Reviews by MathBrush

This is a wild game. It's written in the thinBasic Adventure Builder system. It uses multiple colors of texts and has a ton of sounds.

To help prospective players understand the vibe of this game, one of the first puzzles involves a skeleton in a wheelchair holding a buzzsaw coming straight at you. If you fail to defeat it it tears you apart while a loud chainsaw sound effect plays and red text announces your death.

I found the only way to progress was to open up the source file, and even then it was hard to figure out. I did make it to the end of the preview, however.

The idea is that your father summoned a horrifying demon and was kidnapped into another realm. In that realm is a crossroads. Each of the four paths consists largely of empty hallways with two exits each. However, there are special things in each area, like machines, talkative NPCs, enemies, and special rooms.

This was a fun game, but not very easy to play and could use a lot more testing to smooth out bugs. But since this was released so long ago, it's unlikely it will get finished soon.

This was a really, really long quest game, and one of the longer linear parser games I've played. It is also unfortunately kind of buggy.

It's a sword and sorcery quest game which is better downloaded than played online. You are a young boy who is imprisoned and who learns magic. Throughout the game, you gain the ability fight and have randomized combat. There are also timed events, including some of the hardest real-time events I've had in text games.

It's divided into 5 parts.

In the first part, you sneak around a castle at night.

Then, there is a long romantic and money-filled section where you either romance a rich woman or help a smith romance a poor woman (if you try to do both, you may lock yourself in an unwinnable state and have to edit your save file). You earn money from tasks including guessing the punchline to jokes.

In the third part, you must explore a ruined castle, fighting goblins and assembling items to explore with.

In the fourth part, you must learn more magic and assault a guard tower with timed events where you must hide from guards.

In the fifth part, you have a final battle against a necromancer and assemble a potion.

The game has a combat system with varying attacks and defences. It's a major part of the game.

Overall, the writing had some good plot points but weaker 'local' descriptiveness and line by line writing, and a tendency to include all important info in text dumps. There were severe bugs, like the final guards at the end of the tower just disappearing so the fight options were there but no responses (I edited the save file to include 'Gust' and used it to win). A fun adventure but the bugs were just killing me.

This is the highest-rated Spring Thing game that I had never played. Jim Aikin is the author of Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina, which was one of my favorite games when I started playing IF.

The idea is that you're a farmhand working with your mean old grandma and you've finally saved up enough money to buy a ring for the girl you love. Unfortunately, your grandma's favorite duck swallows it! You have to head to town, deal with some supernatural encounters, and find a way to get that ring back!

This puzzle game is really complex. Almost every puzzle in it has multiple layers. I'd find a goal, progress towards it, be really close, then look at a hint, get past that, and realize there were two more things left to do.

It's like if you wanted to get a drink out a frosted-over freezer, so you find an ice-pick, but the ice pick is held by a goblin who wants peanut butter, and you find peanuts but they're expired, and you find a a grinding machine but it has no power source. Once you fix the peanuts and the machine (their own series of quests) you get the ice pick and pull out the drink but then you realize you have to thaw the drink.

That exact sequence isn't in the game but that's the kind of game it is. This is a great game for people who love charting out maps and examining every object and talking to every NPC.

I did find that frequently the answer was something that was hard to pick out of hundreds of possibilities. For instance, the surfboard. I thought that (Spoiler - click to show)TURN SURFBOARD N or (Spoiler - click to show)PUSH SURFBOARD could work but you have to specifically (Spoiler - click to show)get on it and LEAN RIGHT or LEAN LEFT. Similarly, many puzzles require asking one or two specific people about something you saw, but the vast majority of interactions with NPCS are '____ doesn't seem interested' or equivalent, so you have to really endure a lot of blank responses to get the good ones.

I used the hints heavily. The game itself was extremely polished and had no bugs or typos that I saw, and there were many amusing or interesting parts.

I like this game, and I've played it more than any other Ectocomp game, but it's designed in a way that fully exploring it is very difficult.

It's a timed game, where you have to get 30 different trinkets in a constrained amount of moves. You can still end the game without all 30, 30 is just the max. While playing, you discover a large number of amulets and eyestones. Each combination of amulets and eyestones results in different powers, ranging from faster movement to power over plants to time travel.

The map is large, as well. Without the time constraint, it would be a substantially hard game; with the time constraint, it throws optimization into the mix, especially since some amulets affect the time it takes to perform actions.

So, this game seems to me to be in the vein of Ryan Veeder's Fly Fishing, a game where you chip away at it over a long period of time rather than rushing to a conclusion. I never wrote a review for Fly Fishing because I never finished it (because I have difficulty sustaining focus if I move to other hobbies between play sessions), and I almost did the same thing for this game. But I think I've seen enough of it to say that it's enjoyable and well-written. I know at least one person has gotten 28/30 trinkets in a single go, which is very impressive.

I was making a game that had some thematic elements in common with this one, from what I'd heard, so I wanted to try it out.

Pretty much everything about this game is a spoiler, so I'll describe the non-spoilery parts first.

The idea is that you are a highschool boy who's long-time friend and neighbor Sayori has invited you to join a club with her and three other girls. When you do so, you find that all four members have their own insecurities, but are each in their own way soothed by your presence and attracted to you.

Like most visual novels, text is split up into short chunks with different character poses per chunk. In this specific novel, there is a pretty large gap between choices. I saved often, as I was clicking fast to keep the game's text speed around the same as my reading speed, but didn't want to use 'auto' or fast text due to some text that disappears quickly. The main forms of interaction are choosing the order to talk to people, choosing who to spend time with (rare), and writing poems.

Poem-writing takes the form of 20 or so pages of words. On the other side of the screen are chibis of several characters. When you click a word a character likes, they jump up excitedly. Once you've written your poem, whichever character jumped the most enjoys listening to it the most.

You have about a whole week's worth of meetings and poems and chances to get to know the person you're interested in. This is all part of Act 1 out of 4. There are hints that something else is going on; Monika, the leader, refers to some out-of-game concepts like saving and loading, and all of the girls in the club hint at some darker sides to their lives.

