Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

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 game is framed as homework for translation in a Russian lit class (or similar).

You are given the poem ( a famous one: Он любил три вещи на свете by Анна Ахматова unless I copied it down wrong), and asked to translate it.

The issue is that, like most poems and most translation, it makes use of idioms that don't naturally have a unique counterpart in the other language (in this case, English).

Choosing the meaning to stick with can drastically change the meaning of the poem.

I though this was well made, and powerful.

This game is by Inkle, a studio that has made numerous interactive fiction games. While this game has many non-textual elements, the text is a very important part of the gameplay and the core mechanic is a large textual language puzzle. It took me 16 hours for one playthrough, according to Steam.

The main idea is that you, in an fictional futuristic setting, are an archaeologist exploring an ancient, highly-advanced civilization. They settled a nebula with 'moons' connected by jets of water that are navigable by boat. The main thread throughout the civilizations' history is the use of a language: ancient. This is presented as a series of sigils, usually ran together, that you at first guess and then eventually become certain of (through a mechanic where the game tells you if you got it right after you use it a few times in a row). No spaces are used in most words, making finding where words start and stop the hardest part later on.

I'd like to split up this review a bit into different categories, starting with what was, for me, the weakest part:

3d Navigation and pacing
I bounced off this game at first because of this. One thing that a lot of commercial IF games lean into, especially ones by authors transitioning from indie to AAA-adjacent, is to bulk up the play time, is splitting up stories with long sections of travel. This is done in 80 Days, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, and here, too. This leads to a lot of very dull moments. 80 days helped make up for it with quick transit animations and making the movement part of the overall puzzle, while in most of these other games it's just dead air.

This game splits up content in two different ways. Large chunks each take place on different worlds, split up by ship travel, which has no hazards and no decision making outside of binary choice points and occasional random treasure. The smaller chunks on each world are split up by 3d motion. This uses invisible hitboxes that don't always line up with what you can see; this is especially apparent in 'open worlds' that look easily navigable but are secretly linear. I found myself frequently running into walls and getting stuck. Amusingly, I realized that the space part and the 3d part were very similar to Kingdom Hearts 1, just without the enemies.

Conversations happen in real-time. Speed is adjustable in the menu, but there is no scroll-back and pausing is difficult. I generally like text games because they can be picked up and put down, minimized, multitasked, and easily played around others without being intrusive. For this game, I had to give complete attention at pretty much all times, and even then I missed quite a bit of dialog looking away to itch a scratch or to answer my kids' questions.

Continuing on my scale of not liking to liking are things that I liked a lot but don't really factor into my rating:
Graphics and audio

I think they did a great job here. Voiceover is really lovely, the music is heartrending and sci-fi feeling. The art looks a lot better than most 3d games, and loads well on my potato laptop. The artists and sound designers really did well.

Character and Plot
This is generally very good, with some slight caveats. Characters are very distinctive and mostly memorable. The protagonist has a rich past interconnected with many corners of the Nebula. The plot contains multiple independent strands circling the big mystery: where did these civilizations come from, why is everyone here, and what's going to happen to them?

Our main character is kind of a jerk. I know subconsciously it can be easy to perceive strong female characters as aggressive when compared to similar male protagonists, but I believe our character has attributes would be jerky for men as well, especially in regards to her interaction with the robot Six. It was actually refreshing in a lot of ways, but I think 'jerk with a heart of gold' interests me more than 'jerk with a heart of jerk'. The strong personality does lend to some fun role-playing through.

The plot threads were very intriguing, including the mysterious workings of your home city, the cryptic machinations of you employer, some kids trying to find their place in the world, etc, as well as your progressive discovery of the ancient world.

I felt like the ending in my playthrough came at a time where I had a lot of loose ends, and not a lot of choice to go back and work on them. And the final reveal, while visually stunning, left quite a bit unresolved as well, especially given how much build up there was. I know that it can be hard to simultaneously give people choice as well as a satisfying plot structure (which is one reason, I speculate, that a lot of Choice of Games with award-winning stories often don't sell as well as those with straightforward power fantasies), but I've seen a few people do a great job of this, such as the 'Truth' ambition in Sunless Skies. That game separates your quests into different categories and has clear victory conditions, so you know if you're going to leave threads unfinished. It also provides a very weighty, powerful, and conclusive finish to the final story. I feel like Sorcery! 4 also had a very satisfying ending. This game, Heaven's Vault, was not bad at all with its ending, better than average for sure, but could have been amazing.

Puzzle mechanics

I really enjoy languages. I've studied French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Greek, Latin, Japanese and a little Hebrew, some more than others. So I was definitely up for a challenge here.

As someone who has struggled with many languages, I have to say that the experience in this game is much less like learning an actual language and much more like learning a code alphabet for English. Emily Short, in her review, said "a great deal of Ancient is English in a chiffon-sheer disguise", and I have to agree.

