Reviews by MathBrush

Just as a heads up to readers, I have a personal bias in favor of mystery games.

This is the third thesleuthacademy I've played. I've come to expect a long exploration section where everything needs to be checked out more or less in order, followed by a quiz on whether you solved the mystery correctly or not.

This game mixes it up a bit from the last two, with some non-linearity in both exploration and interviews (so you can follow up on hints from one person to another). I did peek at the hints where I thought of multiple solutions to one puzzle and didn't want to waste valuable ifcomp time on the wrong one.

The characters here are also more developed than in the past two games. They were mostly distinct and interesting, outside of a couple of background characters. It's fun to see the author improve in both writing and programming in such a short time.

This is a classic murder mystery set in a 1937 manor house where a body is found with a dagger in its back. You have to investigate the cast of characters, including servants and family, to discover the murderer.

I got the mystery mostly right but completely botched the motive. I thought (Spoiler - click to show)The L in the letter was the brother, and that the zoologist was in love with him and wanted to off the victim to get the brother some money, not knowing what the will contained.

Overall, I enjoyed this, and if I had any advice for the future, it'd be to continue the development in characters and interactions. I loved the unusual bits in this, like the (Spoiler - click to show)pufferfish and snake meat. While the interaction was more engaging this time, there is still a lot of buildup with examining a ton of things in a row that could be a little more fun, I'm just not sure how. Good game overall.

I want to preface this by saying ahead of time that I have a very specific framing of this game in mind:

I don't think the author thinks this game is realistic, or something that should happen. I read once a theory that our dreams are a place for our brain to try out ideas that are forbidden in real life, things that couldn't happen (like flying or all teeth falling out in class) or shouldn't happen (like kissing someone we really shouldn't). It's not that we subconsciously want those things, it's just a way to see 'what if'.

This feels like a 'what if' scenario to me, a chance to explore an alternate reality where we (or characters we control) do something we could never do in reality. The game itself even explicitly states that at one point, that the characters are expressing feelings the author has in reality to see how it would feel.

So, with that in mind, this is a game about taking your dead abusive mother, cremating her, baking her ashes into marijuana brownies, and eating her one piece at a time while calling friends.

It's clear this is a fantasy or wish-fulfillment scenario--real cremations are around 5 lbs, which is a ton of food (there is a recipe for pound cake which is 1 lb eggs, 1 lb flour, 1 lb butter, and 1 lb sugar, and it makes two 9x5 loaves. So 5 lbs of ashes mixed into enough ingredients to dilute it would be some really big brownies). Similarly, having 9 close friends you can call about and share your biggest traumas with is something also unrealistic for most people.

So what is the point of this scenario? To see what it would be like if you really let loose. What if the person who's hurt you the most passed away, and you literally destroyed their entire earthly existence while deconstructing every painful memory of them?

It's fruitless to say 'you shouldn't do that' or to explain why this philosophy is wrong or how it goes against my personal beliefs. It's clear the author thinks it's wrong! Very clear that one should not eat their mother. Mother-cannibalism goes against his beliefs as well. But that's not what this game is really about.

I wonder if writing this out was therapeutic. There are a few scenarios in my life that I know both can't and should never happen, but I have to wonder what it would be like, to explore those possibilities in the written word.

I found that mobile (in landscape mode) worked best for audio, with most lines in the game being voice acted.

I thought the hub and spoke style of this game was cool, particularly how you reached the end credits and had to rewind each time but the game still kept track and commented on how many paths you had taken and crossed out used ones.

This looks like it was made for a school project, as it mentions a Portland State University interactive fiction course. It seems more polished than most games I've seen made as part of a course, so I feel like the author put some real heart into it.

The structure is innovative, if somewhat clunky at times. You take a personality test at first by giving a list of options and then have to type CHOOSE [option name], rather than hyperlinks or typing a number. The game then lets you view one of four different characters with quests. They are all pretty different; one is about assembling a machine by fetching a list of parts, one is combat where the more you practice a skill the more you improve, one is about fate and destiny and is a word maze, and the fourth involves breaking into a vault. Dying in interesting ways unlocks achievements. Each quest can be completed relatively quickly (maybe 10-15 minutes). Once all are completed, you can view a final scenario with many branching endings.