Spoiler time:

Moderate spoilers (gives away general concept and discusses act II and the dramatic end of Act I)

(Spoiler - click to show)
By the end of Act I, your neighbor Sayori ends up hanging herself, with the character of the music and game presentation distinctly changing.

In Act II, the game resets itself and you play again, but without Sayori. This causes some logical changes in the game world, but we also see more glitches, with some text replaced with a strange bold black font with pink background. The characters you interact with are shown in more and more awful situations.


Full spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)It turns out Monika, the president of the club, is aware of the fourth wall and of your existence as a player, and of the files in the game. She spurs the others to suicide and deletes their 'character files' from the game (as you can check in your OS). You end up floating in a void world with her unless you delete her own character file, which ends up setting up a new world that has its own problems in the brief act 4.


Discussion of the concepts:
(Spoiler - click to show)The game has a lot in common with other popular meta-games of the 2010's like Undertale that address the player directly and show awareness of existing in a game (although such games have existed for a long time). The long Act I, though, with very few 'unusual' events, requires a way to keep the player invested and involved. Ironically, then, in trying to make a good setup for a 'twist', the first act of this game is probably one of the better 'traditional' visual novels, especially since so many other popular visual novels have some kind of major twist in them.

To create horror, this game uses several techniques popular in game creepypastas and horror films, like:
-Use of realistic graphics when 'fake' graphics have been the norm
-making the player think their computer is glitching
-establishing norms for what characters can do and then breaking them (like 4th wall breaking)
-using content inappropriate for the rating level initially established (like strong profanity, sexual references, and graphic deaths and mutilation)

Overall, it was effective in the presentation of these concepts. There is some need to suspend disbelief, though; we see Monika primarily motivated by an annoyance that the player never chooses her; however, choosing her is not an option. This is mentioned in-game, though, so it's not exactly a plothole, more like a Greek tragedy.


There is some content, especially violence and self-harm, that I generally am not comfortable with. In this case, I was well pre-warned, but had another factor that made it less shocking. I tend to immerse myself in characters in interactive fiction or text adventures, which makes shocking events more upsetting, but I did not identify with the main character at all here. He's written with a strong voice and makes a lot of comments and decisions I never would; I know that's common in a lot of games, but I feel like it was even stronger than usual in this game, as if we were never meant to identify with him. I felt at arms-length the whole game.

This game has high production values. I'd give it 5 stars, but I don't intend on replaying.

I've been playing through the most popular games I've never reviewed and this game has been at the top of that IFDB search for a while.

Playing through, I can see why it has been popular over the years. It is a parser game but has a list of all verbs and nouns for each location, and the puzzles are lighter than many other games at the time, making it a pretty easy experience to complete (though I did use a walkthrough at several points). It's also split up into 7 or so smaller adventures, so it's easier to plan out play sessions, and it has detailed pixel art and animations.

It's filled with a lot of pop culture references. Puns, Monty Python sketches, TV shows like Gilligan's Island and Fantasy Island, etc.

While the puzzles were generally fair, there were several points where items that you'd had and had seemed like gags for a long time turned out to be useful exactly then, which is probably where the greatest difficulty lies (remembering everything you've read or seen or picked up up to this point).

There are occasional point-and-click parts, the largest being a system of waterways to navigate.

Parts of the game are genuinely very amusing. As a whole, though, it is really reminiscent of 80's nerd humor, where women are primarily sex objects and non-American cultures are mostly there for jokes. This game has several jokes where rape is the punchline, and a lot of the drawings are of busty women whose clothes are falling off. Part of the game involves sneaking into a virgins' temple where you hope to see them nude, and the first virgin you see (not nude) is 15. There are stereotypes about Native Americans, and so on. All of this would come off as solidly normal, if a bit risque, in the 80s; the art style and jokes are very similar to softcore pornographic games my brother owned like Leisure Suit Larry (though no full nudity is there).

I enjoyed the difficulty level and gameplay, but I soured on the game more over time, especially after the sex-focused Olympus area, so I ended up just using a walkthrough to end it off. I did find the uses of all the magical objects you had gathered to be pretty funny, though!

The Wayhaven Chronicles are one of the most popular series of commercial IF games available. They follow a detective in the small town of Wayhaven who has recently been assigned four beautiful vampires as partners, out of which the detective can choose one to romance.

This series is projected to last through 7 books, although only 3 have been released so far; with some over 1,000,000 words, it's understandable that this might take a while.

This second game furthers the romance in the first game while adding a new mystery. Now that the hero is aware of vampires, other mysterious creatures come into play, and a new carnival comes into town, complete with creepy attractions and a horrifying mirror maze.

I felt like the balance between romance and plot shifted even more towards romance here than the first game. However, due to the need to stretch the romance over 7 games, the progression of the romance is glacially slow (at least for the A romance I chose). It reminds me of the Twilight novels, where Stephanie Meyers had to come up with more and more contrived reasons to keep the two main characters apart, or of the Office and the way it dragged out Jim and Pam.

So for those reasons, I found this game less compelling than the first. The creepy carnival was fun, and getting to know my teammates and the world around me. The game is great at providing enough roleplay options to really act your personality. I played a generally positive and cheerful character who liked their mom and was happy with the supernatural, and even if sometimes there was only a single hopeful choice, I picked it.

I did encounter more failure this time around. Despite heavily investing in one skill and using it at every chance, I often failed checks for that one skill.

While I didn't like this quite as much as the first one, I consider it a 5 star game among the general field of interactive fiction.

I recently heard a theater teacher give advice on how to play drunk people. She told students not to act drunk, but to act like a drunk person trying to act sober; otherwise, it will come off as over the top.

This game is written as a romance pretending to be a supernatural police procedural. Almost all interactions, plot points, choices, and scenes are designed to progress your romances with a variety of options.

The base story isn't bad; it's mostly unresolved by the end, as the game is part 1 of 7 intended games in a series, with 3 completed so far. Still, the 'substory' is fairly resolved.

