Reviews by MathBrush

This game plays out over the course of several days in-game, perhaps a week. It is quite large, on the order of size of Twine games like Birdland, but feels a bit smaller than Spy Intrigue. I have played it once, but it seems to have high replay value.

The visuals on this game are gorgeous, especially when sleeping. The font, letter spacing, and color choices give a DOS type feel. The game is sprinkled with occasional images and animation.

You play a living firewall, an elemental charged with protecting a magic/tech network with 4 locations.

You are presented with a sequence of mysteries, one a day, which you use clues to solve. You can then deal with the mystery in many ways, raising and lowering various stats a la choice of games.

The game includes several times sequences, some violence and some sexual activity.

My only quibble is about one image, and it's a tiny issue: (Spoiler - click to show)I didn't like the illustration of the main antagonist, I thought it was cheesy.<\spoiler>

These games are an adaptation of a series of gamebooks, i.e. paper CYOA books. They must have been absolutely incredible, because this game is rich in detail and options. The game is played on a large 3d-map which you place a DND miniature-type figure on, moving it around to indicate your choice of route (between 2 or 3 options at a time).

You have stamina, gold, rations, spells, etc. The spells are cast by using up some stamina and selecting 3-letter words out of a cloud of letters. The available words differ quite a bit from situation to situation.

The combat system involves guessing a number at the same time as your opponent, trying to beat them without using up too much of your strength. It ends up being a sort of dance between attack and defend.

There are numerous side quests; the main quest can be finished extremely quickly, while one side quest took up an hour of gameplay by itself.

Highly, highly recommended.

This is the first IF game I've played in another language, and it was actually very enjoyable. I had to dust off my german and use google translate to get most of the commands (I didn't know 'look under', 'turn on the lights', 'extinguish' etc.) I got one hint from ifwizz.de

The game is set in a 6-room apartment. The girl you're interested in has to leave for 30 minutes, and has asked you to watch her 4-year old Kai. Unfortunately, as soon as she leaves, Kai steals your lighter and sets fire to a trashcan!

No matter what you do, Tanja comes home after a half hour, and she talks it out with you. The talks range from very bad to very good. Fortunately, the talks give you hints on replay.

As indicated on ifwizz.de, there is a bit of 'guess the noun' going on here. Occasionally, if you are looking for something, you have to use the exactly correct adjective-noun combination.

I'm grateful to have tried IF in a new language, and I recommend this game. Maybe the authors should translate it for next years IFComp.

I played this Hugo game on Gargoyle. This game was nominated for a Best Game XYZZY award in 2005. You play a woman who just crashed on a strange planet and must survive. It feels like a shipwreck story, in a good way.

The game is very constrained. WAIT is disabled as a command! There are only ten locations, and only 4 of them have anything interesting; out of those four, two have exactly one item and one action you need to do.

I didn't like this game at first, for those reasons, but after I played it, the story stuck in my mind. The writing is descriptive and evocative, the items are well-described and creative. It is a game much better than the sum of its parts.

This choicescript game was recommended to me, and I really enjoyed it. It is free, unlike many "Choice of" games, and well-developed. You are a dragon, and like other Choice of games, you have a variety of stats (honor/cunning, finesse/brutality, etc.)

The story was written well, with a good swords and sorcery vibe that I've really missed among IF games. Dragons, wizards, paladins, demons, goblins, all behaving like a D&D game instead of the usual introspective deconstructions popular in IF.

I really enjoyed crafting a cunning finesse dragon, although I died once and got my butt kicked another time. The delayed effect of the choices makes the puzzles significant. I had heard it was hard to get a mate, and indeed I was not able to.

I enjoyed the goblin NPC. If Choice of Games had been more well-known in the IF community in 2010, I feel this would have been nominated for some awards.

Eurydice is one of those games that felt intimidatingly large, but after playing through it, I was relieved to see it is actually short, sweet, and simple. A huge number of NPC's lie in an early room, but only require minimal interaction. It seems at two different points that there are many different directions to go in, but in both cases the different directions lead to small areas.

The game is a modern retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice. It has a beautiful and haunting atmosphere, and excellent writing.

