Reviews by MathBrush

This game is well-written, engaging in its action, and has nice twists and a strong story format.

This is a choice-based game with some use of graphics (noticeably, a turtle) and animation and a lot of styling like darkening screens and so on.

You play as Lorenzo, who, with your brother Marco, have been sent by a video game company to kidnap Kenji Eno (a developer who lived in real life) and force him to let your company sell his unreleased magnum opus.

Your brother does most of the hard work, duct taping Kenji and interrogating him. Your main leverage over him is his pet turtle, which you have to watch over. Unfortunately it keeps escaping over and over again.

And that's the cycle that play settles into. You find the turtle in increasingly bizarre situations that require more and more elaborate responses, return to hear your brother narrate some exposition about Kenji's background and the games he developed, one at a time, with cover images.

All to lead up to one major joke, which I didn't see coming even though the game doled out numerous hints. My slow realization that the company in question is (Spoiler - click to show)Nintendo. My laugh at this funny text, thinking 'that's just like (Spoiler - click to show)Mario!': (Spoiler - click to show)Your supple, Italian middle-aged body fat is coated with years of grease from maintenance work, allowing you to slide down the toilet drain with ease. The final realization that (Spoiler - click to show)You are Italian brothers with M and L names that work for Nintendo and have to fight against a turtle while you also slip through sewer pipes. That was pretty great.

The Kenji Eno stuff is very earnest and lionizes him. I found myself feeling skeptical at this. He was a real man, just a person. My dad ran a video game company called Saffire in the 90's and 2000's and ended up meeting a lot of leading industry people and celebrities. He would tell stories about the wild and often terrible things they did and regrets they had; it was a very misogynistic and exploitative culture. Kenji Eno was an outsider and so maybe he wasn't like that, I thought, but this game is kind of like constructing a parasocial identity for Kenji, imagining his existence entirely based on what his games are like.

Then it hit me like a brick: PB Parjeter is to me what Kenji Eno is to Marco. Do I really know PB Parjeter? Does he know me? If I told my son a story about PB Parjeter, I would say 'one of my internet friends did this...'. I would call him that because I've played many of his games, reviewed them, and participated in several internet forum posts with him and communicated with him in my capacity as event organizer for a few events. If I search my email inbox (I never delete emails), the name Parjeter happens 32 times. But almost everything I know about him is through games. I remember the first game of his I played, Doctor Sourpuss, where I thought he might be furkle under a pseudonym. From his games I assume he likes vintage and/or surreal media, is introspective and philosophical, Francophone, and would be excited to hear about a Cannes film that was 8 hours of unedited trailcam footage (I mean this in a positive way). I would think him a good person overall. And what do I share of myself online? I deliberately avoid forming close friendships with people in the IF world (in the form of DMs, messages, etc.) because I like to use the IF world for escapism and not have it integrated into my reality. So I present a front of myself, and Parjeter presents a front of himself. So, that's what this game makes me think of. Is the Kenji Eno in the game anything at all like the real one was? Why does it matter, if the Brian Rushton you all imagine while reading this isn't really like the real one I am, and the small cluster of people I just pictured when I wrote that don't really exist or map to real individuals in real life?

A fun game, and a lot to think about.

This game does a lot of unusual things that I'm not even sure how to react to. I can't tell yet if I love this game or hate it, only time will see. But I'll describe my experience.

This is the second Anastasia the Power Pony game. I liked the earlier one; I went into it expecting a My Little Pony story (which I would have loved) but instead found an original pony-based setting. This time around there are even more differences that show how the two series aren't really connected (for one thing, in the naming of the characters). I did forget some aspects of the setting which made it very funny when the game completely condoned all manner of violence against llamas but urged you to not injure ponies at all, giving the impression of pony ultra-racism (I think the first game had a reason, I just can't remember it, so it's not actually pony racism I believe).

The game itself has several acts, and here's where the new style of stuff comes up.

