Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game is a hefty Inform 7 parser game set in a bunker city in the planet of Venus, with a horribly dystopian government where the greatest good is turning in others to the government.

The game involves numerous factions and parties (with different endings depending on which of two you support) and crossing and doublecrossing.

There's a lot of death, too. This PC's bodycount is one of the highest in games in recent years.

The game is very open in nature, with many actions being able to happen in any order. This leads to a lot of freedom, but makes the early part of the game fairly overwhelming. The hint system is also all available at once, due to the non-linear nature, and it can be difficult to find what you're looking for.

Overall, the game simply needs more polishing, but it is a good game at core, and is one worth having made.

One thing I struggled with quite a bit was the directions, which are INWARD, OUTWARD, LEFT, and RIGHT. It was hard to abbreviate these, as L means 'look' and IN and OUT map to inform's Inside and Outside directions. To be honest, I would have preferred the author just used the standard Inside and Outside directions and made Inward and Outward synonyms for them.

Giving 3 stars for now but would be happy to bump up if an update is made in the future.

This is a well-designed parser game, with some nice visuals and a compact design that lets it be played in an hour or two.

You play as Galaxy Jones, crime fighting hero on Mars. Your nemesis has personally invited you to try rescuing a celebrity from his clutches, and you have to fight up his giant tower while facing his taunts.

The game is subdivided into 5 or so areas with roughly similar maps, each one containing its own set of puzzles. Many of these puzzles revolve around combat.

The game has 10 points possible, and each time you get a point, an ascii art GALAXY JONES logo fills the scree. Someone else mentioned they hear a guitar riff every time GALAXY JONES pops up and I have to admit I imagined one too.

I liked the writing and the gameplay. The game is overall polished, although I had a couple of times I felt like I was fighting the parser, particularly with trying to do anything with the cable in the first half of the game (Spoiler - click to show)like I tried to put it on the claw, attaching it to the cables outside on the ledge which weren't implemented, throwing it at another ledge). But I ended up figuring things out. These are just minor issues, and I suspect that most parser fans will enjoy this game. If there were an update tidying up things, I'd probably boost this to a 5 star rating.

This is an Adventuron game with some good pixel art and intended for beginners.

Your mistress, a witch, has been hexed by a wizard, and you have to help her! To do so, though, you'll have to go through strange lands, frightening areas, and combat.

The setting is reminiscent of Howl's Moving Castle, an industrial area town where magic is common and regulated in a guild while a war drags on in the background.

There are multiple characters with distinct personalities and the puzzles and quests are varied and interesting. On those few occasions were I got stuck, the HELP command listed all possible verbs and talking with people gave gentle nudges.

It appears there is a secret ending, but I did not feel a need to go back and replay.

Great for a beginner or for an experienced player who just wants to play a chill game. Doesn't feel kid-oriented but is appropriate for kids.

This is a large, ponderous game with many attachments. The image I had when starting was of a gigantic hamburger, one that you'd get at an artisanal place that is far too large to fit in your mouth. You pick it up; it looks good. You eye it, go to bite, hesitate, turn it. A piece of lettuce drops out. You grab it, but an onion is slipping out the other side. So you just start eating, bits dropping here and there, no longer able or willing to manage it all, just enjoying the burger.

The concept of this game is that there was a (fictional) game released in 1996 that was like Photopia ahead of its time, less focus on puzzles and more on story. But it's intentionally made to be like other games of that period, so I guess less like Photopia and more like In The End, which is referenced several times.

Seven years later, someone releases a transcript of the game, which becomes well-known, so a new round of criticism is generated.

This game, in the fictional history, was buggy and received poor reviews. Then, in 2021, the author was approached by some critics/fans who want to do a critical version of it, which he agrees to while they update it (kind of like the Anchorhead update and the Cragne Manor tribute, I suppose).


This game consists of the 'revised version', with an accompanying booklet with the transcript and some art. The revised version has art as well. An in-game guide consisting of critical materials is available in-game, slowly increasing in scope as you proceed.

The art is one of the highlights; the style is unique and well-executed, and the game may be worth playing for the art alone.

The game concept is that you have the ability to remove entropy from some sources and imbue it into others, having been gifted that power by an orange-eyed demon woman in your youth.

It serves as a metaphor for involuntary inaction, similar to ADHD or depression, where you can only use some external impulse to compel yourself to complete some task.

