Reviews by MathBrush

This game has you star as the dashing captain of a time-travelling ship piloted by a helpful Mother AI. An enemy faction is travelling to the past to sabotage your present, and you have to stop them.

There are 4 or so main time periods you travel to, each with its own set of puzzles as well as some recurring characters. Names of things in the game are often references; one whole area is a giant reference to steins;gate.

In between those areas, you can explore the large ship you pilot, with several crew members who can help you can give you advice.

The game has few bugs, although I did lock myself out of victory once by returning to my quarters before I finished a section, triggering a cutscene too early.

The story has good story beats but felt a little less descriptive in the middle, possibly because the author could vividly picture things due to the references but I couldn't due to not knowing the games.

Overall, this is a substantial game and I played it here and there over several nights.

This is a German parser game where you have to leave your work after being fired but not before exposing your boss for all his crimes.

It's a comedy game, with gags like a slick ramp that makes you slide all the way to the bottom every time and nasty food left in the office microwave.

I thought at first that it was really buggy, as I had numerous commands that I found reasonable that had no response, and many errors. But...

I realized that there was just one small bug that I had found that caused all the others. As a non-native speaker, I only looked up words I didn't know. After already having found a hole punch, I then found a "gabelstapler". I thought, 'nice, a stapler!' and picked it up and went up stairs.

A gabelstapler is a forklift.

Having taken it up stairs, I turned it on and tried to get in, but I couldn't because I was holding it. I dropped it and got in and turned it on, but I couldn't drive anywhere by 'dreh linkrad' (or whatever) or going north. Trying to get out made me leave the whole building.

I started over and didn't put the forklift in my pocket. There was no problem!

So I won't take a point off for coding because it was my own fault for doing something stupid lol.

The game has a lot of possible variety, as you can end the game whenever you want by leaving out the front door. I 'won' with 16-18 points out of 25, so there's still a lot left to do. I found the game amusing!

While I may have given this game a lower score, I think it shows markable progression in the author's skill over time. This the fourth Text Adventure Literacy Jam game by this author, and while it has some flaws, it is a complete game with hints and help and is reasonably completable.

You play as a witch with a sick kid, and you have to make a potion to heal them. You go around to different rooms, each with 1-2 items, and you get the three ingredients necessary to make what you need.

The parser is, I think, a two-word parser, as most of my attempts at PUT ___ ON ___ and PUT ____ IN ____ didn't work but 'drop' did in most areas.

There are some fun little twists here and there. The writing is minimalistic, and I struggled with the parser several times. I definitely appreciate the hints and the HELP text.

It's interesting, I've seen Japanese-inspired games pop up in several non-English IF competitions in the last few years (I think Spanish had two), so it's kind of a mini-trend.

This was a fairly polished small game about two lovers separated by many miles and bad weather. You first play as the man, stricken by bad weather and looking for a place to rest.

You then play as the woman, seeking after her lost lover.

Gameplay is story-focused. There are puzzles, some I had trouble with (fortunately there are hints and a walkthrough), but they are all there to further the story, which is about the titular Snow Maiden.

I played to one ending out of 3. I did find some of the puzzles pretty hard, especially for a foreign-language speaker, as it required using some verbs I didn't know and examining, taking and using different background elements in ways that I couldn't have intuited on my own. I'd be interested in knowing from native speakers how hard they found these puzzles. I also felt a bit railroaded into actions I wouldn't have wanted to do in real life (this may be due to the ending I chose and there might be another path outside the walkthrough).

Overall, I liked the overall storyline and the beautiful imagery. I think most people who play German parser games would find it worth their while.

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.