Reviews by MathBrush

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.

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.

This game starts with several puzzles involving climbing out from a pile of corpses.

After that, you need to memorialize the dead.

This is certainly an unusual game. It could have been far better if the various puzzles had been better clued, and synonyms for verbs and nouns implemented.

In this game, you have to pass four or fives puzzles to open a safety deposit box.

These puzzles are based in reality, but have little basis in reality. Just taking a ticket from the machine involves deciphering a complex sequence of button presses.

These puzzles are exceedingly illogical. But the game is otherwise competently written and bugless.

This is an interesting game, with many elements reminiscent of Infocom's Suspect, but much simpler.

You are attending a Faerie masque that a neighbor has thrown; in this masque, everyone has a costume and a role to say.

About half of the game consists of listening to the gala instructions (basically a big cosplay or LARP, all in rhyme), and solving easy riddles. Then it gets harder, and weird.

I liked it, though. It has some layers of mystery that are never unveiled, and which you are left to deduce for yourself, which I was unable to do.

In this AGT game (a parser that I find better than ADRIFT but not as good as Inform or TADS), you have to navigate an enemy stronghold using different cubes of software and slabs and pills.

It's not very polished at all, and the parser has some troubles, and the story has gaping plotholes (it's super easy to walk into enemy barracks and take things from soldiers). But it has a charm to it, and the story seems really deeply thought out; the author says they invented the world in their youth.

In this game, you are marooned on a small island, and you have to get off.

Like most adrift games, the parser is poor and has disambiguation trouble.

The game has a lot of under-described locations. And there is really no hint on what you are supposed to be doing. Also the walkthrough says to take tires, but the game says they are too heavy.

Overall, this seems like a really ambitious game with moving NPCs and fire simulation, but it was probably too big to polish up in time for the comp.

This large game tells a wonderful native american tale. Set in a large village, and in the world of the dead, you have to hunt food for a village while the warriors prepare for the arrival of a deadly giant.

Big and ambitious, this game was massively buggy during the competition and placed in the bottom 10. It was updated later, fixing many but not all problems. I recommend playing with the walkthrough to see the great story.

You are a third-person observer in a ship as Captain Chaos, a relatively benign supervillain, is crashing to the earth.

The writing is good, and funny, but the game is super buggy, with events firing at the wrong time, repeating actions sending your score up over and over, and a whole slew of bad interfaced design problems and missing synonyms.

It's a shame, because the writing is so fun.

This game starts with a long cinematic-type sequence where you are thrown in jail for dressing like a boy.

It's notable for changing location descriptions. However, everyone I've seen that beat it used the walkthrough. It contains several unintuitive puzzles, and is one of those games best experienced via walkthru, in my opinion.