Reviews by MathBrush

This game is self-described as more an interactive novel than a game, and that's fairly accurate. Gameplay consists of clicking different days on a calendar and reading vignettes that happen that day. Multimedia images and animations are displayed on different days, and often the text will rearrange and morph, especially when revisiting days.

The storyline is purposely obtuse, slowly revealing more of itself, with some major shifts. I don't know if even now I'd be able to paint the broad strokes out; (major spoilers for what I think happened) (Spoiler - click to show)I feel like at the beginning some of his family turned to zombies and some didn't, so he left the ones who were still alive and tried to die? Then wandered around, found the cat, met some people, then came back to his living family? Also maybe lost an eyeball as a kid before the change?

This is a grim and unhappy world. This game contains descriptions of violent, painful and gory deaths for animals, lots of zombie-related human gore, disrespect for courses, strong profanity, and suicide references, with multiple gory images. It also features a cat companion for whom things don't always go so well, as well as several positive interactions with that cat.

Overall, the craft in this game is remarkable, and the storytelling is vivid and descriptive. The calendar was a clever innovation, and though I didn't feel a strong sense of agency, I did the best I could by reading dates out of order. The biggest drawback to me personally is the grim and unhappy nature of the game, which is a matter of personal taste.

The author of this game entered the first two-player IFComp game a year ago (The Last Night of Alexisgrad) which inspired at least one other multiplayer IF game (Ma Tiger's Terrible Trip) by another author.

Those games featured a few pages or so of text interspersed by choices which were then communicated to the 'other player' via passing of codes (in the first game) or a server (in the second game mentioned).

This game is different in several ways. In the first place, it is a substantial chunk of text. Each of the two stories takes well over an hour to read through. There are only a few choices to make that get transmitted; the bulk are not.

I'll spoiler much of the rest of the discussion below to various levels of detail. Before that, I'd say that this game has a lot of disturbing content of various sorts: (Spoiler - click to show)occasional extreme profanity, slurs spoken by people presented as villains, torture, execution, and affairs. Overall, it had a gritty/depressing vibe to me.

I'm putting the story descriptions in spoilers, even though they're mostly spoiler-free, because knowledge of one story can be seen as a major spoiler for the other. Reading just one should be fine, with Caroline's suggested as first story.

Short description of Caroline's story:
(Spoiler - click to show)This is a well-written story of a woman balanced between duty and excitement. A young housewife of an arrogant politician is offered a job showing around a handsome and exciting foreign diplomat. Said diplomat has an entourage that keeps him safe and occasionally asks Caroline to carry out an essentially pointless task that seems to be about agency.

Short description of Leon's story:
(Spoiler - click to show)Leon is a military soldier specializing in interrogation. His job is to interrogate suspected war criminals and sentence them to death, torture, release, or return to their cell. However, he can only provide suggestions, which are then sent out to an ordinary civilian who then decides whether to follow the suggestions or not, allowing some plausible deniability.

Bigger spoilers for overall combination:
(Spoiler - click to show)Playing Leon's game was very surreal, at the beginning, as he was none of the characters in the first story and he seemed so disconnected. I was shocked to find that the mechanism of communication between them wasn't the words or choices of the first story but simply the trivial color choices (this would have been more apparent had I played multiplayer first).

It seems clear then that this is the connection to the philosophical experiment in the title of the game, 'The Chinese Room'. In this thought experiment, a person is placed in a room and receives instructions with no understanding of what they are, processes them according to prescribed rules, and then outputs another message which they don't understand. Theoretically, with sophisticated enough rules, the output could seem truly intelligent, the work of a genius (such as chess moves or even conversation), but the person running the room actually has no clue what is going on.

So in this game, you make many many choices that are deeply meaningful and clearly informed by knowledge, but your communication between players is limited to laughably ineffectual systems. An especially amusing/sad point is when the Leon player, after having innocents murdered or hardened criminals released by the opposing player, can send feedback on their performance; however, this feedback only shows up as the color of a handkerchief in a pocket in an incidental sentence I hadn't even noticed in single player mode.

Overall, the two stories together are much stronger than either individually. In a very specific way, this game is a comment on multiplayer systems and communication itself, and is an interesting experiment.

