Reviews by MathBrush

This Shufflecomp game follows the adventures of a boy who loves comics and meets his heroes. The writing style is goofy and casual. The first time I played, I reached an ending pretty quickly, and I wasn't very impressed with the game. However, as I explored more of the branches, I realized how much more text there was that I missed, and found 6 or more endings.

Each single play through is not that great, but exploring all the branches gives you the same unreal feeling that dreams have. Playing the game a few times is just like the sleepy morning time when you drift in and out of sleep and your dreams weave together.

In my original review, I complained about parser problems, especially for a particular puzzle. Two people disagreed with my review, so I wondered if I was just being dumb and not understanding. I went back and tried again, and I found the correct solution, which was imaginative, so I have to give the author credit for that. The game is very short. Perhaps others may find the game more fun than I did; in the end, it seems a bit like the one-puzzle game "More", which similarly involves a relationship, crime, rooms with little interaction, and a single puzzle requiring a leap of intuition.

Original review: I'll begin by saying I haven't finished the game for reasons that will soon be apparent. This game starts out with a very graphic scene of violence, after which you are able to take a little more action. I found it hard to find anything to do at all, but once I discovered where to go and what to do, I started enjoying things more.

But then I was plagued by parser issues. It was just one guess-the-verb game after another, with no implementation of common synonyms and no suggestions for verbs that are close (something like, "the pen can't be clicked, but it can be opened" for that type of situation would be nice). There were other similar problems; repeatedly searching an area kept giving me the same message about discovering an item, and there was one item where it was clear what needed to be done with it, but the parser gave the same response every time with no hint of if I wasn't ready yet or if I hadn't guessed the verb. (Spoiler - click to show)Specifically, the lighter. I pushed in the nest and squeezed the bottle, but I cannot light, flick, open or burn the lighter, and cannot burn, ignite, or light the nest, pit or fluid. In fact, I cannot refer to the fluid in the pit at all. I know I may not have solved the puzzle, but it would make much more sense to say, "not yet", or, "we need to ... first" if that were the case.

Finally, the About command gave no help, and included a boilerplate intro to IF section that mentioned several things that were completely irrelevant in this game.

In this game, you play a Russian official investigating a death on the moon with the help of your trusty robot DUFFY. As you gather evidence and use DUFFY to analyze it, you come to discover who the true murderer was.

This is a shufflecomp game, and as such it was produced quickly, and it shows. Trying to reenter the shuttle you came in from is frustrating; you can't x shuttle, enter shuttle, up, down, go in any direction, open shuttle, etc. By consulting the walkthrough, I discovered that the correct response was "in".

There are numerous NPC's, but for most of them I found only a single topic that they respond to.

The base itself is well-designed; for some reason I enjoyed the wide use of diagonal directions, and the sickle-shape of the base.

Unfortunately, I was unable to complete the game, as the walkthrough does not work at one point (Spoiler - click to show)You cannot go down in the greenhouse, and no other command such as open grill or x shutters could get me into the air duct. However, I wish I could; the writing isn't perfect, the npcs aren't implemented very strongly, but somehow it all comes together to a game that is actually very fun.

Edit: Another user showed me how to finish the game, and the additional content made the game much better for me. It feels larger.

This shufflecomp game is about two teenagers and life changes. There are two main puzzles and then a branching mini-puzzle at the end.

The teenagers are young potheads, and their language reflects that. The game includes some fun experiments in formatting to reflect the world the kids live in.

Because of my experience with other shufflecomp games, I didn't try talking to the NPC much, but after I beat the game, I went back to the walkthrough and was shocked by the amount of programming that went into the NPC.

For those who have played through the second 'act':
(Spoiler - click to show)I thought there could have been more hints for the car. I just typed in obects I know exist in a car, and I collected all the change this way, but I thought it odd that 'look' didn't work. In the hints section, I discovered that I could have asked Jane, which is another point in this NPC's favor.

This well-written shufflecomp game was certainly unusual in its setting, though not unique (it reminds me of Failsafe). This game centers around communication with a certain NPC who was enormously irritating but in a good way (similar to the way Rameses is irritating).

