Reviews by MathBrush

This game has a lot of the hallmarks of Garry Francis' work: puzzle-focused gameplay, polished responses, gentle hints on what to do next, short and easily digestible room descriptions, etc.

The idea is that you're a troublemaker at a school that's going under, and you need to find some treasure reported to be hidden in your school.

Gameplay is generally satisfying, the kind of thing like finding a can and later finding a can opener and using it (not the example in the game). There were a few times I had trouble with the interactivity: trying to leave the room early on (without the tutorial, I would never have thought to do the action, and even with the tutorial it took me a while to find it); and finding the right word for what to do with the (Spoiler - click to show)pencil was hard (I kept trying words like (Spoiler - click to show)rub and (Spoiler - click to show)shade). A couple of the phrases stuck out as odd (I was told many time I thought my teacher was ugly; I think the random chance might need to be lowered a bit).

Overall, I expected a polish parser game and I got one, so it was worth playing. I used in-game hints several times.

This game was written using ADL, which was the engine Ken and Roberta Williams used for some early Hi-Res Adventures (from what I can gather, though I may be wrong).

The game itself is a downloadable windows executable. It consists of a moderate number of rooms (around 10-15), each with either one interesting item or one interesting NPC. Nothing can be interacted with outside of these singular items (no scenery, etc.). All play consists of fetching one item in one room to get a new item in another room (like a trading-up quest). There are occasional typos, and the storyline isn't really there.

The author has admitted to having run out of time. Having more time would certainly improve the game; the author has mentioned implementing the scenery, more puzzles, etc.

For now, though, the game is lacking in polish and descriptiveness, and due to its unfinished nature lacks emotional depth. I'm giving it one star for its current state, but if the author ever updates it I'll definitely increase the rating, as the ideas in it are good, it just looks like it needs more time.

This is a Python-based game. It asked me to install colorama, which seemed to work, but then in command prompt my colors didn't show up, so I think I had something wonky going on.

This is a combinatorics puzzle framed as writing. Your options are to Write (W) or Reflect (R).

But, there are rules! Some combinations of writing and reflecting aren't allowed. And as you go on, larger chunks of writing and/or reflecting are allowed.

Once you beat the game, there's a second round with more rules.

The text is abstract, focused on the meta-concepts of writing and reflecting and whether you obtained inspiration or not, how difficult this session was, etc.

I had some hints about the patterns from outside sources, but it was interesting to try and work out WHY the patterns were the way they were, which I found enjoyable; one of my favorite math problems in college was very similar to this (if you have N parallel parking spaces and can fill them up with Yugos, which take up one space, or Lincoln town cars, which take up 2 spaces, how many ways can you fill up the N spaces?) and of my own PhD thesis, which was concerned with strings of symbols with local rules like this.

I wasn't drawn in emotionally into the game as I was in 'solve' mode, but otherwise I enjoyed this puzzle.

This game uses a custom Javascript system that is similar to Twine or Choicescript in that you click from a variety of buttons to progress the story. It is optimized for mobile, and worked great on Desktop for me. The delay between clicks was just a little too long for my taste, but that was my only complaint.

You are presented as Madame Soo, a Chinese woman who is also a detective. In a classic locked room mystery, you find a man who has been strangled and have to figure out how it happened.

Overall, the writing was descriptive and the characters were fairly vivid.

With interactivity, the main mechanism for progression is to type in the name of an address you want to visit. There doesn't seem to be any way to go back, so its vital that you write down all names and locations as you go.

The clues themselves and all the deductions outside of the names are done by the character in-story. I would have liked to have had more involvement in that deduction, although I know that's a tricky thing to do in a game.

Others have mentioned the presentation of racism in the game. For me, I found it contributed more to being obnoxious than to providing key historical context.

Overall, I'm impressed by the architecture and writing of this game. My quibbles are mainly with the interactivity level and being drawn out of the game emotionally by the depictions mentioned above.

This game is a demo for a Twine engine that lets you pick up things, move around, open things, etc.

The system works pretty well for me and looks cool, I think it'd be fun to have more games like this in the future.

