Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game is written in Unity engine. It uses Roblox-like characters to tell a brief story of a man sleeping and dreaming and confronting his fears.

This game technically uses a parser but in actuality the game tells you what to type at every step, waiting until you type it correctly before moving on. There are about 10 opportunities to type. In one of them, you get to make a choice.

The graphics are amusing, although the game says they were made in one day.

Overall:
+Polish: No bugs
+Descriptiveness: The text is barebones, but the art helps
-Interactivity: Very little
-Would I play again? Don't enjoy Unreal Engine very much
-Emotional impact: Kind of muted by long slow timed sequences.

This game is set in the Hinterlands, which I believe is a setting designed by the author (I've played another game from that setting). The setting reminds me a lot of the Max Blaster comics in Calvin and Hobbes: rayguns, oozy monsters, bizarre aliens, and a daring hero.

This game features a pretty large town with a wide variety of locations, like a farm, a temple, a distant shack, a nearby military base, an apartment building with many individual apartments you can enter, etc. However, everything is designed compactly to be easily traversible.

Your character is kind of a rogue or rascal. In the course of the game, you commit several heinous acts, but with the framing it comes of as more of an anti-hero than a pure villain, more like Rocket Raccoon than Darth Vader.

I didn't encounter any bugs. At one point there was a large rock I needed to interact with that didn't have any adjectives, while I also carried some rocks. So I had to go to another room to drop them; if the rock was 'large rock' or 'heavy rock' that could be avoided, but that's a minor quibble in a very polished game.

I had to use the hints three times, but they're organized pretty well, and each time the solution was fair, just involving more exploring and more talking.

Sometimes the logic isn't clear; you can get away with a lot of things that someone might reasonably stop you from doing. But I feel like it operates with the same kind of consistent logic as a Looney-Tunes cartoon (although darker!). It would make a pretty funny animated short.

I've played several Larry Horsfield games, and I generally have the impression that they'll be extremely long ADRIFT games that require you to look in every nook and cranny and often put you in 'dead man walking' scenarios because you forgot something 400 moves ago.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could solve the game. I started in a magician's room, and I tried looking behind an armchair, looking under a stool, etc. But there was nothing there, so I explored more and found some more reasonable puzzles: a light puzzle, grabbing a book, etc. Then I went to another area, grabbed a lot of stuff; the game even warned me that I hadn't grabbed everything! I explored a dungeon, and got really very far.

I thought to myself, 'Man, this game is awesome. It's a lot smaller than other Larry Horsfield games, and seems more focused on clever puzzles instead of hiding random stuff.'

At one point, the game said I needed a tinderbox, which I hadn't grabbed, so I peeked at the walkthrough, and found out that I had missed it at the beginning. Apparently instead of looking under the stool or the armchair I needed to stand on the stool and it would reveal some stuff to me.

Fortunately the earlier areas were still accessible so I went back to go grab it.

But then I ended up solving what I thought was the final area of the game. It actually ended up sending me to a nexus of areas. The SCORE command revealed that I only had 90 out of 500 points. And the door locked behind me. I thought, 'well, I'll still try on my own'. But getting in a boat told me I should be wearing my war belt. With the door shut, there was no way to get back. So I loaded an earlier save. Unfortunately, there was a bug where going back to get the warbelt meant I couldn't leave for some reason.

I restarted completely, deciding to just blindly follow the walkthrough. But it's missing a command early on and I ended up with a bug situation where there were two 'thin books' in the same room that I couldn't disambiguate between.

So I restarted again, fixed that problem, and just rode the walkthrough the rest of the time. I found out there was tons of stuff I had missed earlier because I hadn't looked under a desk or behind a door, etc.

There were fun things to see on the way, like various foods and desserts. There was also some depictions of East Asian culture that were a bit suspect. There were some words I didn't recognize which wikipedia said are considered offensive (like a name for a kind of Chinese hat). The people are a blend of Asian motifs and generic europeans (they speak the same language as the protagonist and are offended by burping, which isn't very common in east asian cultures). At one point they're singing a sing with the lyrics 'ying tong ting tong' or something, which seemed wildly inappropriate to me, but apparently it's an old song by a group called the goons which has nothing to do with Asian culture. But then why is it featured in this area? Kind of weird.

Overall, if this game had been just the first area up to the dungeon, I might have given it 5 stars; I like the puzzle direction and the writing. But after that point it just becomes so easy to get into 'walking dead' situations.

I'd usually say beta testing could help with these kind of things, but Larry Horsfield has been writing games for fourty years and has been requesting testers recently, which haven't been found. I think the issue is that the core game design itself makes testing difficult; there are so many places to check, so many places to look, so many possible combinations of items. The game is huge but it also includes mechanics designed to make short games longer, like forcing replaying due to missing items or having tightly controlled sequences that are easy to fail. These combined, it makes playing the game without a walkthrough take days or weeks, including for testers. And the games are produced at such a rate (there were three entered in this same Parser Comp competition, although one was withdrawn) that there's wouldn't be enough time to test one thoroughly before the next came out.

