Reviews by MathBrush

This game placed near the bottom of the 2002 comp, and it's not hard to see why.

The game opens with an error message; typing 'walkthru' says 'insert walkthru here'. it says it was written for a 7 year old later, which could make sense, but it seems like the authors knew it wasn't anywhere near done, and gave up.

It has a huge, mazelike map with empty rooms all over. You are given goals, but the winning walkthru ignores all of those goals.

A truly bizarre game.

This game has a good mix of red herrings and regular puzzle items.

You are wandering around a house, looking for your auntie. Magic intervenes.

This game has a fairly large map, but because it's organized so well, it feels compact.

A couple of the puzzle solutions surprised me, and I feel they could have been clued better.

In this game, you commit a series of unwitting (or sometimes witting) crimes, ending in worse and worse prison-related situations.

The story-telling uses really effective techniques, but the writing and puzzles aren't up to the challenge. By techniques, I mean cuts between scenes, timed events, actions with delayed effects, etc.

In this game, you play someone exploring a house during a party, trying to find paperwork on a lien on your house.

There is a death. You want to learn more about it.

The game has some odd touches (some strong profanity from a goth, for intance), especially the fact that you go through every area of the house in front of the unhappy occupants and they don't stop you.

Otherwise, though, this is one of the best Adrift implementations I've seen.

This game is kind of a mish-mash of things, with a seedy individual like the thief in Zork, and a plot about collecting treasures.

I knew I was in trouble when I found myself in Maze Room 1. It was even worse when I discovered that the walkthrough didn't help here due to the maze being randomized.

There were some fun action sequences later on, but the game was too underclued to be easily completable.

This game has you wandering an enormous mansion, exploring room after room, with hidden passages and a strange woman in the library.

I enjoyed it, but only because I used hints. The game has the sort of thing where you have 20 similar rooms and one of them has a scenery item that can be used.

The author is a little too smarmy; if you type nothing, you get "Let me explain something here; you're playing a text adventure...no text, no adventure, get it?". That kind of 'oh silly player' attitude is prevalent. It has a lot of poetry and some physical simulation (freezing and melting in an optional puzzle, flushing toilet, etc.)

In this game, you are in a MUD (like a text version of World of Warcraft). You have to join a beginner quest and complete it.

The game has several entertaining characters. It contains an in-game hint system that makes sense.

I found some bugs related to attempting to do things twice (like after dying).

The game seems to hint at some risque business, but there's nothing really like that (at least not explicitly).

This was one of the hardest games for me to try to finish. You are in a factory with room names like "218 IMO" and "PUR PLE", with characters like "TIND-R-FUT" and "YES-R-KNO".

There is a timer that kills you randomly, over and over (you are a band of six robots, so you have six lives). The solution to the game is randomized, but there are also many irrelevant puzzles.

This game has a lot of bad signs; typos/grammar errors, the plot is literally 'destroy the evil sorcerer', random text dumps happen.

But it actually seems pretty original later on; there are several NPCs, a house with an unusual layout, an island to wander around, and an unexpected story.

I had to read the accompanying transcript, but I liked this in the end.

This game puts you in the place of a general during the crusades.

You have to break into a city and talk to the king. There's a lot of guess-the-verb happening here.

Then you end up telling the story of Christ's death, with some parody elements. You have to reconstruct it into a more 'exciting' story to convert the king.