Reviews by MathBrush

This is a game that is intensely minimalist to a point I'd say it's buggy. Most actions just give you a question mark as a response, which isn't too bad, but in the starting scene in the airplane, and directional movement just tells you that the door is closed, you are told you're seated but can't get up, sunlight is coming in through a window but you can't close it, etc.

Dan Fabulich posted a walkthrough of it, which I used for the very first special action and the very last. After the main intro, you get a variety of scenarios which are disjointed and seem to perhaps be memories.

I like the cool random concepts, but a lot of the fun of parser games is exploring the boundaries of the world and seeing different interactions and having them be intentional, whether they're limited intentionally or expansive intentionally. And a lot of the interactions I had with this game didn't feel like they had intentional responses.

The music was cool! I wonder if it was hand-edited into the javascript by the author.

Gambler's Quest

I think the last move of the game sums it up very well:

> e

Thank you for playing my game! That is all that I have so far. I might finish this at a later date if this gets enough attention, but this small demo gave me enough to work on and I'm happy with it. I hope you enjoyed playing it.You can't go that way.

This game gives you a few small quests including clothing and finding a sword, with one unhinged thing in it, just like its sister game, the Copper Tavern, which had an AK-47 (in this game, its your quest to kill the king.)

As its unfinished, I can't speak to the plot or design or puzzles. There were some bugs in this intro.

Everyone's Invited

This is a downloadable window executable that ends up having some different branching choices selectable by keyboard.

My first impression was, 'Wow, the art's really cool'. It felt like a real dreamcore/weirdcore style of art and music, very weird, glitchy, unsettling.

The story is about going to a party (after a brief surreal opening) where everyone is a kind-of person, a glitch in the universe, not really real. You wander around trying to find any shred of personality or reality. There are several endings, 2 of which are documented in the walkthrough (with a third described more generally).

It reminded me of p-zombies, which Magnus Archives covered in its 'Zombies' episode. The idea is that we can't tell if other people have inward existence or 'qualia' or whatever or if they're just really good imitations of humans. I don't know if that was the idea behind this game, but it fit well.

This game is a short downloadable window executable with music and sound and timed text, many things I typically dislike, but I liked this.

Live and Get Pie

This was amusing. It's a short parser game where every line rhymes (i.e. the middle of the line rhymes with the end).

I wasn't sure what to do at first, but I liked the rhyme scheme (I like rhyming poetry more than non-rhyming poetry) and I found the implementation responded fairly well to a few things I chose.

When I realized what the actual commands to win were, I smiled, I thought it was great. Reminded me of Hard Puzzle by Ade McTavish, games 1-3 (the solution isn't the same or obtained the same way, but if you've beaten all 3 you'll see what I mean).

Logic Land

This is a game played on an Atari emulator. I had a little fussiness with keypresses; sometimes I overshot the action I wanted (you hold arrow keys or press arrow keys and push space).

It's a game like the famous Chinese Room by Joey Jones and Melvin Rangasamy, full of logical paradoxes brought into 'real life'. You try to TAKE in most rooms, gaining random items, then you find the right item to USE in other rooms, like using OCCAM'S RAZOR on a COMPLICATED THING.

It's almost entirely surface-level philosophy, mostly riffing on the names and/or definitions of things without looking deeper, but it's charming and I enjoyed the setup to the very end. With the very limited constraints, there was less room for bugs, and I don't think I encountered any.

Black Thumb

This is a brief parser game that reminded me in positive ways of Baby Tree or Out, parser games that are short and symbolic and which may be a bit buggy (although this game is more optimistic than Baby Tree and Out was better coded). It also reminds me of Map with its direct metaphors (an empty house with a big growing plant in it).

Your parents are gone and your house is empty and lonely, so you stay in your room with your succulent and your dust-covered desk. I almost wonder if we're a ghost or dead or something.

Anyway, your instructions to care for the succulent quickly become unhinged, and we enact great symbolic events.

There is friction here because the parser is underimplemented and trying to figure out the author's intended solution is often puzzling, especially for the final action. But this story 'clicked' in my mind.

Residual Income

This is a vampire heist tale with vivid imagery and a clever twist. Except I'm not fully clever enough to understand the twist.

You break into an apartment to find a writer in a future set in a technological city. The writer escapes into his panic chamber in the center of the house while you circle around, looking for information on him. You don't show up on cameras, which made me immediately think of ghost or vampire, thought it soon becoms clear.