I won't spoil the plot too much, but this short game has 4 possible endings. The main NPC is painted vividly, while you yourself are left vague and nebulous. The whole feeling is that of a dark afternoon on a November day when the snow hasn't fallen but the world is already dead and gray.

Recommended for everyone. Incredible game.

Cape is, in my opinion, one of the best web-based interactive fiction games of all time. It is an engrossing story about a young petty criminal who has 'greatness thrust upon them' as a result of their crimes.

The most influential choice you make in this long Undum game is the choice of your super powers. I've heard some people say that the powers end up seeming the same, but I felt that all three big options were very different from each other. I think what people are talking about is a fact that the actual story is the same; just the details of it change from choice to choice.

Your superhero comes to grips with their powers and their crime-fighting. They are simultaneously uncomfortable and thrilled by their powers. There is an interesting mystery leading to a thrilling climactic confrontation.

The feel is grungy, dark; I lived in Manhattan for a while, and this really reminds me of the feel of the Lower East Side at night. I just loved this game. Loved it loved it loved it. (Note: whenever someone hypes up a game to me, I am always disappointed in it, so you might not like it as much as I did. I just happen to really like grungy superhero stories).

This was my absolute favorite IFComp 2015 game. In Map, you play a woman with a troubled relationship with her family members. You spend most of the day alone in your house, and as you immediately learn, the house is slowly growing new rooms, which is reflected in a map you carry.

During the course of a week, you have the opportunity to (Spoiler - click to show)go back and make changes in your life, which affects your current life greatly. This allows for a lot of flexibility in gameplay, and many endings.

The feeling of the game is poignant and thoughtful, and mildly creepy, especially when strange things happen and noone, least of all YOU, seems to care.

Love this game.

Edit: Before I posted this review, I went through and played again. It was a slow start, but I teared up during the last few days of gameplay. This game really gets me in an emotional place. It had an emotional impact on me that rivals games like Photopia or the Warbler's Nest. It affected me a lot because many decisions revolved around family and relationships.

This game from IFComp 2015 is, in my opinion, one of the best Twine games of all time, and certainly the best outside of the well-developed horror/darkness segment.

In this game, gameplay is split up between a summer camp with a slice-of-life scenario and dreams with an absurdist take on talking birds. As the game progresses, the two halves become more related.

The game takes a stats-based approach, with a twist. You develop statistics at night during your dreams; in the day, it affects what options you have for various activities. At first, I felt like the stats didn't matter, because scene follows scene in the same order regardless of your actions. However, on replay, I found that some of the best material is contained in stats-enabled actions.

This story is long and has several surprising turns. It's split into several days, each of which can be accessed independently in case you can't finish in one sitting. Because stats seem to be reset each night, I don't think you lose anything just skipping ahead.

The game includes some mild summer-camp-normal sexual references near the beginning, and one branch of one scene contains strong profanity.

Recommended for everyone.

Edit: When I played through again, I counted the distinct pages I viewed, and I took 234 choices/pages to complete the game.

As soon as I read the premise of Fate, I found it exciting. As you immediately learn, you are a pregnant queen about to give birth; you also have the capacity to see your child's future. Your goal is to change that future.

Gijsbers' game has excellent writing, reminding me of the best parts of Ian Finley's Kaged and Adam Cadre's Varicella. But what I appreciated most was something else; no matter how many IF games I play, I still seem to need walkthroughs for everything. But I didn't have this issue for this game, because:

1. You can always reach some sort of ending in the game, and your endings improve as you go on. So if you can't get more than halfway in the game, you get a halfway-decent ending.

2. Almost all of the puzzles seem to have multiple solutions.

The game has a dark theme, and includes violence. But your character is clearly motivated by a positive goal, and the game rewards you whether you choose violence or not. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that you can reach what I consider the best ending without (Spoiler - click to show)injuring the pixie. However, I didn't find a way to avoid (Spoiler - click to show)killing the gardener; but as I said, the game doesn't force you to do anything you don't want to.

The moral choices seemed a bit easier to me as well, since your character is (Spoiler - click to show)a prisoner, and (Spoiler - click to show)her family is at war with her husband, who stole her away and won't promise to stop her child from being killed.