Reviews by MathBrush

This is a Spanish-language parser game which is (thankfully, for this non-native speaker) well-implemented and fairly brief.

It has a framing device of being a text adventure generated by an AI (starting with a ‘sure! I can help you with that’ kind of message), and then starts you off in a jail cell as a captured soldier. It becomes a sort of escape room, but a fairly easy one; the hardest thing for me was remembering/looking up spanish parser verbs (at one point I had to use PULSAR instead of EMPUJAR and I’m not sure why).

After the main game, there is a little meta twist, which I thought was great, and enhanced my appreciation of the game. It made the game about twice as long. Then there was a fun message at the end, and it was over.

While AI is mentioned several times in a meta way, the writing didn’t have the negative aspects I associate with AI, and had many positive aspects I associate with the author, who has written several games I enjoy. So I suspect it’s handwritten, but if it’s not it’s well-done regardless.

I looked it up, and the name has reference to a legend kind of like the Bermuda triangle where ships bearing rice (i.e. humanitarian ships with food) would disappear during the mid-1900s.

This is a Bitsy game, where you have minimalist graphics (only two colors per palette, for instance) and can move around the screen, with text happening when you run into something.

You’re a miserable kind of person who doesn’t get along with anyone, but the only person who can put up with you has invited you onto a boat. Once there, things are normal, for a party, until Ricardo messes everything up.

There are, I believe, multiple endings in the game. I reached one that had me exploring a river and doing a kind of trading quest. I thought it was creative and a lot of fun. Overall, it was short, so replaying shouldn’t be too bad, but I only played once as reading in Spanish takes some effort. Fun game.

This is a Spanish language game with an engine that reminds me of the engine Moiki, but I’m not quite sure what it is. (looking it up, it’s fi.js).

The idea is that your car has broken down in the middle of a forest. The last evidence of civilization that you encountered was a sign saying “Mititz”.

Trying to make it back to town, you encounter a strange and frightening sight in the woods. A chase then ensues, and you have the chance to do an inventory puzzle or two.

I wonder if the game might be unfinished, or if it just ends semi-abruptly. I escaped, and an option to huir down the road. But the game stopped right after that. It feels like it could definitely be an ending, but there might be extra content I didn’t find.

I liked the writing in this and emailed it to my Spanish teacher friend, since she’s been doing a unit on superstitions and myths.

I was glad to get this game in my randomized list, as Ruber is someone who’s consistently produced good games for a decade.

This game taught me a lot. I thought at first it was a fictional story about a pro-Amazon forest activist who is murdered by activists, but apparently her life and death were real.

After your death, you have the option of your spirit spreading out and inhabiting various life-forms. I thought that would result in a short branching game, but instead you occupy all of them in turn: a river, a wolf, a tree.

The writing was poetic and pretty. The themes reminded me of Captain Planet, which I watched enthusiastically as a kid, and Ferngully. But knowing it was real made it way more sad. It’s definitely a topic I’ll research more in the future and talk about with my students (some of which are very into environmental conservation).

I was searching through my wishlist looking for the lowest-rated games and this popped up, an old Ectocomp game from 2013.

This is written in pure, raw html, with the only features beyond bare text being hyperlinks and occasional bullet points.

So it is just a classic CYOA-style story with each choice leading to a different webpage entirely, of which there are nine total.

The story is a kind of surreal absurd one where you hear faint music in a hallway but it can spiral into things like being stuck listening to music for a googolplex seconds.

I checked and by the time this came out numerous twine games and other choice-based games had been released, so I wonder if the author just wanted a challenge to try to code something up entirely from scratch. I googled them and it seems like they still do writing now, so that's pretty cool that they've been trying new stuff out for a decade.

I’m pretty disappointed in myself; I played this game for 3 days and 5-6 hours trying to beat it without hints and only got 18 out of 24 before beginning to look things up.

This is a parser game with a moderate-sized map filled with information. You play as an exorcist visiting an abandoned film studio, set on exorcising 24 ghosts that all died in different years. To do so, you must know their name, the year they died, and how they died.

Thus, you embark on your quest to gather up as many pieces of paper as you can find (and you can find a lot) and occasionally using your psychic abilities to examine objects’ pasts.

I generally try in my reviews to be encouraging to newer authors or people who seem like they could use encouragement, but to be more frank and open with people who are well-established. So I’d like to say that I am giving this game 5 stars and think it is great, and I’d like to spend the rest of this review analyzing the game’s design and play style without focusing on building it up with praise.