The setting is sketched out in a diverse pieces, each piece interesting but somewhat hard to connect together. There's advanced technology, strong magic, classic fantasy races like goblins and demons, a magical tower with a fractured timeline visible to the naked eye (or something similar). To me, the setting was a well-done but unexciting play on familiar tropes, with the Fateweaver being the coolest character to me. The mechanics, though, seemed novel and fun. I enjoyed how varied the game was, and the unusual opening and the branching endings. I think that's very creative.

Okay, let's get one thing out of the way. Getting a math PhD has rarely proven to be a useful choice in my life, so I wanted to try it here. But the integral is wrong! The two curves intersect at whole numbers (-1 and 3). Integrating 7-2x gives 7x-2x^2, so plugging in the bounds gives whole numbers. Integratings (x-2)^2 gives 1/3(x-2)^3, and neither bound gives a multiple of 3 when plugged in, so the answer should have 3 in the denominator. I thought there were supposed to be some impossible questions, like Baldi's Basics, but all the others were possible.

Anyway, this game made me think of 5 other pieces of media as I played: Deltarune, for the character creation screen; Ezekiel 16, for being a baby cast out into the wide world; an evil version of Phantom Tollbooth, with all of its unusual and allegorical characters; No End House, the creepypasta, for its succession of rooms that take an increasing toll on our protagonist; and Duke Bluebeard's Castle, my favorite opera and one where Bluebeard unlocks seven doors to show his wife that become increasingly disturbing.

In this game, you have to obtain seven keys from various challenges in order to restore a lighthouse. This world is weird; at one point you're a baby that walks around and grows bigger in seconds, and at another you have a mom you grew up with who raised you. So a lot of things are allegorical.

Each key that you get requires something different. One has a quiz; another requires you to get closer to someone. Many involve self-reflection of some kind. The pattern breaks down a bit at the end when things get more hectic.

Overall, I loved the visuals and the feel of the story. Much of the story was impactful; slowing down the text at the end kind of lessened the impact for me, as if the author wasn't sure that the text alone would be weighty enough. I think it was! It was also a lesson for me because I'm working on a short twine game and had imagined slowing down the most dramatic moments.

The game uses multimedia in an effective way, and overall gives off a highly polished feel. The writing is the kind I would think of if someone said 'What's an example of good writing in a recent IFComp?'

I enjoyed the setting of this game, as I've recently been rewatching Zhen Huan Zhuan/Empresses in the Palace and some of the elements of here are reminiscent of it for me (as the only palace c-drama I've watched): the political maneuvering, having parents in court who have lost favor, upstart generals, etc.

You play as, well, an ancient chinese poet. You are visited at home by the Emperor's most trusted servant, his head eunuch (who I picture as Su Peisheng from the show). Your poems have accidentally spread from your home to the court, and the emperor would like you to come and deliver a poem at a banquet.

Once there, you are encouraged to view the palace around you, with several options on where to look and what to do. Each option can inspire your poetry later on.

You then have the opportunity to deliver your poem, drawing on your sources but still having freedom to alter lines as you will. What you say will lead to multiple endings.

I liked my poem I could make. I focused on nature-based meditative thoughts, although the fourth line I couldn't get to fit into my self-imposed aesthetic. Either it or my fifth line were interpreted in a way that I couldn't quite follow. I thought I had opposed someone earlier, yet my poem was interpreted otherwise due to a subtle nuance. I think on replaying I could likely figure out a pattern to the responses, but I feel happy with my own journey. I think I got ending 18/23, which shows this is highly replayable.

I finished it faster than the listed hour, but that's because I was drawn into and fully engaged with the game.

This is a Gruescript game mixing Total Recall with The Hobbit. It uses ai-generated pixel art.

It's quite long. It's listed as 1.5 hours, but I spent about that long on just the prelude. Altogether I think I spent 3 or 4 hours, with the last hour entirely spent peeking at the code to speed me along.

You play as a gross jerk of a human who hates and is cruel to his wife, doesn't care about sabotaging her medical care and avoids talking to women he deems ugly. This isn't plot relevant and so I guess it's supposed to be either funny or realistic, but I neither laughed nor saw a reflection of truth in it.

The first part of the game has you going to work at the toothpaste factory and scrounging up some money to go to Rekall, a location that allows you to get memories you want implanted. Like the original story of Total Recall, doing so prompts some memories that you have that are true, but buried.

