Reviews by MathBrush

This Twine game is intended to simulate a forensics-focused whodunnit.

You play as a detective investigating a woman who has been found dead in her apartment after several days. You have the opportunity to take hair, blood, and print samples, analyse medication, interview others, retrieve info from a smartphone, etc.

You yourself are nobody, a cipher, while the suspects are primarily interesting in the information they give rather than their unique characteristics.

There is a lot of technical info in this game, and a ton of links to methodically click through. It has the same kind of puzzle structure as in Toby's Nose, where you read all the info, come to the conclusion, and guess the suspect off a list.

I guessed the suspect wrong but had the cause of death right. It was a fun cerebral exercise, and I would play another game like this. If there were any room for improvement, it might be in making the characters have more unique and interesting features and personalities.

I've really enjoyed fairy-based stories in recent years, probably starting from reading SCP-4000.

This is a cute and well-written adventure about two swashbucklers who have been separated by the law. An execution is at hand, but faeries have gotten involved, and that throws everything into the mix.

This story works well in that it leans into the swashbuckling and fairy aspects with full sincerity, allowing their natural humor and adventure to show out. I could see Errol Flynn playing one of the characters (depending on your choices).

There's not a huge amount of branching, but there are enough places where it feels like you can really mess up or do great that I was pleased with the interactivity. There is an inventory system and some text-entry riddles.

Very fun overall.

I played the Spring Thing version of this game.

In this choicescript game, you are appointed head of a 'landship' (basically a medieval steampunk tank) as well as of an abandoned city.

Gameplay consists of combat, city building, relationship management and negotiations with surrounding powers.

I had some trouble with the tutorial combat, with the vast majority of my troops dying. Because of that, I played the rest of the game as an ultra-pacifist, doing everything I could do avoid war and to negotiate. I was able to avoid all fighting entirely and even get an achievement for it!

The city management wasn't very in-depth but I still found it satisfying. The characters were interesting (I spent most of my time with Rosie, eventually running out of new material for her).

I think the only thing really holding this game back is that it is doing many things and each thing could use more content. But making that content is hard! However, I liked each individual part, which is why I wanted more of it.

I'm giving this game a lower rating for now as it is unfinished.

This is a fangame for Baldur's Gate III with a very lovely UI. In it, a nightmare has plagued you and all your companions, and a horrible creature tries to feast on you.

One of your companions, Astarion, doesn't fare as well as the others, and your are plunged deep into his mindscape.

The game has two major goals: interacting with Astarion (who is much like a grumpy/shy cat) and building up your 3 major attributes: touch, speech, and sight.

There are several obvious goals in the game (like opening a door), and I was working towards those goals but kept dying (every day Astarion loses more health). I didn't realize until later that (Spoiler - click to show)interacting with Astarion makes him lose health more slowly. I had only just started making real progress when the game ended before I had reached any of those goals. I had thought the three 'acts' that have been laid out would all be in different areas, but I guess that at least two of them take place in the same room.

Overall, the mechanics were neat, and took a while for me to Understand. Astarion is pretty moody, but his terseness really does make sense when the goal of the game is to level up both his trust and your ability to converse.

Very fun overall.

Review for Twine version:

In this updated review, I'll mainly focus on the differences between the two versions, while a summary of the content can be found in my original review below.

Transitioning to Twine altered the feel mechanics of the game in an interesting way. The original setup was more or less 'one correct action at a time', leading to the next possible action. Due to the nature of parser games, the main interaction with the game was trying to guess the correct command to proceed.

By limiting the set of possible commands through Twine links, this revision on one hand eases the pain of 'guess the verb', but on the other hand limits the feel of exploration. I think it's a net positive, though, as the interface with its inventory and 'nested' sub-links still allows for a feeling of achievement.

My expectations for parser games and twine games are different, so seeing this game in Twine gave me a new viewpoint on the storyline. It's not unusual for parser games to flimsy plots and bizarre settings, as many classic games like Adventure and Zork focused more on interesting set-pieces rather than cohesive storytelling. But Twine has a history of attracting expert storytellers, so the bar is set higher.

