Reviews by MathBrush

This game has a few different twists, but I’ll try to avoid spoilers the best I can.

This is a choice-based game, and it is quite extensive. It took me right around the two hour mark to complete. It’s reminiscent of Gruescript in a sense, with different locations you can click to and an inventory to use. However, the inventory only shows up every now and then in-game.

While it grows more complex, it feels fair to say that gameplay revolves around a ship captain walking around the ship, trying to understand a mysterious poem given by ancestors and talking to others on the ship.

Storywise, it’s all about navigation and pushing to the unknown. There are different books that give you lore about the world. The pirates in the game all curse, presumably for verisimilitude, but for some reason the swearing was written exactly the way the 14 yr old boys in my school swear so I kept picturing very young pirates.

Many of the characters have tragic backstories. There are several opportunities to show mercy or justice and to change your relationship with others.

The writing overall was adventurous and dramatic. Near the end, there were a few different narrative threads that came together, but I’m not sure how I felt about the resolution. I was left with more questions than answers.

There were graphical puzzles in the game as well. At first, they fit well into the flow of the story, providing simple distractions along the main journey. Near the end, though, there were so many puzzles of such quantity that by the time I returned to the story I had forgotten much of what had happened. While I do enjoy graphical puzzles from time to time, they lack many of the features I’ve come to enjoy in text based fiction and thus weren’t quite as enjoyable to me.

The level of craftsmanship in the UI and puzzles was very high; the author clearly has a good grasp of visual design and event-based programming.

This game is a brief but lively game in a fantasy world with anthropomorphic animals (although they're apparently not quite anthropomorphic animals) where you need to whip together a few random ingredients to make a creative recipe.

It’s written for the Magx compiler, a variant of AGT, and runs in Gargoyle for me.

The world seems fun and lively. To me it felt like Redwall but with invented names for the various species and fruits. While the game is fairly short, its many locations and NPCs and the worldbuilding made it feel large.

I struggled with some of the language as much of it feels academic and full of complex words. For instance, in a book on science:

"The book explain how the Subtle is the other face of handicraft and
mechanism-making, and how both can, and must, be balanced, being
the natural path of progress and improved living; the example of how
the energy from the lightning bolt spell can be stored in water-filled
glass container with metallic rivestiment on the outside and a central
spike inside is a prime one of this balancing between Subtle and
handicraft, when on the other side, handicraft instruments are needed
in Subtle research and practice, and no astrometry and time can’t be
done without mechanical devices, and illuminating orbs can’t be
produced without Subtle. Indeed an useful text for a creator, inspiring
useful (and not-so-useful, I admit) creations. Thanks, Etuye !!"

This uses complex language like ‘rivestiment’ and ‘astrometry’ and uses elaborate sentence structure, and some other parts of the game are similar, so I was lost at times.

The puzzles were generally well-clued; I enjoyed the puzzle involving the NPCs, as it felt organic and natural to look around the city and hunt for people.

The implementation is weak in several places, though; many things are described but don’t exist, so if something is mentioned in the text (like the ‘tools of the trade’ in the front room) a command regarding them will result in an error message (like 'X TOOLS: I don’t see any tools here). One puzzle says you need to (Spoiler - click to show)immerse a vine in a pond, but (Spoiler - click to show)PUT VINE IN POND, IMMERSE VINE, INSERT VINE IN POND etc. all don’t work. The walkthrough (which I had to use just for this puzzle) admits this is a ‘read the author’s mind’ moment, but I think it might be better just to make the other actions synonyms for the correct one.

So I think this has some solid worldbuilding and interesting puzzle mechanics, but I think the language could be simpler and more straightforward and the implementation could be refined. When I do rate this on IFDB, I will definitely bump up my score if there is a post-comp release. Overall, I think the characters seemed fun and the food sounded good!

Last year’s game ‘Who Shot Gum E Bear?’ by the same author had a deeply amusing concept (hardboiled noir detective where everyone is candy) coupled with some solid writing but sketchy implementation.

This year’s game ups the notch a bit on the implementation but uses a more secluded setting.

You are called to an abandoned factory which is scheduled for demolition and tasked with finding out what happened to a missing husband. You get locked in, and have to use your wits to solve the case and to get out.