However, this isn't necessarily a negative. Language take forever to learn. I've been studying written Japanese for 3-4 months now and still struggle with basic pronunciation. For the average English-speaking player, learning an actual non-English language would be far too difficult.

So the game simplifies it. 'Ancient' has none of those bizarre ultra-common connector words that can mean so many things (like 'zwar' in German or '就' in Mandarin). Most sentences, especially early ones, follow simple noun-verb-object patterns, with some light prepositions added in later.

Most words are ones that can be easily identified with pictographs. Themes of light, travel, people, fire, water, air, earth, plant and metal dominate the vocabulary. In another distinction between in-game and real-life pictographic languages, there is not a significant 'drift', where everyday words have bizarre derivations based on non-written considerations (like the fact that 'mother' in chinese is woman-horse due to homonyms). Interestingly, the pictograph for 'man' is the same in 'Ancient' and Chinese, although I don't know if that's a coincidence.

Some features are distinctly English, such as the way that past and future tense are conjugated and the use of helper verbs. The game uses symbols that directly derive from modern earth culture, like (Spoiler - click to show)question marks and x's

These features make word-solving easier. Even then, it would be impossible to just begin with a blank slate, make guesses, and hope you're right later. It'd be the worlds' hardest cryptogram and sudoku, a big pile of guesses waiting to collapse. Instead, the game gives you a huge leg up over real-life translators by giving you four options to guess from, 1 of which is always correct. Which every one you pick is indicated by a ? in future uses. Once it's used 3 or 4 times, the game confirms your translation or denies it through your robot or your own intuition. This is probably the main feature that makes the game far easier than learning a real-life language, and it is, in my opinion, what makes it actually fun.

By the end, individual pictographs are all easily identifiable, so the trick is giving you longer sentences with no spaces, so you have to identify words by their structure. The language is very systematic, and I was thrilled to puzzle out some pieces, although some I struggle with, especially (Spoiler - click to show)the difference between a period . and a colon :. It can become very difficult to find the border between words, and you can't figure out new words unless you surround them on both sides with established words. I often had to save longer texts to come back to after I learned more words.

I adored the translation. For me the highlight of the game was finding a huge (Spoiler - click to show)book that never seemed to end. I translated over 20 lines, took a break, delivered it somewhere, and translated more until it made me stop.

As mentioned earlier, the game ended kind of abruptly for me and I had some unresolved translation, but by then I felt like I was going to have to compromise anyway on what I had hoped to achieve in the game. I didn't feel compelled to do another playthrough, but I may try again some day.

Overall

Overall, it was worth the money. I got it on sale. It provided me 16 hours of content and could easily go up to 30 or more, with a large chunk of that being just reading/translating. That's much more than most free/indie interactive fiction. I didn't really like the 3d movement aspects at all, and I feel the ending could have had more narrative weight, especially (Spoiler - click to show)talking more about loops, and the repetition aspect. But the plot still pulled me forward the whole game, and for a language puzzle, it was the best I've seen out there, and the dialog, art, and sound were outstanding to me.

For my star rating system, it was polished, descriptive, had good interactivity, I felt emotionally invested, and I will likely play again some day. Just not today.

Adaptations in IF are generally very tricky. The list of failed or mediocre adaptations is long (including my own Sherlock Holmes game) while the list of good ones is very brief (such as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). The biggest problem is that novels and stories are 'on rails' and are centered on one pre-determined path, while Interactive Fiction invites exploration.

This one does well, I think. Part of that is due to the author's talent at adaptation. The other may be because the original tale includes parts that describe what 'would have happened', which can be incorporated into the text.

You play as Gawain, and the story follows the original tale pretty faithfully. A strange knight comes to Arthur's court and you are soon entangled in a quest. You find a strange castle where the host is kind and generous while the lady of the castle pursues you.

Variables are tracked in this game, but not that many stats seem to be. There is generally one ordained 'right path' but many scenes have multiple interpretations and solutions regardless of your desire (for instance, is it better to admit fear or not to have it at all?)

The game has strong themes of violence and sexuality, but treats both of them more as abstractions or threats or desires with moderate ​detail.

In both the online version and the downloaded version, the chapter headings were broken and I couldn't see what they were. That, and a stray typo, were the only bugs I saw.

I took several days to finish this because I kept getting distracted by work. The actual writing isn't that long, but I wasn't grabbed in by the text; or, perhaps, it was difficult to process my emotions about the strange tale (which applies to the original).

In any case, this exceeded my expectations and is one of the better adaptations I've ever played. I don't see myself revisiting it, as it resonated negatively with some personal experiences I had (by no fault of the author), but it is otherwise polished, descriptive, with good interactivity and emotional impact.

