Reviews by MathBrush

This game was written for the Neo Twiny jam, in 500 words or less. It is part of a series of 3.

The interactivity at first appears intentionally minimal, with the option to enter two names at the beginning and the option to toggle between two variations in a cycling word.

But as I went to write this review, I realized that that cycling word changes much of the rest of the story. It's clever and subtle; the piece is still slight, and must be so to fit into the confines of the jam, but I enjoyed this large-scale choice.

This game is essentially a love poem about a couple, describing their sexual experiences.

It is written in less than 500 words, and interaction occurs in two ways: clicking arrows back and forth, and mousing over text which expands the legible text.

The wording is poetic, and the UI is well-done and artistic. The game had content warnings, which I should have heeded, as it was much more explicit than most games with similar content warnings.

This set of 4 games was a special entry to the 2023 Spring Thing consisting of games written by a teacher and students for their own mini-Spring Thing.

Each game has the theme of Mirror, and I enjoyed seeing how that theme played out. In one, it was an incidental but crucial part of a real-life story; in others, it represented portals; in another, the device used to play the game.

Each game had some imaginative thought, but each could be significantly developed. Many stopped early, only partway through a story; all had a little bit of typos to be cleaned up; many had difficulty figuring out how to branch effectively (like offering choices but some choices are 'fake' and say 'you have to try the other choice'). The biggest thing they all need is time; however, for a school assignment, it is difficult to find such time. But I could see all of them making complex or richly descriptive games in the future.

This game is an Inform/PunyInform game that centers around you, a young priest, receiving a charge to search for the Ark of the Covenant that had been entrusted to your local church for generations and hidden in times of war.

+Polish: Like most Garry Francis games, this is smooth and polished. Many interactions have been anticipated and coded for.

+Descriptiveness: The text is straightforward but detailed. Locations are described both by form and function, with nice little details thrown in about the history you have with things.

+Interactivity: Puzzles were set up in a way that I could form hypotheses and strategize and carry out my plans with just enough difficulty.

-Emotional impact: This game combines two very weighty topics ((Spoiler - click to show)the ark of the covenant and vampires) and treats them in a pretty matter-of-fact way. Dramatic actions like (Spoiler - click to show)unearthing the corpse of a beloved friend and (Spoiler - click to show)burning a vampire to ash are given the same treatment as unlocking doors and climbing ladders.

+Would I play again or recommend? Yes, I think people will like this.

This is an Adventuron game with a forward impetus: no UNDO, no going backwards on the map, only forward, often with a choice or two on how to do so.

The focus is a lot on your companion, a friend you've done many mountain races with who is not feeling as strong as before.

+Polish: The story is well-polished, free from bugs and typos as far as I could see, and responsive to commands.

+Interactivity: The inability to go back or UNDO is annoying in a puzzle game but thematically appropriate for a game about the march of time in our own lives. Good coupling of puzzle with theme.

+Descriptiveness: The locations and people were described in a way that I could easily picture it all in my mind. The changes in the weather and the passage of time were evocative.

+Emotional impact: It made me think of important events in my own life, like a funeral I attended yesterday where I didn't know the person who died but I did know some of their friends.

+Would I play again? Maybe, after a long time, but I think one time is best for now. But I would recommend it to others.

This game was kind of a rollercoaster experience for me.

I started it up, and it looked like a simple tutorial adventure, like a TALJ game intended to be succinct.

But I soon found that I couldn't type, as it looked like it was auto-completing everything I typed, and into weird things.

So I tried experimenting a while but just didn't get it. I saw that ? gave instructions, so I tried typing that.

It turns out that different keyboard keys are mapped to whole actions, and typing that key will give that action. It's not quadratic in complexity, it's linear (1 key 1 action, no nouns as they are context-dependent).

So overall it's an interesting effect, similar to Gruescript or other parser-choice hybrids. Some of the choices for commands were a bit odd, and some (like arrow keys) seem like they wouldn't translate to mobile well (which I didn't try).

Overall, the puzzles were clever and the game was polished. The interactivity definitely threw me for a loop and I'm pretty sure I'm not a fan, although it's hard to say if that's just because I'm not used to it or because it would be perennially awkward. I guess I could compare it to the text adventure equivalent of QWOP.

Overall the charming and complex puzzles are why I'm giving a higher score.

This game combines a parser of its own with some AI-generated responses. The ai-generated text is fairly distinctive, with a very literalist interpretation of things (much like Drax the Destroyer in marvel movies). The plot itself and the 'human written' parts have a strong resemblance to the AI generated part, and I suspect that the plot was generated first by an AI and then pruned. There are riddles in the game that also seem like they were first thought of by an AI.

You play as a PhD student who can't get any postdocs, so they use AI to automatically fill out sweepstakes forms. This nets you some petty cash, but also a ticket to get onto a cruise ship.

The rest of the game involves getting on the ship, making friends, finding a couple of clues, entering some passwords, and grabbing some items, along with a thriller-type story.

The AI provides a lot of responses; interestingly, for me, the actual responses of the AI didn't matter, as it had no 'state' (the game told me a character was looking at his ring and thinking of his wife and kids; I asked him about his wife and he was unmarried). Every character is generic and defined with stereotypes that the AI found most logical (both black characters had grown up in poverty and become army vets; a white guy who went to jail had what looked like a deformed blunt in his hands in the AI image; etc.). But if you talk to them just right they'll reveal their prompt to you. So instead of AI replacing human ingenuity, it becomes a way to use AI to mask the true human ingenuity. What prompt created this? That prompt itself seemed AI generated. What was the original prompt for the game?

