Reviews by MathBrush

This game has you play the friend of the eponymous Beth, whose date has arrived. It’s your job to size this guy up. The game has music and graphics, starting with a black and white picture of the date that is slowly colored in, which was a really neat mechanic.

I was emotionally invested in the conversation. The date guy seemed kind of lame at first but I grew to respect him more. The ending I got when I chose to let him up surprised me quite a bit, but I ended up accepting it in the end.

There is some profanity in the game. Overall I was impressed by the presentation and the writing.

This was a fascinating game. It’s a tour of a city with building pictures and a variety of destinations to pick from, which can all be selected eventually.

I thought it was completely fictional at first, then saw real elements, but Google and Google maps simply don’t recognize Blossom, NY at all. Looking up the Ebenezer society, which features prominently in the game, led me to West Seneca. Eventually, looking at Google maps, I found Blossom.

The story is similar to many in my own life. The Ebenezer Society paralleled the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which started in upstate New York before migrating to the Midwest, and which had a history of leaving behind buildings that were eventually appropriated for other uses (including a temple, where we believe Christ visited, being used as a barn!). The pictures look like Westlake Ohio, where my ex’s grandmother lived and which had experience some decline while remaining beautiful in its own way.

It gives the feel of a real community. I can almost smell and feel the wind in such a town.

The narrative was a bit dry, but the format was an enjoyable one for the digestion of such material. Which is why I didn’t download the grad report, as the same information in static form would not thrill me as much.

I’ve had this game on my wishlist for 9 years, and it doesn’t seem to have any reviews.

I think that may be because it is unfinished or buggy. At least, the version I played on philome.la was; I’m on mobile right now and can’t access the zip so it may be improved. I found a game-killing bug opening a medicine cabinet and a page with no links to click on in the basement, as well as some “image goes here” text.

Outside of that, this game is pretty interesting as an exploratory comedy Twine Lovecraftian game. It has some fancy looking graphics and a “self esteem” and inventory system.

Your high school has weird noises and things coming out of it on a weekend and you decide to investigate. As you do you encounter some math puzzles and a lot of Lovecraftian stereotypes played for laughs.

A charming game. I hope the zip version has less bugs because this game has a lot of potential, but the low number of reviews suggest other would be reviewers may have gotten stuck.

This is one IFComp game I was never able to play due to its use of an outdated Java platform that you have to pay to download.

I was able to decompile its files and port it to Inform (which I've added as a link here).

It's a small game, with only a few puzzles. You're exploring an abandoned building after trying to grab some loose change. The biggest puzzle is finding a mouse running around a maze. The logic of the maze is pretty frustrating: (Spoiler - click to show)You have to predict where the mouse will go and get a number to light up beneath it. Randomly, the mouse will go check the key. If it was happy before and had the right number lit up, it will push it out, otherwise it won't.

So, pretty small and kind of frustrating, but the java code was really neat to work with.

I was looking back at my 'wishlist' and this game had been on there the longest, for most of a decade if I recall. I thought I'd finally get around to it.

This is a short ADRIFT game with music and some real time effects. The idea is that you are at home watching a nature documentary alone at night when you see something out your window that unnerves you.

I'm giving this game a 5-star rating because I thought through my five criteria and how they applied.

+Polished: I didn't encounter any major difficulties with the parser; WATCH TV didn't work, but that was it. The music definitely added to the overall feel.
+Descriptive: gruesomely so.
+Interactivity: There are 4 endings, and reaching most of them felt pretty natural. The game felt pretty realistic.
+Emotional impact: I was creeped out. I kept turning down the music.
+Would I play again? Yeah, probably.

If you download the adrift 5 runner, and get virus warnings, try one of the other versions of it (e.g. runner+development, just runner, etc.), usually one works.

**Zugzwang** by Vanessa Jygon, Eleanor Jimmy

This game was compact and fun. It feature a plus-sign shaped map. Movement is N/E/S/W, but instead of having to return to the middle square, the direction you type takes you directly to that quadrant of the map.

This is a chess-based powerup game. You are a pawn, and all your enemies represent chess characters as well. You learn attacks from each enemy, and can try those attacks on other enemies.

The descriptions were well-done and interesting. The combat was fun at first, but I eventually began flinging everything I had at the enemies, as I had difficulty seeing the logic behind which attacks worked and didn't realized at first that order matters.