This is a wordplay game by Andrew Schultz, the third in a series involving double rhymes (like the name of the game itself).

I found it more appealing than the other two. Like the other games, this is a surreal setting, with names and locations picked more for their rhyme possibilities than anything else. But somehow it felt more coherent than the others. Also, the map is more manageable in this game.

Gameplay mostly consists of taking locations or items and typing two words that rhyme with two words in the location or item. There is a help system that is carefully explained, except for its main feature consisting of two dials. I got about halfway through before I realized that it (Spoiler - click to show)was telling you how many letters to add or subtract to your first and last words, although I'm still not sure what the last two decimal places mean.

I had to go to the hints increasingly more as time went on, and there was one word that I honestly had no clue ever existed (heavy spoiler for later game) (Spoiler - click to show)FLAIN.

The main boss had what felt like consistent character development, and the storyline felt taut and trimmed of fat. Overall, I found this to be above average for a wordplay game.

I remember playing the Frenetic Five games a few years ago. They date back a few decades, and were a funny take on superheroes with characters that had pretty under-powered powers, always taking on villains with similarly silly ideas.

I never beat any of those games without hints, but I appreciated the vibes and felt they were internally consistent.

Although I've forgotten a lot about those games, I was happy to see a sequel/prequel released. This is a pretty fun game about trying to open up a vault.

It's a game that requires leaps of intuition for almost every step, which is a style that is both frustrating and rewarding. Given enough time, I probably would have wanted to play this off and on for a week or more, but instead I played an hour or so before using some hints that Dan Fabulich wrote on Intfiction.

I think the author succeeded in their goal, if their goal was to please fans of the former games and create a difficult one-room game centered on exploration and experimentation. I do like easier games myself, or ones centered on learning complex systems with easy individual parts, but I appreciate the vision of this game and hope the author keeps their intention to make more.

When this first came out in Parsercomp, I heard people talking about bugs, but the author seems to have patched them.

To be up front, this is probably the VtM Choicescript game I’d be least likely to recommend to the general public.

This game is very high quality, but it doesn’t focus on the mechanical aspects of the VtM nearly as much as the others. For me, and I expect many people, the draw of these games is to try out the systems.

Furthermore, choicescript games in general are often easiest to enjoy when the effects of your choices are clear and obvious. This game has a lot of branching text, but much of the variation is in the emotional aspects of your character’s thoughts rather than major events (compared to similar games; there is still major event branching in this game, just not as much). Also, there’s some more strong profanity on this game than I prefer.

With those caveats aside, this is an excellent psychological introspection game. More than the other vampire games, this dives into the inner mind of a vampire. I think the game was describing itself in this quote (only available in certain paths):

“Alex had a knack for putting together campaigns that would test your morality more than your STR and DEX, and they would frictionlessly lead you to dilemmas that forced your group to ask: So, who are we? What do we stand for? What do we play for?”

Another, later quote takes a rare wink in the fourth wall:

“ For a moment, the idea that you might be a made-up character yourself takes root in your mind and seduces you with the possibility. What would it be like to be a fictional character—just another collection of ink and paper in a book with its own backstory and motivations? You're full of so much mundane detail that when the plot needs you to do something, they can pull you out and have you do it without any messy internal conflicts dragging you down—that's the fantasy, anyway.”

The game is about you as a vampire who was abandoned by your vampire-sire, and later taken in by a man named Markos. You live in Athens, which is gripped by a conflict between those who want vampires to continue the Masquerade, hiding from humanity, while others, radicals, want to tear it down and reveal all.

This author is a previous Nebula nomineee, and it shows. The story is tight and excellent. However, it is somewhat dark and can be depressing; failure at the end is not only possible but likely.

Some have described the game as rushed, and I think that’s because of the focus on the inner mind. The typical events of a game, like fights, betrayals, etc. are given less focus while your own doubts and hopes are played out over a longer time.

I had thought of giving this 4 stars, but I honestly enjoyed the storyline quite a bit, especially some parts about sunrises.

This is an Exceptional Story, a part of Fallen London that is available to subscribers or purchasable separately at a higher price.

In this story, you are robbed by two unusual thieves: a pair of sisters of advanced age. You are quickly drawn into their shenanigans, and plot a heist with them.

