Reviews by MathBrush

In the TADS game To Hell in a Hamper, you play a man in a hot-air balloon headed for immediate danger. Your only hope is to lighten your load, but you are hindered by your companion, Mr. Booby, who is a skillful hoarder.

The puzzles in this game are creative and enjoyable. I laughed out loud several times and showed it to my family. The humor works because it plays off the urgency and the tension between you and Booby.

I do believe it's impossible to get to an unwinning state without dying, but it can make the puzzles much much harder. It can be worth it to restart if you realize you need something, as the game is relatively short.

This is my favorite Short game. This game is set in the future, when a colony from earth has developed gene-altering technology. The setting is not really important, however. What is important is the negotiation and the recording features.

Negotiation: The main purpose of the game is to work out what will happen between earth and the planet. Your job is to communicate this, but you have to understand the symbolism of the settlers. The bulk of the game is focused on figuring out what to say and how to say it.

Recording: This is actually not even necessary to the completion of the game, so some players have missed it. There are several recordings in the game which can be 'processed' to one of several different modes, such as a cartoon mode, a scientific mode, etc. It was hilariously fun, and unique among games I have played.

One of the great sci-fi games.

This game was one of the two winners of the very first IF Comp. It is well known for being one of Plotkin's most difficult games, and one of the most difficult well-known games in general.

You play a loner who leaves a picnic/party to look around a secluded woodland area. Puzzles are hard due to:

1. Not knowing what your goal is;

2. Being able to put the game in an unwinnable state without knowing it;

3. Fast-paced timing.

Despite, or possibly because of the difficulty, this has remained a very popular game. Perhaps this is because the game has an inspirational feel. It is easy to identify with the protagonist, and the games understated writing gives you a sense of wonder.

The game was intended to be completed in 2 hours. You will certainly reach an ending within two hours.

Adventure was the very first text adventure of all time. It inspired the genre and its name.

The point of the game is to gather a variety of treasures and bring them back to a small building. The game is pretty accurately based on the Mammoth Caves, which explains the mazes and the fact that exits and entrances sometimes don't match up exactly (i.e. going west and then east may not leave you where you started).

For me, the most enjoyable way to play this game was to keep it at a slow pace, going back to it time and again while playing other games. I kept a numbered list of every room with all of its exits to other rooms. This made the game much easier. After several weeks, I got to a point where I couldn't get any further for several days. I finally looked up a walkthrough for the last three or four puzzles.

Once you get all the treasures, there is an endgame that is surprisingly good; it seems more like a modern deconstruction of the game than the very first game of all.

I played the 350 point version, and I found the game incredibly enjoyable. I admit that I used the wicker cage bug (as mentioned in another review), where you can carry everything in the wicker cage. To get full points, you must remove the items from the cage outside of the building before placing them in there.

Every Interactive Fiction player should play this game because so many other games reference it heavily.

This game has really grown on me. When I first played it, I found the atmosphere a bit depressing and the puzzles underclued. However, after revisiting it, I've realized that this game is a true classic. Especially when compared to other mystery games; this one really stands out.

The writing has a very strong style; for instance, we have the following:

"This room is long and thin, like a jailhouse corridor, from the doorway in the northeast corner to the large bay window opposite which stretches the length of the room, overlooking the street outside. The colours are your eyes on a Sunday; red like blood, red like the leather of the over-stuffed chair, which sits a cheap trophy by the main desk. A bookshelf fills the east wall."

The whole game is filled with a feeling of inevitable loss or failure; not of the game itself, but for life in general.

The puzzles are difficult to figure out. For more casual players like me, I recommend exploring until you feel you've seen everything; trying to solve every puzzle at least once; revisiting it after a day; then using a walkthrough. The ending surprised me twice, and even now, I don't really understand all of its implications. For me, this game only improves more and more with time.

Fail-Safe is my absolute favorite Jon Ingold game. The game has an unusual plot device which you discover quickly. I won't talk about it in this review, because the game is strong enough without it.

The game is set in a damaged spacecraft that must be explored. The difficulty and fun lies in trying to figure out how the spacecraft actually worked.

The game has some timed events (which are fun but hard) and some hard-to-find exits (which is annoying but fun if you can find them).

This game can be played enjoyably multiple times and has a several, interesting endings.

Twiny Jam is a competition requiring entries to have 300 words or less in the code. Many of these games are pretty spare. This game is one of the richest and complex I've seen within this word limit. It is a one-room escape game with numerous puzzles.

As a non-Twiny Jam game, it is only a short bit of fun. But as an example of what you can do in a constrained format, it is excellent.

In this short one-room game, you reverse the roles of Pavlov and his dogs by being the subject of experiments by dogs.

Your goal is to correctly find all of the food in the room. This requires varying amounts of ingenuity. Some of the puzzles are 'leap of intuition' puzzles.

As others have noted, the writing is the strongest point of the game. The strange mix of obedience and resentment makes for a funny game with a sad undertone.

The game has enough easy puzzles mixed in with the hard to let beginners get pretty far without consulting a guide.

A Day for Fresh Sushi is a one-room Speed IF game set in a strange futuristic setting. It is very short and fairly easy, but it provides a strong background to a small game, and hints at a larger world.

The main attraction of the game is the sassy fish that comments on everything you do. Only a master of conversation like Short could implement an NPC this much in such a short time. It has much of the charm of Violet or similar games.

It's worth playing due to its shortness and the good NPC. You can get everything that's good out of the game in a half hour or less, then move on.

This ultra-long game will appeal to three kinds of people: Shakespeare fans, Lovecraft horror fans, and realistic simulation fans. The amount in which the game succeeds will vary depending on the audience.

As a fan of Shakespeare, this game was wonderful. I was skeptical of someone trying to write dialogue for Shakespeare, but this game succeeded fairly well. Shakespeare didn't necessarily talk in as flowered language as he writes, so it works out. The game contains several references to plays William is considering writing (a story about an island in the New World, a story about witches written, etc.). It contains numerous quotations, mainly from Hamlet, and your character (Spoiler - click to show)attends the premier of Hamlet. Other people involved in the game include Christopher Marlowe and John Dee. If you are a fan of Shakespeare or Elizabethean times, you will love this game.

As a Lovecraft game, this game must stand under the fierce gaze of its predecessors, including The Lurking Horror, Theatre, Lydia's Heart, and of course the almost-genre-killer Anchorhead. This game acknowledges its roots; at one point in the game, you can view scenes from many of these previous games, starting with Anchorhead. The King of Shreds and patches offers nothing much new in this area; it has a little bit more gore than some of the other games, but only in one or two scenes (the rest of the game is fairly clean). The main nemesis has more character than most Lovecraftian foes. The obligatory elements (cult, language, mist, visions, etc.) are well-crafted. The game does drag in the middle a bit, but it's huge. I think, overall, it is one of the best of its genre.

Finally, the game contains several simulations of Elizabethean technology. Fans of simulations (such as flying the Ghost Plane in Jigsaw) will really enjoy this game. Others can consult the numerous hints to bypass these segments.

Overall, I resorted to the hints 2 or 3 times, generally finding out that I had missed some text. I highly recommend this game.