Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This French fantasy game is divided in both space and time. You have four days in which to act, and a large map where you can hop to different areas.

I found one ending, but I know how I could have gotten more.

The main idea is that a strange events has happened: the Gods that once ruled mortals have left, agreeing to deal with the human world no more. But some still cling to their worship.

Wandering around town, you follow clues that lead you to a conspiracy involving both gods and King. You must choose what to do with the news that you've learned.

Overall, it was fun. The giant map was intimidating, as well as the four days, but in the end most areas have nothing special and only one event of importance happens in one area each on days 2-4, making it a brief but interesting story with a large chunk of worldbuilding.

Like one comment said on itch, it would be fun to be able to order the tasty food described in the inns!

In this game, you are the lawyer or executor of Tatie Lucette and have to distribute her estate.

To do this, you examine each of the three objects (a fortune-granting golden scepter, a future-telling lamp, and some kind of weird sexual toy that transfers mind consciousness). You have to read many epistolary fragments of Tatie's history to figure out what she was like (a spy, a singer, actress, fighter, drug-user, extensive lover, and so on). Each of her 9 attributes maps on to one of the 3 artifacts.

In addition, there are 7 possible heirs (including a cat), each of which possesses differing amounts of those 9 traits.

So, it's pretty simple: find the three traits each object has, find the person who has those traits, and win!

Unfortunately, there is a time-limit, so you can't interrogate everyone. So you need to carefully pick what you'll ask who.

Or, like me, you can replay several times.

There are a ton of words in this. As a non-native speaker, it was a struggle to read a pageful or more for every choice when each of 8 different options on the screen leads to 8 or more options (so basically like a 50-100 page French book).

The game openly embraces drugs and sexuality, even having you show pornography to a minor at one point, which stuck out to me as something I didn't really feel comfortable with.

Overall, the writing was amusing and the puzzle structure was a good one that I could see being fun in future games as well.

This was quite a difficult French IFComp game for me to finish, as it's a wordplay game and involves several words that I don't know well.

It's a (mostly) one-room game where you arrive at an old professor friend's lab to find yourself locked inside! All that you have with you are the random objects that you can scrounge up as well as the professor's amazing machine that can manipulate letters.

The main rules are that you can take away one letter from an object (which transforms the object) and you can apply that letter to another object. You can only ever store up one letter at a time.

While the main story is a little thin, the setting is amusing and has a lot of nice little details. Though of course hard for me as a non-native speaker, the wordplay was fun, and there are help commands like 'penser' that are a real lifesaver.

The game is not too long, with 3 or so main puzzles to get through and a few sidequests you can do.

If you like wordplay and French, this is a great game for you.

This is a 10K word prologue to a longer planned game, entered into the French IF competition.

It has a compelling story: your uncle whom you've rarely spoken to writes to you, asking you to come quickly. Much of this prologue is occupied with travelling there while simultaneously making choices that define your background (I made myself a poor unemployed person who brought nothing along with the journey).

You soon discover that (through a series of events I won't spoil) you owe a massive debt. You encounter a few interesting people (I thought the neighbor and the ruler of the town were well-written), and then the prologue stops dead in its tracks.

This has a lot of good in it now and could become great one day.

This game is the author's first experience with programming ever, which is pretty impressive given how nice it is.

It's a twine game where your character finds a box of documents on his doorstop dropped off by his mother.

Inside is a blank family tree and envelopes with different names on them. You open yours first, finding a lot of documents about your birth and upbringing.

The family tree can be filled out via a kind of quiz where you select from dropdown boxes, and if you get the information correct you unlock new envelopes.

The author didn't complete their full vision, but there is a lot here. I like epistolary storytelling (is that you you say it? Epistolic? something else) and there is a lot of variety in tone and structure here.

I didn't receive a dramatic ending; I just unlocked the whole tree and didn't see any new links. It felt satisfying though.

This is a choice-based French game that has, I think, 20 or so songs that play in the background (which I didn't realize until afterwards, as I play on a device with quiet speakers).

You are tasked with carrying a cadaver through a dark and twisted land where people live in fear and much destruction has occurred.

Gameplay consists of binary choices, like whether to go north or south or whether to follow fireflies or not.

The writing was great; even as a non-native speaker, I could imagine a lot of the cool scenarios and things that were written about. I had more trouble with the choices, as it was difficult to make any sort of overall strategy, and often (but not always) felt like one had to just guess. There is an undo button which is nice, and other players report there being at least 3 very distinct paths.

This is a short French game in Ink. There are always two choices: "nous" [us] and "je" [we].

It tells the story of a burgeoning civilization, learning to find food and learn language. Choosing 'nous' gives communal results, while 'je' gives individual results.