The idea is that you are a recently-promoted detective who discovers a series of grisly murders by persons unknown. Simultaneously, a team of four vampires move into town (not a spoiler, as the game uses dramatic irony; while our protagonist doesn't know what's going on, we generally do). The four vampires happen to all be described as extremely attractive (and customizable as to gender), from the intense and brooding captain A (except names depend on gender selection) to the gregarious N or aggressive M.

I was pondering Choicescript games recently and realized how much better the system is at romance than almost anything else, the way parser games are better at object manipulation puzzles than most other things. Romance naturally lends itself to choices both on who to spend time with and on how to roleplay your interactions with them. This game has much less of an emphasis on powers and win/loss scenarios than most choice-based games (though some of both exists). Instead, the vast majority of options are role-play that affects your stats, and instead of those stats determining what you're capable of, they determine the way people react to you. If you are positive and happy about the supernatural, people comment about how relieved it was easy for you to accept; if tense and fearful, they are worried too.

The game is a romance power fantasy, where multiple beautiful people care about you, are impressed by you, and are excited about you, while you are simultaneously very important and powerful but also very fragile and needing protecting.

Outside of the romantic options, the game is not quite as exciting as, say, Night Road, another vampire game with investigations, but with them it's a solid game option. It makes sense that this would be one of the most popular Hosted Games of all time. I look forward to part II.

This was the highest-rated non-commercial game on IFDB that I hadn't played (outside of Superstition Season 2), so I definitely wanted to try it out, especially after trying this author's game Eikas in IFComp.

Like Eikas, this is a daily life simulator in a small community with an opportunity to befriend NPCs, search for items, go wandering, and grow food. Both game are well-implemented and provide a variety of activities for the player to experience each day so that they don't become tedious.

Unlike Eikas, there is more of an edge to this game. Even from the beginning, you can find sadness or heartache in many places. Many deaths are discussed in the game, and blood and violence can occur. Some forest scenes are notably dark, and there is an overarching mystery that can be intense. Overall, it reminds me of things like Princess Mononoke, which can be both cozy and violent.

There are four different people to get to know, and whom you can romance (but only one per game!). I found the character storylines well-written. A gender option for characters could have been fun, as I found the storylines for the men more appealing than the stories for the woman; it would have been fun to romance a forest witch-like woman Jonah.

The writing in the game was excellent, and I enjoyed the various mysteries. The ending has parts that are very solid but overall some things feel up in the air, since the game doesn't truly end. Very fun overall.

I beta tested this game.

I have to say right now that I played this game twice, once in Chrome and once in Firefox, which I downloaded just for this purpose.

It is MUCH better in Firefox, where every character is voice-acted. I would really strongly suggest only playing it that way.

This is a long choice-based game with full voice acting about a character who takes up photography as a 'bucket list' item while the apocalypse happens due to a zombie virus.

Your camera purchase serendipitously leads you to find your former childhood friend nekoni online, who you reconnect with, ending up in a discord of former childhood friends.

Playtime is split up into 4 seasons, with an intro, 3 days per the first three seasons, and one day for the final season.

In each day, you'll hang out with your dog, have the opportunity to go to one of several, then hang out in discord, choosing which friend to chat with, then chatting with your friend Neko in a voice call. Your mom also might call.

If you choose the same place to visit each day, it unlocks someone to help you during a crisis later. If you chat with the same friend each day, you unlock a special ending centered around them.

Playing twice gave me really different experiences; in my first one, I hung out with a snail guy at the park; in my second, I hung out with a heterochromia guy in a coffee shop. In my first, I chatted with Artemis the most; in the second, Rainer.

I'm glad I tried multiple paths. One of them (the [spoiler]Rainer[/spoiler] path) unlocks author commentary on the game.

In it, the author mentions that part of the game is about something e visualized for a long time, and this is a chance to experiment with it to see what it would be like.

I think that explains a lot about the plot and setting. Some say dreams are a way of the brain coming up with 'what if' scenarios and testing them out. That's what this game (at least partially) is!

So there is a zombie virus, but much of the game is about the past and discord drama. The virus can be seen as a stand-in for both Covid and for neurodivergence or coming out. The vast majority of characters are LGBTQ+ or allies and respect pronouns. Bad things still happen (at least two really dramatic events occur) but they aren't the norm. The protagonist can positively affect the lives of others.

Thinking about it, the game can be therapeutic. Both of the worst things that happen to you personally are the kind of scenario you can think of in the shower and stress out about, so writing or playing a game like this can be a nice way to work through it.

I liked the voice acting; on this playthrough, the mother's voice and neko's contributed the most. The pictures were great; I especially liked the papercraft.

Not everything is perfect about the game; it feels really long, and it's not apparent at first just how much freedom there is. Due to the personal nature of the game, some choices don't feel authentic to who I imagined myself to be. But it helped when I realized something; I read the Great Gatsby earlier this year. I used to really dislike it, but once I realized that the narrator wasn't intended to be perfect or for us to always agree with him, I liked it much more. It's the same here; I don't think Yancy is meant to be perfect. I think part of the idea is to see what happens to someone who is doing their best but sometimes messes up.

Overall, this game gave me a lot of food for thought. It made me a lot more sympathetic to aroace people, as, while I don't identify as such in the longterm sense, I realized that I have a lot of those feelings right now in my life. And the game helped me imagine different scenariosin my life as well. So a lot of food for thought!

Now, this is another game I tested, but, sad to say, I didn’t finish testing it at the time, because it’s actually pretty hard! I have finished it now, though.

This is a long, difficult Dialog parser game that uses Dialog’s hyperlink system to turn itself into a parser-choice hybrid.

In it, you play as a sidekick to a cowboy hero who is famous for saving people from villains. The secret is, though, that you are the one who is actually saving everyone!

The game is expansive, and largely revolves around getting Buck out of trouble, defeating henchmen, and investigating the outskirts of town.

Gameplay is very hard. You can lock yourself out of victory; to avoid that, you can set ‘winnable on’. If it’s in ‘easy’ mode, you’ll know right away that you messed up. If it’s in ‘hard’ mode, you’ll only find out a few turns later.