I’m going to quote my classification of (many but not all) interactive fiction mystery games:

1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This is the first type. Solving puzzles involves collecting evidence as well as escaping and once all puzzles are solved the game is over. Accusations, motive, etc. are all handled by the PC rather than the player, and I think that works well here.

The game has some suggestive/racy elements, enough that I wouldn’t want my middle-school age son to play it but mild enough that if he did I wouldn’t be especially upset, just have to explain the use of certain items.

The implementation is both really neat and kind of bad. The neat stuff is how the puzzles go beyond ‘one item one use’ in clever ways. The bad is that most of the standard responses aren’t changed. It might help for next time to use RESPONSES ALL while programming to get a list of responses and then changing a lot of them. But it’s not necessary; if the goal is just to have a snack-size fun game, that’s already being achieved here. The responses would only be if the author specifically wanted a more polished game. I think I mostly would want that because the writings so good everywhere else that seeing it in the standard responses would make the game even more fun.

I think the best descriptors for this game might be ‘incestbait’ and '‘unusual UI’.

Let’s talk about UI first. The idea is that you are ‘aiming’ at the screen, with a literal scope in the title page and elsewhere just dragging your aim around. While moving around the page you find text you can click on. So it’s choice based, but with work to discover the choices.

The controls are opposite from what I expected. It all clicked when I realized that instead of panning around the page I was moving the camera.

This is a very long game, and took me longer than 2 hours to complete. Parts of it were difficult; a couple of times I could have sworn the text needed to progress just wasn’t there, so I exited out completely and ‘Resume’ and it worked. But looking back, I likely just had trouble finding the right link. I got very stuck at one point looking for my father, due to the many places possible to look.

The story is one of was and love. You play as two siblings who have had a love/hate/LOVE relationship their whole life. While there is no history of romantic intimacy between you two, everything in the game drips with its possibility, so much that the entire theme of the game seems to be ‘what if two siblings were almost-lovers and sublimated that tension into hate’.

The backdrop is like a modern Gone With the Wind or War and Peace, where a violent war is raging and you are part of a privileged family, the children of an admiral. The countries involved seem to be fictional, but evoke modern tropes: an aggressor country feeding misinformation to others to justify invading a smaller country; corruption at the highest levels, etc.

The game opens with a violent conflict between the two protagonists, and I never really understood the justification for that. Even seeing the messages that spurred the conflict, I don’t understand why the fight happened.

In any case, this really does have the overall feel of the grand war novels I mentioned before, with similar musings on changes in life. The UI was an interesting concept but by the end it started to wear thin. It may be because I was using a trackpad and playing on desktop; I had to click and drag a lot.

There definitely is strong craftmanship in evidence; this is the kind of game where I personally didn’t love it but I’d definitely hire the creator for game work if I ran a studio. So the pros of this game are mostly in the areas of the author’s skill, and the cons are mostly in my personal taste.

There’s a tendency in interactive fiction for people to talk about ‘old fashioned adventures’ or ‘old school’ games , but it means different things to different people, usually ‘similar to games I played as a kid’.

I didn’t really get heavily into IF until I was in my thirties, so I don’t have a ton of feelings for older games. But I do have a couple experiences as a kid; one was trying Zork in my teens and failing to do much of anything (quit at the dam), and the other was playing some obscure text adventures with graphics in 6th grade (one called Hacker and another about rhymes in an Alice in Wonderland type world).

This game really evoked for me the nostalgia of those games, like Hacker. I know other Adventuron games are similar in appearance, but this also really got the feel of games of those time down well. It even reminded me of the feel of games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

Anyway, you’re a spy for a secret organization called TURTLE and you’re called in to rescue another spy who is in trouble. Your goal is to infiltrate the enemy’s secret villa and steal back his diamond while stopping his evil plan.

There are a lot of tropes here similar to the 80s and 90s and early bond movies. Some are a bit outdated, but it has a nice overall action vibe. It’s also very Italian (for me the most Italian moment was finding a monastery where the monks wouldn’t let you in without a crucifix). There’s a lot of Italian text in the game. While I’m not fluent, I could understand most of the Italian pretty easily, but it may be useful having google translate nearby (although you can’t copy and paste from Adventuron, last time I checked).

