usage and text.

This one was a timed optimization puzzle (turn-based time, not IRL timed), where you wander around looking for 10 objects in a map. Most objects have duplicates. Each room has 0-2 interactable objects or doors that take a fixed amount of time to open. There are shortcut items as well including scissors, wd-40, paint remover, etc.

So it becomes a challenge to find all 10 minutes before the end of the day.

I get 5 easily, and started mapping it out, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of reward for it. There's not much story or surprise. I did like the ambient messages. If this were a first-time author's game, I'd say it was amazingly well-implemented and interesting. I guess that Arthur DiBianca just has so many good games that, compared to his others, I'd probably place it 10th to 12th. (just looking over his past list to verify this, there are so many fun ones on there like Skies Above or Variety Box). Out of parser games I've played this competition though, I'd say it's definitely above average.

Mad Warrior

I played this one around 9 or 10 times. I eventually tried editing the json file that Mr Patient mentioned in his ifdb review (when you save), which showed me that all the game code is in your appdata folder, and perusing the code was way more fun than playing the game.

Like Epistemophilia, this game seems written by someone disconnected from the mainstream of IF who simply pursued their passion without knowledge of things that would smooth player experience.

It's a dungeon crawl, breaking barrels and chests for potions and keys while equipping weapons and attack bats. It's kind of like Diablo but with less story and variety. There are 24 floors of the dungeon.

It's held back really hard by its clunky system. What's implemented is fairly smooth, it's just that it's infuriatingly tedious. Almost every room has items. When you pick up the item, you have to open your bag first. To leave the room, you have to close it. Sometimes, your bag is full. Did the author playtest the full game? Did they open and close the bag 256 times and think, "This is what players will love?" I'm sorry that I'm being rude, but playing your own game multiple times is a great test. If it's not fun for you to play, or you find yourself adding ways to skip things, then players won't really enjoy it either.

Editing the JSON let me see more. At lower levels, there are bosses, and defeating them heals you and gives you more inventory space.

Some enemies inflict status effects that can only be healed with specific items. In worst case scenarios you can use an escape rope to get to the top to buy a bandage or antidote or heal. Dying is more likely.

Combat is randomized. Some exits are weird. There's one room you go INTO on the 2nd floor, but going OUT puts you in a room you have to go OUT of again and puts you on the first floor with no way back.

Overall, I found things pretty over-tuned in the difficult direction and tedious. If the bag open/close thing were removed I'd instantly increase my rating for the game. I just can't get what the reasoning is. It can't be realism; it's really easy to have a bag semi open you can slip things in and out of. And realism would mean that to drink potions we'd have to OPEN POTION and DROP BOTTLE and in between we would OPEN MOUTH and SWALLOW. I really doubt it's for code reasons; if that were the case, we could just silently add routines to OPEN BAG before TAKEing anything and CLOSE BAG afterwards.

There are hints of a story, and the characters near the bottom are more interesting.

Ḫattušumna Laḫḫa

This is a translation game, like a real-life version of Heaven's Vault or like The Gostak with a dictionary. It contains three connected mini-games imagined as 'tablets', all written in Hittite, transliterated to roman letters.

The presentation uses a great deal of graphics and typography, and the end result looks good. The user interface is clean and helpful, with a clickable compass rose and dynamic dictionary on the right side that presents a list of conjugated verbs which can be clicked on to type where to go.

I've played many games in non-English languages. Google translate is of course key, but I often use the IF Postcard in the respective languages as a starting point. Here, those basic commands are provided. I could see games having an interactive version of the IF postcard in the sidebar in the future.

Playing this game felt very different than playing other foreign-language games. Typically, the German, French, Spanish and Italian games I try were intended for fluent speakers in their respective language. On one hand, this is much harder as the words are quite complex (some Spanish authors love to do dialect, for instance). On the other hand, the game engines are often designed to respond to 'lazy' inputs. Verbs and nouns are often not conjugated or accept multiple endings, and markers like cedillas and umlauts can be omitted or replaced with shortcuts.

These games are designed to teach the player and to to be simple. So, for instance, the first level has simple puzzles like darkness and a ladder; the second one is a fetch quest, and the third is learning about social norms. Yet some of these easy puzzles are actually quite complex for non-native speakers, the kind of thing I often dread when playing such games (if we need chopped cheese for a quest and find regular cheese, do we assume the character will chop it themself or do we need to do so? etc.)

But the game has several layers of english help. Error messages are written in English, and point out the problems in our sentence formation. (I did have one issue early on where the game said the scribe had an error in a word and I assumed that meant the actual game scribe and that I couldn't refer to the object, but I had just used the wrong case ending). There are english translations of each word you click on, and invisiclues in English. I used no clues in the first game, but as I was trying to finish late at night, I used more clues for the other.

The third game contains nothing but reading and a logic puzzle, which I found most interesting in trying to read the clues, rather than the actual puzzling part.

The game is fairly violent, but it's all at a remove, since we are separated from the text by imaginary time and real language barriers.

This game is much more enjoyable than most education games I've played and much more smooth and player-friendly than most translation games I played. Hittite seems like a fun language, with some familiar aspects and some strange ones (like the particle starting every sentence).

Finally, this game is not like the Anpa Ma game from last year where the player has to use dictionaries and struggle alone, and beating it is a major challenge. This is a gently guided tour, non-trivial, but something most players should be able to do.

Tales of Nivea: GRIP

I had a long emotional journey playing this game.