This games has a secret, it's (Spoiler - click to show)connected to another game in the 2024 Parsercomp. Regarding that:

(Spoiler - click to show)The game is made by the authors of 19 Once. Both games have very similar mechanics and can be solved in a similar way. After beating 19 Once, you can unlock a special command for Zugzwang, and vice versa. The special commentary for Zugzwang makes it much better, giving you that vibe of a friend group that likes each other but has a tenuous hold, with some being grating or weird but you stick with them for now.

Very fun concept.

I've played a lot of Perplexity games over the years (well, I can remember 2 or 3). But something seems to have gone wrong with the programming. It's designed to accept full sentences, but even really basic stuff isn't understood. My start was like this:


You’re going to a restaurant with your son, Johnny, who is vegetarian and too scared to order by himself. Get a table and buy lunch for both of you. You have 20 dollars in cash.
Host: Hello! How can I help you today?
?:hello! I would like a table for two
Hello!
Host: Perfect! Please come right this way. The host shows you to a wooden table with a checkered tablecloth. A minute goes by, then your waiter arrives.
Waiter: Hi there!
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:hello! let me order for my son
Hello!
I don't know the words: let and I don't know the way you used: order
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:let me ask my son
I don't know the words: let, ask
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:johnny, what would you like to eat?
I don't know the words: johnny,
Waiter: What can I get you?
?:i would like a hamburger
I don't know the words: hamburger
Waiter: What can I get you?


I got through the whole game, but the whole thing was like this. The most basic words related to restaurants weren't understood:


?:i eat the food
I don't know the words: eat
Waiter: What can I get you?


I know the Perplexity engine is capable of some sophisticated worldbuilding, so I really don't know what happened here.

Gamefic! I remember a Gamefic game in my first IFComp, Second Story, I remember the parser being better than many custom systems.

This game is pretty small, but it shows the relative usefulness of the parser system. There are a small cluster of rooms in an academic area. Your job is to investigate the death of a beloved professor. But in the middle of your investigation, everything changes.

This game is very minimal. Descriptions are bare-bones. Each room has one object of interest in it, except for one room with 2 or 3. I solved the game by just trying the only available actions.

The parser is pretty good. I didn’t really encounter any trouble. Some fancy future options might be pronoun recognition and cycling through past commands when pushing ‘up’, but the save and undo system worked well.

This game is pretty different from most other parser games.

In it, you are part of a yes-no experiment. You are placed in a room with several background items like walls, a table, a chair, etc.

You are told that the lights will go out and assistants will change the room (or not). When the lights go back on, you have to compare the room to the original room for any differences.

The game really keeps you on your toes. UNDO is forbidden, but I did use SAVE and RESTORE after a while, but tried my best on each level. It was wild to check everything in the room with every sense (I copy and pasted Touch it. Taste it. Smell it. listen to it. and used it a lot).

Sometimes the differences are obviously apparent, and sometimes not. I was always paranoid something very tiny would change (like the taste of a button). Twice I was fooled by something small; there is at least one thing that has two similar responses that are slightly different but don't count as 'different' to the game.

The ending was anticlimactic. I wonder if I missed something? But the game did make me genuinely agitated; it is named well.

This is a ZIL game, a system I haven’t seen used much (the most recent I remember is Max Fog’s IFComp game The Restaurant at the End of the Universe). It’s a retro language that’s recovered from the one Infocom used, I think.

This game is a peaceful nature walk; the game whose genre is closest is, in my opinion, The Fire Tower, another game spent inspecting peaceful places.

This game is fairly short; at first, I just found a boat, a path, and a fountain, and I couldn’t find any other locations mentioned in the exits. I tried randomly walking and eventually found my way to a waterfall and later a cave.

The writing was peaceful, it reminded me of Hypnobirthing tapes my ex-wife had at one point. It was a bit repetitive though. In my first 20 moves, I saw the word ‘tranquil’ a lot:

embark on a tranquil journey
smooth and tranquil journey
its beauty a tranquil retreat
the clearing is a tranquil haven
Set in a tranquil clearing,
Several other words were heavily repeated as well. The descriptions were longer than necessary, and could use some tinkering with structure; I’ve found that in IF people almost always look to the bottom of paragraphs for movable or interactable items and to the middle for less important scenery like tables and desks. So I think it could be useful to cut out the repeated words and rearrange the paragraphs to have the most interesting things at the bottom.

Overall, a small but peaceful nugget of a game.