Reviews by MathBrush

This game uses a similar engine to the author’s last game, Steal 10 Treasures to Win This Game, with some differences. Both only allow a set collection of inputs; nothing else can even be entered. So, error messages are replaced by just not allowing you to type things. However, the older game only uses single letters for inputs. This game lets you type longer words, and does have little responses explaining why you can’t do some things.

The game is set in the fictional land of Yurf, where a royal conflict has divided the world and four gems have been lost. You need to explore the world, which has a surreal Alice in Wonderland/Phantom Tollbooth feel.

The parser is one-word only. This makes the game simpler but also harder. I appreciated the reduced number of actions I had to try. On the other hand, I was frustrated by simple things like trying to look at one person in a group of three, checking my inventory or interacting with individual background items.

The one-word parser has been stretched to its limits here, and that means one thing: riddles. Around half or more of the games puzzles are intuition-based or ‘aha’ type riddles, where instead of manipulating physical objects or learning a system you have to sit and puzzle it out. I ended up having to use hints twice. While I typically enjoy riddles less than other styles of gameplay, they made sense both storywise and given the input constraints.

Overall, a polished and good-looking game, well-written and mostly bug-free (I passed on a typo and a sequence-breaking bug to the author).

This is an ADRIFT game, which I played by downloading the ADRIFT 5 Runner (There are like 3 versions you can download, and google flagged 2 of them as viruses but the third was fine).

This game has a cinematic opening and first few areas. An international space laboratory has been able to cure numerous diseases, but a test virus got out and infected everyone on board! You are chosen to try to clear the contamination (which threatens to infect earth due to an automated shipment) or to die trying.

The initial exploration of the ship was suitably mysterious. After a time, I began to get stuck pretty early on. I consulted the hints, and would a few more times, and found that careful examination of everything was usually the key.

However, a few times I missed some puzzles I don't think I would have gotten because the game gave some negative feedback early on. For instance, I knew that many ADRIFT games have puzzles where you have to (Spoiler - click to show)X something, LOOK UNDER it, SEARCH it, or LOOK BEHIND it, so I spent the first twenty minutes of the game trying all of those things and (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK UNDER IT consistently said I can't do that or there's nothing there. It turns out that very late on in a timed sequence you have to (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK UNDER (or have already done so) to a scenery item. It just doesn't make much sense to me to have an action that the whole game has told me to be useless (and I was only trying anyway because of past ADRIFT experience) turn out to be super important in the end.

The story was pretty fun, especially the beginning and ending, but I was a little disappointed in the middle. The space station inhabitants are Chinese, and two rooms have Chinese names on them, but one was just Mao Zedong and the other was a title like 'fellow Scientist'; I was looking forward to some thoughtfully chosen bespoke Chinese names, but maybe that was just a weird expectation.

The best part to me was the initial exploration.

This was a pleasant adventure game someone hampered by programming issues from time to time.

I played the ‘modern’ version which doesn’t have the graphics that the retro does in the screenshots (which makes sense) but that image in the screenshots looks cool!

This game has Scott Adams vibe: just a fun adventure with minimal text and some atmospheric descriptions and most important items listed separately in each room description. You are on an island and need to find your way off, making use of local floral and fauna and the remnants of past visitors.

There were several issues that caused problems during gameplay. For instance, (Spoiler - click to show)if you get the wrench and drop it, you can never pick it up again. The same thing happens if you drop the reeds and aren’t carrying something sharp.

So, a fun concept and pretty good execution, but could use more polish.

This game was written in the mainframe language Rexx, designed to be played on an emulator.

It features ASCII art, used to make 12 playing cards. The point of the game is to collect the cards. It’s based on the story The Garden Behind the Moon by Howard Pyle, with a Moon House and a Moon Man and Moon Angel.

Gameplay is primarily menu based, with some menu options giving you a word you can type out.

There are only 6 things you can do:
-Buy cards from the moon man (from $5 to $120)
-Sleep
-Visit the moon angel (in the code, this is supposed to make him more friendly, but the code that does that never actually runs, locking you out of part of the game)
-Look out the window
-polish stars (this gives you $5_
-visit the garden (only open once a week, gives random text).

