Reviews by MathBrush

In this German choice-based game, you play as someone who recently died and has to prepare for the afterlife.

To do so, since the IT system is down, you have to talk to a case manager about hypothetical scenarios, and you're awarded points for choosing good actions or bad.

The points are meant to determine what happens to you after you die. I got 30 points and declined going back to get more.

They didn't really seem to come up again, though. I then went to an area with a Kafka-esque gag about waiting in a vast, empty DMV-style place waiting for my number to be called. I then walked through a door and the game ended.

The game uses AI art and ends with AI music. At times the art worked (several pictures had a consistent stylistic choice of shading using parallel lines) while other times it provided details that would be really important in a normal game but not here (like the first picture, which looks kind of like a subway and has a grim reaper in it), or had distractingly wrong details (like two burning windows where flames came from the crack around the window but none inside).

The funniest part to me was choosing to wait over and over in the empty waiting room. But the interactivity in the first area wasn't very exciting, because a lot of it was like 'do you go left or right' with no indication of what that entailed.

I played this game over about two months during lunches at work. I kept thinking I was close to completing it, only to find that there was more.

There are two main gameplay phases of the game (although they aren't the whole game). In the first, you play as a new main character (not the match girl) who has a special key that opens portals in locked doors. You have to hand out five invitations, but a lot of the puzzle is figuring out who the invitations are for, how to deliver them, and what the event is. There are historical areas, fantasy areas, and sci-fi areas.

In the second phase, you command five PCs (!) all of whom can operate independently. I was quite shocked a second phase even existed, as the first phase was very long. This second phase includes a large and complex multi-story map, and each of the characters has unique properties.

Playing this in bits and pieces over weeks, it was easy to get lost, but each time I came back I operated on the assumption that the game was fair and logical and that if I explored and kept notes I could move forward. This worked, although I did have to ask the author about one puzzle involving distracting someone.

The story was full of good twists and turns, and I found enjoyment in the polish of the game and in the well-crafted storytelling. I feel like it has a lot of implications on the match-verse.

This game has an intriguing concept. Your enemy has promised to never give you back a medallion that you once gave her.

But you'll get it back, even after she's been (Spoiler - click to show)cremated.

It looks like the game can't be finished. No one in the itch comments describes finishing the game, and one person had the same issue with me, that the medallion can never be interacted with. (Spoiler - click to show)Following the exact sequence of moves described on the itch page, I hear the medallion and it says I find it, but trying to exam or take it gives an error message.

Overall, it looks neat and I'd love to see the ending. It's short, made with just 500 words as part of a competition.

This is a very short French game entered as part of a competition using games of 500 words or less.

In it, you are Santa and you want to burn the gifts that millionaires give to their families. You can either choose to (with your laser-assisted reindeer) or not.

After two burn options, you can get a third.

There's not much to the game, just an amusing idea.

This game is currently the highest-rated game on IFDB for 2025. I decided to see what it was all about.

I had a little bit of a rocky start. There are two time intro segments, and during the second I went to go get a drink of water so I could read it all when I got back. When I returned, there was just an empty text box with no context. Reloading brought me to the same screen. Eventually I just did an incognito tab and got the game to run again, but it didn't have many instructions here either.

That's when I realized that the game name was also the instruction (and I think it does display it after the tutorial, I had just tried typing something and overwrote it):type HELP.

Anyway, from there on it was a fun ride. It turns out that you're reopening a case that had long stymied investigators. You have access to audio files for many individuals at a house on a certain night long ago. The investigator has organized these files in a peculiar classification system.

Your job is to find all the files. The game, then, becomes a task of discovering the pattern in the file names and recovering all possible files.

Interwoven into this task and inseparable from it is the story. Names, family relationships, overheard plans, all of these are key to solving the game's meta puzzle. You must comprehend the story to solve the game.

The story is an intriguing one. Our 'viewpoint character' of sorts arrives at a house after receiving an invitation. Peculiarly, no one seems to know the man who sent the invitation. Soon, a dead body is discovered.

The dynamics on display include jealousy, romantic love, dark family secrets, and curiosity.

I had a lot of fun. There were times when the game was extremely frustrating. I didn't resort to looking up hints but at times I was stuck for 10 or 15 minutes with no progress at all. I ended up playing so much that I missed two things I've done every day for a long time: going to bed at midnight (I stayed up for a half hour to finish) and drawing (first day I've missed in a year!)

