Reviews by MathBrush

This game by a good author (see 'Delusions') reminds me a bit of Gris et Jaune by Jason Devlin, another talented author. Both games have very strong openings that hint at a great game full of polish.

However, both were not completely finished/polished in time for the competitions they were entered in. This game, in particular, falls flat in the most exciting part: the actual game simulation. You play as Mario, and you have to jump with timed Glulx effects, but it just doesn't work out, and later levels are, I believe, unfinished.

This game seems to almost certainly have been written by a talented but inexperienced teenager who had a great idea for a game but fell down in the execution.

This is a mobster story, with gunfights, methlabs, explosions, burning buildings, etc. But everything is disjointed; creative scenes are established, but not connected to each other. No one seemed to notice horrible deaths or accidents that had occurred minutes earlier, and massive plotholes come and go without comment.

It was an entertaining read, though, with the walkthrough.

This game was an IFComp game. It has you as a detective investigating murder at an airplane field.

You collect clues by searching scenery and by talking to people. It has a lot of elements of a good detective story, but it's really easy to get stuck and throw off the timing. There's also some goofy oddball elements that don't really fit in.

This game has you wake up with amnesia in a space wreck.

Eventually, your world opens up a bit more, and you get to explore an alien world.

It's a fairly interesting game setup, but the story doesn't have much 'bite'. Concepts are introduced but then never explored.

It has a pretty complicated electrical wiring puzzle that requires experimentation at the end.

This game is part of the incomprehensibly large subset of 'a wizard asks you to collect items' games.

It's also part of the 'parser likes to insult your character' genre.

It also begins with 'my lame apartment', including waking up with a hangover in just your underwear, which is also a surprisingly large genre.

However, it also lets you make about 15 different objects with origami, which is pretty cool.

This game, similar to Sylenius Mysterium, has you entering an arcade at night and playing a variety of arcade games in IF form.

Some of the games work out really well (I like the way that Pong was presented). Others are just bizarre (what game corresponds to the politics scene?).

Overall, fun with a walkthrough.

This game is perhaps best left undescribed, as its core mechanic is so unusual. It helps to type ABOUT or (I think) COMMANDS.

The story is based off an old Dunsany Story, just like Nepstad's The Journey of the King. But this game is much more constrained than that one.

I would have rated the game higher if I hadn't been stuck so many times, trying to search for the correct commands to advance the game.

This game has you trying out various products in a puzzly environment. It has a snarky parser that jokes about a corporate environment, uses text pauses extensively, and has you assemble a complicated system.

It's actually pretty interesting, but the implementation has increasingly greater issues, making the latter half impossible to complete.

This game has you enter a series of parallel worlds where darkness is everywhere, and you must attack it with the light.

It seems intentionally to parody things at several points, with gophers as the bad guys and a random plant called Gorarry that is the key to the universe.

I don't see anyone beating this without the walkthrough, but with the walkthrough it has some fun narrative points about player/parser relations.

This game has you wandering around a large map until you reach a manor, where you have to complete several puzzles to convict a rich man of fraud.

Most of the locations are empty, and when they are not empty, they often have strange disambiguation problems. The one NPC is very odd, to say the least.

This game needed a lot more polish.