Reviews by MathBrush

In this commercial game, you are trying to get around the world in 80 Days with Phineas Fogg. It is ostensibly based on the novel, although I haven't read it yet.

This game employs a beautiful map used to select various routes across the world, and has nice, mostly static visuals representing your conveyance, the city you're in, and various NPCs as well as the player and his luggage. However, this game is very much CYOA in beautiful packaging rather than just a text-heavy graphical game.

The usual pattern of the game is that you start each day in your current city with some funds and the chance to get more funds, buy some luggage, sell old luggage, or explore. You then pick a route to travel onto the next city, which may or may not require waiting a few hours or days for.

Each route can cost between a few dozen pounds to 7000 or more pounds. Faster routes generally cost more. Along each route, various events happen such as mutinies, romance, murders, etc. which you have to deal with. Your choices affect what city you are in, how fast you get there, NPC reactions, your amount of money, Phineas' health, and extremely poor choices can lead to death.

The setting is steampunk, a genre which I am on the fence about. Among steampunk games, the writing is very good. Some highlights for me were Haiti (Spoiler - click to show)with organic automata, Agra (Spoiler - click to show)A city that walks on four legs, with the Taj Mahal on top, and Salt Lake City, which provided my first glimpse at an interactive fiction treatment of Mormons, my religion. On their treatment of Mormons, I was pleased to see that they treated it fairly kindly, with any negative reactions being those typical of the day. This is typical of the whole game, in that it seems remarkably well-researched (although never perfectly) for its scope.

I found the game somewhat tedious at times, especially on multiple replays. I frequently found myself skipping filler text or repeatedly tapping on the clock. However, on playthroughs where I focused on exploration over time, I had an enjoyable experience.

Overall, I strongly recommend this game for anyone without a distaste for steampunk. I know several people who would love this game if it had a more realistic flavor. But the steampunk setting allows any historical inaccuracies to be waved away, and provides for some fun pictures, so it's a trade-off.

This game is generally about exploring in a submarine. You catalog new species you find, you can descend, ascend, or go left or right.

Perhaps the best thing about this game to me is the ability to make and execute plans. I had an idea from the beginning of what I wanted to do, and the game let me do it very well. You are constantly presented with choices to explore, to go deeper, to chase something, to return.

You have an air meter that goes down when you make choices. The beginning is more linear than the midge me and endgame.

I only played once, but it seems to be highly branching.

This is a game that I was not impressed with at first. I found the writing to be a bit over the top and disjointed. My initial impression was not completely unfavorable, because the story was interesting and the game worked very well on mobile.

But as I pushed on to the end, the game took an unexpected turn which made me reevaluate my initial feelings. It made me chuckle. I played again for fun, trying to see how much branching there is (a medium amount, it turned out), and I thought I didnt like it as much the second time, but again, the ending made me chuckle.

If you try this one, make sure to finish it. Especially if you find it frustrating at first.

This game has several interesting features. First, it is available in English or Spanish, which I found delightful. This was my first real experience in Spanish, although I only did 1 out of 5 'chapters' in Spanish.

The other most interesting feature is its dynamic text. The only thing I've seen like it is Plotkin's Matter of the Monster, but this game has more depth. You click on links to expand the text, but the expansion can occur at different locations from where you click, opening the beginning of the story, the middle, or the end. In later chalters, the mechanic opens up in unexpected and delightful ways.

Visually, I found the text color and background to be somewhat unaplealing, but it adds to the games character somewhat.

The story is about a couple that leaves a city in an unspecified setting (could be prehistoric, futuristic, magical, etc.). Together they must deal with their children and the new society they take part in.

This is a short superhero game written in Twine. Each screen has one to two choices about your actions as a superhero. Save many, or save one? Conserve strength or use your energy?

The game lasts about a dozen or twenty moves. The presentation is minimalist blue on black. The names of the villains made me laugh, but overall I feel the game could be fleshed out more.

This game has a nice choice of background and font. It is a mostly linear Twine game with a slow, deliberate pace. The text often appears on a slow timer, and the links that don't progress the story are generally reflective cycles. Both of these design choices force the reader to contemplate the game at a relaxed pace.

The story offered several surprises to me. I found it to be well-developed, a description of one woman's lifetime. Everything was understated and hinted at rather than pushed through.

My only issues with the game were that I felt that the placement of links and the available choices didn't make me feel involved in the story, and that the story could have been more descriptive. I only feel comfortable mentioning these flaws, though, because the rest of the game did such a good job.

I'm giving this very short Twine work a point for being well-polished (it runs smooth as a whistle) and 1 point for its smooth writing. What the author has so far works.

Unfortunately, as of Spring Thing, it is too short. You play a baby who is famous, and performs every night. Each day you can pick between one of four baby options (sleep, eat, poop, or pee). Then you hope to have a successful career. The furthest I got was four days.each day has only a few paragraphs of content.

The author references begscape by Porpentine, and these games share many similarities. I liked where the author was going with this.

My reaction may be colored by the author's apologetic blurb on Spring Thing's website. If it had been presented to me as a whole game, I may have given it another star.

Chandler Groover has put his characteristic mark on the magician genre. The game is similar to "An Act of Misdirection" in tone and concept (where the player is forced to perform magic tricks without completely knowing how, in a grim setting). However, the focus is on atmosphere over puzzles. I felt on the edge of my seat the whole time, wavering between fear and mild disgust.

The game is about dueling magicians who will go to any length to disrupt each other. This part reminded me in a good way of The Prestige, especially as the magicians use new tricks to upstage each other and try sabotage.

The game is thoroughly polished, and credits a lot of testers for a compact game, which helps explain its smooth gameplay. I encountered no bugs, and the parser was very well-stocked with synonyms. Playing this game was like watching a thriller, with the parser so slick that it essentially disappeared, leaving the player to interact directly with the story.

This game was the winner of the Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction. That contest was judged solely by Ryan Veeder, a prominent IF author.

This game takes the nursery rhyme "Little Bunny Foo Foo" and references from Veeder's games and blends them into a truly enjoyable story. The highlight of this story is the dialog, masterfully written and emotionally affecting.

You play the Good Fairy who is trying to help out Foo Foo the rabbit. There's a long street with shops and people to investigate.

It's hard to describe the game more without having you play it. Suffice it to say that this is my favorite game of 2016 (up to mid-April, when I'm rating this).

This game has obviously been worked on for a long time; it has sound effects, a hand-made typewriting visual effect, some unconventional interactions with the browser, and several background images of what appear to be hand-drawn images, all by the same artist. This makes for a very polished experience.

However, I found myself frustrated by the slow typewriter effect. I frequently wanted to skip ahead. The only time I found it effective was at the very end.

The story is disjointed and odd. At first, I didn't like it, but it began to gel together the further along it went. It was a bit over the top at times, but it succeeded in the very end of keeping me intrigued and invested.

I'm giving it a star for polish, a star for descriptive writing, and a star for emotional impact.