Reviews by MathBrush

paravaariar, the author of this game, is (in my mind) well-known for literary, high-quality spanish Parser games.

This game uses fi.js, an interactive fiction parser platform for web. It uses a small number of verbs (provided in the ‘manual’) which makes gameplay easier than most parser games.

The background image of the game is a beautiful field of stars. The story of the game is that we have woken unexpectedly early from cryogenic storage on a kind of space station. We need to explore to understand what’s going on, but, more importantly, to understand ourselves.

The game is compact, both in design and in story. In the game, a repeated idea is that there is no room for wasted space, and nothing is wasted in this game.

I think the main idea could have supported a longer gameplay, but I think the game as it exists is well-done and very poetic and literary.

This is a German Grand Guignol game that is about Ghostbuster’s in everyway except the name.

It’s a simple, lovely tribute game. You’re in a Ghostbuster’s museum with wax statues, but every exhibit is missing an important object. Your goal is to find all the objects and return them to whence they came.

Size-wise it feels like a game that started as Speed-IF but which the author turned into Grand Guignol (I can’t confirm this). The detailed descriptions of the Ghostbuster’s equipment and objects were fun; you can tell the person who wrote this really likes ghostbusters.

There is some sparseness, which is what made me think it might be upgraded speed-IF. At point point it is said we see a distant Universe, but this cannot be examined (as far as I can tell).

The game does have an independent NPC in addition to the mannequins.

Overall, this game gave me fond memories of Ghostbuster’s and was easy to play as a non-native speaker (needing just NIMM, X, GIB, SCHIEBE ___ [direction], and WIRF, as well as directions).

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 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 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.

For a few years I've maintained an IFDB list for surreal games set on trains, which has turned out to be a surprisingly common genre:

https://ifdb.org/viewlist?id=y1jy1stmutkbdk5y

I was glad to add this game to that list.

This is an Italian game. Unfortunately, my Italian is not good enough to understand everything (especially given the spooky vocabulary employed) so I enjoyed this game through the medium of Google translate, which I'm sure botched much of the feeling.

Yet I enjoyed several parts of this game. It's a Twine game about a ride on a frightening train. The train itself is organized linearly, where you can either go forward or backward, and each train car has its own surreal or horrifying elements.

While you play, background actions occur, at least one of which referenced another IF horror game.

I found some parts pretty creepy, like some of the sleeper cars.

Overall, there didn't feel like there was much direction, just ambient atmosphere, so a focus on characterization of the train more than plot. That characterization was pleasant, and there was some choices that made a difference here and there. Overall, I think I would have liked more chances to influence the world around me (although part of horror is being unable to do so!)

This is a genuinely funny game; it’s the kind of game I wish I would have written.

The title means ‘Lucky Spinelli Must Die’. Unfortunately, Lucky Spinelli, a mafia hitman, is very, very lucky.

One of the main attractions of the game is the humorous gangster dialogue, which includes references to a recent ifcomp game as well as a series of improbable coincidences, kind of like Pink Panther movies in terms of humor.

The game also has an overall conceit which is very funny that messes with some of the parser conventions for meta commands. By the end I was grinning at how absurd it got.

According to the blurb, this is another game that was meant for Petite Morte but got expanded. Because of this, the game suffers in terms of implementation of objects. The ‘main path’ is pretty smooth, but there are multiple areas I had to decompile the game for because I had to make a leap of intuition in German and couldn’t do it (especially guessing the noun I needed to interact with in the cabin of the truck and the verb to use with the worker).

Very amusing. Unfortunately I am strongly biased towards games of other languages because translation and guessing words and google translate adds another layer of interaction, so I can’t tell if this would still be very fun for native German speakers or not.

This is a lovely little game with themes that I like. It is a bit rough in execution sometimes, but that could easily be fixed in a future update.

It's a surreal game where you are being hunted inexorably by a monster through a surreal world. Gameplay consists of passing various obstacles which slow down the monster, and which for most of the gameplay consists of doors.

Most of the rooms, in particular, have 3 doors, each with their own way of opening, and with different symbolic elements. It quickly becomes clear that the whole game is symbolic or meaning-filled. I played through twice, opening an entirely different set of doors the second time and having a final choice.

I haven't been able to determine yet if there are 'good options' or 'bad options' for the doors, as the two doors I got in each room were similar to each other, so either they're all the same or the 'hardest door' in each room is special.

The execution had some issues, mostly things that come from a complicated game, like having extra lines or extra full stops. I think that having more synonyms for actions could be useful.

The overall story of the game is one told with a heavy hand at the end, but the vivid language used throughout balances that, I think. Great job by the authors, and I think that adding more testers and polishing the game for an after-competition release would make this a great long-standing game. In the meantime, though, the missing synonyms and typos could cause trouble for players.

As a small side note, this game has a nice navigation system that made me think, 'That reminds me of a game I liked a few years back.' Then I remembered that that game was 'we, the remainder' by this same author.

Anyway, this game is melancholy and gradually disturbing, reminding me a bit of The Yellow Wallpaper but also a few other stories (which I won't mention as they are spoilers).

You play as a woman wandering around a mostly-empty house, with clear indicators that you've experience many things in life (an old wedding photo, a dress that is now threadbare, etc.). The background sounds and animated color changes contribute to a mild sense of unease. One of the things that felt most off-putting to me is the matter-of-fact way the game lets you turn on all the water in the house and describes it just running and running.

Much of the game centers around alienation and also the search for your dog. More happens later on, and new NPCs mix it up a bit.

I found the writing evocative, and several sequences did a great job at 'bewildering' horror, like The Spiral entity from The Magnus archives.

Not enjoyable (intentionally so! it would be bad in a way to call this game enjoyable) but a game that I am glad I played and would recommend to others.