Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is another game I tested, a hybrid of Twine and TADS.

The idea is that you are an adult (or teen) woman with a boyfriend/partner. Your father is dying of cancer, and could go at any time. You find out that your partner has been working with him on a game (written in TADS) to present to you, years after he started.

The TADS game consists of a house filled with materials for a party. You have to gather up enough stuff to enter the party: a costume, a thing to share, and an invitation. There are 5 ways to satisfy each category. Parts of the house additionally contain journal entries reflecting real-world issues the father had over time.

I really liked the concept of sandwiching a TADS game between twine games, and I like that it works both online and in downloads.

As a beta tester, I’m not sure how effective I was. I found 1 or 2 of the paths (I especially focused on the board game in testing), but that means I neglected 3 or 4.

And that’s both the blessing and the curse of this game: the multiple paths are very clever, allowing people to bypass a lot of puzzles and get to the end, contributing to a more relaxed atmosphere and helping casual people play.

On the other hand, that means that players (and inadequate testers like me) will only see 20-40% of the game. I’ve written before about how having ‘hidden bonus content’ in your game can make the game very very rewarding for those who find it, but overall tends to drag down the score as most people don’t see the hard work you do (Hanon’s game Transparent I think is a good example, where it’s a beautifully complex and rich game that hides most of it below the surface).

I enjoyed on this second playthrough figuring out the computer/radio problem, although I used hints several times. There was a minor hiccup at the end. I did find the puzzle fun and like the solution, though.

The twine scenes are, I think, descriptive and emotional. This kind of writing, with end of life care, can be really hard to write because everyone mourns in a different way. It’s almost impossible to provide options that meet everyone’s way of dealing with grief; one alternative is to write a strong personality for your protagonist and just provide options that are believable for that personality.

I feel like this game leans towards the second choice. Our protagonist has been deeply impacted by the trauma of cancer, and many options hover between ‘soldier through stoically’ and ‘allow sorrow to briefly overcome you’. This provides a contrast to the upbeat, cheery and often child-like TADS game. I think that the reactions of the protagonist are realistic, for a certain type of person and personality; yet at the same time, there is, in me, perhaps a longing for a positive and direct reconciliation and expression of appreciation that the game does not afford. There is in me a desire to have happy endings for games, but also to write games that do not have happy endings (my original ending for Grooverland was to have the main character frozen as a statue forever in a theme park, but CMG talked me out of it as too depressing).

Overall, I find the complex systems and puzzles of the TADS part and the dialogue and descriptiveness of the Twine part to be the best aspects of the game.

I like this game, one that I tested it. Even though it’s longer, I replayed the whole thing before this review, and one of the hardest puzzles in my current WIP was influenced by a puzzle in this game that I really liked.

It’s a Twine game with a parser influence. Like Scott Adams style games, the screen is split into an upper and lower part, but unlike them, the bottom remains mostly static while the top changes. The game has quadratic complexity, as you choose an action and then choose a noun to apply it to, which can be an object in -game or yourself on the sidebar.

Gameplay revolves around discovering and using new spells, which are in a two-syllable format. Over time, the spell system develops some complexity and richness.

Story-wise, you are an initiate in a fraternity of wizards, completing your final initiation: a magical paintball tournament. You have to defeat your brothers while also coming to know them.

I’ve seen some concerns in other reviews about the way you get to know them: by casting a spell that lets you live out other people’s memories, generally their most traumatic. The original version of the game did not include explicit consent for that action, while the most recent does.

From my point of view (which is subjective), this game is clearly fantasy. Not just wizards and spells fantasy (though it has that), but also a fantasy of friendship and understanding. The dream of having a circle of friends so close that you can share anything between you. In fact, there are a lot of clues in the paintball game itself that the whole thing is kind of a setup, a way for people to get to know you; it’s really quite possible that this mind sharing was intended.

Except…parts of the game indicate that the mind spell is newly rediscovered and exciting.

