Reviews by MathBrush

This game was created by Emily Short as a prize for IFComp, resulting in a game set in Steph Cherrywell's world of Canyonville from Brain Guzzlers From Beyond.

You are Mary Jane, creating a robot for your friend Jenny. You have to train your robot to become just like Jenny. You train it by having it read books in your lab on different topics. However, some books have negative side effects, so it becomes quite the puzzle to figure out what books to read and when.

The major innovation in this game is the use of procedural generation for your conversations with the robot. The robots conversation is affected by numerous variables affecting its emotion, tone, and knowledge. A large corpus is included in the source code, allowing for huge variety. This represents an immense accomplishment, and provides proc gen that is actually fun to read.

This game took me about 45 minutes to finish without hints. I restarted several times, but I don't think you ever need to.

In this game by Porpentine, an author known for creating bio-mechanical worlds that are almost hallucinatory. This game is a great example of her world building power.

You play in a dust-covered world of raiders and scavengers. You can create yourself, but also destroy yourself, and both are necessary.

This game is unusual for Twine in that you have to enter city names in text when traveling. This gives more of a riddle aspect to the game. However, you have a map storing names you've met. There are less than 10 total cities.

The game ends in a sort of transformation that is best experience rather than described. Overall, it has a feeling of exploration and of 'just living'. One of the least disgusting porpentine games, and one of my favorites of hers.

This game plays out over the course of several days in-game, perhaps a week. It is quite large, on the order of size of Twine games like Birdland, but feels a bit smaller than Spy Intrigue. I have played it once, but it seems to have high replay value.

The visuals on this game are gorgeous, especially when sleeping. The font, letter spacing, and color choices give a DOS type feel. The game is sprinkled with occasional images and animation.

You play a living firewall, an elemental charged with protecting a magic/tech network with 4 locations.

You are presented with a sequence of mysteries, one a day, which you use clues to solve. You can then deal with the mystery in many ways, raising and lowering various stats a la choice of games.

The game includes several times sequences, some violence and some sexual activity.

My only quibble is about one image, and it's a tiny issue: (Spoiler - click to show)I didn't like the illustration of the main antagonist, I thought it was cheesy.<\spoiler>

This my second Muckenhoupt game after Gostak, and I found it compelling. You have an evil twin who is always out to get you, and you him. You go out to try and stop him from hurting others.

There is another world out there, his world, a mirror world of evil. The main mechanic of the game is travelling between the worlds and using their transformative properties.

The plot has a few surprises to pull out, and their are some tricky (but no too tricky) puzzles.

I love this game, but I'm a big fan of dual-world games.

These games are an adaptation of a series of gamebooks, i.e. paper CYOA books. They must have been absolutely incredible, because this game is rich in detail and options. The game is played on a large 3d-map which you place a DND miniature-type figure on, moving it around to indicate your choice of route (between 2 or 3 options at a time).

You have stamina, gold, rations, spells, etc. The spells are cast by using up some stamina and selecting 3-letter words out of a cloud of letters. The available words differ quite a bit from situation to situation.

The combat system involves guessing a number at the same time as your opponent, trying to beat them without using up too much of your strength. It ends up being a sort of dance between attack and defend.

There are numerous side quests; the main quest can be finished extremely quickly, while one side quest took up an hour of gameplay by itself.

Highly, highly recommended.

This is the first IF game I've played in another language, and it was actually very enjoyable. I had to dust off my german and use google translate to get most of the commands (I didn't know 'look under', 'turn on the lights', 'extinguish' etc.) I got one hint from ifwizz.de

The game is set in a 6-room apartment. The girl you're interested in has to leave for 30 minutes, and has asked you to watch her 4-year old Kai. Unfortunately, as soon as she leaves, Kai steals your lighter and sets fire to a trashcan!

No matter what you do, Tanja comes home after a half hour, and she talks it out with you. The talks range from very bad to very good. Fortunately, the talks give you hints on replay.

