Reviews by MathBrush

This quest game has refreshingly original storybuilding. It includes a big pamphlet you can read which does a good job of displaying a 'descent into madness', although I think it could have done better if it left a bit more mystery in the last few pages.

The game has a layout (story-wise) similar to Karella's earlier Night House. You are alone in a building, and something is outside, and you have to figure out what it wants.

I was unable to complete this during Ectocomp. Afterwards, some people commented on intfiction with the solution.

Overall, this was a positive experience once I knew what to do.

Ojuel is a master of setting, and this is a great game. You play as an former dancer in 1958 in a communist Carribean country. You have to extricate something from a house party, but you don't know what it is.

The game has great storytelling, using flashbacks and conversation to good effect. I see it getting nominated for several XYZZYs.

There were several implementation difficulties, though, because it was sometimes hard to know what verbs to use. A post-comp release that implemented every command response contained in judges' reviews would not take much time, and would add the finishing touches to this already great game.

I could see myself picking this book up and reading it in the library. You play as an orphan who gets sucked into another world by a mysterious stranger.

This other world is an Oz-like fantasy world that is creatively engineered. A long story plays out.

There's not much interactivity to speak of, though there are options scattered throughout. But I liked this; it reminded me of 'pulpy' kids books that I read when I was a teenager, like Deltora quest.

I beta tested this game.

This game casts you as a translator of ancient languages in a fantasy world. It's split up into three acts: a tense moment on a boat, a fight in a town, and a climactic finale in an archaelogical dig.

The overall story, the characters, etc. are all well-drawn. But the game is so big that more needs to be filled-in; more responses to synonyms and commands, more conversational topics, more alternate puzzle solutions.

I beta tested this game.

This game has a utilitarian interface, but don't let that fool you: this is a seriously great game.

Your magical witch house is broken, and you need to fix it. You have an inventory (even though it's web based), and you have the power to alter the elements of various inventory elements.

It has a cheerful backstory. Different items you carry interact with each other.

The various interactions are fiddly sometimes, and perhaps even unfair; but somehow everything gelled for me in a great way. Not everyone may feel the same.

I beta tested this game, and it was my personal choice for winner of IFComp 2017.

It is a grotesque game; you are a child granted a bottomless pit by a magical character in a fairy tale. You are imprisoned in a dungeon where countless other children have met gruesome deaths.

The game revolves completely around eating, with eating the only real action. Like DiBianca's Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box, where USE was the only verb, the puzzles in this game revolves around timing and sequence.

I found this game satisfying, and have played it 6 or 7 times.

This is a game with a brilliant premise; you are some sort of alien being charged with protecting a young girl.

You have visions of the future, showing you that seven enemies will come and attack her.

You can do various things to improve her chances of survival, with each thing you do providing you with a new vision.

This was very successful in general, but I found it fiddly in two areas. First, some things weren't implemented; for instance, the first thing you learn about Kayla is that she has pulled-back hair and a simple dress. But if you try to examine either one, there is an error.

Second, the game essentially becomes a hidden-object puzzle. You have to scour descriptions for nouns, examine each noun, and hope that you find the right thing. Some solutions that seem like they should work, don't; like finding alternate things for burning/clogging, etc.

But I still enjoyed this game a lot. It has a nice map.

I enjoyed the puzzles of Goodbye Cruel Squirrel with a walkthrough. I enjoyed the writing in general, but not the mean-spiritedness.

You play as a squirrel raiding another tribe. You have to progress through a series of locations, each with its own puzzle.

I got stuck early on and used a walkthrough the whole time.

This is probably the slickest of all the games entered this year.

This is a short mystery tale set in a women's college in (I think) the northeast. You are replacing a professor who has mysteriously disappeared.

The main narrative is about time-hoppers (which feels more like a temporal Gulliver's Travels than H.G. Wells), but there is a sub-narrative about the place of adjunct/temporary/visiting faculty and the various roles of women in academia.

The game beautifully divides between 'asides'-links and 'moving forward'-links by having the first show up as notes in the margin and the latter extending the text.

It's well-illustrated and well-written. One of the best web games available.

This game is about a girl named Mikayla, whose phone you find. The game consists of digging though all the apps in the phone to see what her life was like.

I enjoyed the photos (of random things like dogs and writing) and the poetry. There were text notes and voice memos that were, I think, too long for me. They seemed to be there mainly to provide a feeling of reality and background; however, in a storytelling environment, being 'true to life' often makes things too unwieldly. I feel that the purpose of stories is to condense and crystallize reality, and those two parts of the game could have used significant condensing and crystallization.

Overall, it left a good impression on me, especially the ending (which I found by poring through the code).