Reviews by MathBrush

WalkthroughComp was done by Emily Short, where she wrote out a telegram of a bizarre walkthrough for a nonexistent game, and then you were to write that game.

This game is one of the biggest responses to that; however, it's too big. The game is full of text dumps, and the environment (inside a VR machine) just veers wildly from genre to genre and location to location.

It must have taken a lot of effort, but it needed more coherence, I think.

This game had a really promising opening. You board a cruise ship, and you are unguided; you wander into a gift shop, and can buy many things, there is a 4-day schedule, meals are offered throughout the day, etc.

And then BAM, it becomes a completely unoriginal text adventure where you have to solve unmotivated puzzles to find crystals to defeat a wizard. Why? It was so promising...

This game has you visiting a lost world where the builders, an ancient people of great power, had disappeared, and where your supervisor has disappeared.

It has a fairly small map, allowing you to explore much of it in 30 minutes or so, but it has a tricky maze and a propensity for hiding things in scenery objects.

Overall, I found it a mostly interesting story, reminiscent of a Star Trek movie.

This game puts you in the place of a general during the crusades.

You have to break into a city and talk to the king. There's a lot of guess-the-verb happening here.

Then you end up telling the story of Christ's death, with some parody elements. You have to reconstruct it into a more 'exciting' story to convert the king.

This game has a lot of bad signs; typos/grammar errors, the plot is literally 'destroy the evil sorcerer', random text dumps happen.

But it actually seems pretty original later on; there are several NPCs, a house with an unusual layout, an island to wander around, and an unexpected story.

I had to read the accompanying transcript, but I liked this in the end.

This was one of the hardest games for me to try to finish. You are in a factory with room names like "218 IMO" and "PUR PLE", with characters like "TIND-R-FUT" and "YES-R-KNO".

There is a timer that kills you randomly, over and over (you are a band of six robots, so you have six lives). The solution to the game is randomized, but there are also many irrelevant puzzles.

In this game, you are in a MUD (like a text version of World of Warcraft). You have to join a beginner quest and complete it.

The game has several entertaining characters. It contains an in-game hint system that makes sense.

I found some bugs related to attempting to do things twice (like after dying).

The game seems to hint at some risque business, but there's nothing really like that (at least not explicitly).

This game has you wandering an enormous mansion, exploring room after room, with hidden passages and a strange woman in the library.

I enjoyed it, but only because I used hints. The game has the sort of thing where you have 20 similar rooms and one of them has a scenery item that can be used.

The author is a little too smarmy; if you type nothing, you get "Let me explain something here; you're playing a text adventure...no text, no adventure, get it?". That kind of 'oh silly player' attitude is prevalent. It has a lot of poetry and some physical simulation (freezing and melting in an optional puzzle, flushing toilet, etc.)

This game is kind of a mish-mash of things, with a seedy individual like the thief in Zork, and a plot about collecting treasures.

I knew I was in trouble when I found myself in Maze Room 1. It was even worse when I discovered that the walkthrough didn't help here due to the maze being randomized.

There were some fun action sequences later on, but the game was too underclued to be easily completable.

In this game, you play someone exploring a house during a party, trying to find paperwork on a lien on your house.

There is a death. You want to learn more about it.

The game has some odd touches (some strong profanity from a goth, for intance), especially the fact that you go through every area of the house in front of the unhappy occupants and they don't stop you.

Otherwise, though, this is one of the best Adrift implementations I've seen.