This game was directly influenced by numerous games I’ve never played, included Obra Dinn and Her Story. When I played it, I was strongly reminded of several other IF games, perhaps inspired by those same sources.

Superficially, I was reminded of Dr Horror’s House of Terror, a parser game that took 2nd place in 2021. It also featured a haunted film studio split into 5 buildings, each of which had its own cast of monsters and puzzles to be solved. I soon found that while the setting was similar, the gameplay was almost a polar opposite.

I next was reminded of Excalibur, a fantastic game from the same year (2021) that takes the form of a fake wiki database about a non-existent TV series. It’s self-aware, and even in-game it’s possible the series never existed and the whole wiki is a concoction of a fan. Similarly to Kinophobia, gameplay revolves around looking up cast members with connections to the occult.

The third is Type Help, a game released this year outside of competitions that then skyrocketed to 5th place of all time on IFDB. Like Kinophobia, it has a linear sequence of murders where the names and deaths of the victims must be pieced together, first by finding easily accessible info, then slowly learning the system and finding patterns.

The implementation in this game is paradoxically smooth. Most scenery mentioned in scenery descriptions is not implemented at all, usually a sign of a terrible parser game. Here, it’s just a sign to ignore it. The focus is entirely on the documents.

Similarly, some reasonable synonyms don’t work. “Q Landlord” doesn’t work. “Q The Landlord” does. But again, this isn’t a flaw; the game is about being as exact and specific as possible. You may think you have the exact right name, and a person with that name might exist, but it might not be the right person.

Unlike Dr Horror’s House of Terrors, which took a wry attitude, this game is generally sincere somber. This breaks down under the weight of the 24 suspects. Without hints, I re-read every document over 10 times, searched and researched names (curse you Annie Serpico) until the ambient messages became entirely pedestrian. “Oh? Light is reflected off an iris before me? How droll”. Combing the rooms became a tedious chore (I recommend using SCORE, as it tells you when you’re done exploring). Yet despite this, I put more hours into the game than I have into any other parser game this year (except for the French magnum opus (Le comte et la communiste). I simply enjoyed it, and I don’t think fixing its perceived flaws would ‘fix’ it; a lot of times the best experiences are the best precisely because of flaws that contrast with the rest of the game, and removing those flaws can result in anodyne experiences (I experienced that with Kingdom Hearts 3, which smoothed out the combat system so much that much of its combat feels like ‘press O to watch movie’).

Overall, this is an oddball game with a strong commitment to worldbuilding and nice (which I mean literally, not sarcastically) translation of video game mechanics into parser. I think most people will find something to like here.

I was looking through games in my wishlist with no ratings and this popped up.

This twine game from 2021 has two available routes. In one, you play as a male spy, and in the other as a female spy, both in nearby interrogation rooms.

In both paths, you can look around the cell or pick the lock and try to escape.

The game uses a lot of well-chosen illustrations, some from pixabay and others that look hand-made.

The game feels slightly unfinished; I found some exposed code errors and entered debug mode on accident at one or two points. And sometimes I had conflicting text on the screen that felt like I was seeing two paths at once. So I feel like if the author wanted to ever expand on the game or polish it a bit more, it could be more solid, but I had fun.

This game is from the same 2008 One-room game competition as Escapade!, a game I enjoyed in the past.

The Moon Watch is an Inform game with plenty of background images and sound, having a lot better multimedia experience than most games from that time.

You play as a cosmonaut sent to a tiny, restrictive base on the moon. There is a red button you were told to never touch, but a call from leadership comes and you are told to press the red button. Then the game starts.

As others have noted, it can be pretty hard to get started in this game. I found some reading material, a phone, a drawer with interesting things in it, and I was able to open a door to the outside (looking back, I shouldn't have been surprised (Spoiler - click to show)I couldn't go through it, as this is a one-room game.) But I couldn't figure out to progress.

It turns out that a huge part of the game's programming and puzzles is based on (Spoiler - click to show)keyword-style text, where you type whatever you want and it searches your text for keywords. Even the very first puzzles are based on this.

There were just so many possibilities in the space of all commands that I had too much difficulty and had to run to a walkthrough. But the writing was interesting, although the ending took me by surprise.