In the first act, we are in a restaurant with some snobby coworkers. There's menu-based conversation but we can also examine the area around us. Suddenly, we are recognized, and we must escape subterfuge and/or fighting, all while our dreary coworkers drone on in the background, commenting on our actions. To my surprise, the space is huge; I strongly strongly strongly recommend reading all feelies before playing the game. I imagined this huge space was to have a complex combinatorial puzzle of evasion, but I just used brute force (this map will return later).

Afterwards, there was a fight scene in an alley. You can't save or undo during it, but you can retry or continue. Having not read the feelie that specifically describes combat, I floundered at first, trying stuff like 'jump back' (which worked I think, or maybe step back), and HIT PONY (frowned on due to probably-not-pony-ultra-racism). I took the trash can lid at one point and it let me defend.

Rather than give up, I wanted to keep trying. It's clear the author was hoping that they could implement enough actions that someone could intuitively type whatever they want and have it work, usually a laughable idea in a parser game (there are just so many things to account for) but I wanted to make the author's vision work. As you fight, you get more commands suggested, and COMMANDS gave some more. There are several ways the fight can end. I ended up thinking that I needed to use the same three moves over and over (Spoiler - click to show)(sidestep, duck, and jump) but once they started double-teaming me that didn't work anymore, so I tried using (Spoiler - click to show)THROW and TRIP but it kept saying it did or didn't work for what seemed to me arbitrary reasons. I finally followed the signs more carefully and was able to win. It felt rewarding, but part of that rewarding feeling was wrangling an unruly combat system. So, again, I couldn't decide if I loved it for getting it to work or hated it for being hard to figure out.

A couple acts later we return to the restaurant and have a big all-out brawl, just like the pirate ship in the last game. And the purpose of the 20-something room buffet is revealed: we have to attack making puns!

Now, this just seemed to me like a really bad idea from the other. You have to do stuff like 'RAMMING NOODLES' or something with the ramen noodles. I was deeply skeptical because so many things don't have obvious puns (like lutefisk). And some early things I tried didn't work at all (SAVAGE someone with a SAUSAGE, MASH them with MASH, etc.). How could the author possibly include all possible puns? It seemed like a lost cause and I died a lot.

Then I saw everyone chucking stuff at me, so I chucked stuff back, and it seemed to do something. Regular attacks worked a bit as well.

Spoilers for next bit.

Again, I can't tell if it's genius or horrible. What to do wasn't clearly communicated, but that made figuring it out more rewarding. It reminds me a bit of the draw of older games like the one Garry Francis loves on CASA, where the parser is terrible and getting around that is half the fun. This parser is not terrible, but the many activities with wide-open state spaces makes trying to understand the game as much of a puzzle as the game itself.

Story-wise, the game is a classic street-level superhero story, done well in the classic style. Rather than innovating with big plot twists, the author has instead added lots of jokes and characterization.

Overall, I had fun. I think experimentation like this is what drives the community forward in the long run; someone has to take the gamble on something new. So, bravo. The music worked well for me, too.

I thought this game was both innovative and challenging. It definitely seemed original and I like a lot of the ideas, but I struggled with some of the execution.

This is a choice-based game focused on interrogation. You are a suspect being questioned by the police after being caught in Versailles (I think) and you have to explain what happened.

There are three parts of the story that you can pick up: in the library at the beginning of the game, at the King's bedroom, and in the basement under (I think, again) Versailles.

You try to construct a plausible explanation for what happened, but if you pick the 'wrong' thing, the interrogator calls you out and you start over (kind of like Spider and Web). But, information carries over, so doing something in one thread lets you perform new actions in another.

This was a fun concept and I think the core of the game is very solid. I ran into two issues:

1. I think the 'timeout' for doing things wrong is too harsh. It felt like almost any action I tried would reset me back to the beginning, making you have to click back in and redo it all. This goes away during the very last puzzle (where, ironically, I might have preferred easier resets).
2. The very last puzzle broke things into a few too many steps. I would have preferred it if we could (Spoiler - click to show)color things immediately after washing them instead of putting them back in the box and selecting them from a list again.

