Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This game has you exploring a mid-sized map with a music building, a post office, and a Hardee's knockoff.

The game is well-coded and funny at many times, but many of the puzzles are of the absurd variety that only makes sense in retrospect. Puzzles include 'look behind the one scenery item in the one room that has something', 'try something that has no chance of working in real life', and 'make sure you're carrying a completely random item that will save your life'.

I wasn't a fun of the puzzles, but a large segment of people are. If you like methodically working through a game, drawing a map, and checking every item, you will probably really like this game quite a bit.

This game seems somehow unfinished; you are called in as an expert to an old abbey to investigate some pottery. You travel around the house and grounds, gathering various items, and then are thrown into a different kind of story.

The game then ends soon thereafter.

There are some implementation errors. Overall, its fun with a walkthrough if you are a fan of archaeology games.

This is a really creative and original game, with a nuclear apocalypse and a sort of dual-world situation.

Despite its many plot innovations, the implementation itself is sub-par, making it difficult to play without the hints (which are split up into 5 sub-files, and seem intimidating, but which are fairly simple).

Definitely a good play (with hints) for fans of apocalyptic things.

This is a shortish game mostly involving complicated puzzles (like the lights puzzle where pushing off one light turns on all those around it, or counting to 255 in quaternary).

Some of the puzzles are gross or a bit mean-spirited, and it could all use some more cluing. Beyond that, it's pretty competently programmed.

Mostly interesting for fans of convoluted puzzles.

This game has you as a student of the future in a little pod who has to print a paper. This is one of 6 virtual reality games in IFComp 1997, probably as a response to Delusions from IFComp 1996.

This game also reminds me a lot of The Legend Lives, which has a very similar opening setup.

I actually liked this game; it was overwhelming, getting started, but I liked the well-thought out means of transferring information between the physical and virtual realms.

Well, I guess marketing works. After seeing months of promotional materials for Strayed, I decided to try it while it was on sale out of curiosity.

This is a longish hyperlink game. Although the ads seemed to show graphics for the pc version, the android version was, as advertised, pure text.

The game has a strong central horror narrative, with several detours allowed on the way, with many of the choices being flavor choices.

Just before this game, I had played Abyss, which is a similar game (twinelike without stats, on the play store). This game has better writing, less typos, and is more mature than Abyss, but is of comparable size. Those differences, though, make the difference for me between a free game (Abyss) and a commercial game (Strayed).

On replaying Strayed, I found quite a few new areas I had not previously explored, and the grand finale was different in a way that ties into the nature of the horror.

However, I did not find the horror gripping. It reminded me the most of some creepy pasta stories, where some reactions of the participants don't reflect reality (an example not from the game: "You see an airplane that morphs into a fluttering leaf. You shrug it off.")

I guess I was hoping more for emotional investment (like Hana Feels) or persistent consequences of actions (like Choice of Games), both of which the authors had written for. But $1-$2 is an appropriate amount for this game.

Edit: I added another star when I found out the underlined text showed you what your choices had affected; I really like this in a game.

This game is like a DnD or serious Munchkin game: door, challenge, reward. You select some attributes about yourself (like luck, strength, etc.).

Then you are shown two doors, and you have to pick one. Behind each door is a text scene with some sort of dnd-like encounter, like a feast of food you can eat or not, or a chest that is obviously trapped.

The font, colors, and atmosphere were very good, and the writing was good.

I had to download the entire ifcomp 2016 file to get all the files for this game.