The solutions to all puzzles revolve around objects that are far away and that usually aren’t labelled or associated in any way with the area you need them in. Given that this is a big game, that means that the best way to progress is likely carefully mapping out the world and taking every object you can find, looking at what verbs it’s capable of, then trying out obstacles one at a time.

Alas, there is an inventory limit that comes into play fairly often. I think you might be able to carry some things in the knapsack, but I forgot to try that this playthrough.

As a side note, multiple puzzles require you to throw an object into an adjoining room, which isn’t standard in most Inform/Dialog games, so keep an eye out for that!

Overall, I think this game deserves a long, careful playtime that will likely exceed the two hour IFComp limit. So I recommend trying it out, and coming back to it after the comp if you like it!

This XYZZY-award-winning TADS game shows off a lot of the power of the engine, like tracking what the sense can detect and from how far away.

You play as an officer in an Empire of planets, sent to check on a small backwater. Your goal is to talk with the local technophobic elders and leave. While there, though, you meet a strange, disingenuous but beautiful woman.

I like quite a few of Eric Eve's games, which tend to be very polished, have highly interactive characters, and fun puzzles. All of his games tend to have attractive women who either already know you and are attracted to you or just met you and are attracted. This game leans kind of heavily on the latter; in fact, if you ignore the girl and just complete your mission, you can only score 10% of the points!

This game is both easy and hard. It has many objectives, but you can end the game at any time. Winning at all is super easy; getting the maximum score is incredibly hard.

Smells and sounds matter in this game, as does physics. Objects can be pushed around, etc.

I do think it's a bit too hard to complete fully, and somehow I found the open-ended nature of the game a little less personally satisfying than his other games, including my favorite, Nightfall, which has stronger pacing. However, it's clear why this game was a candidate for (and winner of) the XYZZY Best Game award: it is impeccably polished, responsive, and clever.

This is a long, worldbuilding-heavy, sincere fantasy Twine game about a world where dark magical creatures are born from mirrors. You play as a tired mother who is desperate and starving, looking for some kind of money for your family. You descend into the monster's caves to win wealth, learn about the monsters, or die.

The game is polished, and I didn't find any bugs. There are occasional illustrations and it makes use of different background colors.

I thought it was well-written. The creation myths were some of my favorite parts, as was interacting with the gods. Overall, this seems like a setting that would do well in fantasy book.

I had ups and downs with the plot. Up until the end of Act II, I felt like there was a definite progression, and could feel the tension rising. I reach what felt like the apex of the plot, but then...there was Act III, which felt like it let the wind out of the sails. (Spoiler - click to show)We get a new protagonist and repeat many of the same plot points. It's interesting too because with Act I and Act II I thought, 'This could be a great fantasy novel if it was expanded with more interactions with the characters, more door history, but the author probably didn't have enough time', and yet Act III itself is quite large. I would have preferred to have just Act I and Act II, fully fleshed out, and maybe Act III as a later sequel book.

But this is just quibbling and it's not like I can dictate that kind of thing. I liked the overall story and thought it was well done, I'm just recording the thoughts that passed through my head.

The choices were both good and bad. A large chunk of them fell into two categories:
1) Be nice vs Be mean
2) Injure yourself to discover something vs Be safe and learn nothing

I found little motivation to be mean early on, so usually just stuck with being nice. Later on, I found that there was more subtlety to some of those choices, but it would have been nice to have more options that weren't on the good/bad axis. The choices I liked most involved the gods, who had some great variety. The choices did provide the chance to feel like a hero, though, and were meaningful, often having significant-feeling effects. The game doesn't seem to branch too much but it does adjust itself based on your actions.

It was a long game. I played over two different evenings, and it took up a couple hours in each.

Overall, I can recommend it to players in generally, but most heartily to avid fantasy fans.

This was a long game! It took me around 3 to 4 hours to finish, possibly because clicking links wasn't quite as fast as typing, but it went well.

Two of the most enjoyable murder mysteries of the last ten years are Erstwhile, a twine game where a ghost has to try to solve his own murder, and Toby's Nose, a parser game where a dog has to aid Sherlock Holmes.

This game combines the two! It's a parser-choice hybrid where you are a ghost that has to influence your dog to solve your own crime.

The setup is a classic murder mystery: you have died in the middle of the night, and four people stand to inherit from you. Each suspect has to be cleared or convicted before the day is through.

The game relies heavily on physics and on the five senses, as well as interactions with the neighboring humans.

Overall I found it very fun. I'd like to describe some nitpicks with the puzzles but those should come with the caveat that I had a good time!

The thing with some of the puzzles is that I could conceive of many possible solutions to problems but couldn't tell what the game was looking for or what effect things would have. How much do lights illuminate things? How far does sound travel? How does a dog communicate with a human?

I grew a bit frustrated, but a light bulb went off when I realized how few red herrings the game has (although they're there!). I changed from *deductive* reasoning to *inductive* reasoning. Instead of making a plan and trying to figure out how to achieve it, I looked at the items, actions and locations I hadn't used yet and thought, 'How can I do something with this?'

Occasionally there were plotlines that stretched my disbelief (especially the amount of things the dog got away with) but not so much more so than a normal mystery book.

Overall, I enjoyed the high level of polish. I realized later on that the 'find ____' options were actually really good at zipping you through the map quickly; if you remember where something is, you can just type it in and click on the 'find such and such' link and go there immediately. I also liked the characters of Watson and Davis.

The hint system works very well. The game has some automatic hints at the beginning which were a bit too spoilery for me, but fortunately the author has added a way to turn those off; the normal hints, on the other hand, can be accessed at any time.

Playing this game was a whirlwind of associations, expectations, references, and laughs.

You play as the valet to Bruce Wyatt, billionaire playboy, who is undergoing a crisis of sorts at the worst possible time. He's acting, well, like a bat, fleeing bright light sources, screeching, and crawling around. All this is happening right when a fudnraiser party/gala is about to start!

