Reviews by MathBrush

This game is written in Toki Pona, a minimalistic conlang (artificial language) designed to have only around 100 words. The whole dictionary can fit on one page, so it's possible to (slowly) play this game without any prior knowledge.

I first got an idea of how to play by reading a Let's Play on the intfiction forums. After I tried playing a bit, I found that you can TRANSLATE any bolded word you see, which translates the object, its description, and context. With that as a base, I found myself slowly able to translate lines one at a time.

However, there are some big text dumps where TRANSLATE doesn't work. For those, I searched online for a Toki Pona translator and only found LLMs that do it. I decided to use Copilot to translate big chunks. I vary in my feelings on AI usage, focusing mainly on whether the AI produces good work, is depriving others of work, and on resource usage. AI is pretty good at translation, there were no other ways to translate Toki Pona except by hand, so I was only concerned about resource usage, so tried to limit my use to very large pages where I was stuck. I also assumed the author would oppose AI usage and want people to pick up the language, so I did my best. It was fun to realize that some words were just english or romance languages adapted to the alphabet (like 'group' becoming 'kulupu').

Once I was done, I realized that while the translation was done in a cool way and the game by itself is fun (and has cool CSS), they don't mesh well. I play a ton of foreign language IF, and I've found that such games are easiest for foreigners when:
-Vocab is kept simple and most commands are given on the postcard or given in the text (I found it hard to figure out how to TAKE things in the game, as it's missing from the IF command postcard and only found in text. You have to KAMA JO something or JO something. Furthermore, you MUST put an E before the object of any verb. So you have to both somehow figure out you need to type JO and to put E before something. Also, the vocab is quite complex given the simple language, as we have mechanical devices and bizarre creatures).
-All connections and points of interest in the world model are clearly labelled (In this game, there is an important action and an important exit not mentioned in the text. The exit is hinted at in a very long text dump, but the action of (Spoiler - click to show)looking under the bed is one I only tried because it was a verb on the postcard).
-Talking is handled by menu, choices, or simple TALK TO (in this game, you can ask about different topics).
-Actions like unlocking and taking and dropping are handled implicitly.) (In this game, you have a two (!) item inventory limit!)

The points above are not 'good game vs bad game', just 'games that are personally easier for me to play as a non-native speaker' vs 'harder for me'.

The story is pretty neat. To help any future players, here's a long explanation of what I encountered as I played (essentially complete spoilers):

(Spoiler - click to show)I woke up in a house and found a letter describing my affection for a dark-haired person named Penelopi. Penelopi went to the underworld. I wanted to follow. I looked under the bed and found a coin. I went outside and went to a forest. I saw plants and a bug that I remember Penelope liking. On a later playthrough, I saw a tree and had a memory of her being kind to a lizard while I flirted with her, and she suggested climbing the tree. Up in the tree I found a mechanical egg.

Later, I went (Spoiler - click to show)to a town where I went to a shop. On my first playthrough, I had no money, so I went out and talked to a guard at the mouth of a cave to the underworld. The guard wouldn't let me in and also had a copy of Counterfeit Monkey in a bag. They wanted to learn english to play it. I went and found the coin under the bed and spent it to buy an english dictionary. I gave it to the guard. He then let me into the underworld after warning that it was dangerous.

Once inside, (Spoiler - click to show)I fell down a broken floor and saw some cool CSS. I took a yellow flower. I then fell more and found Penelopi turned into a lizard monster. She saw the flower and like it so she ate me. I then replayed, looking at the game textdump uses glulx-strings and saw that there was a mechanical egg (that apparently has a neat distraction tool inside). I sold the egg and bought the ring and took the letter. This time I showed Penelope the letter and the ring, and she decided she liked me and that I could stay.

Overall, the frustrations with the difficult content in a conlang game made me want to rate 3/5, but making a game in a conlang feels like a 5/5 thing, so I'm giving 4/5.

Compared to the Gostak, this game has hard basic structure (remembering stuff like li and la and e was hard) but easy vocab ('jan wawa' isn't too hard to understand after a while), while the Gostak has easy basic structure (just English) with almost impossible vocab. Since the basic grammar structure is most of reading, I found the Gostak easier to read in a 'flow state' but this game easier to understand the overall narrative.

This is a compact puzzle game. You are a young keeper of time, and the time crystals have been stolen, opening up portals to famous disasters.

Disasters include a lot of conflagarations, like Krakatoa, Hindenburg, and the London Fire, balanced by the icy Titanic sinking and mediated by the San Francisco earthquake.

Some subareas are small, with most being 3-4 rooms and a couple being significantly larger.