I think the puzzles and concept here are neat, and most of the execution works for me. I also liked how the inconsistencies in the statements resolved themselves in the end.

While I was playing this game, I thought, “This almost feels like if someone went out of their way to antagonize as many people as possible by doing everything people on the forum hate.” Later on, I started to wonder if that might actually be true, since the game is ‘meta’.

First, this is a windows downloadable executable, which, outside of uncompiled python code, is typically the least-played out of all IF formats. Unlike Steam, where windows executables are king. many IF players and authors use Linux or Macs and can’t run windows exe’s easily. A big attraction of IF is the ability to have it running in the background during other tasks, able to start and stop it at will, but executables are full screen. Also, unlike Steam, there aren’t really any safety guarantees that exe’s won’t give you viruses.

Second, this game uses timed text in perhaps its most devious form: text in a typewriter font that is slightly slower than average reading speed, but very quickly moves on to the next passage once done, with no back button and no history option. There is a pause button. If you look away from the game for a conversation or to check the stove and forget to pause, you’ll have to start over.

Third, the game picks your choices for you. The controls for much of the game do nothing, with the cursor moving itself and picking what it wants. There is no agency in these portions.

But, the game does address these things! Kind of. You see, the game is a scene, like in a play or movie, and you are the ‘player’ in the audience. Eventually, you get the option to protest what is going on and to deride the lack of agency. I eventually consented to an option to ‘erase’ the game, and got one ending.

So, it’s a clear commentary on the nature of agency in games. While I dislike all of the choices listed above, I’m glad the game is self aware and that everything is done intentionally. Sometimes it’s okay to do unpopular things to make a personal statement you care about. Also I liked the art style, it reminded me of the witches in Madoka Magica.

This was a fun game that took a (to me) unexpected turn or two early on.

In the vein of the earlier Galaxy Jones game, I had expected a classic action/secret agent scenario. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by a mathematical combinations and language translation game.

Cyborgs are going to blow up Mars using its moon, Phobos. You, Galaxy Jones, have infiltrated the base and need to stop them.

This entails two main puzzles and several smaller ones: First, you have to hack doors by discovering the patterns in their codes, and second: you have to find more of the language and translate it.

The language puzzle is, for the most part, not actual translation. Instead, we find text, scan it, and learn more of the language, which lets us automatically understand more and more words. Doing so encourages us to revisit earlier texts to see what new secrets we've unlocked.

The other puzzles are mostly math related. Hacking the doors is an exercise in number theory, a lot of the time. To me the puzzles seemed to be a much higher level of math than is usual in text adventures (outside of things like base 5 arithmetic in Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina).

The game is highly polished, with the signature Galaxy Jones logo every time you score a point and several intentional stylistic choices like no room headings.

The game has a lot of paths, unusual for a parser game, and I can think of at least three possible endings (there might be more). I thought that was pretty neat.

Overall, when I think of this game, I'm going to think of the advanced math in it, which is something I like.

This was great. I like sci fi, languages, trying to understand aliens, etc. It reminded me of works like the movie Arrival or the book The Mote in God's Eye, both of which I like.

You play as an exolinguist, an expert in alien languages, assigned to a new military mission where you discover you have been assigned an impossible task: decode an alien language that has remained untranslated for over a hundred years in order to help the military use a new weapon.

You're assigned a team of individuals with differing talents and have to interface with multiple commanding officers and a robot companion.

One major feature of the game that I didn't pay attention to (I'll have to replay) is that the musical soundtrack changes dynamically as you play, which I thought was really neat. There are some 3d animations as well, but I found myself enjoying my imagination more more often.

I thought the writing was solid, especially dialogue and interactions with other characters. My only real grip is that I felt that the ending came at a time where there was still narrative momentum; it didn't feel like the right time (to me) for the game to end, which might be due to having multiple endings in the game (making it harder to pace it).