The story is divided into an act/scene structure. And my expectations swirled around. Spoiler-heavy discussion:


(Spoiler - click to show)
At first, I thought the game would be a Verdeterre-style optimization game as we struggle to make enough money, a game that would be heavily replayable but relatively brief. I thought the story was a reference to Der Fledermaus, a comic opera I've seen a few times but have mixed up with Der Rosenkavalier at times.

Then I started thinking that the money changes weren't related to optimization, but rather a way to inject additional humor into a scenario. Having someone get injured or annoyed or amused can be mildly funny in and of itself but attaching a specific dollar amount to it is especially amusing.

Similarly, I realized that this was a Batman parody when I saw the names of Bryce Wyatt's parents, Thomas and Martha (or something similar). Soon guests arrived, and I saw versions of Two-face, Poison Ivy, and Catwoman.

But others eluded me. Then the game itself mentioned Der Fledermaus, and I looked up the wiki description to refresh my mind, and saw that it included other characters that were in this game! So it was referencing two bat stories at once (and I saw later, in the credits, another one referenced).


Pacing was shockingly smooth. On several occasions I began thinking that I would run out of things to do, when subtle nudges pushed me in the right direction or major events (like the doorbell ringing) took place. Conversely, at times I'd have so many tasks piling up I thought I'd have to miss some and replay the game to see them. I kept thinking, "Surely this can't hold up, the pacing's going to go all wrong at some point and I'll be stuck twiddling my thumbs or getting too frustrated," but it never happens.

Compass directions have an in-game explanation, which I found fun given that Chandler Groover has expressed his own struggles with the compass in other parser games and his decision to keep it out of most of his own games; so having its presence so carefully justified here makes sense both outside of the game as well as in the game as a kind of tutorial for new players. Perhaps the later parts of the game where (Spoiler - click to show)the compass serves as a tool for control and destruction serves as an unconscious metaphor for the community's over-emphasis and use of the compass and the pressure it puts on authors to do the same.

Overall, this game was well-made and enjoyable. It includes some sensual material and some puerile material with bodily fluids, but both are framed in such a way that they are not really objectionable and leave more to the imagination.

Given that a few characters resemble people from different sources, I wonder about those I couldn't place, like (Spoiler - click to show)the twins. Are they from another source, or new creations?

I think this game will join Eat Me and Toby's Nose among Chandler Groover's best-regarded games, and serve as both a good introduction to new players and a fun treat for the experienced. Great work!

This is a long exploration game involving picking up and using various tools and ammunition in a surreal technomagical future.

Many Pacian games are in such an environment; Gun Mute and Weird City Interloper come to mind. This game, though, seems to be directly set in the same universe as the game he released last year, Killing Machine Loves Slime Prince. Both involve solar royalty (the Third Prince in the previous game and the Second Princess in this one) and many of the other characters and concepts pop up in both games.

In this game specifically, the princess (your girlfriend) has defaulted on a big debt, and the debtors have come to collect. Golden roots have invaded the city and are sucking the life out of all the office workers while Mad Max-style Junkers (I've never seen Mad Max, just going off vibes here) roam the city attacking anyone they see. Your goal is to save and/or chastise the princess while rescuing the citizens.

A variety of survivors can be found throughout the city, each unique, with widely varying personalities and amounts of helpfulness. Conversation is menu-based, and can change depending on your progression.

The gameplay features simple randomized combat using rolls for attack and defence, both of which can be modified by equipping special clothing. Your only weapon is a gun which comes unloaded. You have three inventory slots (including the gun) and this is filled over time with items like lockpicks and money.

I had a bad experience at first. Combat is random, you can't UNDO, and I didn't find any ammo in the first area. There is an enemy at a bridge right away, and to use the bridge you need several actions, so I was just getting hurt with no way to fight back and the monster wouldn't go away. It felt frustrating, like the game had set up a complex system and wasn't letting me interact with any of it. I had to use all my healing items and didn't find any more for a long time, and I was resigned to not really enjoying the game.

Fortunately, past the ammo-less opening (I hope I'm wrong and someone points out that I missed some really helpful early ammo so others don't suffer my same fate--Edit: someone did find early ammo, so it's just my fault!), the game is a lot more fun. Combat can either take place through violence or through escape and patience, and I chose the latter the most often. It got really intense in one late area with tons of monsters, but I was satisfied when I was able to (Spoiler - click to show)summon an assassin to kill 3 monsters in one turn.

I was invested in the story, and the exploration was smooth and satisfying. I found no bugs. Like many of C.E.J. Pacian's games, there is a great romance element between the leads that is much rarer in parser games than in choice-based games. He's able to turn combat and parser look/take/drop gameplay and make them into acts of love, which is nice.

Great game, lots of fun!

This game occupied all of my play time today. It's really quite large, which is fitting for a game with 34 contributors. Most entries are puzzleless, so it's not so never-ending as Cragne Manor, but it has a similar variety of experiences.

This game feels like a text version of MeowWolf. MeowWolf is an unusual art exhibit that exists in at least two locations (New Mexico and Texas). I visited one with a group of students and happened to live next to the second one that was built. It's a kind of art museum that has a central theme (a family's two-story home, recreated inside of the museum, has been affected by twistings in space and time, leaving clues behind as to the family's fate) with a variety of unusual and bizarre art rooms connected by creative things like tunnels behind refrigerators or cast iron spiral stairways. Each of the art rooms is just (as I understand it) given to a local artist who decorates it in any way they like, from sculptures of meat robots to videos of beaches to a secret club venue for bands to play in. The whole thing is an elaborate maze.

This game has the same feel. You play as someone stuck in The Maze Gallery, which is a bizarre exhibit. You pass through rooms filled with moving inkblots, eggs painted like clowns, vicious fashion designers, tiny paintings etched on rice, and more.

Some of the 'exhibits' are actually encounters spread throughout the game written by single authors, like a series of diary entries or a loving couple that shows up time and time again.

Parts I especially liked include some of the (Spoiler - click to show)presidents, the four humors, the de(void), the clown alley, the talking paintings, the wing of bad art, and Jo's cafe.

The only time I really encountered friction was in a maze-like part where you need to pick the right path from three options. I didn't distinguish that it had a separate ruleset from the rest of the park and couldn't figure out it's mechanism, so my experience was mostly a voice getting more and more frustrated and annoyed at me until I got kicked out.