It's a fairly short game, with two endings which the author says are meant to lead us to reflection. I thought it was pretty interesting, but I felt like the plot was a little generic, and it would have been nice to have some effect of mixing the two options or some other effect of the choices.

It was pretty fun though!

This was a fun game with a short playtime but some replay value.

You are in a village in a post-apocalyptic, bucolic life. Unfortunately, looking out the window, you discover that a zombie, a monster of legend, is coming to attack you!

You have to run (or, if you die, your neighbor runs) to the nearby houses to try to recruit more villagers to help you survive against the zombies.

It's a kind of optimization puzzle, where some people only respond if you already have a large group, or if you've talked to the right person, etc.

I played 3 times, and managed to save everyone the third time. Parts of the story felt a bit thin on replay, but the puzzle and seeing the network of relationships was fun.

I intended on playing all of the FrenchComp 25 (or, more properly, the Concours de Fiction Interactive Francophone) games in a week or two, and then I found this game.

Altogether, it took me over a week to finish. This is quite a big game, with the unusual feature that almost every part of it is illustrated with beautiful ASCII art, including the inventory screen (showing our heroine and the things she carries), a map, and all of the NPCs and several important items.

The source code is huge (partly due to the art), currently the second-largest file I've personally ever opened in terms of words and the longest in terms of lines (in Inform 7).

But is it well-made and fun?

I think so. The idea is that you are a spy sent to pose as a laundrywoman in the mansion of a count rumored to be a Russian general in disguise. You have to infiltrate the mansion, gain everyone's trust, and do everything you can to promote the communist cause, with missions of increasing importance.

Gameplay is almost entirely choice-based, with numbered and lettered menu options. Occasionally it was fiddly; if you want to look at something you're holding, you must open the inventory before looking at it. Similarly, if you want to use an item you're holding, you have to open the inventory. Making the wrong choice can take a few turns to get back on track as you have to opt out of the menu you're in.

But once you get practice with the system, it works well.

I didn't encounter any major bugs. After 5 days of making progress on my own (real life days; in the game I was on night 3) I asked for hints from the author, who obliged. Following the hints got me stuck twice due to not doing the things that I should have done first ((Spoiler - click to show)I didn't find the elevator before getting the photographic kit, and I didn't open the crates before sabotaging them). However, I found cheat codes in the source text which let me skip exactly those parts.

There is a great deal of text in the game, most of it very interesting. The characters are nuanced and there is a lot of tension, especially with our spy handler who is also likely our lover.

Some puzzles were a bit hard to figure out, but it's hard to know whether that's due to me not knowing French or because the game is hard. Playing in a foreign language casts a rosy glow over a game for me, so a native speaker may find it less fun or more fun than I did, I suppose. I don't know!

The text presented in-game is thoroughly pro-communist, extolling the virtues of the worker and decrying the capitalist system. Growing up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I've read many texts by church leaders in the 1910's to 1980's that warned of communism as one of the greatest threats in the world, a godless conspiracy that killed millions and had the goal to destroy religion, abolish the nuclear family (since kids are raised communally in traditional communism) and so on. So it's interesting to hear full-throated explanations on both sides for why essentially the same actions are either a great evil or the greatest good.

Overall, puzzle highlights include using a wartime code-sender and operating (Spoiler - click to show)a tank and various old-fashioned tools.

A fun game. A long game; it takes place over 5 days and each day is basically a complete game. I thought that the first day would be about it (getting into the basement) and was shocked there was more; in fact, there was a lot more, I hadn't even seen half the map and seeing the whole map isn't even half the game! I'd say it's similar in size to Counterfeit Monkey and Anchorhead (maybe a bit smaller than Anchorhead, it's hard to tell. More dialogue, certainly).

This game is structured like a linear visual story, with black and white hand-drawn images. It won the Short Game Showcase.

Here are the criteria I use to judge things with:

-Polish: The game is both polished and Polish (the author is from Poland), so it doubly fits here. More seriously, the game uses a variety of textual techniques to vary the appearance and the writing had no typos that I saw.
-Descriptiveness: The writing was vivid and I was able to picture what was going on.
-Interactivity/Use of medium: While there was little interactivity, I also use this category for the artwork and structure of visual novels. The art definitely contributed to the overall feeling here, expressing disinterested observation, alienation, fear, isolation, and determination.
-Emotional impact: I actually originally played this game for the first few pages a while ago and stopped because I didn't like what it was about. Finishing it later, it was not what I had originally expected. Both times I felt a strong emotional reaction.
-Would I play again?: Yes, I think I would, there's a lot here that is of interest.