Reviews by MathBrush

There's a long tradition of games about completing a magical education, including early games like Enchanter and more recent games like Winter at Hogwarts and Junior Arithmancer.

This game is a pretty standard example of the genre, where you have 5 tasks to perform and must search for spell books and ingredients to complete the 5 tasks.

This game uses a custom web parser. It's actually not too bad, being able to handle things like hitting the up arrow to repeat earlier commands and getting a lot of commands I typed right. It does have weaknesses, though, like not understanding pronouns like 'it'.

The nice things about this game include multiple paths to solutions for many puzzles. It has a built-in hint system, but I often found the hints were only available for things I already knew about. I had to check the walkthrough for about 30-40% of the game, and finished at 2 hrs 7 minutes (according to the game's handy timer).

I found several typos in the game, and it wasn't very descriptive. But I had fun with this game, and appreciate how the engine seems to be coming along nicely.

This game is a fairly hefty parser game where a spaceship is sent spiraling off into space with only one person, you, in it.

You have a to-do list that expands and contracts as the game demands. There are a lot of little devices: cabinets, panels, fuses, etc. and a very intricate-seeming fuel injection system.

The puzzles are generally clever. Some of them are moon-logic type puzzles.
As a case in point, very near the end of the game (heavy endgame spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)you find the captain's journal and need to unlock it. The captain has two pictures: one of a dog named Pluto and one of the moon. The idea is that the password is Pluto's moon, Charon. But why would someone, in their own room, make their only personal objects just happen to be an obscure hint for their own password?. But most of the puzzles are fair.

Implementation is sometimes missing but when it's not it's very solid. So a lot of cool objects are implemented (including a large rope) but a lot of scenery objects are just not there or are missing reasonable actions. (For instance, (mild lategame spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)if you unlock the starboard chest, it has wires, but you can't refer to them or interact with them in any way. Similarly, there is an operations console on the bridge which isn't implemented.

I think this is already a good game, but I think with a few tweaks it could become a great game. Maybe there could be a post-comp release with a bit more things written in? Either way, I enjoyed playing this. It was a little unpolished, but had nice puzzles, pretty descriptive, and was enjoyable, and I would replay it if it was tweaked.

This is the third game by Eric Zinda with the Perplexity engine. The first two games were intended to be played with voice, I believe, while this game didn't seem to have the voice option.

The Perplexity engine is still really rough, but each game has been better than the last one. I imagine there's a ton of backend work going on between games, but I think the front-facing part could use a tune-up.

In this game, you explore a bunch of surreal areas, usually involving nature, a deer, and traffic-related imagery.

While the game is a significant improvement over previous entries, it's still pretty rough.

Polish-wise, the game tends to form uncapitalized sentences when using automated descriptions. It is smart enough to answer the question WHERE IS THE _____? but not smart enough to make the output easily understandable. This version seems to understand most traditional IF commands and abbreviations (like X for LOOK AT and I for INVENTORY, which is a big relief.

Descriptiveness-wise, the game has many rooms with a cursory description followed by a list of visual objects, sometimes kind of confusing (like 'A bush, a bush, and a tree').

When it comes to interactivity, the game is mostly fair, but at least one point in the walkthrough asks you to interact with an object that is not visible and doesn't show up in the description of other objects (specifically the (Spoiler - click to show)branch in the mossy log area).

Emotionally, I liked the surreal theme and thought it was cool. The little clues were nice. The other issues made it harder to stay invested but I like the concept.

There's not a ton of replayability, but overall I wasn't sad I played.

This seems exactly like the kind of game that would be made by a talented and energetic individual who had never played a text adventure made in the last three decades if they woke up one day and said "I'm going to make the coolest text adventure on earth" but didn't have many people test it.

It's a python game with a bunch of actually really good ascii art. It has a maze, randomized combat, some tricky puzzles, art that sometimes changes according to your actions. Seems like everything a text adventure would need.

Except it has very few of the quality-of-life expectations most parser games have, and many of the solutions are poorly hinted.

For instance, on the very first screen, you are around some trees. Commands like N, NORTH, I, INVENTORY, X ME, LOOK ME don't work at all, but that's okay, this is a custom parser so it has no need to follow conventions from other games. Rereading the help text shows that STATUS gives inventory (although I didn't notice this till later). X TREE and EXAMINE TREE don't work, but LOOK TREE does. It turns out you're supposed to (Spoiler - click to show)CLIMB TREE. Once you make it to the next screen, it's not a big jump to (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK PLANE, but now what? After several fruitless minutes, I turn to the guide to discover I should (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK IN POCKET. But why? If the author had had several people try this game out, they would have found quickly that few people would guess this. You can access a HINT that generally helps you, but most people seem to like games to be solvable without HINTS, using them only when stuck.