The main focus of this story is the relationship between the two sisters, and their individual meditations on mortality and age, as well as the loss of ones dear to them.

The heist itself, and your group, is relatively straightforward, leaving more focus to go into immortality. The groups you encounter here are the urchins and the Gracious Widow, with this story giving some chunks of info regarding her that are otherwise difficult to obtain. I'd primarily recommend this story to people interested in the Gracious Widow specifically, or who have considered what it would be like to get a new lease on life in their old age.

This is an Exceptional Story, an additional piece of content for Fallen London that is available to subscribers, or for purchase for an additional amount.

This story centers around a revolutionary (called the Growling Radical) who was essentially exiled from London for a time. He wants to come back and put on a performance that will shock the powers-that-be.

And that's all that really happens. There aren't too many twists in this story; he asks you to help his song, he puts on the performance, and you can influence a bit how things go.

In a recent survey, out of the 100 stories that require money, this story ranked 90th, one of the least popular. But the author has also written a story in 6th place, The Brass Grail, so it seems less like a skill issue and more like just an idea that didn't work out as well as hoped.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, an extra piece of content that subscribers receive and which can also be purchased separately for additional costs.

In this story, you, a detective (as most characters in Fallen London become early on), are asked to track down a missing Dachshund. Your client is a newspaper reporter that covers the Bazaar (a Bazaarine Correspondent).

But soon you discover that you are entangled in a web of espionage. A lot of the story revolves around decrypting messages with seeds you find (this decryption is carried out automatically, rather than solving a cryptogram by hand). You find several people out to get you, and you soon get embroiled into a massive conspiracy with supernatural terrorism and several Masters.

I'm a fan of mysteries, and this game does a great job of setting up several curious and mysterious things that later get pulled back in satisfyingly and surprisingly by the story; kind of like Checkhov's machine gun instead of Chekhov's gun.

Descriptions are vivid, especially of people. The masters are painted vividly, the clay men are humorous, the new assailants and missing people are unusual and diverse, and the locations are creative (especially the sugar factory).

I think one thing that I enjoy about this story (and Chandler's others) is that the player is at the center. Many of the other stories, including recent ones, have you at the edges of some great conflict, where you observe for a while and then make some monumental choice at the end. It's like you're in someone else's novel, but you play the side character who gives good advice at the end and changes the tide.

But in this and other Groover stories, you yourself are the main story. You are the problem for other people, the main driving force of the plot, the center around which other things resolve. Your actions feel weighty. Some other stories by other authors do this, too, like the Icaran Cup or Flint.

Overall, I enjoyed this one.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London. Exceptional stories are chunks of additional content for subscribers which can also be purchased separately.

This story takes a lot of strange terms, some of them very dark. One warning for a kind of content that might trouble a lot of people (even people who usually don't need warnings): (Spoiler - click to show)possible animal abuse. More specifically: (Spoiler - click to show)you can voluntarily choose to murder a sentient elephant and watch it die and get harvested for ivory. This is only a small side part of the story and not the main thrust.

In this story, there is a mysterious band of thieves that seems to be making enormous amounts of money, but without any apparent victims. Your job is to figure out who their victims are.

This ends up being tied to some of the deeper lore of Fallen London, specifically (names of factions it ties into): (Spoiler - click to show)Parabola, the chessboard, and the Red Handed Queen. It has some significant choices that gave me pause, and features a lot of duality, which is a favorite topic of mine to play in IF.

Overall, I would give this 4 stars, except it features a couple of concepts I personally enjoy quite a bit.

This is an Exceptional Story from Fallen London, a piece of additional content for subscribers that can also be purchased separately.

In this story, a group of the Tomb Colonists (older people who have pushed Fallen London's immortality too far) desire to experience true death through the ancient Totentanz, a mystical dance that releases the dead into a dream world.

The dance is connected with the Third City, a predecessor to Fallen London from pre-Columbian America that ended in a horrible tragedy. It's also connected to moonlight, which in Fallen London shows things how they would be, not how they are.

Most of the story revolves around assembling the various parts of the dance. This includes visiting a mad scientist, hunting down a mysterious woman all across London, and attending a high stakes auction.

The concepts are interesting, but some of the interactions feel a little like filler. Definitely a good one for fans of the tomb colonists, though, or Mr Wines.