I at first worried it would be a boring AI game, given its well-made UI and its use of M-dashes, but as I played I found it had a fairly solid plot arc and escalation and continuity, and that characters were well-defined and interesting.

It's a game designed to make you question 'just following orders'. You live in a society with scarcity issues where people can be born with magical powers of different elemental types and strengths. Your job is to process ones flagged as dangerous or interesting to either send them to military conscription, permanent home arrest, or death.

There are criteria for each three, though I forgot them early on (it may be worth writing them down). Two are clear, but conscription was harder for me to know.

The game tracks your choices. I found it compelling to try to decide between them.

Less compelling was the rather opaque interface. I thought I had been a complying toady the whole time only to discover I received the 'rebellious' ending. Looking at the code, apparently every time you question the children at all, you gain 'doubt' points. So getting more content from the game hurts you without it alerting you to that fact. Other aspects are confusing at times; I kept getting notices at the end of cases that I hadn't compared two facts. I thought that was because I had selected the wrong messages to transcribe in my notebook, but apparently I was meant to click on that message and that would resolve it (I don't know if clicking on that message increases any counter).

Sometimes I felt the game was a bit too strong with the emotions, but other times it did a great job of selling powerful moments through understated text, which I liked. I think the author is talented at writing.

It reminded me of jury duty I had this year. The defendant was a young adult man. We found out that he was on trial for child molesting. A lot of us were thinking about how many years to give him (he had pleaded guilty and it could not be overturned, this was just a sentencing trial). Many of us at first seemed disposed to give him what felt like a large amount, like 20 or more years. As the trial progressed, it turned out he had abused numerous children, even infants, and had been on trial before and found guilty, and had gone to therapy but skipped out on most of the meetings, and then had signed up as a church youth counselor. He testified (against counsel) and said that he would likely do it again and it was something he did to relax when tense.

Even then, the jurors were split. I advocated that he be in jail long enough that even with parole he wouldn't get out while his victims were still children. One man said he'd only do life. Several people refused to do life or anything over 60 years, since it meant this guy's entire life would be gone by the time he went out.

We had restrictions. We were instructed to follow the law. We could assign a fine. Asked who the fine would be paid by and to, we were told that 'the law is before you, follow it' and were not given further instructions.

So, it was exactly the scenarios in these files. You have people, often repeat offenders, who are a hazard to the community. Do you deal with them as the law requires? Even if you feel the law is unjust?

Anyway, the memories of the trial came up during the game (I know this is heavy, but I'm making the connection of my own free will, so I hope the author doesn't feel obliged to step in and say 'that was awful!' or 'I'm sorry it made you remember that' because I think one of fiction's best uses is presenting our minds with unusual scenarios that help us process our thoughts, memories and emotions).

I do think some of the mechanics could be made more clear, and sometimes I felt the story expected me to remember more of earlier incidents than I did. Overall though I found this a thoughtful, well-constructed and worthwhile game.

Ironically, while playing this mystery game about putting clues together, I had two moments of clarity where I thought 'ha, this reminds me of ____' and then put two and two together.

The first (which should have been obvious) was that I thought, 'man, this interface really reminds me of Paintball Wizard', which lead me to look up and realize that Doug Egan made Paintball Wizard.

The second moment was that I was enjoying the clue linking thing and thought, 'Ha! I used that for my game Color the Truth, and Erstwhile used it to. I'm glad to see someone else had the same idea.' Then after I beat the game, I saw in the credits that the author was originally planning on using the Color the Truth system before settling on Twine. I think the game is better for the Twine version; the menus and quick navigation significantly improved my experience.

This game is a goofy cartoonish comic hero mystery game with distinct characters and solid dialog. You play as a brain on a skateboard with no real way of interacting with the world. The leader of your superhero band, Captain Prodigious, has died, and you have to figure out who killed him.

Gameplay has 3 main systems. The first is talking to people, which gives clues. You can say those clues to every suspect, and can combine them to get better clues. The second is gaining more physical capabilities, such as pushing, taking, and getting keycards. The third is using those capabilities to obtain physical evidence.

Some clues cannot be used in normal conversation, but are saved up for a big 'in the parlor' type meeting where you finally explain things to everyone. There, you pair up clues again.

I was worried that I'd be put off by the goofiness of the game (which continues throughout), but it's good-natured fun and it has serious undertones that were meaningful, like the desire for young adults to be treated with respect and the difficulties that married couples have in spending time with each other, or the way that disabled people can be neglected.

Like many of these clue-matching games, the midgame was the hardest, when you have the most unmatched clues and knowing what to do next is hard. I used one hint at the time. Other than that, the game did a great job of managing the quadratic clue-matching space by hinting at things like 'oh, this conversation topic was almost enough, you need more to convince this person' or 'you should try this with someone else'.

The game felt substantial. It felt more approachable to me than Paintball Wizard was. It does have a few rough edges; I think I remember someone mentioning that waiting for people to leave a room or be together was hard, but someone else pointed out that you can wait in the foyer, and I used that and it was great (until it disappeared near the very end before the summative thing, but by then I didn't need it anymore). Actually, that's the only real rough edge I had.

I'm really interested to see how this places. I love mysteries, and the good features in this game mean I wouldn't be surprised to see this in the top 5. However, I don't know how people will react to the interface and the goofy superhero genre, so I could see it placing somewhere else in the top 20. But I personally hope it gets higher than paintball wizard did! (which was 13th). I've played a lot of fun games this comp already, though, so I guess it's not overall placement that matters, but quality of game, and I think this game is really high quality.