But that’s one aspect of the game I only really noticed now as a player. It’s really trying hard to tell three different stories at once:
1-A goofy game of paintball between fraternity friends with whacky spells and silly pledge rules
2-A dark and serious exploration of humanity’s injustice to those who are different from them
3-A heartwarming tale of acceptance and overcoming insecurity.

So I think part of the problem other reviewers identified isn’t so much that the idea of furrowing through someone’s mind is inherently bad for a story, but that the significance of events and characters takes on really different shades of meaning depending on which part of the story they’re in. Riptide, the frat brother in a treehouse, is a comic individual; Riptide, the oppressed child who essentially experienced torture, is not (I think that was the right character, but I’m not sure).

Overall, though, I enjoyed each subplot separately and found them worthwhile, but I’m not sure they coalesce into a greater whole (something I’ve been concerned about with my own game, which has a similar mix of the flippant and the dark).

Puzzle-wise, it’s outstanding, but also very difficult. I’d likely chalk up the low number of reviews to the puzzles, which are among the most difficult I’ve seen for choice based games of this size, requiring several leaps of intuition and a lot of experimentation. I had to get help several times on my first playthrough, but none this time around.

Overall, I found this satisfying.

This game by Arthur DiBianca has you exploring a multi-layered dungeon while collecting glowing gems of mysterious power (which are attached to the titular Vambrace).

Its big innovation is that there is no need to hit enter; one key is one action. This isn’t the very first game I’ve seen do this (there was a game in this year’s Parsercomp with the same concept), but I think the execution is great here. I feel like care was made to make the commands easier to remember, and I like the gradual reveal of more and more powers/keys.

Making a game like this takes a lot of talent and skill. I recently tried adding a ‘limited command’ section in my own game, specifically emulating Arthur DiBianca, and it was by far the hardest part to code: coming up with interesting puzzles, doing a lot of timing and such. It’s quite hard.

But it comes off great here. Most of the puzzles involve defeating foes or traps in a multi-layer dungeon, and my favorite type of puzzles in the game is where you come across a foe or trap and think, ‘I know exactly what I need to solve this, but I don’t have the capability.’ Then later, you get a new power, and you can run back to the earlier area and solve it.

This author has a lot of good games, but I’d put this in the top third or fourth of all his games.

This game is not archived, but I’m only reviewing it by request. (although technically it’s open on github so I guess that’s the same thing!)

There have been several multiplayer IF games in recent years, many of them by this author. Approaches to multiplayer IF have varied; there are parser games where codes must be passed back and forth and collaboration is key; twine games where codes are passed back and forth but no other communication is meant to be made; and games like this that utilize a server.

This is a very well written and technically proficient game. I think I’m going to divide my thoughts on this game into three areas: the story/writing, the mechanics, and the multiplayer aspect. Because this game works well and the author is proficient, I’m going to be a bit more critical than I would with a newer author, since I think this author values thoughtful criticism (and I hope I’m thoughtful!)

Story and writing

The main storyline is that you are Antony and Cleopatra, with Antony being the Vice President (I assume of the US) and Cleopatra being the Queen of Egypt (I wonder what it would be like if the vice president in real life was married to a monarch of another state. That’d be pretty interesting!). The two of you have been asked to solve the murder of Marlon Brando. You have around two weeks to gather clues, conduct interviews and investigations, and to make an accusation.

The story has varied suspects with differing motivations and interests. I’ve played a lot of other detective games where everyone just kind of blends together, a lot of rich white british people who have no distinguishing characteristics. But in this game, each character is very different. Interviewing Rasputin was memorable, and Vitruvius was very different from James Dean, who was very different from the General.

You’ll notice all the names are taken from famous characters in history. That’s part of the conceit here; kind of like Clone High or Fate Grand Order (neither of which I’ve watched or played), all of the characters are characters from history, modified to fit into a single scenario. For instance, Marlon Brando and James Dean both work at Raytheon.