The consistent css and art style and placard images managed to keep the tone remarkably consistent. A game like this usually feels very distinct in voice, but this one could almost conceivably have been written by one very creative author. The poetry segments and Zizi!!! are perhaps the most distinct.

I was hesitant at first that this game would be impossibly large, but it's in a fairly compact 4 act structure and not all content is visible on first play. I got lost once, but looking at a directory showed me the path forward.

I felt satisfaction at reaching the ending and enjoyed feeling more oriented in life, in a way; like the game presented a wide variety of viewpoints and feelings and gave me more of a sense of where I am mentally in relation to a sea of others. That was even a theme of one of the rooms, where (Spoiler - click to show)a mirror shatters representing you and you can only grab for some of the pieces, holding onto what is most essential and hoping that you grabbed what was important.

There were several other wonderful parts of the maze that I wasn't able to fit into this review (like the Hungry room and the ladder and so on) so thanks to everyone that participated!

This was a hefty TADS game that I took several hours to play. It employs a variety of perspectives and player characters, and uses literary quotes, mostly from Poe.

The game primarily takes place in two time periods. One is set in the present (or around the present), in which an author has been discharged from the hospital after a explosion in a skyscraper leaves him wounded. The other is set in 1800s Baltimore where Edgar Allen Poe lies raving in a hospital sickbed.

The modern parts, while they include puzzles, are more story oriented, light on puzzles, and philosophical, while the older parts are an atmosphere-heavy mystery with puzzles and codes.

The city of Baltimore is fairly large, although the author has kept the total number of rooms to a small amount and gatekeeps them a few at a time to keep from getting overwhelmed.

The story that plays out is one that many can relate to, commenting on writing and authorship itself in a way that I found delightful. The exact specifics of who is who and what we were meant to believe and what is true can be difficult to suss out at times, but I'm thinking about replaying in the future to nail down those parts.

I became very stuck at one point due to the nature of some of the puzzles in Baltimore that are based on elapsed time. Something had changed without my being aware of it, and I went through every hint in the help section and couldn't figure it out, and even dumped the strings in the game and that didn't help, until I wandered around a bit more. So I'd say that frequent exploration, careful examination, and gathering everything not nailed down (and maybe some that is) are definitely helpful here.

Overall, the game has a literary or cinematic feel, much like Photopia. The game itself focuses on two ideals for writers: (Spoiler - click to show)popularity with the masses vs critical acclaim. I wonder which of the two ideals the author believes this game to be aiming towards, and which the audience response will be closest to (of course neither or both are a possibility). I love the idea, the writing rolled easily over my mind. I did have to take frequent breaks as there is quite a bit of information and it could be a lot to digest at times, what with both in-game puzzles, the big area, the multiple narrative layers and the mysteries left to the reader to puzzle out even after the game is over.

The author's most recent game before this, According to Cain, won the XYZZY Award and placed highly in IFComp. I found this game fairly similar in length, quality and difficulty to that one, but with more of an emphasis on the passage of time and interactive NPCs and with more unity in the story while According to Cain had more unity in the puzzles.

**The Bureau of Strange Happenings** by Phil Riley

This is a long, polished parser game that took me around 4 hours even using copious hints.

You play as an agent with they/them pronouns in the Bureau of Strange Happenings, a government agency that has recently been defunded due to political shenanigans. You end up in a small town strip mall and, even worse, all your devices have to be turned in and replaced.

Unfortunately, your phone has been locked inside your new desk. Getting it out is, in many ways, the big puzzle of the game.

I was excited to see a game about supernatural happenings, but I was kind of bummed because for the first 30-50 minutes I was met with a series of mundane challenges and events--trying to get into a laundromat, using a pawn shop, etc.

Using hints to get past that, I realized that it went so long without supernatural shenanigans because it was the prologue for a much bigger game. I remember after a couple hours of play landing in a large suburban town with over a dozen locations and thinking, 'okay, I'm going to bed, I'll handle this in the morning'. There's a lot of content, and it's super-polished; I didn't encounter any bugs.

I do think the entrance point for the supernatural was perhaps too obscure; I had to find one of many rooms, and in that room which had many objects examine something that was only briefly mentioned, and then go to a specific location to use it. I don't think I would have ever figured it out without either using hints or careful examination (which, to be fair, is true for a lot of parser games).

I enjoyed the unusual directions in this game. I also enjoyed several slow realizations about what is going on; this game really includes a lot of 'delayed punchline' or Chekhov's gun moments.

The difficulty level is high, and I relied very heavily on hints. There is a large proliferation of keys, knicknacks, red herrings, books, and so on.

Story-wise, it's heavy on atmosphere and world-building over pure plot. The game makes use of (Spoiler - click to show)lizard people as the main enemy; while some have used this concept as anti-semitic conspiracy in the past, that doesn't seem to be the case at all in this game, which has a much more X-Files feel.

To me, the roughest part of the game was frequently not knowing what to do. The best parts of the game were the innovative directions and compass system and the big suburban puzzle.

**Hildy** by J. Michael

Whew! This was a long game! I used hints a lot but I tried to do as much as I can on my own; I think I solved around 40% of the puzzles without assistance.

This is a Zorkian game, both in style and in setting; many characters from the Zork universe appear and you use its magic system.

The game has a long, linear opening that sets the stage followed by a long open puzzle segment and concluding with an endgame and epilogue.

Storywise, you are essentially a young college student named Hildegard (or, Hildy) who is on the rocks with the superiors. After unwinding, your advisor suggests you go out and clear your head, but that leads you to a long-deserted location where many mysteries await.

The author has made some solid games in the past (Diddlebucker, For the Moon Never Beams), but I think this is the best yet. The early segment is fair and the vast majority of puzzles feel well-clued and logical.

The difficulty is pretty high, though. It's like Infocom games where sometimes the struggle is knowing that a certain verb or action is even possible. You also have to pay close attention to detail; things can get mentioned early on and then never mentioned again.

