Reviews by MathBrush

This is a story-driven Twine game and is, I think, the first game I’ve seen by this author, although I’ve seem them around a lot recently.

It has nice styling and no bugs that I could find, and uses a variety of interaction forms like buttons for content warning, expanding ‘aside’ links and regular continue links.

The story is one of love and obsession, two people who meet and hit it off instantly, starting an intense relationship. Things devolve from there. It’s a story I’ve seen play out in real life, but there was an interesting twist here.

I enjoyed the time I spent reading this, which wasn’t too long, and I’d look forward to any future games by this author.

This game by the Stelzers follows in the footsteps of A Familiar Problem last year (maybe it’s in the same universe?). You play as a homonculus with a strictly limited set of available actions (just 1!). That 1 action, though, has the effect of gaining more actions, including navigation and interfering with others.

Story-wise, is kind of a pastiche of mainly Phantom of the Opera along with Shakespeare, other plays, and fantasy elements.

Gameplay-wise, it feels like a growing power-fantasy. You start out with so many limitations that it feels like the world will just always be mostly inaccessible, but it ends up growing until you can do quite a few amazing feats.

I had a great time with this fun game. My only regret is that one part near the end is written in iambic meter, but some lines have 8 syllables and some have 10 and I couldn’t see any pattern or reason why. Even still, that part was fun, it was just something minor that stuck out to me.

I think most people will like this, and the intro flows well; I think it was the best intro for my tastes out of all Stelzer-made games.

This is a horror Twine game that plays on the fear: what if you were alone, far from society, with a man who wanted to exert complete power over you, leaving you no freedoms, nowhere to run? Also, what if that man and his family were also super messed up and wanted to mess you up, too?

This is an effective horror tale. I could feel the helplessness of the protagonist and the disturbing nature of the family’s ‘hobbies’.

I played through twice, once super quickly to estimate length and check for content warnings and another for real gameplay. I got two pretty different endings, so there is some real freedom here (ironic, given our protagonist’s plight).

There were some occasional grammar or spelling oddities, similar to the amount I tend to have in my writing. Other than that, the game seemed highly polished.

This is a Larry Horsfield game, and his games follow a pretty specific pattern. There are 32 games listed on IFDB and 20 listed in-game as part of the series this game is in (and side-series). Larry is a prolific author of large games; if an author’s work was measured by the total sum of all moves necessary to win all games, he might be near the top (this game, while large by usual standards, is comparatively small, requiring only a few hundred moves rather than the thousands of some of his other games).

Like the others, this is an ADRIFT game, and it shares with them the classic opening castle setup that I now have memorized (a suite of rooms where extremely important items must be found by looking under beds or, a favorite place, on the mantelpiece of a fireplace), a building layout of east-west hallways connected by vertical stairs, the dungeon in the middle of the bottom floor, a long row of dungeon cells (which I was amused to see were being refurbished into guest rooms). Then a portal to a faraway land where we wander through a forest, town and castle.

I followed my normal protocol of playing as far as I can (in this case, I got to the dungeon with the ringbolts and got stuck) and then using the walkthrough for the rest. The game (as it says in the opening screen) requires you to frequently look on doors or at parts of the room not in the initial description (like walls or roof beams). That’s not unreasonable, but there are dozens or hundreds of rooms each with a lot of furniture. I went through tons of rooms looking at each door and closing each door and looking under every bed and every table. I later discovered my error was that I should have, in one specific room, (Spoiler - click to show)looked behind a door.

Deviating from the walkthrough can cause problems. I got a pop-up ADRIFT error when I tried to DROP ALL because I had been carrying a non-droppable item since the beginning of the game (the (Spoiler - click to show)fossy whereas the walkthrough had instructed me to put it in my pocket. Similarly, I couldn’t (Spoiler - click to show)CLEAN or RUB a tombstone, I could only CLEAR the IVY on it. The games are completable without the walkthrough, as in other ways they are eminently fair (most areas don’t have much available so you can exhaustively search everything), it just requires quiet patience, a sense of enjoyment from trying different parser commands to discover the right ones (a VERBS list is helpful) and the willingness to try very many unhelpful searches while waiting to find the rare diamonds in the rough where it is valuable.

