Reviews by MathBrush

I had a few different revelations while playing this game. First thoughts: interesting mix of hyperlinks and parser. Second: is this vorple? No, Dialog. Third: a joke about Peano arithmetic? This is someone who's really familiar with parser games and math, I have to know this person. But I didn't recognize the itch name until I went to their page and saw it was Draconis!

This game is very polished. I had no idea it was meant for Petite Morte, as it would fit in just fine in IFComp. I'd say I had a 10/10 experience in the beginning, 7/10 in the middle, and 8/10 in the end.

It's a limited-verb game where you, a kind of homonculus or familiar, gain new verbs by absorbing other homunculi or familiars. These can give powers ranging from eyesight to motion to strange alchemical powers.

The game is educational as well as fun, with references to chemistry, tuning, literature, math, etc.

I was proud of not needing hints until I got stuck on a certain puzzle. I eventually realized I wasn't closely reading the results of all my actions, but only after hints. "Nudge" was useful, but for a large chunk of the game my nudge was 'gong', so I kept assuming I had to do something *to* it. That lost period was my 7/10 section.

Two things that could have been clued a bit more were what can be 'cached' and the rules surrounding the security familiar in all its uses.

Overall, very good, exactly the kind of stuff I hope for when I play interactive fiction.

This is a game that I suspect rests entirely on understanding the lyrics of a song. Unfortunately, I’m playing without headphones while my son’s on a call, and so I had to keep it down, and the genre is metal with a screaming/distorted voice, so I have no idea what’s going on. The artist is credited, but not the song name, so I have no idea what the lyrics are.

The idea of the game is that you see a cute little worm which wants you to follow him. You then peek through a hole to see a party, and the song plays while the worm grows horns. I can only assume that .

It looks like this game is another game advertising Moiki’s new sound capabilities, which seemed to work very smoothly. The graphics and color transitions were also great. Judging as a game itself, its low interactivity and brief length, coupled with its reliance and careful listening, made it rank a bit lower in my mind, but I don’t think the author was trying to make a complex game, just show off some great multimedia. The band does sound nice, and I’m surprised their youtube channel only has 192 followers.

I believe this is an extended game that is part of the same group of students that produced the game Hotel Halloween, but this story is much longer than those (although still completable in under 15 minutes).

In this story, a visit to a graveyard takes your mind to a different time and a different place, where you are tasked with finding out exactly what is going on.

The game has several surprises, and the writing has touches of emotion and descriptiveness. There are a variety of endings. I felt like its plot arc had a good resolution by the end. One thing that could be improved is better spacing of the paragraphs in the text (just adding another blank line between them would work, I think).

I was interested upon seeing that Christina Nordlander wrote this; when I started IF in 2015, I felt like I saw her name everywhere, so it's fun seeing someone who I consider 'famous' come back.

This is a Playfic game that has a large scope for a Petite Mort entry (completed in 4 hours or less). You are walking in the middle of the night and approach a house, looking for a light source.

The game is fairly complex, with multiple objects that can be turned on and off and a bit of branching in the middle. I found one way to do something very dangerous, which produced a shocking result, but looking at the code later, I realized I had missed another, more liquid event.

Of course with a Petite Mort game there are some coding issues here and there. I didn't encounter bugs but I had huge trouble finding a way type the name of a certain glowing thing because it had a two-name word in the code and I kept trying either the first name by itself or the second, but never both together.

Overall, I liked the vibes of this game; it reminded me of a couple of old Twilight Zone Episodes, somehow.

This petite morte game surprised me with how polished and nice it looked, with a dark color scheme combined with eery accents and cephalopod-based art.

It's a choicescript game about forbidden knowledge that comes from unholy texts. Again, I was surprised at how much text the game has.

But, it ends abruptly, which makes sense, as this is a Petite Morte speed-IF game. And it relies very heavily on a famous work of horror fiction, so some of its best parts were parts I had seen many times before. So the things that stick with me the most are its own innovations, like the abrupt change in setting.

Overall, a neat concept, and fun to play.

This is fos1's third game, I think, and it's been nice seeing them progress over time. This is his most complex game yet, I think. It still is rough in some areas but I enjoyed playing.

The idea is that you are in charge of a fireboat on the Hudson river in NYC, and you are visited by a strange ghost who begins to leave you messages.

The game is both hard and easy. It's a little hard because some things aren't coded in, like some synonyms, and you have to use nautical navigation (although that wasn't too bad). It's easy, though, because the game tells you exactly what to do.

I enjoyed zooming about the river and having memories of my family. Places that I think could use improvement in the future are improving conversation and replacing Inform's default 'you can see a ____ here'. The best way to do that (for an author who wants to) is to type the name of the object in the room description with brackets around it, like: 'Lined up in a row are some [map charts], a [dial], and [a compass]' (if you had those three things).