As indicated on ifwizz.de, there is a bit of 'guess the noun' going on here. Occasionally, if you are looking for something, you have to use the exactly correct adjective-noun combination.

I'm grateful to have tried IF in a new language, and I recommend this game. Maybe the authors should translate it for next years IFComp.

This was my absolute favorite IFComp 2015 game. In Map, you play a woman with a troubled relationship with her family members. You spend most of the day alone in your house, and as you immediately learn, the house is slowly growing new rooms, which is reflected in a map you carry.

During the course of a week, you have the opportunity to (Spoiler - click to show)go back and make changes in your life, which affects your current life greatly. This allows for a lot of flexibility in gameplay, and many endings.

The feeling of the game is poignant and thoughtful, and mildly creepy, especially when strange things happen and noone, least of all YOU, seems to care.

Love this game.

Edit: Before I posted this review, I went through and played again. It was a slow start, but I teared up during the last few days of gameplay. This game really gets me in an emotional place. It had an emotional impact on me that rivals games like Photopia or the Warbler's Nest. It affected me a lot because many decisions revolved around family and relationships.

Cape is, in my opinion, one of the best web-based interactive fiction games of all time. It is an engrossing story about a young petty criminal who has 'greatness thrust upon them' as a result of their crimes.

The most influential choice you make in this long Undum game is the choice of your super powers. I've heard some people say that the powers end up seeming the same, but I felt that all three big options were very different from each other. I think what people are talking about is a fact that the actual story is the same; just the details of it change from choice to choice.

Your superhero comes to grips with their powers and their crime-fighting. They are simultaneously uncomfortable and thrilled by their powers. There is an interesting mystery leading to a thrilling climactic confrontation.

The feel is grungy, dark; I lived in Manhattan for a while, and this really reminds me of the feel of the Lower East Side at night. I just loved this game. Loved it loved it loved it. (Note: whenever someone hypes up a game to me, I am always disappointed in it, so you might not like it as much as I did. I just happen to really like grungy superhero stories).

Eurydice is one of those games that felt intimidatingly large, but after playing through it, I was relieved to see it is actually short, sweet, and simple. A huge number of NPC's lie in an early room, but only require minimal interaction. It seems at two different points that there are many different directions to go in, but in both cases the different directions lead to small areas.

The game is a modern retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice. It has a beautiful and haunting atmosphere, and excellent writing.

I won't spoil the plot too much, but this short game has 4 possible endings. The main NPC is painted vividly, while you yourself are left vague and nebulous. The whole feeling is that of a dark afternoon on a November day when the snow hasn't fallen but the world is already dead and gray.

Recommended for everyone. Incredible game.

As soon as I read the premise of Fate, I found it exciting. As you immediately learn, you are a pregnant queen about to give birth; you also have the capacity to see your child's future. Your goal is to change that future.

Gijsbers' game has excellent writing, reminding me of the best parts of Ian Finley's Kaged and Adam Cadre's Varicella. But what I appreciated most was something else; no matter how many IF games I play, I still seem to need walkthroughs for everything. But I didn't have this issue for this game, because:

1. You can always reach some sort of ending in the game, and your endings improve as you go on. So if you can't get more than halfway in the game, you get a halfway-decent ending.

2. Almost all of the puzzles seem to have multiple solutions.

The game has a dark theme, and includes violence. But your character is clearly motivated by a positive goal, and the game rewards you whether you choose violence or not. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that you can reach what I consider the best ending without (Spoiler - click to show)injuring the pixie. However, I didn't find a way to avoid (Spoiler - click to show)killing the gardener; but as I said, the game doesn't force you to do anything you don't want to.

The moral choices seemed a bit easier to me as well, since your character is (Spoiler - click to show)a prisoner, and (Spoiler - click to show)her family is at war with her husband, who stole her away and won't promise to stop her child from being killed.