Puzzles were generally fair and well clued, and had fun features like a computer system and a money system. I had to check the walkthrough near the end about three different times.

Overall, I had a great time. Very fun.

I opened this game and I was poking around and thought, ‘Man, this really feels familiar. Where have I seen this before? Did I test this?’

Then I checked, and I realized that I had played it in the German Grand Prix as Fischstäbchen! I really enjoyed that game, so it was fun to see the translation here (something which has only happened recently since rule changes allowing translations of games).

This is a fairly hefty but manageable parser game about exploring a fishing boat in Point Nemo, the point on earth furthest from land. Things don’t seem quite normal; your crew won’t come out of their rooms and your cook spends a lot of time chanting out of ancient books and being surrounded by freezing mist…

I loved the German version of this game, especially since it had a built-in help menu to list all verbs that you need to finish, something that worked really well for me as a noob. This version seems like slightly different compared to the old one; it has some puzzles I don’t remember, and some features like highlighting of exits, which I like.

On the other hand, seeing it in my native tongue makes it easier to be judgmental. For instance, several times, there were ‘double directions’ like saying something is ‘down’ but you access it to the ‘west’. Even though both ‘down’ and ‘west’ are highlighted, going ‘down’ gives an error. I think it would have worked better to redirect ‘down’ and ‘west’ to work the same way.

The map is pretty intimidating at first. I’d recommend just exploring and mapping the whole thing before anything else as several of the puzzles just involve finding people or things.

I used the hints a couple of times, even for things I did in my last playthrough.

Overall the things I liked last time are still here: the Lovecraftian/dry humour mix and the active and engaging puzzles. I also like the guidance it gives you on some puzzles and the restart method for when you die.

Overall, I think I liked the German version slightly better only because playing in another language presents its own unique challenges and gameplay, but I still enjoyed this one.

This game is an Inform murder mystery by thesleuthacademy, who has written numerous reviews for mysteries on IFDB in the last year or so. It’s nice to see a game by them!

Mysteries are one of my favorite genres of game, so I was interested to see how it plays out here. There are several standard ways to run a mystery in interactive fiction:
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This game is a mix of 3 and 4. You have to collect enough physical evidence to proceed to a quiz, and then pass the quiz to beat the game.

The storyline is simple. A man was found alone in his room in a pool of blood with no visible wounds. You must examine this single room to discover the clues.

This game boasts a large number of beta testers, which is nice. I struggled with some of the setup, however. Many of the ‘standard responses’ for Inform were not helpful. For instance, there were some ear plugs that I tried to take and it said ‘That is not portable’. Some commands that might have had useful responses didn’t work; for instance, TALK TO didn’t have any message like ‘Conversation in this game is handled by ASKING’ (although that was mentioned in the help system!) and PLAY PIANO had no response.

There are some very helpful responses, though, like SEARCH and LOOK UNDER saying you only need to ‘examine’.

At the quiz at the end, I really struggled with the third question. I guessed it but then decompiled the game to see how I could have gotten there. It seems that the conversation system is a lot larger than I had expected. I had gotten stuck since SHOW (something) TO (someone) often didn’t have a response, so I assumed asking about those things wouldn’t be helpful.

There is one puzzle of a type I haven’t seen before in a parser mystery, involving a grid. I thought that was pretty clever.

Overall, I felt like tightening up some of the standard responses and adding more synonyms and actions like TALK TO and PLAY PIANO would make this an excellent short mystery adventure.

This is a game translated from Russian that has quite a bit of twists and turns in it. Most are discovered early on.

I’ll say that a game with a sleeping woman and ‘16+’ and referring to ‘your mistress’ turned out to be something very different than I was expecting. It turns out to be a grim tale about the effects of war but with a sweet perspective.

More on the setting:
(Spoiler - click to show)The gameplay style is Twine with inventory management and location state tracking. So you can move objects from room to room, and your constant inventory of things like hands and feet change in their function over time.