The author is aware of these issues; on intfiction.org, there are posts going back to 2014 discussing how this author has trouble getting beta testers and why.

This is the third time I have played and reviewed this game. I first saw it in the Spanish Ectocomp, where I found it difficult as I had to learn new verbs, but I found the story intriguing and creepy.

I then experienced it as a French game in French comp, where it was fun contrasting the two versions.

Now here it is in English, my native language, and it's honestly a different experience this time.

In this game, you play a Russian soldier who is obsessed with writing the perfect letter home, specifically the letter you write to your family in the case of death. You are not confident in your own writing, so you steal the letters of others that die, whether on their own, or with help.

The game contrasts the insanity of war with your own insanity.

Experienced in my native language, the game is still good, but I notice more the abrupt changes in scene, emotion, and motivation. Sometimes others are suspicious of you, while at other times they take your word even in suspicious circumstances.

One difficult I had was technical; near the end, with the tent and the (Spoiler - click to show)explosives, I needed to find a word to (Spoiler - click to show)light the explosives. However, (Spoiler - click to show)LIGHT and BURN didn't work. I had to type (Spoiler - click to show)EXPLODE CHESTS to get it to work.

Overall, it's been fun seeing this over time. There were definitely some nuances I didn't understand until I saw it in English (especially since Adventuron doesn't let you copy and paste text into Google translate). I had fun.

This game is more the hint of a story than a full story. It's written in Gruescript, a relatively recent language that is a parser/choice hybrid, created by Robin Johnson.

This game blends physical objects with conversational topics. What you're holding, you can talk about. If you can talk about something (like a name), you can take it and drop it.

The setting is some kind of alternate mythology, a fantasy world that has echoes of Greek mythology (some kind of box that wasn't meant to be opening, blends of snakes and people).

There's just not much here; I reached an ending early on that I thought was a time limit. I restarted and found out it only comes from asking a certain topic. I avoided that topic but couldn't find much more; downloading the (helpfully provided source), I see that that was the full ending.

So this game is pretty short. The concepts are good, though I had some trouble with figuring out how to do what I wanted. In a fuller game, it could be very fun, but for now, I'll be content with this hint of a game.

I briefly beta tested this game.

This Adventuron game has you searching for seashells on a beach. Pretty soon, though, things take a drastic turn, and you end up (Spoiler - click to show)being able to cast spells!

The game also utilizes two protagonist perspectives which is nice, reminding me of the old Atlantis Indiana Jones game.

Overall, the mechanics worked well for me. I think the design of the game could have supported an even larger game, but it's pretty substantial already and is part of a competition for beginners, so it makes sense.

I briefly beta-tested this game.

This is a feel-good game (mostly!) about a fun children's competition in a quaint village on a summer's evening.

A carnival is in town and the Mayor is throwing a competition where you have to gather clues. You race around with a bunch of other kids who move from place to place, all of you looking for clues.

The kids running around really helps make the game feel more alive. And the puzzles in the game have a wide variety, a lot of them making use of your ability to customize requests for various items like food and flowers.

There's a vaguely sinister subplot running through as well. Even with this, though, it feels like there's not a strong narrative thread, more just an excuse to have fun, which isn't necessarily bad. Fun for a nice diversion.

I briefly beta tested this game.

This is an adventuron game about making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You start in a kitchen and have to combine the three ingredients.

The game manages to add at least 3 major twists to this setup, which is pretty amusing. They aren't all necessarily coherent, but it makes enough sense to by funny.

The main character has a definite idiosyncratic personality that shines through more and more as you play.

Overall, it's pretty solid, but could use a couple more synonyms for things (like JAR for JAM), although it's been improved since I and others tested it.

This is a brief Adventuron game that has a short tutorial at the beginning.

In it, you play as a young child at a hotel who wakes up to find an old woman in your room. She beckons for you to follow.

And that's most of the game; the gameplay is pretty simple. There are a few small puzzles, but this is otherwise mostly linear. The concept has a lot of implicit horror in it, but I feel like that theme wasn't developed as much as it could have been.

Overall nothing is bad in this game, there's just not much: not much story, not much interaction, not much game. I feel like it could be expanded a bit, but as it is, it was fun while it lasted.

I played the English version of this game as part of the TALJ.

This is a fairly complex Adventuron game. Your girlfriend, a self-conscious milkmaid, is devastated that she forget eggs for her special salad, but you promise to bring some from your farm, in addition to another surprise.

The game is fairly large, with many rooms and also many items hidden within items within each room.

The writing is rustic and fun, with different animals you can interact with.

It's actually pretty hard; I found at least two different ways to completely fail without any warning given that I had failed, making it 'cruel' on Zarf's cruelty scale. But it's short enough that I was able to replay a couple of times to fix it.

This is one of the author's first full parser games. It's far more polished than most 'first' entries, but one kind of bug that slipped through is that many locations describe objects after you take them, like the alum.

Overall, it was one of the most rich and well-written TALJ games I played.