Reviews by MathBrush

Being alone or in a small group in space is a classic story setup. Even before space people did it with ships, like Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson. Movies like The Martian or Gravity, podcasts like Vast Horizon or Wolf 359 or Girl in Space, and IF games like Protocol or Seedship all deal with isolation in space.

To me, that says that there's something about the experience that satisfies some primal human urge for self-evaluation and discovery, like a spiritual quest to understand yourself. In this game, **Metallic Red**, you float through space, tend a garden, communicate on the internet, order packages, and get into Tarot; a very 2020 kind of life.

The gameplay is split into days, with a typically day consisting of browsing the web, checking your plants, and sleeping with strange dreams. It changes quite a bit by the end of the game.

The tone of the game is melancholic and isolated, with themes of change, loss, and growth. It is well-put together; the only thing that looked like a bug was a possibly repeated conversation.

I'm not sure whether the game was structured around a certain set of themes or if it was built around this character and just imagining what life would be like for a person. I wonder if it's the latter because (Spoiler - click to show)someone being raised religiously then becoming depressed as an adult, leaving the religion, and getting into gardening and tarot is such a universal experience that I know 2 or 3 people personally who have done it and dozens more online. So this could just be a way to take a universal experience and put it into space.

In any case, I liked this story. State isn't really tracked; you can use a chapter select to hop from part to part. I forgot one of the instructions during a cooking segment and couldn't figure out how to get out of it for a while, but I found that part satisfying.

This is a parser game set entirely in real life. You are an Italian man on a weekend vacation with a beautiful young woman. Your goal is to check into a hotel and eat breakfast. And that's the game!

The game is both polished and unpolished. On one hand, many things are implemented smoothly, and there is quite a large number of background objects in different containers and so on that work right. The screen has some color to it, and special characters are used to show good and bad reactions to things.

On the other hand, I had a runtime error (moving 'nothing' into a bin). Several important objects were not in the descriptions and had to be guessed that they are present. So it's a mixed bag.

The girlfriend is highly interactive. She will constantly comment on what you do, and will suggest what you should do next. If you are not fast enough to please her or do behavior that she dislikes, she will chastise you and you will receive a negative symbol (represented by a spade). If you do what she wishes she will praise you and give you a heart symbol.

Just as in real life relationships, I find myself constantly on the hook for many faults, such as leaving a bathroom door open or not sitting while eating. My day was a series of never-ending criticisms, which only multiplied as I fumbled around trying to satisfy her unending list of demands. Perhaps the genre of the game should be 'social horror'!

In any case, the game is good at several things that many other games are not good at, like providing a realistic and detailed hotel setting. On the other hand, I found myself at odds with both the parser and my girlfriend. So some good, some bad. Overall it wasn't long and not too difficult; I used the walkthrough once in order to find the newsletter.

This game might be described as "Weird Urban Fantasy". After a brief prologue, it starts off with a classic 'my apartment' game that models different rooms of a fairly mundane apartment before digging into some of the strangeness.

Gameplay consists of crossing a map and discovering unusual individuals, each of which is far from baseline reality. Unlike much of fantasy and sci fi, most of the people are normal, physically, but inside is something different. There are of course some exceptional cases.

While there are many different threads running through the game, they feel like they all have thematic similarities. One constant refrain is (Spoiler - click to show)fear of nothing happening, stuck in eternity balanced against (Spoiler - click to show)the fear of something changing or finally happening after so long.

Implementation is iffy. One really tough issue is that pronouns aren't set right for women so X HER doesn't work, and for both men and women you can't X MAN or X WOMAN, you have to instead type out the full name of the person you want to speak with. Many objects listed in the description can't be interacted with in-game and many that you can't interact with don't give responses. TAKE SHOWER uses Inform's default response of 'That's hardly portable'. So it could use some polishing up. I didn't see typos or bugs, though.

I liked the game. It gives me the same kind of feel as Deadline Enchanter, one of my favorite games. I also have some major phobias associated to some of the things in this game, but the way it handled them made me feel less tense rather than more, which is nice.