But yeah, this is one of the games that reminds me why I like interactive fiction in general, it's just fun to read, interaction felt meaningful, and it intersects with a lot of my niche interests.

This game draws on Agatha Christie’s books, with the main NPC being the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the PC being his good friend Captain Hastings. This is set later than most of the books, and Captain Hastings is now a widower with four children.

Unlike Christie’s usual fare of murder and intrigue, this is a light and pleasant game, more like a walking simulator or coffee shop AU. At all times your next task listed at the top of the screen, only one of which requires any sort of big difficulty. The rest of the game is just ‘chill vibes’, checking out the world, etc.

It’s effective at that. Bolded words draw attention to items of interest. You can talk to each character. I only wished that either the TALK response was more drawn out, or that we could ASK people about each other (of course that would take a lot of writing, so it might not be feasible. A menu conversation could have been fun, too).

The final part of the game involves a mystery, which I found to be a little unfair, but the MC had the exact same issues with it that I did and expressed them, which I found funny.

I’ve read most of the Poirot books (maybe all?) and this was a pleasant place to reminisce about it. I don’t know how someone knew to the characters would react, but I expect they’d find it pleasant as well.

This is my third and final Lamppost Projects game to play during this competition, and it is quite different than the rest in some ways.

All three games are set in a D&D-lite world with orcs, half-orcs, halflings, tieflings, magicians, and a setting a little later in European history than most fantasy I've dealt with (this one seems to be around 1600s or later, maybe even 1700s).

All three games also feature watercolor-looking art and a collection of four or more romanceable characters per game, of varying races and genders.

Where this game differs from the rest is that you have skills and animated dice rolls; the others had no randomness at all. The animated dice rolls look really satisfying and seeing the numbers and the target difficulty (and the way the game encourages you to try and fail and keep trying, just like a good GM) makes this a much more pleasant randomized experience for me than most.

You are a private investigator brought into to protect an opera from a threat of robbery. You have to meet the various performers and backstage people and take careful notes, while making use of the background knowledge you chose beforehand. I focused on observation but made myself clumsy, so I did great in conversations but pretty bad when trying to sneak peeks at things covertly.

One outstanding feature of the game is that you can guess the truth of the game at any time starting near act 1, and the game rolls with it if you get it right, which I did right at the end of act 2. You have to pick the right suspect, motive, means, etc. and what's great is that you only have to be mostly right (I had the wrong motive, but otherwise succeeded). If you succeed most of your rolls for your good skills, the villain is fairly obvious, but the target and motives eluded me at first.

I think I like this game best of the three despite a few rough edges (there is romance but it's all packed at the very end of the game and feels separate from the rest), because I have a personal fondness for detective stories, and deduction is very hard to model but this system is one I'll mention in the future when others ask about mystery game advice in the future.

I've played a lot of Stewart Baker's games, and I usually associate him with lighthearted longform narrative-focused choice-based games.

This is a more serious choice-based game with a complex world map and a lot of navigation and some light tracking of objects. To me, it feels like an experiment in shifting tones, and so I'm framing my review with that mindset. That may be an incorrect interpretation, which may render parts of this review less valid.

In this game, you are on a sea, your memories shattered into several (visible) pieces and you have to visit the important locations of your life to remember and revive that part of your life. You learn about your experiences as a youth and as a powerful wizard, and can visit the islands in any order. The world map is navigated with compass directions, as are the individual islands. In each memory, you wander around completing tasks, often tasked with going to specific parts in the map one at a time. Some memories are much shorter. As you complete memories, you have some leeway in how to end them, which raises your score in one of three attributes.

I think recovering your memories as a powerful but defeated creature is a solid trope and works well here. It reminds me of the game Dreamhold, a parser game where you are similarly navigate a space collecting your past memories of a life involving magic and power.

The most effective parts of the game to me were the heavily unusual parts, like what happened to our childhood schoolfriend and what lies hidden below the caves we explore. The author has a talent for describing the truly unusual in an unsettling way.