The game itself was a bit confusing for me. You kind of pass out and wake up in a labyrinth with nothing but an old man for a companion. It's basically just a big maze, and at one point I thought I had gotten locked out, so I restarted, and ended up in the same spot, but then found something new and interesting, so I went to try it out on a room I remembered, but then it wasn't there any more...I eventually found an ending that seemed 'real' but overall the plot was disconnected and the maze wasn't super exciting. I feel like a lot of the elements of a great game were there, but just needed something more to glue it together.

This is an experimental, somewhat unpolished game entered in the back garden of Spring Thing. As an experiment, I think it works, but it could use some touching up as a game/story itself.

The idea is that you, following the examples of Orpheus and Heracles, have descended into the underworld to follow after the woman you love.

Like other stories about the descent into Hades, you have a guide, Phos, a ball of light that follows you around, and who gives you a guided tour of the afterlife, showing you what happens to people there, etc.

This is written using Vorple, which allows multimedia and hyperlinks to be added to Inform. Most of the game, if not all, can be played by clicking links in the text, typing directional commands, and choosing menu options.

The art is Ai-generated, and looks very good; the model seems well-trained on the style used. Apparently some text is also AI, which makes sense; I had in my review notes that 'the text has strange errors at times, not like non-native English speakers, just strange placement of words'. So if it were AI-influenced, that would make sense.

The game doesn't outstay its welcome, and has some very nice moments. However, there are some stray typos, like double periods or the word 'sturggle' instead of struggle. Sometimes menu items for conversation still appeared even though I had left the area in question. But despite these rough edges, the core game is enjoyable.

Note that Vorple games such as this one don't currently work well if downloaded and played offline.

This game is heavily centered on world-building. It's a Twine game and it's focused on you, a person who is not quite alive and not quite dead, who has to stop your mom from destroying the world.

The main attractions here are the characters and world-building. This definitely seems like a setting and a group of people the author has spent a great deal of time thinking about, from the murder-happy girlfriend to the html-breaking Ataxia monsters to the mother figure herself. All of them seem well developed and polished.

I think what's in this game is solid (nice use of text manipulation, too), but I'd love more chance to explore the world and see more of these concepts in play. I guess I'd either prefer a tighter focus with the current level of interactivity or the bigger story with the wider exploration.

This is a cute little game made together as a family.

Your goal is to retrieve the Sacred Shovel of Athenia, which is stuck in the road. Unfortunately, you can't do that right now, because you aren't a cat lover, so a kind of restrictive device has been put on you until you are kind to a cat.

That doesn't really make much sense, but that's okay, because the game wasn't made to make sense. It's mostly a framing story to help a kid learn how to be kind to a cat.

I struggled a bit with the parser here and there, like trying to figure out how to use the fishing rod. Overall, the core concept of the game is good, but it just lacks a bit of cohesion and polish.

This is a wordplay game centered on the phrase 'Beam me up Scotty'.

You play as Captain Kirk, and gameplay consists of the presentation of some silly scenario involving you, Bones, and/or Spock, as well as Scotty. To get out of the situation you have to type 'B____ me up scotty', where the blank is some word starting with B.

So it's all riddles/wordplay, and mostly centers on finding synonyms for words in the text. You either get it or you don't; if you just can't get it you pass. I got 70.86%, so I had to pass a few times.

At a basic level it's pretty funny, but I kind of found the hints and pass system abrasive. They're basically 'ha you loser you're dumb and didn't get it'. But why would I like that? It's just a made up game and I'm playing it for fun. The author doesn't even know I'm playing it. I'm just deciding of my own free will to have a computer say I'm dumb. I'm not really into that.

The humor is the best part of this.

The first Marie game, Pre-Marie, was the first Adventuron game I ever played, and it gave me a good impression.

This one fleshes out the details significantly. It's in PunyInform, I think.

I'm giving it 5 stars, but not necessarily because I think most people will adore it. It simply had a nice combination of things I like: a vague conspiracy, a tense mystery setting, logical but kind of sticky parser puzzles and a lot of standard parser gameplay. And the in-game timer provided some tension. So for me that's exactly what I was looking for in a game.

The idea is that you are investigating a kind of conspiracy related to you and your town, but you've been kidnapped and stuffed somewhere. There's just a hint of the supernatural, possibly a fakeout or even unintentional. Most of the game involves escaping from your situation in progressively larger containers/rooms/locations.

Pretty fun, if you just want a brief chill parser game. I fought with the parser a couple of times, but it was overall pretty smooth.