So, the only way to make money is $5 at a time, with sleep in between each money-making event, and a little animation that plays when you polish the stars, and you have to do that 64 times to get all cards. Furthermore, you have to wait another 20 days or so to actually beat the game.

I didn’t finish the game all the way through, opting to read the code instead. The ascii art is lovely, but I don’t want to just repeat the same text over and over again for the cards; the gameplay is just too simple, I think.

Here we have another python custom parser game, but this one is surprisingly smooth, once I read the ABOUT text. It understands abbreviations for directions, inventory, and LOOK, and it implements LOOK; it has hints, an INTRO page and a HELP page. While it does fall short in some areas of the parser (I think BREAK MANACLES should have a response, for instance), it is impressive overall, and the presentation was nice (although I had a lot of blank lines before my command prompt for some reason).

The game itself is just a preview, but it’s a perspective rarely seen in parser IF. You play as a (supposedly) evil power, imprisoned for centuries by the forces of good (maybe). You have the ability to SING TO (ST) things to interact with them.

I loved the descriptiveness and the imagery. While I do wish the whole thing were finished, it’s clear that a lot of work and talent went into this. In a good way, it reminded me of EAT ME, with its focus on one verbal phrase (SING TO) and its opening in a dungeon, manacled to a wall.

(would give 4 stars if finished or if polished more, 5 stars if both as the idea is awesome!)

This is a downloadable python executable. I was able to make 7 package deliveries, and then nothing else happened; I presume I won, unless there’s more hidden.

This looks to be a custom engine. It simultaneously looks like it took a ton of work and also is far from the level of other parser in the competition.

The best analogy I could give is that it’s like someone entering one of these realistic cake decorating competitions, but they bring sheafs of wheat, a live chicken, and sugarcane, and spend the first two hours grinding everything by hand and waiting for the chicken to lay an egg. Then, in the last remaining time, they whip together a homemade pancake.

Was it a lot of work? Was it impressive? Yes, and yes. Does it match what others are bringing to the competition, and does it provide what the audience is looking for? In this case, for this audience, I’d say no.

In this game, you are a parcel delivery person. You have a store room with boxes, you take them and look at them to see the label, and then you deliver them. Some of the deliveries are puzzles you have to solve, but these are fairly simple. There is well-done pixel art graphics that look hand made (the shrimp store sign was especially neat).

The parser doesn’t recognize abbreviations, so you need to type out INVENTORY for inventory and EAST for going east. It seems to slice words and only recognize part of the text because typing NORTHEAST is the same as NORTH in some spots, and when I was trying to examine the post office at the beginning it took me inside. The game doesn’t recognize LOOK or LOOK AROUND, so the only way I found to repeat room text was to leave and come back. There is no HINT or HELP, no UNDO, SAVE, or RESTORE. Synonyms and partial matches with nouns don’t work (so you must TAKE SQUARE BOX, not TAKE SQUARE, TAKE BOX, or TAKE PACKAGE). Pronouns aren’t recognized (so TAKE IT won’t work). GIVE PACKAGE or TALK won’t work, you have to DELIVER ____ BOX. Fortunately the game is designed to run fairly smoothly given these constraints.

I usually write reviews for both the author and the players, but I don’t think Jim reads the reviews, so I’ll write for the players.

Jim Macbrayne is an author with a polished self-made writing system that he has used to make several parser games, usually 1-2 a year for the last several years (as well as some TADS games in the past). These games are windows executables and feature a command-line style interface with some color use. The Function keys are used as shortcuts in-game. An unusual feature of his games is that objects in containers cannot be referenced, so if there is a fish in a bucket, you can’t type GET FISH or X FISH. Instead you have to type GET FISH FROM BUCKET or GET ALL FROM BUCKET. He has reserved the F1 key to always print out GET ALL FROM IT as this occurs very frequently in the games.