The opening of the game made no sense to me, but after replaying it all clicked, so I recommend trying that afterwards.

In this game, Kronos has imprisoned the Gods, and you must rescue them two by two.

This game acknowledges it was written with ChatGPT, so I won't spend much time (if any) discussing that, as it seems the purpose was to make sure descriptions were descriptive, and they generally were. I knew that it would hallucinate, so I ignored most of what the text said except for objects that were easily interactable with (and a command INVESTIGATE let me know what those were, most of the time).

The map is several different cities, each of which can be moved between fairly easily. Sometimes the exits list were incorrect (like S vs SW) and one, the Necromanteion, isn't listed (you have to ENTER when you're north of the city that is near it).

Puzzles are generally complex code-type puzzles. I used decompiling to figure out rules for some of them. Players will need to know they can ROTATE something COUNTERCLOCKWISE or the game is impossible to beat. Player's should a know that you might be able to put things on a statue's head when you can't put things on the statue itself or the shelf that is on the head. A certain YES/NO question glitches if you type YES, but you can just type YES then NO and it treats it like a YES.

The HELP command here is useful, because if players don't know they can WAIT 11 HOURS, they might have to type Z dozens of times.

Overall, some of the puzzles were fun. I liked the one with flowers. What this game needs, in my opinion, is more careful puzzle testing and more bug-fixing in general. Having one dedicated gametester or several less dedicated testers who report bugs and an author who has time to fix those bugs could make this game a lot of fun. The puzzles are the main draw here, and the overall story idea, with everything else as set dressing, so I'd love to see them shine even more.

(I do have a better impression of this game because the author was open about using ChatGPT rather than hiding it. It is often clear that an author used ChatGPT, and if they do that and don't disclose it, it gives me a much more negative view of the game).

**Why Pout?** by Andrew Schultz

Andrew Schultz has a long history of making wordplay games which all follow the same general pattern (typing words based on an overarching wordplay theme using words that appear in the location) as well as a large repertoire of other games (like chess games and even a baseball game).

His longest running series, called 'Prime Pro-Rhyme Row', involves rhyming pairs of words. While fun, I had the feeling it was getting mined out.

This game takes on a fresh mechanic that still involves two-word pairs. Unlike the rhyming games, which could be slowly brute-forced by trying each letter of the alphabet and then adding multi-consonant starters, this puzzle type (which I won't spoil just in case) can be solved through multiple means, including auditory and mechanical, but with much less possible lawnmowering.

That's not to say it's trivial. I did use hints a couple of times. It turned out one puzzle was there that I didn't even realize was a puzzle that was gating all the others.

Anyway, the story here is mostly surreal, with a sequence of random, fantastical things that don't exactly fit a coherent narrative, but the overarching plot is heartwarming and fun: you're collecting friends. In different areas you find people that need help, and, in return, they help you solve more of your puzzles, and can give you pep talks as well.

This is a lot of fun. The pep talks can be nice, too. Some are more general and vague:

> The ________ discusses ways to identify people or situations that justneed a bit of help, and how to do so without making them feel
> hopeless or in need of help, or that they got themselves in this
> position in the first place.

while others are more concrete:

> You think up a ________ you mumble under your breath. The
> merchant finds it a bit weird you like THAT as a way to keep positive.
> It doesn’t seem like that sort of thing helps the economy. Their
> cheeriness slips slightly, with impressively-balanced potshots at
> people more and less successful than they are.

I prefer the more concrete ones, as they have a lot of character.

Overall, this was fun. Recommended for fans of wordplay parser games.

Parser games let you type in whatever you want. They only respond to a small fragment of that. If I open a random parser game and say 'I endeavor to hop on my right foot fifty-five times before squawking like a parrot', then it won't respond with meaningful feedback (I know AI can respond, but the chance of that response containing content intended by the author that directly pertains to my command is low).

This is one reason new parser players struggle; how do you know what to type?

Parser games traditionally solve this in two ways. The first is by the community adopting unspoken customs about what commands are important. By experience, players come to know that 'X ME, 'INVENTORY', 'TAKE', 'DROP', 'PUSH', 'ENTER', etc. are generally understood and work well.