Puzzle solution generally revolves around finding an item in one area that allows progress another, so basically like a key-door structure (with three of the items being actual keys, although none get used for doors).

The game is decidedly puzzle-oriented. Time travel is ripe for philosophical quandaries, questions of ethics, unrequited hopes, resignation, ontological paradoxes, butterfly effect, etc. Here, the author has neatly sidestepped all of this, avoiding any deep contemplation about time travel. Time resets every time you leave and enter an area, but only the watch time; all things you did remain in effect and all NPCs remember what you told them. Trying to warn individuals about disasters has no effect or reaction.

The lack of implicit actions in PunyInform is frustrating. A lot of gameplay was like:
>GO [location in water]

You can't do that while holding things.

(oh right, I'm holding a key).

>PUT KEY IN [container]

I splash around a bit and get somewhere. Now I need the key.

>UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY.

You're not holding the Key.

>GET KEY. UNLOCK DOOR.

The door is unlocked.

> ENTER DOOR.

The door is not open.

>OPEN DOOR. ENTER DOOR.

I do what I need to. Time to leave into the water.

'You can't do that while holding items'.

That's a vague excerpt, but some implicit actions for going through closed doors and using items that are in a carried container would be nice. Similarly, X SIGN and READ SIGN are different, which could be interesting, but almost all the descriptions for X-ing things with writing just say 'This is a readable thing. It would be neat to read it', so I wonder if it would be easier to just assume the player wants to READ it whenever they X it. It would be very difficult to examine a sign in real life without reading it, since most of a sign is words.

I did softlock myself once by getting really far into an area and not being able to return to the portal in time, so I recommend saving.

Charles Moore, Jr. is an author who I associate with very large, complex games with difficult puzzles.

This game is pretty big an puzzly, but not quite as hard as his others. The tutorial is very friendly and the cheat sheet is a great help together with the 'help' system, which I used a lot.

You are a bear in the woods, and you are very hungry. There are 12 different meals you can get, almost all from humans that you find. You lack most of the powers of a usual adventure protagonist like speech or fine motor control but you make up for it with fearsome presence, growls and brute strength.

The map is quite large and complex. I used a mental map and got through, but got lost many times partway through. Mapping would both help solve a ton of puzzles and make the game a lot easier.

The only drawbacks I found were that sometimes I had difficulty knowing what to type for a puzzle solution I already knew (for instance, I didn't know I had to (Spoiler - click to show)push the atv UNDER the beehive instead of just pushing it to the room.), and that sometimes the puzzles solutions involved a seemingly random combination of items from far across the map (especially the puzzles involving the (Spoiler - click to show)rubber duck and the flare gun). Other than that, I found this a well-written and enjoyable nature journey.

This game was entered in 2025 the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

In it, you wander around a makerspace with tools for sewing, cutting, soldering, etc. Along the way, you discover a broken time machine.

Repairing the machine takes you all over the makerspace and through time, helping you learn what everything does and interacting with the people there.

I got lost pretty early on as there are a ton of red herring items. As time went on there were less and less things I hadn't used yet and so it was simple to deduce what was next.

I really enjoyed learning about the makerspace!

I didn't enjoy the text, which seemed mostly AI generated. I found this odd, as I have enjoyed Richard Pettigrew's terse but witty style in his earlier games. Now, it may not be AI generated, but if it was hand-written, the author was remarkably repetitive and unhelpful. Almost everything is 'a testament to the hours/years/minutes of love/labor/etc. of its users'. Every item 'radiates usefulness' or 'hints at a special meaning' etc. Every room has several nouns mentioned in its description which aren't there at all, which defeats the purpose of a text adventure where the text is the game (it would be like a 3d game that randomly placed guns, powerup icons, medkits and quest icons but all of them were fake and did nothing). I eventually realized I could completely ignore all text except item names, as the AI text never provided any use or interest for me. I feel like I would have had more fun just reading the prompts that were used and imagining it myself.

Also, for some reason my character would randomly burp and fart for some reason throughout the game.

I liked the story progression and the ending. My favorite part, though, was the satisfying crafting process.

Zeno Pillan has made several games in the past that were short, surreal parser games with cool ASCII art.

This game is much larger, with code at around 60K words. It's a party game; you're at a house with a ton of people in it and you can do things like watch youtube (where you physically enter into the videos), play a fighting game (with real attacks like special moves and stuff), talk to all the different friends, enter a world of books, etc.

The game also has four endings (and more if you read the code). Some endings are really easy to find, while the dance ending can take ton of work.

Overall, the atmosphere is wholesome and nostalgic, the ascii art is cool, and the different endings are a fun idea. The annotated code is fun to read in and of itself, with cool little doodles and such.