(Edit: I'm listting this as 2 hours, because I lingered over it, while others have said it took them only 1 hour going fast).

Given the popularity of Flexible Survival together with the excellent production values of this game, I predict that this game will find a lot of success with certain communities after the comp, perhaps ending up as the most-played game form this comp. I also think, though, that it has some features that will end up hurting it in this comp’s voting.

This is a hardnosed combat and storytelling game with furry characters (well, animal/human hybrids, including reptiles). It has very nice-looking screens, including an action video later on when an SUV pulls up that’s certainly the best-produced thing I’ve ever seen in IFComp.

You play as a series of characters in a run-down and dark world where mob bosses rule. Characters can pick up a variety of very specific weapons and ammo.

Gameplay is stat-based, with an initial point buy system and later gains. Every part of the game is turned into a puzzle that either depends on stats or correct choices. Even ‘click-reveals’ (when you click on a link and it expands) are gamified: you have to click them in the right order to get bonus points.

This game is difficult. Without God mode, you have to make very specific point buys to get past even the second challenge (when the truck comes by, if you don’t have quick feet or health, then you get hit for 0 damage, but your 0 health gets checked and results in death.

With God mode, I made it very far until I made a bad choice and got an instant death. I think I could have restored but I had the following bug:

"I can’t find a save slot named ‘AnimaliaBookI4’!►
I tried to save or load the game, but I couldn’t do it."

Overall, I actually like the writing quite a bit. The intense difficulty of the game will likely be a plus for the target audience, as I think this is meant to be a game you replay a lot and have strategy guides about, something like Sunless Skies or 80 Days.

For the comp, though, it makes it hard to play through in a short time, even with God Mode.

-Polish: Great production values, but bugs need fixing.
+Descriptiveness: Nice writing
+Interactivity: For the comp, it's no good, but I like the extra challenge for more replay value.
+Emotional impact: Yeah, I was invested.
+Would I play again? Yes, especially the finished version.

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.

This is by the same group that has done the Seneca Thing for the last two Spring Things.

This is a collection of students that write mini-twine games under the direction of their teacher.

This year, the theme is a horror hotel. Like many young beginners, the games are primarily branching with little state tracking or merging of branches (although there are some fancier games that do this, like the soda bottle game!). There are some typos here and there, which makes sense as each one was written in a 2 hr time limit.

Where the games excel is in the imagination. One game has really funny messages when the player dies; another manages to be genuinely creepy (with the dolls); one with a maze is pretty complex; and so on. They all have creative things that happen, which made it enjoyable to play through them all. I hope the students continue to write engaging and entertaining games.

I liked the way the ending of this game was handled.

You play as someone in the basement of an old house who must do everything they can to escape. This is a twine game written with an inventory-based system, and so puzzles revolve around taking and using objects.

I found it challenging a bit, probably due to my non-native speakerness of Spanish, but also partially due to the fact that you have to be pretty creative for some of the puzzles.

The atmosphere is described at a distance, objectively, dispassionately, but the objects seen show that a lot of destruction and wild events have occured.

The story that gradually evolves worked well for me, especially contrasted with the more austere opening. I loved the very last actions you have to perform, which felt very fitting.

I enjoyed this game; it reminds me of the games that first got me into Twine (like You Are Standing At A Crossroads).

This is a well-made Bitsy game about a creepy hotel.

Bitsy is a minimalist text and pixel art animation game engine. Here, the author has modelled a hotel with quite a number of items scattered around, and multiple rooms.

The ambient messages you find around are effectively chilling. At one point, I was checking something out the second time and the game changed drastically. I made a choice, and got a very interesting ending.

I don't know if there are multiple endings. If the one I found is the only one, that's neat; if not, I appreciate the branching. Overall, a very strong bitsy game.

This game is set in the world of Castle Balderstone, but is a standalone entry as opposed to the large anthologies usually found with Castle Balderstone.

It's a western, a genre of IF I enjoy as it traditionally wasn't very common (although more have popped up recently!) (although now that I think of it it's set on a military base, so it doesn't have to be a western, but it has western themes kind of, like a solo hero with a gun, musical elements, a jail with a single cell, etc.)

The idea is that literal hell on earth has appeared at a military base, and monsters roam around. You have a pistol and can acquire more weapons.

Most of the gameplay for me was finding demons and then shooting them a lot. There's a little bit more (like puzzles) but I found that the main appeal of this game was the overall aesthetic, with the mechanics mostly serving as a way to flavor your experience of the aesthetic. In that way, it resembles Winter Storm Draco and The Ascent of the Gothic Tower out of Ryan Veeder's other works.

I enjoyed the writing and its demons, and the excruciating moral quandary that our hero encounters in the final verse.