Twice I was stymied by not noticing exits, including once very early on ([spoiler]I didn't realize my bedroom extended to the north[/spoiler]).

There are some 'old chestnut' puzzles, mainly a logic puzzle involving squares. I didn't mind it, but I could see others doing so.

I used a walkthrough for much of the game, and I have always done that with large parser games; it's one reason I've completed so many. Without a walkthrough, this game could last many hours, maybe being good for playing over a week or two. Without any hints at all, some things would be very hard to guess, so that would make play take even longer.

So I'd recommend this to two groups of people: those who enjoy the Zorkian setting (who could use a walkthrough or not), and those who want a polished, longer parser game (where I'd recommend not using it).

Very much enjoyed this game.

I’m not finished with this game, but have played more than 2 hours. I’d be happy to finish it later, though!

I’ve seen this game before in the German Grand Prix. I had a goal to beat every game, but when I saw this very large puzzle fest with many complex German words I was overcome by the difficulty and gave up on the Grand Prix.

So it was nice to see an English translation! It also seems to have been updated with new puzzles and more points (2000 vs 810).

You play as a magician seeking a mystical jewel of life hidden in a master magician’s lair. Once you find it, though, you realize that getting out is a whole different problem.

The game has a humorous tone and a wide variety of puzzles. It leans a bit to the risque side, as the master has pornography and is known for seeking after young women.

Gameplay can vary between traditional parser and choice-based, depending on your settings. In choice-based mode, nouns have a drop-down menu with actions, some of which involve other nouns. There are many possibilities, which is good and bad; good because you have to think and can’t just lawnmower through all choices, but bad because it can be hard to find the right option.

I found the puzzles very interesting, especially those involving the stuffed animals. My biggest difficulties were with objects where you need to USE one object WITH another, but if you get the order wrong it doesn’t work (so, for instance, using a key with a door might work but not a door with a key).

There are some minor errors here and there that can be confusing. I had a problem with a snake that I messaged the author about but which I think might be soon fixed, so I’ll update once I get past that part. There is a very helpful hint system with three levels of hints, although occasionally some things don’t have hints or the hints aren’t a complete solution.

I think the only drawback some people may not like is the sheer number of options, with many rooms having many objects which have many interactions. Playing it as a parser game can help, but some objects don't respond to their in-game names (like 'left shelf' must be referred to as 'leftmost shelf', I think). I think the people who will like this most are people who like Steve Meretzky’s games (I feel like the tone and puzzles are similar) and are patient with working through puzzles involving a lot of careful examination.

I usually write reviews for both the author and the players, but I don’t think Jim reads the reviews, so I’ll write for the players.

Jim Macbrayne is an author with a polished self-made writing system that he has used to make several parser games, usually 1-2 a year for the last several years (as well as some TADS games in the past). These games are windows executables and feature a command-line style interface with some color use. The Function keys are used as shortcuts in-game. An unusual feature of his games is that objects in containers cannot be referenced, so if there is a fish in a bucket, you can’t type GET FISH or X FISH. Instead you have to type GET FISH FROM BUCKET or GET ALL FROM BUCKET. He has reserved the F1 key to always print out GET ALL FROM IT as this occurs very frequently in the games.

The games have a standard format and this is no exception. You generally are in a world that is fantasy with some mundane/modern objects (for instance, this game has a Gymnasium with a climbing rope in it) and different devices. There are usually potions of some kind and often a teleporter device that can be calibrated to different settings (in this game, a coin-operated dial). Puzzles often revolve around entering combinations using colors, numbers, keypads, etc. with the solution to one combination found on a card or piece of paper in another area. There is usually a book of spells that you can memorize a certain number of times, each time you casting them having one copy of the spell disappear from memory.

This game has all those things. The framing device is that you have been asked to find Excalibur, King Arthur’s sword. In the meantime, you’ll pass through caves, castles, and more.

I generally find these games pretty chill and soothing. I like to play for a bit till I get stuck, get some hints, play more, and then when I’m really not sure to use the walkthrough. I got around 60 points out of 230 before using the walkthrough. I feel like playing without help would take a week or two, with a lot of time waiting for ‘aha’ moments.

I did miss some of the more exciting parts of earlier games; for instance, this game didn’t have much NPC interaction.

I expect to see more similar games in the future, and they’re nice to look forward to, and I like to play them early on in the competitions, as they don’t get many reviews (mostly due to being a Windows executable). The nice thing is if you play one and like it, there are many more to enjoy.

I knew before I played this game that it was fairly old-school, with the possibility of getting in non-winnable positions and a strict inventory limit.

I assumed that meant it would also be buggy or sparse. But I was pleasantly surprised to see I was wrong on both counts!

This is an amusing and puzzle-dense and polished game about zombies and other undead. You meet quite a few supernatural beings, many of which are pretty goofy and others which are frightening.

This is a hard game, and I used a walkthrough for the majority. I was able to get about 60 points on my own out of 300. I was glad to see that there was a 'winnable' setting you could activate to know if you had done something dumb or not.

The inventory was a major sticking point, though, and I'd probably raise the score by a point if it were removed. It is very tight, and I locked myself out of victory by bringing a shovel into the mansion, since I couldn't carry everything I needed out of it. And it doesn't contribute anything to the game; no puzzles are improved by the inventory limit. And you can take things out of the backpack but not put things in when it is being worn, which exacerbates things.

Overall this author shows great talent, and I would be happy to play more games from him (without inventory limits if possible!)

This is a great Twine puzzle game that manages to have immense complexity.

You play as Rosalinda, an animated skeleton who can detach her body parts, and Piecrust, a powerful mage turned tiny mouse.

Rosalinda can detach her body parts, allowing you to control up to 5 independent characters/things, including the mouse.

Piecrust can cast numerous spells, gaining more as the game progresses, with some serving as a Chekhov's gun.

Both have their own inventory of items. Items can be dropped, picked up, and, adding to complexity, used on things in the room or combined with each other or, reaching tertiary complexity, combined with each other and then used on items.

