Reviews by MathBrush

In this game, you commit a series of unwitting (or sometimes witting) crimes, ending in worse and worse prison-related situations.

The story-telling uses really effective techniques, but the writing and puzzles aren't up to the challenge. By techniques, I mean cuts between scenes, timed events, actions with delayed effects, etc.

This game has a good mix of red herrings and regular puzzle items.

You are wandering around a house, looking for your auntie. Magic intervenes.

This game has a fairly large map, but because it's organized so well, it feels compact.

A couple of the puzzle solutions surprised me, and I feel they could have been clued better.

This game placed near the bottom of the 2002 comp, and it's not hard to see why.

The game opens with an error message; typing 'walkthru' says 'insert walkthru here'. it says it was written for a 7 year old later, which could make sense, but it seems like the authors knew it wasn't anywhere near done, and gave up.

It has a huge, mazelike map with empty rooms all over. You are given goals, but the winning walkthru ignores all of those goals.

A truly bizarre game.

This game is just terrible. In it, you are a misognyistic, sadistic, horrible man, whose goal is to make everyone's life worse.

The game jumps from genre to genre, and in my version, was unfinishable due to a bug near the end, but I wasn't interested in finishing it anyway.

In this TADS game, you spend much of the time smoking marijuana and passing it around, before later taking peyote.

The author's note claims the game isn't about getting enlightened for drugs, but it's hard to know what it is about if not that. It definitely seems like a good anti-drug advertisement, given that following the drugs leads you to being a dirty, unwashed bum that children run away from.

Scattered strong profanity, extensive drug use.

In this game, you are a 9 yr old turned into a dog.

Much of the game revolves around acquiring coupons for a dog salon, to transform yourself. It uses graphics extensively.

The game would generally be fun, with a tight map and interesting puzzles, but it has so many puzzles requiring waiting for a long time, and it has a lot of underground bad feelings for women, non-white american peoples, and the aged. It also has a direct attack on a former IF author which is essentially vicious.

This game has you as a student of the future in a little pod who has to print a paper. This is one of 6 virtual reality games in IFComp 1997, probably as a response to Delusions from IFComp 1996.

This game also reminds me a lot of The Legend Lives, which has a very similar opening setup.

I actually liked this game; it was overwhelming, getting started, but I liked the well-thought out means of transferring information between the physical and virtual realms.

This is a really creative and original game, with a nuclear apocalypse and a sort of dual-world situation.

Despite its many plot innovations, the implementation itself is sub-par, making it difficult to play without the hints (which are split up into 5 sub-files, and seem intimidating, but which are fairly simple).

Definitely a good play (with hints) for fans of apocalyptic things.

This game seems somehow unfinished; you are called in as an expert to an old abbey to investigate some pottery. You travel around the house and grounds, gathering various items, and then are thrown into a different kind of story.

The game then ends soon thereafter.

There are some implementation errors. Overall, its fun with a walkthrough if you are a fan of archaeology games.

This game is like a DnD or serious Munchkin game: door, challenge, reward. You select some attributes about yourself (like luck, strength, etc.).

Then you are shown two doors, and you have to pick one. Behind each door is a text scene with some sort of dnd-like encounter, like a feast of food you can eat or not, or a chest that is obviously trapped.

The font, colors, and atmosphere were very good, and the writing was good.

I had to download the entire ifcomp 2016 file to get all the files for this game.