Reviews by MathBrush

This is a Squiffy game in a generic fantasy setting. Your town is raided by orcs that are mind controlled by white worms, and your brother and father are taken.

The rest of the story is mostly a bunch of standard fantasy sequences glued together and hurried over. For instance, you can go request aid from a king, visit an enemy city, make friends with a half-orc.

You generally have two choices at a time, sometimes more, but the branches converge again quickly. Sometimes the author forgot important information in one branch (like not telling you a beggar is following you).

There are major plot holes near the end. Overall, this story seems like if a very talented teenager spent a few weeks making a game in Squiffy, or someone older getting into writing IF for the first time. Either way, getting more practice will help and I expect future games would be significant improvements.

For now, though, my rating is:
-Polish
+Descriptiveness
-Interactivity
-Emotional impact
-Would I play again?

Andrew Schultz recently release Fivebyfiveia Delenda Est, a fun small game with chess puzzles that was one of his higher-rated games.

This is a larger game with chess puzzles that have a bit more complexity. There are a bunch of mini-kingdoms to invade and each has two 'tiers' to conquer. The game itself has 2 difficulty settings. I beat it on the first, and started the second, only to realize that it was very similar.

The puzzles involve setting up 2-3 pieces on the chessboard to trap the enemy king. Interestingly, sometimes you have to set up enemy pieces as well.

The storyline is fairly thin but understandable. The game sometimes holds your hand a bit more than I would have wanted. Specifically, beating one area sometimes automatically beats neighboring areas, even before you know what they do. If I had more idea before I left what each area was like, or was given the option to grey out such areas, I'd prefer that.

I was playing through all the IFComp games that are in inaccessible formats, and I thought I got them all. But then I saw this game and was surprised. This is a raw python file, and games like that almost never get reviews in the comps and tend to place lower down. As one of IFComp's most successful long term participants, Schultz would know it, which was my surprise.

But it's not always about crushing the competition, which is exactly the point of this game. You play as an adult who sees a kid playing tic tac toe. As a kid, you always had a 'draw' with other kids, and if they let you win, you got mad. But once, you won a game because the other player missed something, and you want to recreate that experience for the child.

I'll admit, I was mystified at first, and just played regular old tic tac toe games. It reminded me of Infinite Adventure in this comp, just repeating the same old interactions over and over (in this case, endless games of tic-tac-toe). But then I finally got it, and the game became a lot of fun. I first solved it the easiest way, and then I solved it the hardest way. I wasn't sure I had gotten everything, so I checked the walkthrough and saw I had done what was intended. I didn't go through and do all the other variations, because I felt satisfied.

This is a pretty small game, but:
+Polish: It was very polished
-Descriptive: There's some meaningful text trappings, but it's mostly a puzzle with some bare-bones story
+Interactivity: The puzzle was intriguing and thoughtful
+Emotional impact: I loved the motivation for the puzzle and enjoyed putting myself in the protagonist's shoes
+Would I play again? This was a very smooth experience.

This is a 2-player Twine game. Every time you make a decision, you are given a code, and asked for the code of your partner. This means you could play side by side or (as I did) messaging back and forth with people. I played once as each faction and am playing again with another person.

I never play IF with others, except at the Seattle IF Meetup, but I was able to find some great people on intfiction to message back and forth. It took a while to nail down transmitting codes but then proceeded pretty well. There are only about 10 or so choices so the game is pretty fast, although there is a lot of text per each early choice.

Story wise, it reminded me of the faux-historical games from Choice of Games (like The Eagle's Heir). You play either as the first (and last) newly-made dictator of an idealistic socialist republic or as the king's general who is coming to crush the rebellious city.

Choices definitely matter here, with different branches by one character giving different branches for another. They tend to share many features in common (so it's not a Time Cave wildly branching structure) but it includes different locations, choices for death and violence or peace, etc.

I found it fun and effective, and I didn't expect that to happen. There was one or two typos, but overall it's fairly polished.

I rate games on the following scale, which can give a high score even to relatively short games like this one:
+Polish
+Descriptiveness
+Interactivity
+Emotional Impact (I didn't get completely drawn in, but I did roleplay as my character and was able to be drawn into how they would react)
+Would I play again? I already have several times

This game defied many of the categories I tried to put it in. It looked like a parser game, Adventuron specifically, but appears to be custom written.

You walk around with on-screen arrow keys and a menu of verbs you can apply to your inventory or things around you, kind of like old Lucasarts games.

There are a variety of items, and a variety of people you can help.

On one hand, the programming is very impressive and the game looks well-done. On the other hand, it often contradicts itself. It will say 'there is a flier here you can take' but if you click TAKE nothing happens. It will say 'the frog leaves' but then the frog is still there. I was able to complete the game, and found it humorous, but I think that this could have received even more testing. For me, I like to spend 50% or more of my development time for parser games in testing alone, and for choice maybe 10-20% at least.