This is clever, but to me the influence of the character’s historical figure is like La Croix; it’s not really there, just a hint of it. For most of the characters you could have swapped them with some other historical figure and there would be little difference. If it has been Queen Victoria instead of Queen Cleopatra, much of the game could have remained the same, outside of the Blood Diamonds bit. James Dean could have been Timothy Chalamet, etc. The only character that seemed heavily influenced by their historical counterpart is Rasputin. For the others, it mostly seemed like the name was just tacked on with a reference or two (Napoleon’s coat) with the mental associations meant to be developed by the reader.

But that’s not to say the characters aren’t developed; they’re very well developed! Just not in ways that strongly justify the unusual character choices.

The storyline itself was really interesting, and I liked seeing how things developed out and new storylines emerged.

Mechanics

You’re given a calendar with several blank days, each day with two appointments to make. You can schedule interviews or visiting locations (I thought you had to do one of each at first, but later I doubled up on appointments once I realized you can do so). Once in a meeting, you can mostly just click every link, although there are occasional choices you can make that make a difference. So the real strategy lies not in each individual interview, but in which interviews to schedule.

I found that satisfying in the long run, as time began running out and I had to guess which meetings were most important to schedule.

I’ve mentioned before my informal classification of mystery IF:

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 a type 3 murder mystery. At the end you have to pick who did it and why.

I got it wrong, mostly because I psyched myself out about a character I hadn’t had a chance to interview. But the solution was logical!

Multiplayer aspect

I played this game twice, first as part of the Seatlle IF Meetup and then again on my own.

In the meetup, we only got through the first day after 30 minutes of playing. On my own, it took me over an hour to finish.

Overall, I usually play IF around other events in my life like meals, childcare, work, tutoring, etc. and so it’s pretty hard to find time to meet up with others to play IF. That’s why I tend to prefer multiplayer IF that has small amounts of text and short gameplay (like Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip by the same author).

This game has a lot of text and long gameplay! There was also one time while (when playing with two browsers on the same computer) it said I was losing connection and might have everything reset without saving.

That says to me that this type of game may be more appropriate for a ‘multiple people in one room’ setting, like a TTRPG or boardgame, but digitally.

This feeling was strengthened once I realized that there’s not really special abilities for each of the two protagonists or information only one receives. There are certainly little details here and there and there are some witnessses where you get substantially different options, but by and large most of the multiplayer aspect is ‘do the two of you agree on this course of action’, which again to me sounds better for a cooperative game played by people in the same room.

Overall

This was a strong game, well made, and I enjoyed it. The multiplayer aspect and the historical figures weren’t compelling to me, and I believe the game could have retained much of its enjoyability without either one. But I’m glad it encouraged me to work with others and I’m glad I spent time with this.

This is a brief Texture game about falling in an infinite void. The setting gives me fond memories of the Magnus Archives, but the tone is very different; rather than using the infinite fall to provoke horror or terror, its used here as a sort of metaphor, although a vague one.

You have a companion in this falling, a mysterious person dressed as a rockstar whom you can learn more about.

There were a lot of real choices in the game, as most options disappeared after choosing one. I didn’t choose to replay because I found my one playthrough satisfying.

This is a short branching Twine game with links to other websites and multimedia about a lion.

I don’t have much to say about this one. It’s pretty chaotic; each branch does something really different and then returns. I found a death ending but no other ending.

Parts of it were sweet and parts of it were funny. The writing is a little weird; not in a ‘bad spelling/grammar’ kind of way necessarily, but in a logical flow kind of way. It jumps from idea to idea, kind of like listening to someone spitball ideas about a game.

It had some interesting links about lion diet and a girl hypnotizing a frog, so that was cool. Interesting game.

A long time ago I studied IFComp games and noticed games that were marked as unfinished tended to do really poorly in the voting, regardless of their quality. I wonder if that’s changed now? It’ll be interesting to see how this game places, given that it says it will be updated and that several of the endings cut off in the middle of the story.

Your glasses are missing, and you have to find them! There are two key suspects, Minh and Jaime. All of them and you belong to the same book club.

The game branches pretty heavily, with one early ending being peaceful and happy and another ending I had involved organized crime(???)