Anyway, I look forward to future games!

This is part of the author's series **Prime Pro-Rhyme Row**, all of which are based on looking at the two-word, alliterative name of a room and thinking of a rhyming set of words that are also alliterative.

In this one, you are trick or treating, and encounter various spooky Halloween things on your way to trick or treating.

The games in this series really rise and fall on how responsive they are. Other ones in the series acount for almost all player options; this one, however, is missing a ton of possible rhymes, even ones that make sense (like against the (Spoiler - click to show)twit twins, I would have thought (Spoiler - click to show)wit wins would be a clear choice).

While there have been some great entries in the series (like the original Very Vile Fairy File and the recent Bright Brave Knight Knave), I was glad to see that this might be the last in the series, as the author's newer mechanics in recent games have been, to me, a bit more fun (I liked Why Pout and Roads of Liches).

In any case, though, I found this entertaining. I did get stuck a few times. I thought it was interesting that the protagonist here is constructed as a flawed individual, for instance as someone who can't keep track of the different names of his Asian classmates; that's different than the protagonists of the rest of the series, who tend to be heroic types who grow in self-confidence.

This is a puzzle-centered choice-based game about an operative at a water treatment plant who receives a haunting visit on Halloween.

Your goal is to take care of the plant and to deal with your unwanted (or wanted?) guest. At your disposal is the plant itself, which is modelled in surprising detail: multiple spaces to represent one room, multiple levels, machinery that can connect and disconnect, several short sub-games.

Story-wise, I found the overall concept of ‘the legend about an old employee’ neat and well-done. The antagonist felt a bit one-dimensional, so it could have been fun to find out more lore or learn more about them (although maybe I missed some areas).

This was a neat game overall.

The Little Match Girl series consists of games where a time-travelling assassin girl adopted by Ebenezer Scrooge enters various worlds through the means of looking at flames.

This game is creepier than most the others, in good ways. I enjoyed the thematic unity of this one.

I originally forgot about the flame thing and so I wandered the opening area for a while before finding anything. Then once I examined a flame, things took off.

I enjoyed the diversity of the worlds this time. The main story here is that an evil werewolf is travelling through time, attacking others, and each time period and place you visit has also been visited by the werewolf. Despite the variety of worlds, the after effects of fear and strange sickness are common. I found it especially creepy that in one world the characters slowly became stricken as I left and visited again later.

Overall, the game is very polished. I ran into the same couple of issues others did (hints assumed I had grabbed something from a room when I hadn't, since the thing I needed to examine in that room didn't stick out to me; and 'percipient' was spelled as 'perpicient', unless that was intentional) but I didn't have the vorple-breaking bugs some reported.

I think I liked the atmosphere and single-mindedness of this game over some of the more elaborate other Match Girl games. It reminds me of Marvel's Werewolf By Night, as both are smaller, darker, werewolf-themed entries in a series filled with grand spectacles, and both are uniquely charming in their overall series.

This is a visual novel with excellent background images and ambient music, and which has no interactions other than clicking 'next'.

The story pays careful attention to first and second person, with 'me' being a young child named Pierce and 'you' being a figure that grows more throughout the story.

This is a family drama, and deals with Pierce's loss of a family member in the past and with haunting visions.

Reviews can serve a few purposes, two of which are telling the author if they did a good job and giving others an idea of whether they'd enjoy the game or not. My general review system incorporates writing, emotional impact, and interactivity, among others. I believe the author intended this story to have its impact almost entirely through writing; many kinetic fiction authors use the size of paragraphs and new pages to give the 'next' button a more active feel, but this game felt to me to lack even that kind of interactivity, with fairly uniform page sizes.

So, I think the author succeeded in writing an excellent narrative, and I think they should be commended for succeeding in their desired text. I also think that many users are interested in interactive aspects of stories on IFDB, and so my overall rating of a 3 takes that into account.

I do wish I understood the game a bit better. I played Doki Doki Literature Club for the first time recently while researching visual novels; in it, the 'literary' character writes a poem about a ghost under a streetlamp that is flickering. Once you read it, she says something like, 'and of course you know it wasn't about a ghost, it was about a woman trapped in a situation'. And the protagonist is apologetic at not realizing that or understanding the metaphor, but it makes them feel more appreciative of the author and her poem. I feel the same way with this story; it's clear the story isn't really about what it contains, but I don't think I got the real message. What comes across strongest to me is the alienating feeling of being a young child with no family support and everyone you love feeling like they're drifting away, but that doesn't fit with the role of the housekeeper in the game, so I feel like I can't grasp at the 'center' of the story.