Reviews by MathBrush

This game gave me all sorts of different reactions.

First of all, it has nice visuals and sounds chosen from a variety of operas and symphonies.

The text is slow during musical portions, but the game overall is relatively short.

This game is a retelling of the Phantom of the Opera, where you can customize it in 6 different ways depending on the time period and the way you perceive the story of the Phantom.

However, on replay, choosing entirely different options, I found myself with almost the exact same story. I checked the code of the game, and all the stats affect at most one or two paragraphs each.

The writing is interesting and makes for a good retelling, with narrative twists. I felt that the characterization of Christine as seductress was surprising to me and didn't really gel with my version of the character, and then later events further differed, but I suppose that's the variety in retelling a story.

So I honestly don't know. This is in no way what I would consider a bad game, but it has a lot of unusual choices that I need to sit and unpack for a while.

+Polish: Everything worked well from the get-go.
+Descriptiveness: The characters and locations were vivid to me.
+Interactivity: Despite the small effects of choices, I felt like it was interactive, especially the first time.
+Emotional impact: I'm a Phantom of the Opera fan, so it was fun to play it in Twine form.
+Would I play it again? I don't plan on revisiting this.

In Adventures in the Tomb of the Ilfane you play as an adventurer who is running from Nazi scientist Doktor Chirlu while you break into the tomb of Ilfane, ancient Autarch of the Teresten people. You have access to a beautiful mural of Teresten history, a Dais that represents the planets, and a sarcophagus covered in strange runes.

Below is a spoiler that may help those who didn't see the blurbs and cover art in IFComp 2020:

(Spoiler - click to show)Check out
"Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!" by Tarquin Segundo and
"Terror in the Immortal's Atelier" by Gevelle Formicore
and return here if you get stuck after that.


Below is more spoilers for people who've seen the first spoiler.

(Spoiler - click to show)I'm clumping these three games together because they have remarkably similar presentations. The titles all use quotations, their cover art has similar themes, and they all contain the phrase:

"Remember, no knot unties itself. You may need to seek aid from an unusual place."

in their blurb, in addition to using the same names for different characters in their blurb.

In case it's not clear, these games are part of a set, and in particular, they are all parts of the same game.

I've seen some people speculate about this on the forums. This is strongly reminiscent of the Hat Puzzle (see the second-to-last section of https://intfiction.org/t/what-makes-a-best-puzzle/46852).

The large amounts of worldbuilding and lore in each game can be overwhelming. It's descriptive and interesting, but I wonder if we could have gotten by with more names like 'the Knot' and less like 'Willershin Rill', not because they're bad but because it can be difficult to parser, especially since the first game contains several many-page books.

Fortunately, the author(s) foresaw that and put anything that you need to know in flashing lights with the words 'you need to know this' and puts them in an ordered list.

As you can guess from the similarities, the games are all the same game. Once you know that, the puzzles become easy: search everything you can for a password. Find out which game it belongs to and input it there, getting the next password. The final puzzle has the credits.

Overall, I'm pleased with these. I definitely think this works better than the infamous Hat puzzle which was not discovered without hints. The styling (especially on the runes and star chart) is nice while I usually despise slow text, it went quickly and much of it is skippable on replay.

+Polish: This game is definitely polished in appearance and effects.
-Descriptivenes: The proper names were a lot to deal with, and I couldn't picture things vividly.
+Interactivity: Great puzzles. Love it. Maybe XYZZY Individual Puzzle nom?
+Emotional impact: I felt excitement upon solving the tomb and the fade-to-white almost gave me chills.
+Would I play again? I'll check it out again in the future.

In Incident! Aliens on the Teresten! you play as a member of the starship Teresten which was attacked by an evil horde called the Ilfane after your scientist Chirlu experimented on The Knot. You have a computer that can unlock the knot if you can chart a correct course on a grid, as well as a dictionary for alien runes and a beautiful planetary logo to look at on the wall.

Below is a spoiler that may help those who didn't see the blurbs and cover art in IFComp 2020:

(Spoiler - click to show)Check out
"Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane" by Willershin Rill
"Terror in the Immortal's Atelier" by Gevelle Formicore
and see my review of 'Adventures' for more detail.


+Polish: This game is definitely polished in appearance and effects.
-Descriptivenes: The proper names were a lot to deal with, and I couldn't picture things vividly.
+Interactivity: Great puzzles. Love it. Maybe XYZZY Individual Puzzle nom?
+Emotional impact: I felt excitement upon solving the star chart and the fade-to-white almost gave me chills.
+Would I play again? I'll check it out again in the future.

Terror in the Immortal's Atelier has you fleeing an evil sorceror named Chirlu, Autarch of Telestren, who has stolen the Knot and placed it in the container called the Ilfane, which you have to open. You have 4 books telling you about magical creatures, and a huge table full of reagents you can mix and match in any order.

Below is a spoiler that may help those who didn't see the blurbs and cover art in IFComp 2020:

(Spoiler - click to show)Check out
"Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane" by Willershin Rill
"Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!" by Tarquin Segundo and
and see my review for Adventures for more detail.


+Polish: This game is definitely polished in appearance and effects.
-Descriptivenes: The proper names were a lot to deal with, and I couldn't picture things vividly.
+Interactivity: Great puzzles. Love it. Maybe XYZZY Individual Puzzle nom?
+Emotional impact: The evil version of 'The Giving Tree' was honestly pretty great.
+Would I play again? I'll check it out again in the future.

I tested this game. When I tested it, it didn’t have its flashy index page, which I thought was pretty cool, especially the worldbuilding elements and the cool animation. I had trouble at first though because I thought it was text-entry and not links.

The game itself is small and simple, a one-room game. The main feature here is that you have an app on your cell-phone that lets you connect to items by their ID and manipulate them through reading and writing. There are multiple endings, one normal and one which lets you be a hero.