Overall, it was fun, but just needs some more work. There were some typos (like ‘peak’ for ‘peek’, which is funny because I’ve made that same mistake at least twice this week), but not too many.

It’s interesting to compare this unfinished Choicescript game to One Knight Stand, another unfinished Choicescript game in the comp. This game is pretty minimal with just a few choices, but still manages to branch a lot. The other game has over 400K words with tons of choices for each option. Both manage to be pretty fun.

I liked what I saw of this game, there just wasn’t a lot.

I really enjoyed this escape room game.

While you’d think there’d be a big overlap in escape rooms and interactive fiction, the two have very distinct flavors (at least ifcomp-style interactive fiction). I wonder if its because escape rooms often rely heavily on visual clues? (like this game does).

In any case, this has the hallmarks of an escape room: a contrived scenario with codes, color schemes, passwords, chains, etc. where its clear the story (while strong) is in service to the puzzles.

You wake up, chained and forgetful, in a room filled with locks, drawers, safes, keys, etc.

Most of gameplay revolves around trying to figure out correct passphrases to type into boxes. The passphrases represent you having ‘done the work’ of solving.

I knew once I started this that it was pretty hard, probably too hard for me. I also knew that for this type of game, getting hints would probably significantly diminish the experience. So I persevered for quite a while, and finally solved it without hints! That was very satisfying.

There do seem to be several red herrings.

I do think this game defies a lot of conventions of IFComp games, with its fairly contrived story and emphasis on visual-only clues and passwords. However, it executed this at a high level of skill, and I really liked it.

This is a heist game, written in Twine.

It has a character selection screen, and then you’re given a problem to solve. In this case, an ancient Cat goddess desires her treasure back!

The game that ensues is almost entirely focused on mechanics, with the story broadly sketched out. You end up in a very large museum that you have to navigate, finding the clues and items necessary to grab the treasure.

I found myself wishing for an on-screen map early on, getting lost pretty easily. Eventually a found a map, right before I won, but it could have been nice to have it onscreen.

There are 16 or so locations in the museum, and each one has only a line or two of description, with perhaps one interesting item to interact with. This strips down the game to its core features, which are primarily movement and object gathering.

I’ve seen a lot of reviews of parser games saying ‘I wonder if this should have been choice based’. Here, I think, not ‘this should be parser based’ but ‘I wonder if the author would enjoy writing parser games’. There seems to be a true pleasure in gathering inventory and travelling that I think could make parser code appealing.

In any case, I solved it, but only with some hints and a little peeking at the code (I was dumb and couldn’t find the key combination on my own).

Overall, I would have liked a little more fleshed out detail in the museum, since it sounded cool, and would have liked an on screen map, but I did have fun. I scored 82/100!

This game has a fun concept, using a messaging app to tell a story (in this case Telegram).

I don’t have Telegram, so I played the web version.

This idea has been played around with before; the Lifeline series of games has you texting with an astronaut, and I once was commissioned to write a game where you get a series of texts from someone using a Ouija board to communicate with you.

Anyway, I like the concept a lot. The timed text would fit in with the messaging thing, but I had an issue where every time the next message appeared it would change the focus of the screen, losing my place. So I could either have the text be really slow so I could finish before any interrupt (but then feel frustrated) or fast and constantly lose my place. I generally solved it by increasing the reading speed to 20x, letting it all appear, and then scrolling back. I think in the future it could be nice to have an option to have the messages not ‘bump’ the screen (unless there was such an option that I missed!)

The story is one that seems part symbolic or dreamlike and part lifelike. You are swallowed by an enormous whale, and discover a variety of things inside. I visited around 20 of 90 passages, so my experience was likely very different from others. I encountered and befriended a strange hermit, discovered my past, and attempted escape.

The graphics were really lovely. Sometimes they didn’t quite match what was being said (mentioning baleen but showing normal teeth, describing a bench with a watch and a hook but not showing them in the image), but the quality was high and they looked lovely.

Overall, I like the writing and art and would definitely try more such games.