The only drawback I found was that the game seemed like it could use more time to get feedback from others and implement it, and to do some grammar and typo fixing. This isn't a 'the writing is bad' issue, the writing is fine, it's more stuff like capitalization errors and punctuation. One thing I like to do is run my text through a spellchecker like grammarly (although I usually ignore grammarly's more complicated suggestions). I know the author wrote this 60K (!) word game on his phone, so it might be harder there. Similarly, it can be hard to find beta testers. But if this had typos fixed and player feedback for bugs, I think this would be an amazing game. As it is, it's only a good, really fun game.

This game was fun to play in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

It's a wordplay game based on shifting rhymes, and written with Adventuron. I really appreciated the extensive explanations and help early on, the colored text and the little hints really helped me navigate the game.

The images went perfectly with the game as well, having the same whimsical vibe as the rest.

Gameplay was simple in a pleasing way, good for the context the Literacy Jam, but there are a ton of accomplishments that I didn't achieve which diligent players could search for.

I liked the game overall, but I don't see myself revisiting it; it felt like a one-time satisfying play.

This game has you star as the dashing captain of a time-travelling ship piloted by a helpful Mother AI. An enemy faction is travelling to the past to sabotage your present, and you have to stop them.

There are 4 or so main time periods you travel to, each with its own set of puzzles as well as some recurring characters. Names of things in the game are often references; one whole area is a giant reference to steins;gate.

In between those areas, you can explore the large ship you pilot, with several crew members who can help you can give you advice.

The game has few bugs, although I did lock myself out of victory once by returning to my quarters before I finished a section, triggering a cutscene too early.

The story has good story beats but felt a little less descriptive in the middle, possibly because the author could vividly picture things due to the references but I couldn't due to not knowing the games.

Overall, this is a substantial game and I played it here and there over several nights.

This is a German parser game where you have to leave your work after being fired but not before exposing your boss for all his crimes.

It's a comedy game, with gags like a slick ramp that makes you slide all the way to the bottom every time and nasty food left in the office microwave.

I thought at first that it was really buggy, as I had numerous commands that I found reasonable that had no response, and many errors. But...

I realized that there was just one small bug that I had found that caused all the others. As a non-native speaker, I only looked up words I didn't know. After already having found a hole punch, I then found a "gabelstapler". I thought, 'nice, a stapler!' and picked it up and went up stairs.

A gabelstapler is a forklift.

Having taken it up stairs, I turned it on and tried to get in, but I couldn't because I was holding it. I dropped it and got in and turned it on, but I couldn't drive anywhere by 'dreh linkrad' (or whatever) or going north. Trying to get out made me leave the whole building.

I started over and didn't put the forklift in my pocket. There was no problem!

So I won't take a point off for coding because it was my own fault for doing something stupid lol.

The game has a lot of possible variety, as you can end the game whenever you want by leaving out the front door. I 'won' with 16-18 points out of 25, so there's still a lot left to do. I found the game amusing!

While I may have given this game a lower score, I think it shows markable progression in the author's skill over time. This the fourth Text Adventure Literacy Jam game by this author, and while it has some flaws, it is a complete game with hints and help and is reasonably completable.

You play as a witch with a sick kid, and you have to make a potion to heal them. You go around to different rooms, each with 1-2 items, and you get the three ingredients necessary to make what you need.

The parser is, I think, a two-word parser, as most of my attempts at PUT ___ ON ___ and PUT ____ IN ____ didn't work but 'drop' did in most areas.

There are some fun little twists here and there. The writing is minimalistic, and I struggled with the parser several times. I definitely appreciate the hints and the HELP text.

It's interesting, I've seen Japanese-inspired games pop up in several non-English IF competitions in the last few years (I think Spanish had two), so it's kind of a mini-trend.

This was a fairly polished small game about two lovers separated by many miles and bad weather. You first play as the man, stricken by bad weather and looking for a place to rest.

You then play as the woman, seeking after her lost lover.

Gameplay is story-focused. There are puzzles, some I had trouble with (fortunately there are hints and a walkthrough), but they are all there to further the story, which is about the titular Snow Maiden.

I played to one ending out of 3. I did find some of the puzzles pretty hard, especially for a foreign-language speaker, as it required using some verbs I didn't know and examining, taking and using different background elements in ways that I couldn't have intuited on my own. I'd be interested in knowing from native speakers how hard they found these puzzles. I also felt a bit railroaded into actions I wouldn't have wanted to do in real life (this may be due to the ending I chose and there might be another path outside the walkthrough).

Overall, I liked the overall storyline and the beautiful imagery. I think most people who play German parser games would find it worth their while.