This is another game I've had for many years on my wishlist. I've attempted it quite a few times but as it has many frequent death traps, randomized combat, no UNDO and no SAVE for the first chunk of the game, I never got very far in my attempts over the years.

This time, I finished it with the aid of David Welbourn's walkthrough.

Combat RPGs written in Inform are often unenjoyable in a way that CRPGs and TTRPGs are not. Kerkerkruip, Little Match Girl 3, and Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom are some examples of fun Inform RPGs, but most are pretty bleak. What gives?

For me at least, the fun of both TTRPGs and CRPGS is discovery, storytelling, and getting new gear or skills that makes previously-difficult challenges feasible. While TTRPGs ostensibly threaten player death, every time I've DMd or been in a group we work around that (a god revives you but requires a quest; the enemy leaves one of you alive and laughs at you, calling you weaklings who don't merit death, etc.). In CRPGs, you can restore and grind or walk around and at least try a new path or see new things.

With Inform, though, dying and retrying almost never produces new content or interesting story changes. You can just memorize the sequence of necessary moves and race through, not bothering to reread text for the 20th time. Endless, Nameless even makes fun of this in a way, letting you just RECORD a series of moves to REPLAY every time you reenter the world.

So we have a sequence of tedious moves. And authors frequently disable UNDO or SAVE to keep players from savescumming. Why? Because there's no reason not to savescum when you have boring gameplay.

The fun RPGs I mentioned above have one thing in common: they have a hierarchy of encounters where high ones kill you quickly but low ones leave powerups. So it becomes a strategy/puzzle game where you have to optimize your path through the encounters.

In the wider field of Choice-based IF, I've played plenty of great RPG games, of which I especially like VtM: Night Road and Werewolf: Book of Hungry Names (although I played with a profanity filter). These are more like the TTRPG approach mentioned above; you can theoretically die, but usually instead losing your health just gives you horrific in-game consequences like going on a rampage.

Anyway, this game doesn't do any of those fun things. It's a bog-standard Combat RPG with automatically-generated rounds of randomized dice roll, traps, and (a trope I quite earnestly dislike) a magic system that consumes your health. I don't think I've ever completed a game with that type of magic system on my own (like Chronicles of the Moorwakker). If there was a wondrous story that you could be rewarded with, that would be better, but it's just standard DnD with wry little twists (like a Were Spider instead of other were-creatures or a Wyvern instead of Dragons because this is called Woodpulp and Wyverns in-game).

Everything is polished and smooth; the line-by-line writing is good. It's just that these excellent authoring and programming skills were turned towards a goal which I don't much care for, and quite a few haven't cared for either.

For an RPG-adjacent game by Graham Nelson, I much prefer Balances.

This game has been on my wish list longer than any other game; I think it's been on there for years.

It comes from an interesting time in the IF community. While there are many different historical interactive fiction communities, the one I interact with the most can be traced back to IFComp, the two rec.*.if forums, and Infocom games. Between the end of Infocom and the beginning of Inform, there was a few-year 'interregnum' period with what I can only describe as pretty bad games that have not proven popular in later years.

Most of those were early TADS games (like the Unnkulia series) or AGT games (like this one). Among those are some standout gems, like Compuserve.

This game belongs firmly in the era it was published. It is an unabashed treasure hunt with a grab-bag setting and no literary aspirations. You are taking a test to get into a thieve's guild, so you wander a bunch of rooms that range from very boring (like the 'plain' room) to wacky like The Wizard of Oz, heaven and hell.

The key interesting feature is a portable hole that lets you travel through walls in every direction, making it helpful to map things out and guess where rooms might be. There are also a wide variety of strange devices.

Like most games of this era, this was designed to be tough, take a long time to replay, and require several playthroughs to time things right. I stopped and went to walkthroughs after I got stock in Oz (although later I found out I could have gotten out. But there's a plant that seems to eat you if you pass it too many times. But there's a way around that. So maybe you can beat it in one playthrough). Anyway, it's long and difficult. Club Floyd didn't finish it, and neither did one walkthrough writer.

It makes sense for its time; there were less games total, and one of this length and humor would have been difficult to find, so having something that would take forever to complete would be worthwhile. And collaborative play was more common then, with players posting hint requests on usenet. I could see this game making a great Let's Play nowawadays.

There's a lot of good in this game, so I thought of giving it a 4, but there's also a lot of silly arbitrary stuff and instant deaths, so I gave it a 3. I do think it's one of the best games in between Infocom and Inform that I personally have played.