The randomized maze combat was hard. I was determined to finish this game, although I kept randomly dying (and there is no UNDO and typing the wrong command after dying exits out of the game entirely, and the command for loading a game during the game is different than the command for loading the game after dying and typing the wrong one will also exit the game as will hitting enter just one too many time). Combat is just pressing enter over and over after picking your weapon, and looking at the code the strongest-looking weapons are incredibly weak while the weakest-sounding weapon is the strongest. There are several insta-deaths in the labyrinth as well.

Overall, it looks like it was magnificently fun to code and make the art, but it doesn't seem like a game that was created with a lot of player-side input, and I ended up frustrated. My 1-star rating is not indicative of the effort put into the game or the total amount of fun that can be derived from it, but merely results from the fact that my usual grading rubric (polish, descriptiveness, interactivity, emotional impact, and replayability) evolved from a different style of text adventure than this one.

(Note: for a much more positive review by a different reviewer, see this link: https://intfiction.org/t/b-j-bests-ifcomp-2022-reviews/57995/3?u=mathbrush)

This game is self-described as more an interactive novel than a game, and that's fairly accurate. Gameplay consists of clicking different days on a calendar and reading vignettes that happen that day. Multimedia images and animations are displayed on different days, and often the text will rearrange and morph, especially when revisiting days.

The storyline is purposely obtuse, slowly revealing more of itself, with some major shifts. I don't know if even now I'd be able to paint the broad strokes out; (major spoilers for what I think happened) (Spoiler - click to show)I feel like at the beginning some of his family turned to zombies and some didn't, so he left the ones who were still alive and tried to die? Then wandered around, found the cat, met some people, then came back to his living family? Also maybe lost an eyeball as a kid before the change?

This is a grim and unhappy world. This game contains descriptions of violent, painful and gory deaths for animals, lots of zombie-related human gore, disrespect for courses, strong profanity, and suicide references, with multiple gory images. It also features a cat companion for whom things don't always go so well, as well as several positive interactions with that cat.

Overall, the craft in this game is remarkable, and the storytelling is vivid and descriptive. The calendar was a clever innovation, and though I didn't feel a strong sense of agency, I did the best I could by reading dates out of order. The biggest drawback to me personally is the grim and unhappy nature of the game, which is a matter of personal taste.

The author of this game entered the first two-player IFComp game a year ago (The Last Night of Alexisgrad) which inspired at least one other multiplayer IF game (Ma Tiger's Terrible Trip) by another author.

Those games featured a few pages or so of text interspersed by choices which were then communicated to the 'other player' via passing of codes (in the first game) or a server (in the second game mentioned).

This game is different in several ways. In the first place, it is a substantial chunk of text. Each of the two stories takes well over an hour to read through. There are only a few choices to make that get transmitted; the bulk are not.

I'll spoiler much of the rest of the discussion below to various levels of detail. Before that, I'd say that this game has a lot of disturbing content of various sorts: (Spoiler - click to show)occasional extreme profanity, slurs spoken by people presented as villains, torture, execution, and affairs. Overall, it had a gritty/depressing vibe to me.

I'm putting the story descriptions in spoilers, even though they're mostly spoiler-free, because knowledge of one story can be seen as a major spoiler for the other. Reading just one should be fine, with Caroline's suggested as first story.

Short description of Caroline's story:
(Spoiler - click to show)This is a well-written story of a woman balanced between duty and excitement. A young housewife of an arrogant politician is offered a job showing around a handsome and exciting foreign diplomat. Said diplomat has an entourage that keeps him safe and occasionally asks Caroline to carry out an essentially pointless task that seems to be about agency.

Short description of Leon's story:
(Spoiler - click to show)Leon is a military soldier specializing in interrogation. His job is to interrogate suspected war criminals and sentence them to death, torture, release, or return to their cell. However, he can only provide suggestions, which are then sent out to an ordinary civilian who then decides whether to follow the suggestions or not, allowing some plausible deniability.

Bigger spoilers for overall combination:
(Spoiler - click to show)Playing Leon's game was very surreal, at the beginning, as he was none of the characters in the first story and he seemed so disconnected. I was shocked to find that the mechanism of communication between them wasn't the words or choices of the first story but simply the trivial color choices (this would have been more apparent had I played multiplayer first).

It seems clear then that this is the connection to the philosophical experiment in the title of the game, 'The Chinese Room'. In this thought experiment, a person is placed in a room and receives instructions with no understanding of what they are, processes them according to prescribed rules, and then outputs another message which they don't understand. Theoretically, with sophisticated enough rules, the output could seem truly intelligent, the work of a genius (such as chess moves or even conversation), but the person running the room actually has no clue what is going on.

So in this game, you make many many choices that are deeply meaningful and clearly informed by knowledge, but your communication between players is limited to laughably ineffectual systems. An especially amusing/sad point is when the Leon player, after having innocents murdered or hardened criminals released by the opposing player, can send feedback on their performance; however, this feedback only shows up as the color of a handkerchief in a pocket in an incidental sentence I hadn't even noticed in single player mode.

