Reviews by MathBrush

In this game, you are dared by the devil to get out of a mall with the seven deadly sins in it so you can go on a date with a beautiful young woman.

First, the annoying things. This game claims it is too easy to need a walkthrough; like most games with such a claim, it doesn't implement very many alternate solutions to puzzles (in faft, I think there is only one solution for each puzzle), as well as neglecting many synonyms. The goal of the game is to make a passive, desirable girl sleep with you as a reward. Finally, it has some unnecessarily gross parts, such as with Lust.

Beyond that, the setting has some creative touches, a gently vague in-game help system, and some creative depictions of the seven deadly sins.

This game was entered in the very first IFComp in 1995. The competition was originally intended to give sample code for Inform authors. This game uses the z-machine to model games like tic tac toe, dots and boxes, towers of hanoi, etc. using ASCII graphics.

The puzzles are unfair, and you must cheat to beat about half of them.

The game is full of homages to Curses! and Trinity. Several puzzles require explicit knowledge of these two games. Even with this knowledge, some steps near the end are extremely difficult to guess.

This game is interesting as a sample game and for fans of puzzles as described above.

This game has a mid-sized map and a good number of items and characters. It is not too hard, but it takes quite a bit of time compared to most IFComp games. You are trying to rescue a princess from a dragon, and you have to explore a forest.

You compete with other adventurers, and you have to use magic embodied by water-balloon like spheres that you toss at things. There are several items that you use over and over again.

The game has some sexual innuendos in it that creep up fairly often at the beginning and at the end.

Overall, a game for fans of Zork-style humor.

Jane is a game that is openly influenced by Photopia, yet tells its own story, in this case about domestic abuse.

You play a variety of characters, jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint, but your main character is Jane, a victim of domestic abuse that blames herself and rationalizes her husband's actions.

The writing was good, and several actual abuse victims consulted with the author during the writing process.

Good for fans of alt-games (games that primarily tell the story of a minority or of someone with a particular condition or bad situation).

Mite is by Sara Dee, author of the slice of life game Tough Beans. In this game, you play a green pixie boy who is trying to return a stolen gem to its owner, the fairy prince.

The game is easy to map and simple to play. The map is a V shape, where you start at the vertex and can go down either path (and eventually do both). The puzzles are really very cute (How can you get into an orange tulip? How can you rescue a ladybug in peril?).

I enjoyed this game. It lasted about 30 minutes, with no walkthrough, which is very rare for me.

The idea of this game was to make a scoring system that could be incorporated naturally into the game. In this fantasy game, you play a guy in a village where everyone has had a body part changed into an animals body part. You left paw, a wolf's paw, becomes more human as you progress.

The game has several chances to lock yourself out of victory without too much notice. I found the puzzles quite difficult, and sometimes unintuitive. The concept and setting were clever.

I liked the last half better than the first half.

Overall, not my favorite Paul o Brian game. The Earth and Sky games were really very good, and I encourage everyone to check them out.

This is a brief, 5 room game with purposely minimal implementation.You find things like pits of binary numbers, syntax errors, and self referential rooms.

The puzzles are ridiculous, but there's so few items, you can just try everything. The solution to the main puzzle is based off a joke that the author used to tell to their friend.

Many people like this game, including me, because it's absurd and silly but has logical puzzles.

This game is one of the most well-regarded Twine games available, as demonstrated by its listing on the IFDB Top 100 as of 2016.

In this game, you play as a chancellor of a university, brother to a Duke. The setting is not historical England, though there are similarities.

The game is serious, and focuses on your relationship with your brother. You remember your past, learn about his present activities, and make choices about your future.

It's very interesting as a study in relationships, and also as a medieval-esque game.

In this game, you play a young person who wants to be friends with the town's cool kid and his friends. However, to play his game, you need dice. Five dice. As you go on a search for them, things begin to get weird.

This game incorporates a number of concepts in geometry and topology, such as the Klein bottle (a surface with no inside or outside, which also was featured in Trinity); platonic solids (the five solid shapes which are as symmetric as possible); duality (where vertices and faces of a shape are swapped); Hamiltonian circuits (where you walk through every vertex of a graph without repetition); connected sums (which amounts to wormholes in physics); and a few other references such as the equations for quaternions.

A lot of this amounts to an extended in-joke, but otherwise the game is fairly well put-together. I feel that it would have benefited from some more explanations, such as an in-game textbook.

In this game, you play as an archaeologist through the eyes of their assistant, Aubrey. In the course of the game, you discover a journal, sending you to a first-person flashback, where you play the leader of the secret order of beet mongers.

The game is wacky and fun. The beginning somehow reminded me of Michael Robert's Ditch Day Drifter opening, which is one of my favorites.

The beet monger part has two paths: war and peace. The war part was relatively easy, and I played to both of its endings. The peace ending seemed more difficult.

Overall, recommended for fans of dry, quirky humor.