Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This is a Texture game, where you drag actions onto nouns.

It also seems to be incomplete, or possible part of a series, as it includes ‘TO BE CONTINUED’ at the end.

You play as a famous and talented musician who has had one of the best years of their life. Leading up to their biggest performance yet, a deal they made comes due.

Overall the characters were interesting and the story a timeless one that has been retold in many ways in many ages. It felt a bit slight; there is a complete narrative arc, though. I almost wonder if it would have been stronger without the ‘to be continued’.

This was a pleasant treat to play, although it was often sad.

It’s a looping game where the same events play out over and over but with variations. Many things are the same: a visit to a flower shop, passing by a statue, etc.

Things change visually as well, with the game getting darker over time.

I liked the writing and thought the loop was fun. I liked the note the game ended on.

I didn’t always see a clear progression between the different cycles. At first it seemed like things were getting worse and worse, and the darkening would imply that, but in many ways that didn’t happen. Maybe it was just about change? It’s okay for things not to have clear progression, but the background darkening seemed to indicate there would be. In any case, this was well written and I’d definitely play another game by this author.

This is a Twine game with lovingly crafted visuals, using backgrounds, animations, and various techniques like mouseover links, cycling links, etc.

I did something with it that is likely bad for the experience, like people who use online recipes and complain ‘I substituted ground dates for the chocolate and it tasted terrible!’. In my case, I downloaded the file and changed all of the timed text links to have a 0 second timer. Some of the original timers were 6 seconds and it was just agonizing to play.

So my experience may not be the one intended.

The story imagines a world where a common parasite exists that can puppet a body’s nervous and muscular systems after death, allowing corpses to speak and to remember.

Your brother has been found, and you have been called in to talk to him.

The main content of the game is divided between the top layer (you talking directly with the player) and the bottom layer (your memories and feelings about your brother). This is not a happy relationship whatsoever. It implies that your brother was extremely abusive; at first I thought it was sexual abuse, and may be, but physical abuse seems much more likely.

The game is effective in its communication of both the bitter anger after abuse but also the self-doubt. Where the writing is most effective in my opinion is that it contrasts scenes of deep hatred and unhappiness with scenes of love and affection. The variation in emotion and tone gives a much stronger gravitas to the scenes of pain and violence.

This is a Twine (edit: Ink) game about, well, fixing your mother’s printer. It features some neat UI by Josh Grams in addition to the main story content by Geoffrey Golden.

It’s basically a long troubleshooting call with your mother, trying to fix the printer. In the meantime, she discusses your life and hers.

Mechanically, I felt like I had a lot of options. I could be nice or mean or sad, I could attempt to solve the printer puzzle in various ways, I could bring up topics, etc.

Storywise, the writing was tight, and the characters realistic. But I didn’t connect emotionally much with it. I’ve had fights with my parents before, but I’ve never really doubted their love and care for me, it was always arguments about how that was expressed. I’m not really used to this situation where you’re on speaking terms but there’s constant barbs and negative comments and defensiveness. Even the way my parents were with their parents, there was some negativity and unhappiness (one of my grandfathers was physically abusive), but they just left him alone and were polite when interaction was needed.

So I think that this story would ring true emotionally a lot more to me if I had had a different set of experiences.

It was very satisfying to get the printer to work. I chose the nice options because it was fun, and because that’s almost exactly what I do when I’m tutoring math; you work through things with people patiently and listen because that’s how people learn, and so often the problem turns out to be just the one little thing you wouldn’t even think about.

I don’t know. It was interesting, and I think it was high quality. But gave me a lot to think about and made me want to text my grandma!

Hmm, this game is really intriguing! I had a bad experience at one part and good experiences at the other.

The idea here is that you play as a guy who, together with his best friend, enters a high-stakes two-player video game competition.

Except, things are not as they seem…

The intro is generally a linear story, although there are definitely opportunities to add your own flavor to things. There are extensive images and some background music; it seems like your characters are designed to look like anime high school protagonists.

Once the game starts, you have a lot more freedom. I had fun playing a character playing a character (the ‘Gameception’) and felt like I had real options.

But then…the game changed. And man I got really frustrated!

It becomes a ‘gauntlet’ where you have two choices at a time. One is right, but the other makes you die.

I was worried I’d have to play the whole game over. But it just took me to the start of the gauntlet.

But that’s the only checkpoint! And the gauntlet is really long with some timed text!

I tried 9 times and got so frustrated I had to quit. I ended up opening up the code; I guess I was really close to the end. And also there’s an almost entirely complete other game in the code too, which is pretty wild.

So, mostly fun game, with one super frustrating part. If that part just added some more ‘checkpoints’ I could have done better. Literally everything else was fun though.

This piece was good for me, I think. I’ve encountered different people with stuttering over time, and some of them I was kind too and some not. I had a group when I was younger that was both in church and scouts together. I never hung out with them alone but it was essentially my “friend group”. There was one guy who had a strong stutter. As a whole we often didn’t treat him well, and I regret it looking back.

Now I have a student who stutters a lot, due to having a stroke in his youth. I find it a lot easier to have patience with him and listen to his thoughts. He’s also an incredibly prolific writer (having written over 200 scripts each over 20 pages for a tv show idea he has.)

This game presents the experiences of one person with a stutter. They have a day to go through a list of chores and tasks.

I thought it was effective. It does have timed text but I made it work by playing it on my phone during a very boring work meeting where having it long and drawn out was a benefit. And I imagined the game itself as someone with a stutter and practiced being patient with them. After all, a lot of things that you would never do or like normally are acceptable or good when dealing with disabilities (like someone with IBS having frequent smelly farts).

My ex wife and son both use wheelchairs so it was interesting to see how similar some experiences are across disability, especially with other people under or over estimating the difficult of tasks. (Like “come to my house! It only has one step up, a few inches, that shouldn’t be a problem, right?)

So overall, lots of polish and good work and helped me reflect on life and saved me from a boring meeting.