The puzzles are fairly tricky but logical. One thing I might have appreciated was automatically ‘looking’ after travelling to each new location, since what’s in each location often changes due to your actions. I also had a bit of trouble some times mentally picturing how all the different locations related to each other.

I think this is around a 1-2 hour game, although I used the walkthrough for part of it. I like the concept, and appreciated the dedication at the end. I think there are a lot of strong story elements here and puzzles. There are also some neat images, although playing online on the ifcomp website I didn’t see some of the images, and they were broken. You can still click on them to advance though.

Part of the game is designed to show the horrors of war and for me it was very effective, the way the protagonist just didn’t understand really helped drive home for me how scary it must all be.

I have to preface this review by saying that I have always that that Francis Bacon, the renaissance guy, was the same as Francis Bacon, the scary pope painting guy. I thought it was just some kind of über-Protestant thing. This game really cleared that up!

I was excited while playing this game, although perhaps not for a reason the author would have foreseen. I’ve been making an area in my own game which is a puzzleless museum placed adjacent to conversation heavy areas, and I was wondering how many conversation topics would be appropriate, and how large of a museum would make sense, and whether players should be able to lawnmower all topics or have to pick and choose.

So when I saw this puzzleless museum conversation game, I was very intrigued to poke around at the mechanics and see my overall impression. So while the game seems far more focused on story than mechanics, this review will focus a bit more on the latter.

The setup is that you are in a museum with three main rooms, each with a triptych of paintings. The paintings are real paintings by Francis Bacon; I was able to look them all up and see what they looked like in real life.

Examining the paintings and walking around the museum gives you the opportunity to converse with various figures, each of which has their own opinion on Francis Bacon. The NPCs are also adaptable, and you can change their opinion of you and willingness to talk by various actions, in a way I haven’t seen much of since games like Galatea and Blue Lacuna (although on a smaller scale here).

Topics are listed, and as you talk they change, although the change isn’t notified. You can ask about some things not on the list (for instance, I asked an early character about Christ, since the topic of the painting was Golgotha).

There are also several achievements, allowing for some puzzle elements. Some of them are straightforward, while others might be difficult to think about. Several achievements involved exhausting conversation trees, which I honestly did not want to do; not because I didn’t want to see more text, but by picking only the topics I wanted, I felt I had agency, but exhausting the tree didn’t feel ‘agent-y’. ‘Agentic’?

This game has some very heavy themes: sexual abuse and rape, violent assaults, traumatic death, obsession, religion, broken relationships, and so on. But all of it is examined in a thoughtful way, from a distance. None of these things are glorified; instead, different observers comment on it, some finding it deeply repugnant, others finding beauty in pain.

There is a great deal of strong profanity, and some of the language around Christ made me feel uncomfortable (as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), but I understand the author’s choices here and the effect they were going for. So while those parts weren’t for me, much of the game was, and I plan on rating this very highly. Beyond just appreciating the game’s messages, I also learned and grew as an author by reading this work, which is the highest compliment I am capable of giving.

This is I think the 5th Jim MacBrayne game I’ve played, and I think it’s definitely the most fair and well scoped of them that I’ve played; either that or I’m simply getting used to their internal logic.

These games are all written in a custom engine that is remarkably smooth, as least here. For those new to Jim MacBrayne games, the most unusual feature is that if an object is in a container or on a supporter, you can’t take it; trying to will say ‘You don’t see any…’. I believe this is due to the fact that tracing through the contents of all the supporters and containers is too hard for the engine to handle. Instead, you have to say TAKE ALL FROM ____. There is a shortcut specifically for that (F1).

Anyway, the main idea of the game is that you are hunting through a cottage and adjoining area for a mysterious orb, with clues left behind by a circle of elders.

Most of the puzzles revolve around enigmatic devices that you have to figure out, interspersed with riddles and codes that explain how to use them.

I was able to get pretty far on my own; although I only got 70 points by the two hour mark, when I checked the walkthrough I was about 40% through the game. The puzzles are tough but fair; the place where I got stuck was due to not remember a clue from earlier.

The setting is very abstract, and much like Zork in its mix of fantasy and modern aesthetics.

I was glad to play this game, and hope Jim MacBrayne is able to enjoy coding up games for a while to come.