The game encourages you to reconsider choices by listing all branch points, allowing you to go back and change a point at any time. The game even trains you to do this in a fun way.

I'm going to have to play the game a few more times to understand the plot. I found all listed endings in less than half an hour.

Is this game enjoyable? It's like trying sushi for the first time. It tastes great, but you spend just as much trying to process the sensations as you do enjoying the flavors.

That said, I strongly recommend that everhone play this game just to see what it is like.

This mid-length, well-polished Inform game is dense with puzzles and background flavor. It was an entry in Shufflecomp 2.0.

The PC is an animate doll in a garden of magical plants (such as cherry trees with chimes in the fruit or a lawn that maintains itself). Your goal is to help your masters.

The number of puzzles was surprising for a Shufflecomp game. The puzzles were mostly very fair, where you know what you need to do even if you don't know how. The imagery is fun and beautiful, and everything seems well-implemented.

There was one area I felt could be done better; different areas of the gardens suggest memories, which I didn't know what to do with until I saw the walkthrough (after solving all other puzzles and getting the "bad" ending). Apparently, what you do with the memories is (Spoiler - click to show)examine them. I couldn't find one memory listed in the hints ((Spoiler - click to show) the ghost hunt.

False Mavis is based on an old, creepy song and has managed to keep the same feel. Reading the song after you reach an ending can be helpful. The game has some pretty gruesome parts.

This game allows backing up and has multiple save slots. The game feels pretty wide-open, but can be completed in less than 45 minutes. The number of options you have at first can be overwhelming, until you start to understand your purpose.

One great idea the game had is time-based challenges, signaled by a banging sound. Your multiple options start fading away when this happens, often with bad results. It was exciting.

There are multiple endings; none of them seemed that great for the PC, so I'm wondering if I missed one or if the game is just a downer.

This Shufflecomp game is about a mayor who encounters a linear sequence of obstacles. Each obstacle has the exact same set of options to use when encountering it. The game's three endings don't depend on any one of the obstacles; instead, the ending you get depends on your overall pattern of choices.

The writing is silly at times (the first few pages include Buttsville and Poop Lake), but this is justified in-game, and in fact the silliness is an inherent part of the games plot.

The scenarios the mayor faces were actually compelling, and on the first play through I really though about the effect it would have on the city. There was a surprising number of scenarios to go through as well. This helps keep the game from getting monotonous, as opposed to The House at the end of Rosewood Street, where a similar list of repetitive tasks was extremely tedious.

Building is a real gem. I enjoyed playing this game on and off over the course of a few months. It is a medium-large size adventure game like Zork or Curses!, but set in a sort of post-apocalyptic office building.

The game has enormous attention to detail; the game's vocabulary is about 2000 words, and the number of in game messages is about 2000 as well.

This attention to detail becomes a bit too much at times, with descriptions that are over packed with words. Many of the puzzles depend on clues hidden in the middle of large paragraphs.

The game contains more red herrings than any other game I have seen.

In the end, after seeing some of the author's reviews here and his blog (the author is AmberShards), I wonder if the game is partially autobiographical. The author and the PC hate conformity, and fight against perceived oppression.

Zork is the most famous adventure game, although it was not the first. This version contains much of the three Infocom Zork games which were developed later.

Zork is a large puzzle-heavy exploration game. It has inventory limits, a timer of sorts (the light in your lamp), and it has several unfair puzzles (depending on the version you play, some important in-game clues can be omitted). The exits in the rooms work in a non-symmetric way, so going north and then south might bring you back to the wrong place.

I found that mapping out the entire game myself was very helpful. Instead of drawing a map, I just made a numbered list in the notes section of Frotz of all the rooms and their exits. That alone let me get much farther than I did 5 years ago.

I used walkthroughs after getting about half of the points, but the version on IFDB contained a fatal bug preventing me from completing the endgame. I found another version online that ran slower but which allowed me to complete the ending.

The game gets better the further you get. The 'hidden' areas are really fun, and I was surprised how huge this game really is. It makes sense that it was split into 5 games later.