The rest of the game is a parody of The Hobbit where gold has been replaced by toothpaste, the misty mountains are now a ski resort, the dwarves have disappeared, and the main badguy is toothpaste entrepreneur Tom Fallows.

Most non-Robin Johnson gruescript games I've played have been pretty buggy or poorly implemented (with a couple notable great exceptions, and now that I'm searching I'm surprised to see only 10 have only ever been released. And Dialog only has 22; wow)

There are parts of this game that I like and parts I dislike. I'm going to talk about both, and try to frame the dislikes (like the being a jerk to your wife part) as my reaction to something and not as an innate quality of the thing itself.

I like some of the imaginative puzzles. There's a lot of tricks going on with things like moving turnips to strategic locations, figuring out how to use the lemonade, timing, and the troll bag puzzle.

I didn't like getting stuck because I forget to look and grab an item a hundred turns ago. Fortunately I saved a lot! Also the random timers felt off a bit. The maze randomness I saw in the code wasn't something that I experienced joy from, nor waiting for the trolls to go to bed or the cat to wander into the kitchen.

Story-wise, I experienced the most happiness at the innate difficulty in establishing what's reality and what's the effect of Rekall, something I also enjoyed in total recall.

I didn't like the Tolkien elements as much, it felt kind of like it just took the summary story of the hobbit and tried to make an encounter matching each one without really caring about parodying the deeper themes. To be fair, that's a totally fine way to parody things; I parodided Chandler Groover's games in Grooverland with entirely surface-level references, so I can't complain. Maybe what I really would have liked is a more unified parody theme. Sometimes things have been updated to modern times, while other times the scenes play out almost exactly like the original. It could have been fun to have something tying it all together more.

The AI art was hit or miss. A couple of times I thought, "Okay, this looks cool," but then I realized, for instance, that our bedroom that looks like a hobbit house with first-floor window overlooking a forest is actually not the hobbit part of the game but our 2nd floor bedroom in the middle of a city. Similarly, styles change from room to room and so do seasons and so on. Just like the parody, without a consistent theme, it's not much more helpful to the game than just imagining each scene ourselves.

If I were the author, I'd be proud of assembling a very long gruescript game, perhaps the longest I've played (Detectiveland might be longer). All told it has few errors, a rarity for such a long game, and there were multiple places I found enjoyable.

This was a very polished parser game, with no real bugs that I found, a full map that adjusted based on the room, music, and an interesting story.

You play as someone whose researcher father has disappeared, leading you to track him down to a small town in the mountainous forests of (I presume) Italy. Once there, you have to find where he went, following clues of an ancient monastic order.

I was worried the game would be overwhelming at first, with its large-seeming map and tons of scenery items, but the game is essentially organized with 3 or 4 areas that are pretty small (just a few rooms together) connected by linear paths that can either be walked on slowly or ridden on with the bicycle. There is a maze type area but it is easy to solve by stumbling around and there are multiple ways to solve it without exploration. So it's not as intimidating as it seems.

I did neglect to examine one important bolded scenery item and got stuck, so I had to check the walkthrough. After that, it was smooth sailing.

I liked the NPCs in the game. Two of them have not much of a role but all have very distinct personalities.

The game doesn't last too long, but it was pleasant to play while I tried it. It made me want to see these places in real life.

There was a big shift that I saw in Twine games from when I started (around 2015) to now. Those earlier Twine games were often influenced by Porpentine or furkle, and it was common to have long, surreal stories with intense, personal writing about loss, identity, or feelings with a big dash of absurd humor. There were other twine writing styles (like 16 Ways to Kill A Vampire at McDonalds), with more of a gaming/puzzle/points focus, but the number of intense personal games was higher.

Nowadays, the Twine field has too many genres to call any dominant, but a lot of popular Twine games are puzzle-based (still accompanied by strong stories), like The Den or A Long Way to the Nearest Star.

So this game gave me some nostalgia, as it seems like it could easily have been a popular 2015 game.

There's a good chance I missed something essential in this game, so take my summary with a grain of salt.

You play as someone who has experienced some kind of loss or betrayal of a friend or romantic partner. 'You' and 'me' are different people; I think they might both be facets of the same character, or 'me' might be a demon or grief itself or the person who they lost, I'm not sure.