The second is by giving the commands in-game, either explicitly (like limited parser games that list the required vocab) or implicitly (if the game says, 'You feel a strong desire to yodel', then you can reasonably expect to be able to yodel).

This game takes neither of those two paths. In it, you play through various related scenarios about a traffic jam in an intersection. Many, if not most, of these scenarios are solved by commands that are both unusual in parser games and which aren't provided or mentioned in-game.

That makes this game pretty hard. Adding on to that, there are some default actions that don't have responses, making it hard to know what to do.

The storyline is a fun concept, and I enjoyed the ending, but I ended up using the walkthrough for about 70% of the game. I won't elaborate too much on the story as there are some early spoilers that give much of the flavor of the game, but suffice it to say that this is a puzzle about examining a system of interconnected events and trying to figure out how to adjust them in order to save yourself.

I think the game could benefit from responses to an ABOUT command to give expectations to the player. While I personally would have also liked more nudges in-game or a better idea of necessary commands, I realize that that may not match the author's vision and that they may have directly desired for players to have to hunt and experiment for a while. If that's the case, I think it's fine to leave it as-is.

This is a twine game with three different paths about a group uniting to defeat a powerful vampire. You can play from three perspectives.

I can sum up my reaction to this game by saying I loved the story, liked the mechanics but found a lot of typos and bugs.

The story (from the point of view of a new vampire, which I chose first) is that you are recently-graduated art student whom a powerful vampire lord has turned into a fledgling vampire. You are captured by a human-vampire-cooperative group called the Redjackets, and together decide to take down your lord.

The game boasts three perspectives and allows a variety of both emotional/roleplaying choices together with choices that affect the overall story.

I liked the atmosphere and dialog of the game. There were numerous minor typos, though, and several passages with broken Twine code. The very first screen said 'error' on it (due to some code that checks your previous playthroughs); several times, the text was from the wrong perspective; the face of one of the characters got duplicated once, instead of showing two people; and the game said it would remember my choices when doing the next path but I saw my former character take all the choices that I didn't take.

However, none of these bugs really prevent the playing of the game itself or the enjoyment of the story. So I still like the game overall, I just want to be complete in my review when describing it all.

I do want to call out the color scheme and UI as being especially nice-looking (for my tastes).

**Verses** by Kit Riemer

This was a hard game to play, but not for the usual reasons. It wasn't difficult in a puzzly way and it didn't make me feel bad inside.

This game was hard to play because the text really made me have to think to understand it, to try to piece together everything, to absorb the different layers of meaning going on.

Here's an example. The links in this game are colored differently, with one mostly representing 'forward motion' and the others side details which are placed below the main text. These side details take the form of definitions and can vary from mundane to metaphorical, often one right after the other. Here's a snippet I clipped:

(Spoiler - click to show)
air: the chill makes you shiver.
smoke: something becoming something else.
meat: how would it feel to be cooked?


So I felt like I was wrestling with a hydra, trying to take on this game on multiple narrative levels at once.

I failed, I think. I can only identify the surface themes in this story, alas.

Which is why I've delayed describing the story so far, because I'm not sure I can.

As far as I can tell, it's set in a different timeline than ours where biological modification is common and words usually reserved for religion are applied to other mysterious phenomena.

You are an analyst, which seems to be a job involving organic, technological and spiritual components. You are assigned into the middle of nowhere with little company in a rotting building. Every day you're asked to analyse, partly using the computer and partly using your own intuition. The whole process actually just now reminded me of accounts of Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Mormon, first using a tool designed by God for the purpose before later relying on it less.

Analysis seems to be all about interpreting the words that come to you, but those words are unclear at first. Simultaneously, the game includes many translations of poems, going into great detail of the difficulties in preserving metaphor, beauty, rhyme scheme and tone between Hungarian, Romanian, and English. It was fun learning a bit of Romanian (I saw a word for claw or hoof that looked like 'ungulate'). The protagonist takes special pride in translating poems with good meter.