The main big twist, which I won't write here, is about the vampire's method of feeding. What I am still pondering are the other facets of the game, not spoilers, but worldbuilding. It's not necessary to answer questions about that (ambiguous worldbuilding is often better than clearcut!) but I wonder how the place into the game. For instance, the author claims to have written a thousand or thousands of stories, and talks about not getting 'come-alive chips'. In our day, even the most prolific authors struggle to reach a thousand books (except, of course, Corín Tellado), so that combined with the idea of needing a chip to come alive made me wonder if this were an AI author, but that doesn't fit at all with the other themes. Maybe life is prolonged in this future world?

I'll try running through the game again real quick and see. Hmm, just noticed that the very first link is a different voice we tell to shut up. I'll have to see if that recurs. I also see a flower saying it looks like it comes from a virtual render, which would fit with my ai idea. I find a minor typo in the name of the writer's love; I remember the first time being surprised at the discrepancy but thought I had just misremembered (unless the typo is also intentional). The story says the guy has been writing for 50 years, so this isn't an expanded lifespan situation, this guy is really cranking about a book every few days. And the game says that his books were selling millions of copies, so is this guy a billionaire? No, because someone has his residuals, his 'owner'. So he's forced to make books in a book sweatshop?

That's why that original idea popped in my head. Couldn't the vampire be a reader, someone who desires interest and fun, so they turn to an AI that cranks out books, but finds it intellectually bankrupt? I doubt that's the intended story, but it was fun to analyze.

Anyway, I thought this interesting, fun to read, good to have in the competition.

High School Reunion

This is a well-done texture game with a lot of short, branching paths. You go to a high-school reunion and decide whether to go in or not. You can leave right away to get a "coward's ending", or experiment with varieties of deception or the supernatural. My favorite path ended with me beat up in a Wendy's parking lot.

There's not a lot else to say about the game. It's short and doesn't have an overarching plot, and there's no real bugs I found either. A platonically neutral game, like a 7.0 pH solution.

IF Derby

An amusing concept. This game simulates IFComp and other competitions by having randomly named horses (with names drawn from a database of mashed-up real IF titles) race against each other.

Text is almost minimal, but occasionally a horse will appear in the lower right corner indicating an option to talk. Those options are infrequent, but interesting.

The winner appears to be truly random each turn. It's a good reminder about how pure skill alone can't win a competition, that even though you can reach near the top, there are always unexpected factors that can sway things one way or another. But supporting each other, even the 'losers', can build meaningful connections.

I do appreciate the author giving us a way to ensure we get a lot of money, but in the end, that, too, doesn't matter quite as much.

Uninteractive Fiction 3

I finally got around to playing this with a group of people today.

It kind of reminded me of Hard Puzzle 4. Hard Puzzle 1-3 each had a single puzzle with a hilariously complicated setup which ultimately could be solved by a single command or similarly simple strategy. Hard Puzzle 4 was a full-on game.

Uninteractive Fiction 1 and 2 were one-note games that were tiny jokes.

UI 3 is a larger-scale game that attempts mechanics and plot, which means I'd prefer to compare it to other games that attempt mechanics and plot.

There is a timer on the screen that counts down from 60. Once it reaches 0, you can hit PLAY and tap a drum. This increments a global counter. As that global counter increases, you get different text. Once it reaches a multiple of 400, it starts over and increments a red number at the top of the page.

I recruited several people to help me today, and we got through the whole game in 1 hr.

The writing kind of reminded me of Swigian. When I wrote Swigian, I originally was trying to prove that any polished parser game that isn't repetitive and last 200 moves or so would place highly in IFComp. I just wrote random filler things, having a tree to chop and an axe and a flint. I didn't know what to do after that, so I had the character fall asleep and wake up somewhere else, and then decided to throw in some Beowulf references. But the stuff was just there to fill up content.

I kind of felt like that about the text here. There were some parts I thought were really cool, but I didn't really feel compelled by a narrative arc, it mostly felt like filler. I did enjoy spending time collaborating and talking with others. I've seen Damon write some fantastic stuff (I love the candy detective games), but this wasn't as strong.

So where does this leave the series? This entry is a very slow timed-text vehicle for a semi-randomized mostly-linear narrative without strong plot points and only the occasionally gorilla gif to present variety. Making it more fun makes it more interactive. It's interesting.

It'd be fun to see the code for this afterwards, the secret-keeping parts like having the text not be highlightable would be especially interesting.