Reviews by MathBrush

Most of Andy Phillips games have the same bones with different overlays. In all of the games, you play a protagonist with some sort of special features (in this one, you're an intelligent accountant), a femme fatale, and cinematic scenes with really hard combinatorial puzzles.

The special features of this one are the setting (most of it in an abandoned boarding school), and the gruesomeness of it. It was a bit over the top, even compared to his other games.

If you haven't tried any of the other games, I really liked Heist and Time.

I did not like the first Magnetic Scrolls game, The Pawn, at all. It was juvenile, and the puzzles were unfair.

Guild of Thieves is much better; it's still unfair at times, but not so much, and the juvenilia have been cut back.

You play a thief who has to steal a large number of treasures from a castle and its environs. It's a very Zork-like setting. The map felt large at first, but eventually it was easy to picture it all.

There are treasures absolutely everywhere. It's easy to find several treasures, but I doubt anyone's found all of them on their own. Magnetic Scrolls aren't know for their fairness, anyway, but you can get a lot of enjoyment out of this game right from the getgo.

(Caveat: I played a final (non-beta) version of this game without graphics right before it was released).

Wordsmith by Ade McTavish is a very, very good game. In 2014, the author released Fifteen Minutes, which was one of the best difficult puzzle games in a long time, an intricate time travel game involving half a dozen copies of yourself. Then, in 2015, he took 2nd place in IFComp with Map, a mostly puzzle less but big story-based game that was emotionally powerful.

In this game, he's combined his best of story, setting and puzzles. The game has a free version and a commercial version.

In the free version, you create worlds in several stages, like Sim Earth. Your solar system ages over time, making different planetary orbits more or less favorable over time; you can make a planet for each orbit out of different alchemical materials. You then try to create a form of life that fits that planet , and then you teach the life culture and skills until, hopefully, they develop interstellar travel.

I found this thrilling, well-written (with procedural generation) and difficult. Fortunately, with 6 orbits in each solar system, it isn't too hard to get one to interstellar travel.

The game seemed to require a big info dump at first, which put me off, until I just ignored it and experimented. This worked much better; I should have thought of the book you get as a reference guide, not a book to be read back to back but to be consulted.

As for the commercial portion of the game, it's just getting started after the world building ends. You explore an absolutely huge, 7-level space station with a sprawling plot involving a widespread conspiracy and opposing forces.

I found the world building fascinating, although it was hard to keep track of the various locations; this should be a lot easier with the graphics in the finished version. I especially got lost in the ground floor a few times, as the building rotates.

There is a complicated card game in the finished version which I have yet to try, as I found an alternate path around that part of the game.

Overall, I recommend this game, and would rank it around the level of Blue Lacuna or Sorcery!.

Edit: I forgot to mention that this game uses graphics in a way not seen in parser games ever. The graphics respond to commands in this game in an extremely useful way. It's a technical masterpiece in this sense.

This game combines an intricate alchemy system with technology aboard a sort of magical spacecraft. This isn't a rocket engine; it's a complex environment that uses magic to translocate in space.

Something has gone horribly wrong on your magical ship, leading to major disruptions in time and space.

You collect what may be hundreds of items in this game, perform dozens of rituals, and visit quite a few locations. In this sense, it ranks with other ultra big games like Mulldoon Legacy or Spellbreaker. However, this game has an advantage in that it simplifies things for you. Any ritual, once performed, can be done again with a single command. There are database type commands that allow you to recall all rooms, all items, all rituals, etc.

The setting is barren and mysterious, with the outside world leading to a variety of mysterious lands.

I couldn't put this game down. Very well done.

So, my experience in playing Phobos is atypical; I played in tame mode, and I just used a walkthrough, because I wasn't very interested in the game.

But the writing turned out to be quite good. The mishaps of my companion and the finale were some of the best things I've read in a while. This game ends up reading a lot like the meretzky-adams game Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Also similar to that game is the transportation syste, where you travel between disconnected worlds.

Even in tame mode, some dirty stuff sneaks through, but it is on the level of the movie Space Balls (e.g. a suggestive spaceship, a man or woman getting almost undressed against their will, etc.)

Using the walkthrough, the game seemed pretty hard. The copy protection in this game is achieved by having a horrible maze with horrible monsters, where you have to use two of the feeling to get through.

The game has the infamous t-removing machine, inspiration of future games such as Earl Grey and Counterfeit Monkey.

Overall, I'm not sure if I'll play it again. But I think meretzky does some of his best writing here (perhaps he was enthusiastic about the subject matter).

Like all of his other games, this Andy Phillips game is extremely long. Typing in and reading the output of the walkthrough took me several days of playing.

You have an beginning area that is longer than most games, and then you can teleport to 6 different sub-areas. Each sub-area is fairly long, about as long as an IFComp game but with high difficulty.

The idea is that in the first area, you become a thief, and then in each subarea, you pull off a heist. Every kind of theft is represented: (Spoiler - click to show) housebreaking, military espionage, a booby-trapped pirate cave, a ritzy ocean liner, a museum, and the crown jewels. Each area has its own inventory separate from the others.

As always, the writing is evocative and beautiful, and the puzzles are vastly and deeply unfair. If you don't do exactly the right thing, you will die. Unusually for these games, however, is a large randomized element, so that even those using the walkthrough will have to experiment for some time. This was fun.

Overall, you really have to have a taste for this type of game to enjoy it. Without a walkthrough, don't expect to see more than 10% of the game.