Your mother is dying in the hospital, and you need to go see her. There are several obstacles in the way, though.

Besides the main goal of the ending, there are many mini-deaths along the way. The more you get before the end, the better ending you get!

Except...even if you only get a few, you can see what the ending would have been for the other options. I only got 6 points, but I wasn't super motivated to see the other 27.

And let's talk about why.

This game is very polished. It had numerous testers, and it feels like it. There were only a few times I felt like there were 'bugs', like trying to (Spoiler - click to show)OPEN DOOR while on the roof and having it say that that's not something you can open. Overall, though, I'd say it has a high level of polish for a game in general, especially one of its size.

Where I found some difficulty was in knowing what to do a lot of times. I felt like the game swung between no details and overfull details for clues sometimes. Like finding deaths; I really couldn't figure out the mechanics behind finding deaths at all. There were no exposed electrical lines or broken glass that could obviously hurt me. And things that were dangerous (like a heavy tree branch) didn't respond to what I thought were death-inducing things (like pushing them). The hint menu has dozens of hints, but none of them at all are for the deaths except for an explicit listing of the exact actions you need. In the main storyline, too, I often found that the things I got most stuck on weren't in the hints at all. I suppose I was just on a different brainwave.

It might have helped to highlight relevant features in some way. For instance, the (Spoiler - click to show)AC unit is mentioned early on in the first line of the paragraph, in the middle of a list of a bunch of non-useful material. Given its significance in the story, it might have merited more prominent place, nearer the end of the paragraph.

Fortunately, the game is implemented well enough that even while struggling there are generally good responses to obtain while looking for something to interact with.

The three layers of Drew Cook (the real one, the author one, the PC one) all blend in interesting ways, positive ones, I feel.

It's hard to evaluate the quality of the in-game writing. I think I would like it, had I found it in the wild; however, all of the in-universe reviews, mostly written by the (real-world) author, praise the quality of the writing. They'll say (paraphrase) 'the writing was excellent, but the bugs were terrible'; it came up more than 4 or 5 times. It's kind of like trying to judge the natural light of the moon when someone has set up a dozen spotlights aiming up at it in an attempt to brighten it. Does this artificial praise really affect my perception of the prose? It's hard to say, and it would have been interesting to see how I felt about the writing quality without simultaneously reading a great deal of manufactured praise for it. However, I do see the reasoning for it, for otherwise why would this game have been preserved?

Overall, I think of lot of people when looking for parser games to play are looking for something that's not super buggy, that responds to most inputs in a helpful manner, and that has a nice outer shell of story, setting and/or (in this case) art. So I think most people will be pleased with this. It made me think quite a bit, and I could see myself revisiting it.

I enjoyed this brief respite while playing Spring Thing games.

You play as a mutant pig farmer dealing with bikers. Life is kind of unfair, because if you don't feed your pigs, shovel their poop, and deal with bikers, you're gonna lose your pigs! And there's not enough time to do all of that...

Fortunately you have other options as well. And trying some of them out can give you different fun endings in a short amount of time.

I reached a point where I could pick between two different endings, and I picked a deathmatch, which was pretty amusing.

I liked the game, finding it polished and descriptive, but I didn't feel like replaying it in the end.

I was involved a bit with the creation of this game; it's part of Seed Comp, where people put game ideas out there and others make full games of it.

So I made the seed for this game, and I'm very glad things worked out the way they did. I had heard of the Red Door, Yellow Door game online before and even jokingly tried it with my son once but he got creeped out so we stopped right away.

My issue was I didn't know what kind of surreal dream imagery to put in; that's not my forte.

So I'm glad Charm Cochran picked this up, because it ended up as exactly the kind of game I had wanted to play when I came up with the idea: disturbing, creepy, and unpredictable.

The basic idea is that you're at a slumber party and your sister is put into a trance and instructed to visualize two doors, and then you and your friends tell her what actions to take in the dream world.

You soon find parallels between the dream world and your own, but also bizarre features like giant buildings or creatures. The part with Claire's different voices I found especially thrilling.

Literally the only drawback I see is that there are a couple of things that could be polished up. Most of the game is amazingly responsive, with a lot of dumb things I thought of trying having a custom response with an in-game voice, an effect difficult to achieve. But there were a few things like uncapitalized room names or objects that were difficult to pick out from surrounding scenery (like the (Spoiler - click to show)cabinets in the kitchen). I had a smooth experience because I relied on intfiction hint threads, though.

