Reviews by MathBrush

This game was written as a learning sample of the ZIL language. It was written over just a few days.

As such, it is small and lean. But Welch has managed to put a few clever puzzles in.

I was unable to solve this without a walkthrough the first time I tried it. After the walkthrough, which is very detailed, I felt like the game required a number of fairly mean actions, but with suitable rewards.

I find this game most interesting as an example of the ZILF language. I wonder how many of the standard responses were hand-coded, and how many part of the language.

This game is highly unusual. It is a text adventure maze implemented on an emulator of an old type of computer.

The setup is fairly simple: a maze that reveals its shape to you once you fail to complete it, and which regenerates randomly each time. A single item, of questionable utility, is found in the maze each time.

The solution to the maze uses a trick I have never seen before in interactive fiction, and which is very cruel.

In this game, you have jumped down a hole into a central hub-like room with multiple color coordinated rooms branching off.

Puzzles follow a sort of game-logic, where mysterious machines and illogical creatures and locations abound.

Parts of it seem forced and/or rough. The machine that merges birds with items is fun to tinker with but some of the results seem hard to guess.

The writing takes a major downturn during the whale segment, where it begins insulting the player and taking a negative and small view of life. This is isolated, and weird.

Overall, I can say with Dwight from the Office: "A lot of the evidence seemed to be based on puns."

I love reading creepy stories and sci-fi stories, and one subgenre of both of those that I like is the time loop story. While such stories can be played just as a puzzler (get this sequence right to fix the machine, like Fingertips:Fingertips), I especially appreciate the ones that focus on human thought and feeling.

This game is well-written and focuses on character and depth. It is, as far as I can tell, completely linear (or completely cyclical, I guess I could say). It's like an endless roundabout with occasional exits that lead to the same roundabout. But it does have an overall narrative arc.

It contains some dark themes, and isn't really appropriate for children, I would say. I found it meaningful and well-done.

This uses slow text, which I usually dislike but found appropriate here (and not too slow). It also used music which I didn't listen to.

I'm a fan of Anssi Raisanen's games, and this one in particular was interesting, but it lacked a few key features that other games from this author have.

It had one particularly clever puzzle involving an extra image included with the game, one maddening guess-the-verb puzzle, and one short and sweet puzzle. Overall, it was shorter than most Raisanen games, and with somewhat less good implementation.

But if you're playing through the author's whole collection, I wouldn't skip out.

This is an odd little game with some major implementation problems.

You start out in a room with a tree and a mysterious force. Exiting this room proved too difficult for many IFComp reviewers in 2006. Evidently, it requires an action that is explicity denied by the GUI. This seems to be an oversight, and not a puzzle.

The rest of the game involves exploring a series of generic rooms. There is a minimal walkthrough, but it seems to leave out several interesting portions of the game. I was intrigued, but unable to discover more than a few hidden set pieces.

This is a surprisingly good Twine game from Spring Thing a few years back. I say surprisingly, because I never hear anyone talk about it.

It uses graphics and background colors to distinguish between two different worlds: one, a porpentine-like world with beings of slime and technology, and the other the human world, where a father is struggling with mental illness.

It has puzzles; at one point, there is a long sequence involving the food chain. I found bits of this fiddly, but interesting enough that I was happy when it was done.

The overall storyline was great, and that's what I like best about games. So I recommend this one.

This is an odd game. The author coded up a little puzzle where you find answer to homework questions and then type them in, together with one or two little fetch quests.

They then spent a great deal of time polishing that game and adding extra frills. But the core game is brief, and the means of completing it are clunky.

This is certainly a unique game.

This game purports to be the eleventh in a long series, which is a clever gimmick. The game has several clever parts.

However, it has a lot of little bugs that add up to a good deal. It's self-aware about it (the game's most accurate line is "Oh boy, you sure hope these generic messages don't mean this puzzle is bugged!").

Overall, it was interesting, but I wasn't able to complete one of the three core puzzles, the one belonging to the error message above. I did read the ending after decompiling, though.

I beta tested this game.

This is a unique concept for a text adventure. You are pitted in a Chopped-style cooking challenge against three other chefs. Your goal is to cook a certain recipe in twenty minutes.

Unfortunately, your competitors have their own ideas, and you have some trouble on your own.

This reminded me of Varicella, both in the numerous autonomous actions of others, and in the time constraint. It also left me feeling like there was more for me to discover that I hadn't figured out.