The game is slow. Those who long for the days of slow processors and chugging Apple-II's will be thrilled that this game also takes a lot of time to process actions. For me, if ai-powered games are to be common, speed will be an important factor.

I struggled with interacting with the game, and in the end looked up the author's github and found a test/walkthrough hidden in the code and used it (except for what seems to be a testing-only password for one room).

This game has convinced me that AI won't replace human ingenuity any time soon, especially for riddles. I wonder if the CSS and markdown and stuff was also AI, because there were several typos like too many ** symbols and such.

I usually strongly advocate for games to be archived long term and I hope the code for this is stored, but this game probably won't run 5 years from now, given its heavy reliance on an ever-shifting public resource.

This is a fairly short ADRIFT game in which you command six different soldiers, switching between their viewpoints to find aliens to kill.

Each soldier has their own mini puzzle. Some of these are pretty short, requiring little effort, while others are fairly complex and may need some repeat tries.

I found the writing enjoyable and many of the interactions were clever and well thought-out.

I found a few small bugs. Ducking if nothing is around acts as if something is there; most interactions were bug free, though, and two things I was going to bring up as second examples were actually caused by own error (I kept typing 'pulse rifle' instead of 'laser rifle', for instance), so I guess there really weren't a lot of bugs (except the six you kill haha). I do wish that saving and UNDOing worked even if you had switched your player character though.

The interactions were generally pretty simple, but there is an (optional) hour long timer and a (non optional) 80 turn timer that significantly complicates things. I had to restart several times to figure out a good strategy. But I was invested to do so several times, ask for hints online and switch the version of Adrift I was using because I did want to finish the game.

Phew! This was a long game. I took a break from playing the other parsercomp games for 4 days to finish playing this one; and that was just by using the walkthrough, which spans 8 pages of 3-columned text.

The idea of this game is that you are at a party at a large mansion where a murder has been discovered. It is your job to stop that murder!

The presentation and the writing are of high quality, which some nice visual effects with regards to headings and fonts, and very incisive and biting wit. There are many characters that are generally well differentiated, although almost every character frequently expresses very strong sexual urges in non-explicit ways, so it can blend together when the 5th or 6th man talks about how hot the widow is.

I played for about an hour or two to get a feel for the game. I got maybe 23 out of the 250+ points, then decided to use the walkthrough.

It soon became apparent just why the walkthrough was so long. The map is large, especially a garden area which is a maze with several almost-identical areas. The vast bulk of the game, around 75%, consists of some character asking you to give something to or ask something of another character. So you have about 10 or 12 moves navigating the garden maze and going into the mansion and finding your target. That character then says they can only do that if you bring them something else. So you type 10 or 12 moves going there and doing that, and so on and so on till you reach the end of the chain. Then you report back to people in reverse order, with the same maze navigation between every chain.

Due to this the plot really kind of stopped taking off. At first I felt like I was really getting somewhere (finding the widow! searching the murder room!) but if you charted the plot intensity with regards to time it would look like a giant snake that had just eaten a string of 30 rats. Flat plot progression for a long time, with a little bump of action, followed by more flat plot progression, with a little bump of action.

The writing was constantly of high quality in the genre it had set out to follow, a kind of bawdy, everyone-is-rotten nobles vs commoners dark comedy.

Outside of the fetch quests, the game consisted of finding objects in random and unusual ways. The kind of thing where touch a glass pane and it reveals a trapdoor which takes you on a chute ride to find an oubliette where you overhear two thieves talking and one drops a potato crisp. (this example isn't necessarily in the game).

When I wasn't following the walkthrough I had a bit of trouble. An early quest needed me to find some cream buns. I saw food on a table and tried X FOOD. That didn't work so I went into the kitchen and tried X FOOD. I figured maybe they were there but not in the description so I tried TAKE FOOD and TAKE BUNS. It turns out I needed to X COUNTER instead to find them.

So given that the discovery of objects was often difficult with the parser, and that seemingly unrelated actions were necessary to find the objects, and that almost each step of each task required navigation of almost-identical maze rooms, and that the game was as long as Curses and other huge text adventures, I think it's no surprise I turned to the walkthrough. There are copious clues though for those who prefer more gentle hints.

I didn't play this game in the intended way (just opened two windows and played both).

I've played 3 or 4 two-player IF games in the last few years, and I think this one definitely benefits from being in the same room or able to talk to each other. The other two-player games I played had a major twist that was apparent from the start and sharing info would have ruined that. This one is different; even having complete knowledge of the other game doesn't really help you in the current game.

Instead, codes are used primarily to move objects from one game to another. When this occurs, you get a code you send to the other player, and they type that in to get an effect in game.

The puzzles are designed to be fairly light, but there were times when I got stuck in one of the games for ten or fifteen minutes, which is why I wonder if it would be better for the two players to talk to each other and bounce ideas off each other.

I loved the humor in the game; puzzles were oddball and events were shocking at times and cute at others. Despite this I never felt immersed in the game world; it definitely felt artificial and made as a kind of puzzlebox; but it was a very enjoyable puzzlebox, even as a single player.