I was less enthusiastic about the world model and compass navigation. There were large swathes of maps that were essentially 'Hallway D' (but the outdoors equivalent'. I remember something Adam Cadre wrote in a review of Galatea:

In interviews I've been asked to give potential IF authors out there advice, and one of my usual lines is, "The pieces of text you write are the player's reward for thinking of the command that calls them up. So make them rewarding."

While this is choice-based and you don't need to think up commands, it still holds when it comes to discovering new text through exploration. Some of these descriptions could use some more excitement:

This hut is nothing special. Twenty strides by twenty, it holds whatever the village needs holding.

You can reach the veranda of your home to the south-east, while a dirt path leads south-west towards the main road.

This isn't universal advice; Wizard Sniffer has shockingly bare room descriptions and a lot of connecting hallways yet is still well-beloved, but that's mostly due to the large and lively cast that provides flavor in those rooms. (Sorry for the long digression!)

I chose to mostly focus on Despair, one of the three stats you start with. I enjoyed the freedom to choose what to focus on. I think there was one very minor bug near the end where, even though I had used despair the most (both getting and giving), the options I had to choose were ones the walkthrough indicated as applying to coldness. (Specifically, (Spoiler - click to show)the trials I faced were fire and a rickety bridge, though my stats were 3 1 1 (D C R) and I spent 2 1 1 on the four islands.

The overall plot is something I liked, and it felt like a replay would definitely be meaningful, since most islands have very different endings to the stories depending on you choice, and there's no back button (there are saves though). So I thought that part of the game was particularly well-constructed.

This is a Twine game where you wake up in hell and things only go worse from there. But that's because you work there. You wander around trying to torment souls efficiently. Depending on how you do, your boss rewards you.

There are different torment areas. Here's the one for gluttons, for instance:

Whoa, that sweet tooth ward, man, it's a real food paradise! Walls covered in big, dripping chocolate cakes and sticky caramel fountains. Wobbly carts full of treats everywhere, with little sweet-tooth devils running around, stealing cream puffs and licking their sticky fingers.

Nurses in ice cream-stained aprons trying to keep things straight, but they just end up slipping on banana peels or diving headfirst into whipped cream pools. Every corner's full of laughs and sugary chaos, a place where even the devil can't say no to another cookie.

Torture Level: [😈😈]

Your trusty... assistant is here!

If you ask about the diet, it tells you:

Man, this week's diet? It's like, welcome to the sweet tooth ward of hell, where every meal's a feast for those gluttony sinners! Day starts with pancakes stacked sky-high, buttery croissants, and hot chocolate thick as lava. Lunch? We're talking towering cakes and chocolate fountains with marshmallows. Snack time? Cream puffs that explode in your mouth and cookies that just call your name. Dinner's the grand finale, with mousse, tiramisu—Italy's legendary coffee-infused dessert—and soufflés that look like magic on a plate. Every meal here's a temptation you can't resist! .

Call me crazy, but these descriptions don't really scream 'hell' to me, especially for gluttons. In this case, we can add some medicine to mess up the food and increase the torture level.

The game was originally written in Italian it seems from the Twine code (which has all passages titled in Italian), which explains the very rare word in Italian that can be seen from time to time.

To me, the game felt like an exploration game, like Alice in Wonderland, just looking at things. That puzzles that are there aren't too tricky; one was labelling things according to a table, most others just depended on the order you clicked links, so it wasn't too bad.

I found that the writing of each sentence was pretty good, although it was kind of choppy with lots of m-dashes and emojis and asking itself questions (like 'Lunch? We're talking towering cakes!'). Different paragraphs didn't seem closely connected, though, and different areas seemed altogether dissonant from each other. It was hard to see the unifying themes; what makes this place hell-like? Why are orcs here? How do the unusual accents of me and my coworker contribute to the game?

The use of colors for text was nice.