The translation and the analysis seem to go hand in hand, but of the rest of the story, what does it mean? I visit a farm which I've already heard rumours about, and find (Spoiler - click to show)masses of bioflesh with human organs waiting to be harvested. As I translate more, I (Spoiler - click to show)lose my humanity, my eye, my leg, my ability to speak. I consume the flesh of the unholy and the dead. What does it mean? It feels almost like Kafka's "In der Strafkolonie", with its vivid and violent semi-religious imagery with no explicit moral or meaning.

I don't think this is a game meant to be enjoyed in a brief time to serve as entertainment; it feels like something designed to provoke thought, like someone deliberately crafted something to cause as much pondering as possible.

As a final note, what I think is going on with analysis is that (Spoiler - click to show)the biscuits you consume are pieces of waste extruded by long-dead aliens that preserve some of their consciousness, which you slowly become attuned to at the price of your own body and mind. They appreciate this as it grants them some freedom, but you yourself lose everything.

In any case, definitely a game worth checking out. I found a small bug where I had to click on some links repeatedly before they worked, but it's been passed on to the author and a workaround may be available. I wouldn't let that stop you from playing, though, it worked well for me even with that.

This is a windows executable game in a custom system. It runs in the command line but also has pop-up windows with html-style formatting for things like hints and pictures.

It describes itself as an old-school 80’s type game with minimal story and mostly puzzles, several of them timed.

The idea is that you are on a mission to help rescue a kidnapped girl but your plane crashes near a pyramid and you find out the kidnapper, a shaman, died and the girl has disappeared.

The game is ultra-minimalistic in text. For instance, the description of the first room is:

You are in the desert.
So from here I can go north south or east.

I see the plane.

Wandering around, there are several interesting things, like a foggy area called 'Perdition" and a strange altar.

I had some trouble with the parser. Early on, I was trying to answer the phone, and I had the following exchange:

I see the plane
Incoming video call…
What now Me?
> answer call
Ok.
Incoming video call…
What now Me?
> i
You Own:
a mobile phone
Incoming video call…
What now Me?
> x phone
Let’s see…
Incoming call 0331785692
What now Me?
> push answer
But… the cell phone isn’t ringing
What now Me?

My character’s name was Me because the way the game asked for my name was:

Are you the chosen one?
Who knocks at this door?

and I answered ‘Me’.

Sometimes when I got an error in the game, no matter what my next move was, the error would repeat. For instance:

> x mantle
MANTLE ? It’s not relevant now.
What now Brian?
> go in house
MANTLE ? It’s not relevant now.
What now Brian?
>

There is a help system, that first gives your a kind of riddle hint and then an explicit action. In many places, the only hint is a picture of a mummified hand and the phrase “Do you want a hand? Not now…;-)”. In others it’s more explicit. The hints often refer to things that aren’t in the room description, like walls.

I was able to get into a house with drawings in it, and the hints include a picture with a reversed message, but at that point I got stuck. I’d be happy to try again with a full walkthrough, or if anyone else can get past that point.

The best parts of this game were the cool audio messages and the very nice drawings; very nice additions for a custom command line parser!

While I am giving a 1-star vote at this time, I don't think the game is horrible. It's just that my criteria are:
polish (where the game could use some more commands it understands),
interactivity (where I was lost on what to do a lot),
descriptiveness (the game uses a minimalist style),
emotional impact (which I do think is good and is worth a star with the cool pictures), and
would I play again? (and right now I do not feel that way).

I'd be happy to bump it up one star if the author requests it, but right now those are my feelings.

This game was the only game entered in Spring Thing 2020's Late Harvest, designed to accomodate designers who were unable to complete their games in time for Spring Thing due to Covid.

It's a parser game with a long sequence of almost-identical rooms, each with different puzzles in them. The puzzles can repeat, and I believe in the long run that all of the rooms are procedurally generated in some way with common elements in them.

There is a bit of a twist, which I saw in the Club Floyd transcript and which was hinted. Explicitly, (Spoiler - click to show)You can TOUCH WALLS to go through them and end up in a story segment that you have little control over.

Overall, the plot was interesting, as were the puzzles, but both were a bit threadbare. Not bad at all for a first game, though.