This game had heart to me, and it was polished and I might play again, so I'm giving it 3 stars. If the bugs were fixed I'd make it 4.

This game is an educational game about kidneys made for kids using a custom engine that reads full sentences.

The game itself has multiple endings; I finished after only examining 3 rooms out of 5 in the main hub.

A magical fairy is helping you get a Halloween costume by transforming whatever you pick up into costume parts. Meanwhile, you get hungry, and eating requires you to take phosphate binders due to your kidney problems. This opens up a minigame where you have to hunt for phosphate crystals.

Throughout IF history there have been at least two different threads: one using text to provide a realistic simulation of the world (including Emily Short and her physics games), and those pushing for abstraction and ease of use (including Ryan Veeder who provides a lot of subtle affordances to make gameplay smoother). Most people authors use a mix of the two.

Abstraction and ease pushed to its extreme leads to dynamic fiction, where there are few choices besides 'next page'. And realistic simulation pushed too far leads to hunger timers, inventory limits, and an insistence on proper grammar, all of which this game has. It's a stylistic choice that some are fond of, but I don't really enjoy my character getting more and more hungry as I go back and forth between rooms because my character can only hold two objects. The engine is also slow between responses, so it can be a bit frustrating.

I found the educational part fascinating and didn't know the kidneys had anything to do with phosphate. Also, this game is specifically designed for kids unfamiliar with IF tropes, so I'm specifically not the target audience. And a lot of the things I found off putting could be fun for kids; discovering the game character actually responds like a real person with needs and limited capacity is something fun about text adventures when you're new (at least it was for me).

Overall:
+Polish: It worked smoothly.
-Descriptiveness: The game felt kind of bare at times.
-Interactivity: The game felt a bit too fiddly for me at time.
+Emotional impact: I love the idea of making a game for kids and the phosphate thing was cool.
+Would I play again? I don't really feel like it, but I only found one costume and there were many rooms I missed, and I'd like to support this idea of making games for health purpose (kind of like Gavin Inglis's game about self-abuse).

The author of this game has made several other very successful twine games, including Birdland and its related works and Known Unknowns. Many of them are smooth and enjoyable LGBTQ YA stories and this is in a similar category.

You play as a young woman whos prom date gets publicly ruined as embarrassingly as possible. Unfortunately, this prom is also on a boat.

There are many characters, and all choices are dialogue options. This author tends to have a ton of little options hidden in the code, but each path you can take in this game feels like the 'intended' one.

There's nothing to see here in the way of puzzles or major decisions; the real draw is the witty dialogue, teen-relatable situations and, for those interested, LGBTQ representation.

For me, what it keeps it from being 5 stars is its lack of the extraordinary. I enjoy this author's games the best when they become bizarre and absurd, like weird dream birds or raccoons speaking in emoji. For me, this was like very good cake without frosting: delicious, but leaving you wishing it had that extra ingredient.

Liminal spaces are popular right now; my young son enjoys playing liminal spaces games on Roblox and I've seen bots about them on twitter.

Whatever the original definition of liminal spaces was, they are now dominated by endlessly repetitive/abandoned/mass-produced areas. The Backrooms is a classic example (an endless system of hallways with boring carpeting and yellow walls). Another common kind of liminal space is something designed for entertainment but which is now empty, or uncanny valley areas.

This game involves you travelling between several such regions. Interestingly, just like liminal spaces in popular culture are often worn down, this game is underimplemented, missing several exit lists and lacking custom responses for many things.

Here's my rating:
-Polish: The game is missing exit listings and just feels kind of undercooked.
-Descriptiveness: The areas that are described are evocative, but some are given just a single line that is rather unclear.
-Interactivity: I had to decompile to finish it.
+Emotional impact: It has the kind of liminal feeling that I assume it was designed to create.
+Would I play again?: Sure, why not. It's short and good at creating the feeling of low-key chills.

This was a truly pleasant game to play. The art was very lovely, reminding me of a more advanced version of the art in Laura Knauth's Winter Wonderland.

This is written in Adventuron, and has a few 'modes', including a cozy one and a sad one. I played both of those.

The game has its own internal logic that doesn't correspond 100% to standard interactive fiction tropes. For instance, a few puzzles require that you type the desired result without detailing the physical actions that prompt that result (an example, not in the game, would be like saying 'go golfing' instead of 'hit ball').

Because of that, I got stuck a bit, but I noticed that the many other people who played seemed to get by without asking for hints online, so I persevered. Overall, I enjoyed the atmosphere of this game the most out of this comp, and think this is an outstanding use of Adventuron.

This game opens with a spooky pixel art world and story, then transitions to a generally pleasant, somewhat magical real life world with photographs.

It has 3-5 puzzles. All are simple, and most are well-clued. One involving a fish felt a little arbitrary to me, but overall it was nice.

The game felt smooth and polished. The writing gives hints of interesting worldbuilding. Overall, like others have noted, the game feels a bit disconnected between its two sides, but both sides are individually well put-together.