There are a few niceties missing here and there (you’re told that everyone is working, looking at their screens, but can’t X SCREEN) but given that I was a tester I can’t really complain, can I?

If you like this game, you should try Michael Roberts’ immense game Return to Ditch Day which includes a lot of testing ports and running cable to access devices. Other games for gadget/tech people/fans of oldschool interfaces include Rover’s Day Out and Final Exam.

+Polish. The cool file system makes up for the implementation.
-Descriptiveness. The game is pretty sparsely written, and most objects described are generic.
+Interactivity. Great system!
+Emotional impact. Mostly wonder for the phone access.
-Would I play again? Doesn't have a ton of replay value, but that's okay.

So this game is something pretty rare for IFComp. It's laid out like a board game, with four different rooms and three independent characters who move around.

Discovering what this game was and what it's rules are was a great difficulty in and of itself. When the game begins, the only options you have are to wander around and insult John Cage. The only things you can do in other rooms is to turn the stove off or on or take a watch (which puts a timer up on the screen).

John Cage starts walking around, and sometimes you can ask him about events that happened. I learned that he got a message from a lawyer, and that was about it.

After dying, I read that I could get hints by clicking a book in the bookcase. But I didn't see any bookcase!

I finally turned to the hints, and discovered that the game requires very precise sequences of events and conversation to unlock more things. Many of those things involve a large group of identical objects, and you have to pick the right one, but the info on which one to pick is randomly given in different playthroughs and most playthroughs won't give you that knowledge.

The writing is sparse and terse, suiting the board game setup. The main goal of the game is antagonizing John Cage, which isn't motivated. Before IFComp, I was playing through all the Choice of Games published titles, and I noticed that games where you could be evil were popular, but only if motivated. Being a jerk without motivation is something very few people find appealing in a game.

This is heavily-modified Twine, and the visual presentation is the best part of the game in my opinion.

+Polish: The game is very polished visually.
-Descriptiveness: This game is terse and sparse.
-Interactivity: I had great difficulty in discovering how to engage with this game.
+Emotional impact: I felt annoyance during the game, but a lot of it was intentional by the author, so it succeeded in its goal!
-Would I play it again? I peeked at the possible endings, and I'm not sure I'd like to keep playing.

I remember playing a game by Skarn a few years ago about an alien in t.he future, and so I was definitely interested in seeing what this one was about.

Mechanically, this game is very impressive. You're part of an underpaid, understaffed community group who needs to take care of three magical problems: decaying magical protections, dangerous magical books, and finding herbs for werewolf potions.

You have 9 characters that you can split up for these different tasks, with diverse options like Cheshire Cats, golems, centaurs, etc. One person is pre-assigned to each task, and then you choose the other 2. Each task then lets you pick who does what, each with their respective text.

This is a combinatorial explosion like Animalia, although shorter in each runthrough. The fact that the author was able to code in so many special combinations (and even ones that interact with each other!) is absolutely amazing.

I don't know if the tone of the writing matched the game, though. The tone is crisp and businesslike, told at a distance, while the content it is describing is wondrous and magical and deals with people's inner thoughts and feelings and interpersonal relationships. But I doubt that will be a universal reaction.

I'd definitely be interested in playing through this one again to see everything! The cast of characters and the worldbuilding is excellent.

+Polish: Pretty smooth.
-Descriptiveness: The game is quite descriptive, but as I said above I felt a mismatch between tone and content.
+Interactivity: I was impressed by the many options.
-Emotional impact: I felt a distance from this game, emotionally
+Would I play again? Definitely. Got to see all the cool options!

This was an Ink game, longer for me than suggested (listed as 15 minutes, I took around 30 to get through), but I think the greater length worked for it.

In this game, you play a woman kidnapped and thrown in a cage by a cruel, murderous man. Gameplay is linear at parts but others felt like it could make a major difference; I'd have to replay to find out.

The game is somewhat visceral. Its content warnings are completely appropriate: " Gore, sexual harassment, physical assault, graphic violence, blood" (not that sexual assault itself isn't in there). It also contains frequent strong profanity.

It lacks polish in parts. There are frequent spelling/grammar errors, mostly capitalization. I thought it might just be an author technique, but a typo in the final line of the game (for my playthrough) made me think that perhaps the game wasn't completely checked for bugs ahead of time.

The action sequences of this game were intense and descriptive and the main NPC has a well-thought out personality and set of actions.

-Polish: Some typos and grammatical errors.
+Descriptiveness: It was easy to picture what was going on.
+Emotional impact: I definitely felt more on edge.
+Interactivity: It worked pretty for me. Options were logical and I could strategize, whether it affected the game or not.
-Would I play again? I think once was enough.

I think it would be fair to describe this as an escape room game. You wake up in the dark and have to navigate from there until you exit the room.

This is exactly the kind of game that works well with La Petite Mort (the four hour competition): has a concept that wouldn't work as well in a longer game, has a constrained setting to allow for more detail.

I didn't encounter any implementation problems at all, which is pretty impressive. Definitely had a fun time with this little puzzler.

This is a short game written in 4 hours in which you stumble upon a shrine on a journey.

It reminded me or Caleb's Cannonfire Concerto, which is perhaps the Choicescript game that personally affected me the most. The surreal atmosphere (which is similar to his earlier games released this year) is splendid.

-Polish. As is expected for a 4-hour game, there is a lot that is not implemented or otherwise confusing with the parser.
+Descriptiveness: A lovely and vivid world, if dark.
+Interactivity: The puzzles felt directly connected to the narrative and lent it more emotional impact.
+Emotional impact: The twig-pilgrim was my favorite part.
+Would I play again? Yes, I like this game.