Overall, the two stories together are much stronger than either individually. In a very specific way, this game is a comment on multiplayer systems and communication itself, and is an interesting experiment.

This is a wordplay game by Andrew Schultz, the third in a series involving double rhymes (like the name of the game itself).

I found it more appealing than the other two. Like the other games, this is a surreal setting, with names and locations picked more for their rhyme possibilities than anything else. But somehow it felt more coherent than the others. Also, the map is more manageable in this game.

Gameplay mostly consists of taking locations or items and typing two words that rhyme with two words in the location or item. There is a help system that is carefully explained, except for its main feature consisting of two dials. I got about halfway through before I realized that it (Spoiler - click to show)was telling you how many letters to add or subtract to your first and last words, although I'm still not sure what the last two decimal places mean.

I had to go to the hints increasingly more as time went on, and there was one word that I honestly had no clue ever existed (heavy spoiler for later game) (Spoiler - click to show)FLAIN.

The main boss had what felt like consistent character development, and the storyline felt taut and trimmed of fat. Overall, I found this to be above average for a wordplay game.

I remember playing the Frenetic Five games a few years ago. They date back a few decades, and were a funny take on superheroes with characters that had pretty under-powered powers, always taking on villains with similarly silly ideas.

I never beat any of those games without hints, but I appreciated the vibes and felt they were internally consistent.

Although I've forgotten a lot about those games, I was happy to see a sequel/prequel released. This is a pretty fun game about trying to open up a vault.

It's a game that requires leaps of intuition for almost every step, which is a style that is both frustrating and rewarding. Given enough time, I probably would have wanted to play this off and on for a week or more, but instead I played an hour or so before using some hints that Dan Fabulich wrote on Intfiction.

I think the author succeeded in their goal, if their goal was to please fans of the former games and create a difficult one-room game centered on exploration and experimentation. I do like easier games myself, or ones centered on learning complex systems with easy individual parts, but I appreciate the vision of this game and hope the author keeps their intention to make more.

When this first came out in Parsercomp, I heard people talking about bugs, but the author seems to have patched them.

To be up front, this is probably the VtM Choicescript game I’d be least likely to recommend to the general public.

This game is very high quality, but it doesn’t focus on the mechanical aspects of the VtM nearly as much as the others. For me, and I expect many people, the draw of these games is to try out the systems.

Furthermore, choicescript games in general are often easiest to enjoy when the effects of your choices are clear and obvious. This game has a lot of branching text, but much of the variation is in the emotional aspects of your character’s thoughts rather than major events (compared to similar games; there is still major event branching in this game, just not as much). Also, there’s some more strong profanity on this game than I prefer.

With those caveats aside, this is an excellent psychological introspection game. More than the other vampire games, this dives into the inner mind of a vampire. I think the game was describing itself in this quote (only available in certain paths):

“Alex had a knack for putting together campaigns that would test your morality more than your STR and DEX, and they would frictionlessly lead you to dilemmas that forced your group to ask: So, who are we? What do we stand for? What do we play for?”

Another, later quote takes a rare wink in the fourth wall:

“ For a moment, the idea that you might be a made-up character yourself takes root in your mind and seduces you with the possibility. What would it be like to be a fictional character—just another collection of ink and paper in a book with its own backstory and motivations? You're full of so much mundane detail that when the plot needs you to do something, they can pull you out and have you do it without any messy internal conflicts dragging you down—that's the fantasy, anyway.”

The game is about you as a vampire who was abandoned by your vampire-sire, and later taken in by a man named Markos. You live in Athens, which is gripped by a conflict between those who want vampires to continue the Masquerade, hiding from humanity, while others, radicals, want to tear it down and reveal all.

This author is a previous Nebula nomineee, and it shows. The story is tight and excellent. However, it is somewhat dark and can be depressing; failure at the end is not only possible but likely.

Some have described the game as rushed, and I think that’s because of the focus on the inner mind. The typical events of a game, like fights, betrayals, etc. are given less focus while your own doubts and hopes are played out over a longer time.

I had thought of giving this 4 stars, but I honestly enjoyed the storyline quite a bit, especially some parts about sunrises.

This is an Exceptional Story, a part of Fallen London that is available to subscribers or purchasable separately at a higher price.

In this story, you are robbed by two unusual thieves: a pair of sisters of advanced age. You are quickly drawn into their shenanigans, and plot a heist with them.

The main focus of this story is the relationship between the two sisters, and their individual meditations on mortality and age, as well as the loss of ones dear to them.

The heist itself, and your group, is relatively straightforward, leaving more focus to go into immortality. The groups you encounter here are the urchins and the Gracious Widow, with this story giving some chunks of info regarding her that are otherwise difficult to obtain. I'd primarily recommend this story to people interested in the Gracious Widow specifically, or who have considered what it would be like to get a new lease on life in their old age.