Andy Phillips games are basically movie plots where you have to guess the exactly right actions. They are extremely long, and so difficult that I doubt anyone has completed them singlehandedly without hints.

This one is about a superhero name the Golden Crusader in Atlantic city. After an opening that is longer than most games, you are given a tutorial on how to become the next Golden Crusader and use her four big powers, you then are given five locations to visit to stop evil henchmen. The villains are memorable. One is unnecessarily sexual, killing people with sex and attraction perfume. She is the most encountered villain. The others include an evil toy maker, a pirate captain with a laser sword, a cult leader, and a magician with deadly tricks.

There's really no way to beat this without hints, but it can be fun to play with the walkthrough until you get to a cool part, play around for a bit, then continue with the walkthrough.

Here is some of the pop culture referenced in this game:
(Spoiler - click to show)Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Song of the South, Peter Pan, Waiting For Godot, the play Rhinoceros, a knot theory joke, the ten-inch pianist joke, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Star Trek: Voyager, Zen koans (is that pop culture)?, famous mathematicians like Archimedes and Fibonacci, Duck Tales, etc.

And that's just the ones I could remember off the top of my head!

This game joins the list of ultra-long games such as Blue Lacuna, King of Shreds and Patches, Mulldoon Legacy, and Time: All Things Come to an End.

In gameplay, it resembles Mulldoon Legacy a lot; both are supersized versions of Curses!. You explore a huge structure, manipulating a variety of magical or technological systems, with a variety of hint systems.

Finding Martin has smooth implementation, including several very long time travel sequences interacting with multiple copies of yourself. This forms the last third of the game, and is the most technically competent time travel I have seen. Imagine All Things Devours as a subgame, 4 times.

Finding Martin has a tendency for very long text dumps. As I enjoy reading, this wasn't an issue, but there are probably 20+ cutscenes of 2-4 pages of text each.

As others have noted, Finding Martin is spottiest when it comes to hints. Some things are hinted well; in particular, there are several systems of providing hints, and if you get further in some puzzles, you'll unlock long cutscenes containing hints for other puzzles.

However, so many puzzles require leaps of intuition that you are bound to fail multiple times. For this, a walkthrough is essential. I've tried to upload a walkthrough to IFWiki that I found on web.archive.org, but it didn't seem to go through. The link is https://web.archive.org/web/20080516223332/http://www.qrivy.net/~gayla/fm_walk.txt

This game, as with Mulldoon Legacy, should be more played and more discussed. However, both games suffer from information overload. I get stressed playing Blue Lacuna, which can be played puzzlelessly, and even Counterfeit Monkey, where puzzles are well-clued. These games (Mulldoon and Martin) are just too darn hard to be solved by anyone without clues.

However, my strategy for such games is to play through with a walkthrough, then come back months or years later and try to play without a walkthrough. I've done Curses! 3 times now this way, and I hope to do it without a walkthrough. I hope to replay Finding Martin one day.

1893 is a game set entirely in the real world. The map is based on the actual layout of the 1893 world's fair, and has hundreds of locations. The game includes 500 historical photographs used to illustrate these locations. Your enemies are counterfeiters, thieves and murderers. There is no magic or advanced technology (except in a hidden easter egg).

But at it's heart, this is a fantasy game. If the game said at the beginning 'You are at a bustling magical metropolis on the world called blah blah blah' and assigned random names to the buildings, this game would make an excellent fantasy game.

Explore bizarre cultures and exotic locations. Walk on an enormous cheese, witness arcane rituals, use devilishly complicated machines, and, most importantly, deal with a madman leaving a trail of dead bodies and missing diamonds.

The game asks you to find 2 persons of interest and 8 diamonds. These quests are almost entirely independent of each other, which is good, because this game is so huge and non-linear that it would be a great challenge to complete a linear sequence of events. After finding the 2 people of interest, you have the opportunity to complete a final quest.

I could not complete the final quest, because the event that triggers to find one of the people (Greenback Bob) never happened for me, even though I was following the walkthrough. However, I completed the rest of the game, and found it enjoyable.

There are many, many NPC's, some implemented well and others just sketched in.

The game includes in-game hints; the person who stole the diamonds WANTS to be found, and will give you hints if you call him.

Overall, an under-appreciated game. Few will be able to complete it on their own, but it is worthwhile to try. Try exploring the fair, picking up everything you can, and investigating everything. The 7 days that you have are very, very long, so you can afford to look around a while first.

This Infocom game nails the pacing. The game always felt exciting. You play a young woman searching for her father who is abducted by pirates. You carry out increasingly bold tasks throughout the game, and, as a player, I felt excited at my ability to be part of the action instead of being helpless on the side.

The game has two main areas: a ship, and a house. Events are tightly scripted and well-thought-out to keep the action flowing. The tight pacing may require frequent saving.

I found the game slightly easier than usual for Infocom; however, I was stumped twice in the middle (around points 16-19). It took about a week or a bit less of playing on and off to finish it (total time around 4-5 hours).

Be warned that this game uses Infocom's piracy protection, so you need access to the 'feelies' to solve key puzzles in the game. I used the Lost Treasures of Infocom app, which has the feelies included as images.

The romance novel aspects were infrequent, mostly resorting to ardent glasses, although right around the 16-19 point range where I got stuck, things got a bit heated as I was losing, but the game avoids anything explicit.

Overall, one of my favorite Infocom games, probably due to the great writing and simpler (but rewarding) puzzles.