There's a lot that doesn't make sense in this game. Why is there an entire chest, locked, containing (Spoiler - click to show)a single gold ring? Why is there (Spoiler - click to show)an altar that requires sacrifice, but that sacrifice isn't killed, just trapped inside? Later on, most of these concerns are addressed, because it sets up (Spoiler - click to show)the second playthrough(Spoiler - click to show) as a resolution for many of these questions, but it's a bit bewildering on the first go through. On the other hand, the game is influenced by the Conan series of books, movies, comics, etc. and there is perhaps no better way to show tribute to the original writing style than to have a flamboyant, bigger-than-life story that doesn't quite make sense but allows Conan to hit a lot of things really hard.

Overall, I felt like this was a satisfying play. It has different strengths and weaknesses than the original, and I think I ended up liking both version about the same. I did laugh at the jokes the second time and enjoyed the details in the writing, and I feel like overall the 'Conan-style' writing is my favorite feature of the game.

Original review:

This game is one whose development I have followed for some time.

This is a parser game set in a Conan The Barbarian-like world, with a muscular barbarian king who travels about fighting monsters and wizards and generally destroying things.

There is a cast of memorable NPCs and the writing has a strong voice, with complete customization of almost all messages and a rich setting.

This was originally developed in conjunction with the single choice jam; this game, instead of having exactly one action in the whole game, like most other entries, has exactly one correct action in each location (or, more appropriately, only one allowed action in each point in the game, since some rooms require consecutive correct actions).

There is also a limit on available verbs (customized to have clever names), so that means that at any point, to progress, you need to figure out which of the available verbs to use. Theoretically, this means that you could progress at any point just by trying all of the verbs on all of the nouns. The author works around this by frequently requiring unusual or surprising combinations.

Overall, it took me around 1.5 hours, and I found it clever and richly descriptive.

This is a polished parser game entered in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

In it, you find that Mother Goose was kidnapped, and you have to save her! On the way, you'll encounter many of the characters from Mother Goose's fairy tales.

Gameplay is classic parser style, with most of gameplay revolving around taking and dropping objects, using objects with clearly-defined uses, and talking with NPCs.

There is an odd feature of the game, where most of the time the use of an object is directly told you ('you should search this', 'you can open it', 'you can PUT IT ON something'), but other times you're merely told what you can not do, often with objects where some use would make sense. For instance, I was stymied when (Spoiler - click to show)the game told me that I needed to hide my smell, and I had (Spoiler - click to show)perfume, but the game only said (Spoiler - click to show)you don't feel like putting on the perfume. I felt like that was pretty frustrating. I found a different item later, but I thought it odd that the game had a clear solution which was just ruled out as a preference. A similar thing happened with (Spoiler - click to show)the need to make a loud sound and (Spoiler - click to show)the gunpowder. While I've spent a long time on this, these frustrations were only a part of the game and the rest was overall smooth.

I enjoyed the writing in general. The characters, while true to the stories, were also more flirtatious and/or violent than many modern adaptations of nursery rhymes, holding more true to the original versions.

Overall, a well-made game.

The trouble with parser games is that players can type in literally anything and hope to get a reasonable response out. This causes problems when the player enters something that seems logical to them which the game rejects.

There are two ways of addressing this: training players on a standardized set of verbs, so they enter a narrower range of commands, and programming more responses into your engine/game.

This game is a custom C# engine. Unfortunately, it doesn't recognize as wide a range of commands as most of the popular parser engines do, and it doesn't use common player-recognized commands and shortcuts like I and L, so it's missing both ways to keep player frustration at bay. I ended up frustrated a lot. I couldn't even read the initial text, as it scrolled off screen and mouse and arrow keys didn't move it (althought pg dn eventually did).

There are buttons and an extra text field, designed to make the task easier, which helped. But overall I think that the author vastly underestimated the ability of players (including me) to type exactly the wrong thing, over and over.

Combined with this, the game does not save or undo (and I had to manually exit to restart), and it has several instant deaths and other ways to lock yourself out of victory (I had to restart on two different occasions because I GAVE something TO someone, which the game accepted, but they didn't give it back).

The storyline is that you are in a dungeon cell where Excalibur has appeared, in the stone, and you have to escape. There are a few segments with fairies, but that's the end of this preview.