However, those few unpolished moments actually played up the dreamlike atmosphere to me, so I'm not even certain they need to be resolved. Dreams are often like that, enchanting, full of exploration, but with frustrations and occasional non-sequiturs.

My only regret is I don't have other game ideas I could see Charm Cochran's spin on, because this was great.

This games has a parser written from scratch in Twine.

Making your own parser is a fraught thing, and many people have tried and failed over the years. The last-place entries of IFcomp are sprinkled with poor parser of years past. The biggest issue is that there is a bewildering amount of tradition in parser games that varies from group to group, all of whom may get upset if your style doesn't match theirs (like GET vs TAKE, X vs EXAMINE vs LOOK [object], G for again, Z for wait, abbreviations for cardinal directions, hitting 'up' for copying an earlier command). A few people have managed to make very robust custom parser: Robin Johnson, Nils Fagerburg, and Linus Åkesson.

This one is better than many I've seen, especially since it doesn't require downloading a Windows Executable and it has fairly quick response times. However, there are a few oddities that got in my way a bit: compass directions are part of play, but the text does not indicate possible compass directions to go in. Some basic actions are not repeatable, although no reason is given for it (generally things that give you one-time info). On the positive side, keyword highlighting is in use, similar to many Aaron Reed games, where you can interact with objects by typing their names. On the neutral side, much of the game occurs by typing Continue.

On the story side, this is reminiscent of books like The Giver or Divergent, where you are in a futuristic society and your role in life is chosen in a big ceremony.

I liked the overall story, and found it fun. I ended with a pretty big surprise in my playthrough, which was good. Some of the individual word choices stuck out as strange to me; one guy was referred to as 'the being' and 'the male' a lot, which made him sound kind of alien, and there were a few other choices that were a bit odd.

For me, I tend to choose interactive fiction that has features of escapism, and feel like I'm taking a break from reality when I play the game. That's one reason games like Violet threw me off at first, since, despite their quality, they reminded me of my real-life PhD pressures.

This game is quite the opposite of escapist. It poses (from my perspective) a single question: if you knew you were going to die, what would you do to be remembered?

Bez talks in honest and self-reflective detail about his experiences with pseudo-dementia, which led to concern that they would soon perish. Now, though, e's in a better place, so now we can look back and see how things were going, and how the game A Single Oroubouros Scale was developed.

Like a few of Bez's other pieces, this is structured not as a game but as a narrative essay, which different chapters broken up by hyperlinks. For me, the hyperlinks brought a definite sense of interactivity to the piece, because it was like finding clues in a mystery game, except instead of solving a crime you're trying to understand a human being.

I thought I had finished the whole project, and felt it was missing just a bit more that could help communicate the author's intent, but when I came to review the game, I found a poem (by the poet that his recent game Hidden Gems, Hidden Secrets centered on) which beautifully complemented the overall experience.

I enjoyed this dark game. You play as a young child bartered away to be the spouse of a pale and fitful girl, scion of a rich family.

The text is dark, but themes of light and the color white prevail through the game, with the light presented as being more evil and twisted than soothing darkness.

There are numerous endings to the game, and a variety of conversations where you can choose between topics.

I enjoyed the game's depiction of helplessness in the face of unspeakable horror, as well as its blending of dream and waking.

Surreal gothic horror is on of my favorite genres (such as the game Heart of the House or the book The Haunting of Hill House), so I think I enjoyed this more than most people would. So while I'm giving it a five star rating, I could see other people having different opinions.

This game definitely brought back a lot of memories. I had a long relationship where I had a lot of work-life balance issues, and it eventually ended up falling apart, and this reminded me of that.

There are several endings, so there are likely different versions of this game depending on how you play, but in my playthrough, there were two main characters: a wealthy government official, and a young, poorer-class individual.

They love each other, but there are tensions. The poor one is concerned with fairness and trying to find beauty in day to day moments, while the richer one is trying to 'bring home the bacon' and do well at work.

An argument about one partner staying home late and missing an appointment because their boss corralled them at work reminded me of times that my boss in my first job wanted me to stay home late while my partner was caring for our newborn.

It's a tough situation. So I think there's a lot of emotion in this game. Your choices have a lot of freedom, too.

The only thing missing for me is length; I felt like the pacing in the first half was more drawn out and set up expectations for a longer game but that was rapidly concluded in the ending, leaving me wanting or expecting more.