So, while the game was extremely frustrating at times, it would be silly to rate a game that consumed my attention so much less than a 5, which I've done.

Edit:
As a side note, a lot of the 'best puzzles' as voted for in the XYZZY awards over the years are ones where you learn a new system, like a language or a machine. This puzzle set is a great example of that, where you have dawning realizations and where you actually become better at a skill over time (the skill of deducing the next files).

In this twine game, you play as the Administrator at a mining complex (I think) run by a conglomerate. You are the bourgeoisie here, barricaded in your room as you contemplate your sins. Your company is out of contact. The workers are coming to kill you, as far as you know.

There are a variety of apparent paths, though I only took one. You have three or four different people or groups of people you can interact with and you can choose how to do so. No matter what, many choices require you to be an arrogant blowhard, which makes sense.

I ended up becoming a communist and ending the game with an Adam Smith quote.

It was a little one-note, but enjoyable, and had me really thinking about who to believe and how to strategize.

This French fantasy game is divided in both space and time. You have four days in which to act, and a large map where you can hop to different areas.

I found one ending, but I know how I could have gotten more.

The main idea is that a strange events has happened: the Gods that once ruled mortals have left, agreeing to deal with the human world no more. But some still cling to their worship.

Wandering around town, you follow clues that lead you to a conspiracy involving both gods and King. You must choose what to do with the news that you've learned.

Overall, it was fun. The giant map was intimidating, as well as the four days, but in the end most areas have nothing special and only one event of importance happens in one area each on days 2-4, making it a brief but interesting story with a large chunk of worldbuilding.

Like one comment said on itch, it would be fun to be able to order the tasty food described in the inns!

In this game, you are the lawyer or executor of Tatie Lucette and have to distribute her estate.

To do this, you examine each of the three objects (a fortune-granting golden scepter, a future-telling lamp, and some kind of weird sexual toy that transfers mind consciousness). You have to read many epistolary fragments of Tatie's history to figure out what she was like (a spy, a singer, actress, fighter, drug-user, extensive lover, and so on). Each of her 9 attributes maps on to one of the 3 artifacts.

In addition, there are 7 possible heirs (including a cat), each of which possesses differing amounts of those 9 traits.

So, it's pretty simple: find the three traits each object has, find the person who has those traits, and win!

Unfortunately, there is a time-limit, so you can't interrogate everyone. So you need to carefully pick what you'll ask who.

Or, like me, you can replay several times.

There are a ton of words in this. As a non-native speaker, it was a struggle to read a pageful or more for every choice when each of 8 different options on the screen leads to 8 or more options (so basically like a 50-100 page French book).

The game openly embraces drugs and sexuality, even having you show pornography to a minor at one point, which stuck out to me as something I didn't really feel comfortable with.

Overall, the writing was amusing and the puzzle structure was a good one that I could see being fun in future games as well.

This was quite a difficult French IFComp game for me to finish, as it's a wordplay game and involves several words that I don't know well.

It's a (mostly) one-room game where you arrive at an old professor friend's lab to find yourself locked inside! All that you have with you are the random objects that you can scrounge up as well as the professor's amazing machine that can manipulate letters.

The main rules are that you can take away one letter from an object (which transforms the object) and you can apply that letter to another object. You can only ever store up one letter at a time.

While the main story is a little thin, the setting is amusing and has a lot of nice little details. Though of course hard for me as a non-native speaker, the wordplay was fun, and there are help commands like 'penser' that are a real lifesaver.

The game is not too long, with 3 or so main puzzles to get through and a few sidequests you can do.

If you like wordplay and French, this is a great game for you.

This is a 10K word prologue to a longer planned game, entered into the French IF competition.

It has a compelling story: your uncle whom you've rarely spoken to writes to you, asking you to come quickly. Much of this prologue is occupied with travelling there while simultaneously making choices that define your background (I made myself a poor unemployed person who brought nothing along with the journey).

You soon discover that (through a series of events I won't spoil) you owe a massive debt. You encounter a few interesting people (I thought the neighbor and the ruler of the town were well-written), and then the prologue stops dead in its tracks.

This has a lot of good in it now and could become great one day.