As a C# project made in a month this is very impressive, so much so that I would be impressed by this if I were on a hiring committee. As a parser game among many other parser games, it falls a bit flat. I don't know if the author reads IFDB reviews, but I'd suggest looking at some other current parser games to see what's possible in terms of responsiveness, and/or running more cycles of feedback with having people test the game and see what commands could be implemented to smooth gameplay.

This game was part of the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, which requires a tutorial and asks authors to make games appropriate for newcomers.

The tutorial in this game was, I thought, as long as the whole game, as it was very complex, involving following a complex recipe. I was surprised to find out there was more after, and quite a bit!

This is one of the longer Adventuron games I've seen in a while, not as big as Faeries of Haelstowne, for instance, but it took me around an hour or more.

You play as an Athenian maiden trapped in the labyrinth with the minotaur. But...he's actually a very nice minotaur. And he needs your help!

The gameplay and story reminded me of Bronze by Emily Short in a way, with an injured beast man that you have to care for. But this is a more positive game, and contains many references to Greek Mythology.

One thing I liked about this game was that it has a lot of optional side quests, meaning that if you are having trouble you can just leave, but if you're enjoying yourself and want more of a challenge you can attempt the other quests.

There are a lot of hints and things.

I had several parser frustrations, many of which were just due to having a complex project in Adventuron, in my opinion (I had a big Adventuron project that had similar issues). I passed on everything I found to the author, though, and I didn't have much trouble completing the game in the end.

I liked the storyline overall, and felt it was a good spin on mythology and I loved the synergy between me and the minotaur. Glad I played.

This is an Adventuron game designed for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam. It has simple puzzles and structure, designed as an introduction to IF.

The author often had trouble when playing Adventuron on mobile because it wouldn't save, so this game is based on a password system. An early choice in the game leads to 4 branches, each accessible by a password.

Most of the gameplay revolves around driving to work, getting an assignment, then carrying out a task involving riddles or metaphoric actions of various sorts, including solving number patterns and changing the emotions of animals. There's one big final chapter at the end.

Overall, the game has some heartwarming moments and some big ideas. The execution doesn't really pull through though. There are a lot of typos and grammatical errors; the author is a non-native speaker, likely using a mobile device based on the author notes, but it may be worth running the text through a spellchecker like grammarly (you can even put code into spell checkers, just ignoring the errors the code part causes). A lot of items are underimplemented; one important item is stuck in a gate, but X item acts as if it's not there; similarly, there is a billboard that you can't EXAMINE or LOOK AT but can READ. You have to GO OFFICE to go to the office, but if you try to GO ______ for an address, it says 'not yet'; instead, you must just type ______ (i.e. the address itself). Due to these issues, I found myself struggling to enjoy parts of the game. With more polish, I could see this being very fun!

There is some pixel art, which ranges from abstract and confusing to fun and silly. There is an odd part about buying underwear off models, leaving them nude, but otherwise it's pretty solid.

Overall, lots of fun stuff here, just needs some more care and attention to spelling and implementation.

This game was entered in the IF Grand Prix 2024, in German. In it, you play as someone determined to stop a sorceror from hatching a dragon egg and dooming the nearby community.

Gameplay revolves around looking around, exploring, and then using different items you find to open up new areas.

It's written in a custom engine which looks visually appealing but which I struggled with. A lot of objects weren't implemented that were mentioned in the text, and many synonyms I've become accustomed to from other German games didn't work here, so I had about 25 commands at the beginning that weren't understood. I finally got one to work by accident. Exploring around, some commands were hinted in the text and just didn't work; an example (not from the game) would be like 'it looks like you can pull it!' but 'pull' doesn't work.

Not being a native speaker compounded this problem, but I've seen on the German forums that others had the same problems. I ended up using the walkthrough helpfully provided, pausing here and there to explore some.

Other than that, the game is a good fantasy game. Some of the puzzle solutions were a bit confusing but the game is small enough that just trying everything should be fine.

A new IF engine takes a ton of work. This one is very promising but could use some more synonyms. For instance, in Inform I can type 'Oben' and 'Hoch' and both make me go up, or just 'schau' for looking around (maybe these are unusual commands and I've trained myself wrong by misplaying other German titles, a native speaker would have to correct me). I see now when writing that there was a Help page on the front page of the game, but I didn't see that when I first played, and typing Hilfe didn't bring anything up in game. The help page would have helped some, though, but it doesn't mention the up and down directions, which I struggled with.