In three different acts, you explore an abandoned house (that is 'slated for demolition' and is also the game itself), a grocery store and an apartment building. There's a checklist of items that you can find in those, but it's not necessary to get them all and the game has fully prepared for you not to do so. It allows you to play with or without the back button, and I chose to play without it, and I also chose to choose the most self-damaging or excessive options at any point.

And there are a lot. Spaghetti has trauma associations here (and so do red slurpees), with multiple memorable scenes where you can draw out your own innards as spaghetti with continual pulling until you're hollowed out.

There is a segment near the end involving (Spoiler - click to show)suicidal ideation by someone dear to us. I couldn't tell if this was a new person or the main person we think about.

The ending prompts us to (Spoiler - click to show)consider something we regret and might need to let go. I enjoyed picking a few things in my life to contemplate on and to write down in the game, like my alma mater not accepting me back as a professor when they had intimated for years that they would do so, and the slow decline of a once-close friendship.

For me, I didn't understand the story, but I understood the feeling and feelings, or at least I experienced the emotions I read about in the game like ' this game gets it, I've felt like that before'.

The game seems like it has many different paths, but I didn't feel compelled to replay, as I feel like it fits the game's message to not go back and correct mistakes.

I was excited to add this game to my list of surreal games on trains, an oddly specific genre that pops up in all years and among all platforms.

In this parser game, you enter some abandoned train tunnels and an abandoned train. You are tasked with taking photos of 'something that wasn't meant to be seen'; at the end of the game, you're scored on your photos.

Gameplay is a combination of escape-room style gameplay and bizarre NPCs. There's the creepy little girl Lily who's just chilling in an abandoned train that you just unsealed the door to, and the Crazy Rat Man (I'll let you guess what he's like). Puzzles include things like color-coded keycards and buttons, items like crowbars and rope, and the extensive use of your camera for both information gathering (the author came up with some creative ideas in this vein) and for scoring points.

The whole game is linear, not in puzzles, but in outline; all the rooms run east-to-west with occasional up or down moves.

Parser implementation is mostly good; it looks to me to be the level of someone who is intelligent and talented but doesn't have a ton of experience yet. The five testers listed surely contribute to the state of the game (which didn't have any major bugs that I found), but there could be more synonyms and more use of Inform's special tricks. For the synonyms, I'd recommend the author read the automatic transcripts IFComp makes and look for times people got error messages, and try implementing any reasonable commands that they tried (if they plan on a post-comp update). For the special tricks of Inform, I'd incorporate more special messages for objects that you find. Objects are often listed in the text and then again at the end in a 'you can see , __, and here'. This can be fixed by either making the object scenery, putting the object's name in brackets (like "There is a [shelf] on the wall") or by saying 'The initial description of the shelf is ""', or something like that.

This was fun. The twist at the end did explain a lot of things. I think the game overall is one I would consider a 'success' as an author and one I enjoyed playing.

This is a parser game set in an eccentric older man's joke-filled house using traditional parser game play (i.e. taking items and using them in places, unlocking doors with keys, etc.) and riddles.

The map itself is fairly small, but hides a lot of details. I had to use the hints at one point because I completely missed an important piece of furniture. I used it again a couple of times when I couldn't guess the solution to a puzzle involving a tree and a different one with books.

The main gameplay cycle is to go to a clue room, push a button to get a clue describing an item, find the item, put it in a box, and pull a lever. This gives you a new item like a key or a useful tool that allows you to progress to the next clue.

Most of the items seem kind of random, but the main themes that I saw were household items, puns, and the memories of Willy's life. I liked the way the very end pulled everything together.

There could be some improvements in the game. A lot of the items are listed in the room description and at the end as well; this can be avoided by either putting brackets around the item name in the room description (like 'you see a [cabinet] here') or by making the items 'scenery', or by adjusting their default description like:

A box is in the side room. "You see a strange box on the floor."

I didn't notice any bugs. It was a bit strange to have to (Spoiler - click to show)physically grab the ants and termites out of their jars and shoot them in a slingshot or put them in a box. I think in such a pun-filled house it could have been fun to have a little more description for some things. Overall, though, this is a solid game and I found it pleasant to play with little frustration (outside of running to the hints).