None of this is meant as criticism for the author to follow; with 20 games into the series and decades of stories in the universe, it’s clear this is a labor of love that will be made exactly as the author wants. It’s just a general description for players new to the Lazzahverse. I’ve never regretted playing these games, and generally give them fairly high ratings, because they do have a sense of adventure and of a living, evolving universe.

This was a great game! Both cute and genuinely creepy, with the two facets playing off of each other.

It’s a parser game where you play as a bug, and everyone else around you is a bug in a bug society with jobs, writing, culture, etc. While bug-based media has existed for decades, I pictured everything in the Hollow Knight art style as that’s the bug-based media I’ve seen the most of recently.

Unusually for a parser game, it has multiple paths to progress the story and a variety of achievements. However, it keeps the classic parser game play loop of exploration, grabbing items, and solving puzzles.

You’ve come back from a long trip and you’re just starving. Strangely, some of your fellow bugs are missing. Your goals are to sate your hunger and investigate the disappearances.

I had a lot of fun with this game, and it does get disturbingly creepy later on (more so because the horrors exist in real life).

This game overall reminded me a lot of Slouching Towards Bedlam, both because of the multiple paths and because of the overall plot.

This game is based on a book by the same author.

It’s written in Gruescript, and is one of the better Gruescript games I’ve played; I didn’t encounter any bugs or missing descriptions.

You play as a young man with the ability to read the minds of appliances (or at least communicate with them) and to see the hideous tentacles coming out of those machines. You are convinced that your girlfriend’s TV is out to get her, while she’s convinced that you’re being a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

You have to get advice/help from all the appliances in your apartment and in your girlfriend’s as well, devise a plan, and take down the TV!

The story is amusing, and in general felt paced well. I was surprised by how readily helpful Amanda was given the issues we had at the beginning of the game.

Puzzles are engaging while being fairly straightforward; if you just explore everywhere and carry out requested tasks you can win pretty easily.

This was a tricky game for me! It’s a Spanish-language parser game that uses a lot of wordplay and clever phrases. I also had some trouble with the parser occasionally (which is normal for me when playing a game not in my native tongue). I’ve attached a transcript if anyone wants to see me struggling to get even the bad ending (I also decompiled the game to get some help).

You play as a private detective, but, as you are a ‘detectivo privado’, you can only examine yourself! That’s an example of wordplay that I didn’t quite get as a foreigner; I assume ‘privado’ has a dual meaning between the english word ‘private’ and a meaning of ‘self’ or ‘personal’ or something.

You are alone in a locked room with nothing but a photo of yourself, a pistol, some handcuffs, and a cushion. But, as the game tells you, you can only examine yourself, and you need a crime (in the form of a cuerpo delito), a client to contract you, and a criminal!

I eventually discovered that the key to progressing was to (Spoiler - click to show)sit on the cushion and to look at the photo (possibly needing to meditate first). Once I did that, the game became complex and I was able to interact with a lot more things.

Like I said, I received a bad ending in the end. Some things are on a timer, and it looks like I was caught up in a bad end, but I liked the clever concept of the game and enjoyed playing. It was funny and mind-bending, and I was impressed by the concept and story.

This was the next randomized Grand Guignol game I got. This one is interesting: a smooth and polished, mostly-linear adaptation of a short, sad, romantic movie called Schneckentraum or El Sueño Del Caracol (both meaning Snail Dream). It’s about a girl who is enamored with a boy and follows him to a bookstore, meaning to ask him out, but she’s too embarrassed to do anything but buy a book. Day after day she comes to see him, amassing a small pile of books.

It’s a good story, and I can see why they wanted to adapt it. There are a few branches early on to ‘opt out’ of the story, but it is otherwise a straightforward retelling of a touching story. It reminded me of the song Jueves by the group Oreja de Van Gogh.

I also wanted to add that the styling and images from the movie chosen for the game helped contribute to the atmosphere.

This was a short, well-written game about a horrifying experience being trapped in the darkness.

Most of the game is about your reaction to the things happening to you. The hardest part is the fact that everything is in complete darkness, making you have to react to everything without knowledge of what you’re truly experiencing.

It stays mysterious to the end. I did make a silly translation mistake in my head; when the game says you are surrounded by (Spoiler - click to show)miles de patas, I accidentally thought it said (Spoiler - click to show)miles de patos, and pictured the lights going on, revealing that your enemy was thousands of ducks. I laughed and thought that was fun, then later realized my mistake. The actual story was quite grim, and had a fitting ending

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.