The games have a standard format and this is no exception. You generally are in a world that is fantasy with some mundane/modern objects (for instance, this game has a Gymnasium with a climbing rope in it) and different devices. There are usually potions of some kind and often a teleporter device that can be calibrated to different settings (in this game, a coin-operated dial). Puzzles often revolve around entering combinations using colors, numbers, keypads, etc. with the solution to one combination found on a card or piece of paper in another area. There is usually a book of spells that you can memorize a certain number of times, each time you casting them having one copy of the spell disappear from memory.

This game has all those things. The framing device is that you have been asked to find Excalibur, King Arthur’s sword. In the meantime, you’ll pass through caves, castles, and more.

I generally find these games pretty chill and soothing. I like to play for a bit till I get stuck, get some hints, play more, and then when I’m really not sure to use the walkthrough. I got around 60 points out of 230 before using the walkthrough. I feel like playing without help would take a week or two, with a lot of time waiting for ‘aha’ moments.

I did miss some of the more exciting parts of earlier games; for instance, this game didn’t have much NPC interaction.

I expect to see more similar games in the future, and they’re nice to look forward to, and I like to play them early on in the competitions, as they don’t get many reviews (mostly due to being a Windows executable). The nice thing is if you play one and like it, there are many more to enjoy.

This game was entered in Spring Thing 2024. It's a parser game that uses the Bisquixe interpreter, which I worked on, to do some color changes, so this review is biased. It is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to see when I made it so I'm very happy.

The story is one of suspense. You arrive at a studio apartment, ready to sleep, but you have to prepare for the night first. While doing so, you, the reader, will discover that there is more to your life than first appeared.

Later on, the game enters a new phase. (Spoiler - click to show)A stranger starts opening the door, and you start planning on what you'll do, using the future tense, one of the few times I've seen someone use this Inform option.

The world is dense and richly implemented, with tons of items, electronics with menus and submenus and programs, etc. It can be overwhelming at times, but the gameplay isn't as complex as I was worried it would be. You can reach several different endings fairly easily, although there are a lot, some harder than others, if you're going for completionism.

The suspense was there for me, and there were several big moments, emotionally, including the fun color changes.

This game puts you in the roles of a corporate office jockey in a soulless dystopia where all art, including poetry, must be removed.

You sort things into 'facts' and 'poetry' and delete the poetry.

A strange messenger appears and lets you save some words of the poetry, which you can rearrange into your own poems. The deletion process proceeds in real time, so you have to click fast to save them.

The whole game lasts about 9 in-game days.

I found the setting interesting, and liked the poem making mechanic. The real-time event wasn't my favorite (I like IF precisely because it doesn't have real time events) but it was pretty forgiving and adjustable.

Overall, a fun concept, and I liked the Shakespeare quotes. I feel like a lot of the game was spoken in generalities, when I might have preferred more specifics, but perhaps a blank canvas was intended.


These are the poems I made (although I copped out on the last line of the last one):
(Spoiler - click to show)
their den in the light smells Like a gray shadow of the night

Assignment 646: Lanirian
cry lightning
Some Verses inspire,
Some Verses blind
may I become blind
may the day become knives.

Assignment 655: Mol'ztor'lorian
Hope is the sweetest thing heard on coldest wind.

Assignment 665: Olkuts-pons
first Swelling,
sweet and joy
it might be joy
what joy and sweet times

Assignment 671: Marvumheonackolin
Again
Every pulse
half awake blessed comfort
He thinks Every secret
When fairy numbers didn't pulse

This Twine game is intended to simulate a forensics-focused whodunnit.

You play as a detective investigating a woman who has been found dead in her apartment after several days. You have the opportunity to take hair, blood, and print samples, analyse medication, interview others, retrieve info from a smartphone, etc.

You yourself are nobody, a cipher, while the suspects are primarily interesting in the information they give rather than their unique characteristics.

There is a lot of technical info in this game, and a ton of links to methodically click through. It has the same kind of puzzle structure as in Toby's Nose, where you read all the info, come to the conclusion, and guess the suspect off a list.

I guessed the suspect wrong but had the cause of death right. It was a fun cerebral exercise, and I would play another game like this. If there were any room for improvement, it might be in making the characters have more unique and interesting features and personalities.