There is a big cast of characters. Overall, I'd say this game is more story-driven than the first one, which felt more like a puzzle box exploring using Rosalinda's bones in creative ways. This game has a lot more variety, and has extensive character development. Honestly, I loved it.

It's a long game, taking me several hours. The plot is hard to summarize, but basically Rosalinda is exploring her (un)life and where she came from, but her and her friends get captured and put on trial. Later, everyone is separated, and must find each other again.

This is the first chapter of a large Choicescript game. I played past two hours on my phone, saving occasionally, but I lost about 30 minutes of progress near the end by forgetting to save (I got to the point where you can pack your suitcase). I think I got pretty close to the end, from what other reviews have said.

The scope of this game is large. The current largest Choice of Games title is 1.2 million words (while some Hosted games are larger), so one chapter of 400K is quite big. Production seems to have taken a long time, as there is a lot of reference to face masks and social distancing.

The overall concept of this game is that King Arthur and his court were real and still exist in a certain way (revealed later on) in the modern world. Simultaneously, demonic forces are trying to start the apocalypse, and you can help stop it.

There were two main romantic options I saw, a man and a woman. There are tons of different chance to declare your affection, so many so that I felt I had to constantly be turning down the people I wasn’t interested in.

The game has lots of action scenes which I thought were full of descriptive language and feeling like stakes were real. I died in one! (to see what would happen). A lot of times it was over the top (lots of Zalgo text for horror and tons of quip/pun options for humor).

The game is so large, I feel, because all the normal Choicescript stuff is amplified. Usually you can pick a few features of your appearance; here you can pick if you have hair, what length is your hair, what color is your hair, what shade is your hair. Instead of five to ten options, there are 15 to 20. Instead of choosing conversation topics from a repeating list that gets narrowed down, you pick from a list of conversation topics that each open up to their own list of conversation topics and so on.

This provides for a lot of customization but it can kind of interrupt game flow sometimes. I felt a bit of decision paralysis from time to time. It’s kind of the opposite of the problem a lot of games have, where all of the cool branching and decision making is hidden and players think the game is small/short because they don’t realize the choices they could have made.

In contrast, here everything is put on display constantly, revealing the massive amount of possible choices. And some don’t even seem implemented yet, like the fencing club (unless there is a way to get into there!).

I liked the Merlin character, and saw them as a fun RO/mysterious person. The overall magic system seems thought out and coherent, and the worldbuilding feels like it’s on an epic and grand scale. While I did find the large amount of choices overwhelming at time, it seems reasonable given the overall scope. I could definitely see it being popular when it comes out.

This is I think the 5th Jim MacBrayne game I’ve played, and I think it’s definitely the most fair and well scoped of them that I’ve played; either that or I’m simply getting used to their internal logic.

These games are all written in a custom engine that is remarkably smooth, as least here. For those new to Jim MacBrayne games, the most unusual feature is that if an object is in a container or on a supporter, you can’t take it; trying to will say ‘You don’t see any…’. I believe this is due to the fact that tracing through the contents of all the supporters and containers is too hard for the engine to handle. Instead, you have to say TAKE ALL FROM ____. There is a shortcut specifically for that (F1).

Anyway, the main idea of the game is that you are hunting through a cottage and adjoining area for a mysterious orb, with clues left behind by a circle of elders.

Most of the puzzles revolve around enigmatic devices that you have to figure out, interspersed with riddles and codes that explain how to use them.

I was able to get pretty far on my own; although I only got 70 points by the two hour mark, when I checked the walkthrough I was about 40% through the game. The puzzles are tough but fair; the place where I got stuck was due to not remember a clue from earlier.

The setting is very abstract, and much like Zork in its mix of fantasy and modern aesthetics.

I was glad to play this game, and hope Jim MacBrayne is able to enjoy coding up games for a while to come.

This is definitely one of the heftier IFComp games; I took a whole evening to look at it, spending two hours playing it and then speeding through with the walkthrough and thinking about it for a while after.

This is the 6th in a series of games that are all based on the same concept: rhyming pairs of words. Progress in the game consists of walking around/exploring and taking the names of rooms or objects and finding another pair of words that rhymes with them (like the name of the game itself).

Andrew Schultz has written many wordplay games over time (more than 40!) but I think this concept has proven the most productive, given the number of games that have been produced with the rhyming pairs.

I’d like to describe what this game has in common with the earlier games and what’s unique to it.

First, in common: This game is set in a kind of abstract land, reminding me a lot of The Phantom Tollbooth, where abstract concepts are taken literally. By removing the need for all items to be concrete or to fit into a unified setting (like a fantasy world or spaceship), it opens up the opportunity to include a ton more of the rhyming pairs.

Another thing in common is that the game is centered on an emotional journey of sorts. with a lot of focus on emotions and experiences. I said earlier that the game doesn’t have a unified setting, and while that’s true physically, each game has a unique emotional setting, a journey of self actualization that changes from game to game. Most games have an enemy that represent negative social traits such as bullying, peer pressure, cruelty, lying, pandering, or other bad traits, which the protagonist can only defeat after a great deal of personal growth. Not every game has these exact ingredients, because there is a lot of variety.

So that brings us to the unique parts of this game. First, its personal journey is quite a bit different from the others; rather than the hero alone reading books or psyching themself up, they help others. You can grab a whole lot of friends to walk around with you, each of which can help you in different ways. You can also find some people who have been wronged that you can bolster and lift up. Your friends’ journey becomes your journey, in a way. Overall, I liked the positive atmosphere.

You’re also provided with a list of items to get, which I found helpful as a way to track my progress in game.

It’s also pretty hard; while you can just go through the alphabet plus some letter combinations, it can be tricky to come up with solutions. I’d recommend one of two different play styles:
1-Taking a long time on the game, with breaks between sessions, to let yourself find everything.
2-Explore for a while to get as many answers as you can before getting stumped, then using the walkthrough to get to a new area and repeating.

This is definitely one of those games that you can figure out early on if you like it or not. The puzzle types and themes are very consistent, so you can try out the first few rooms to see if you feel like playing more or not. I’m glad I saw the end, even if I needed some help to get there.

This one was a bit of a wild ride.

It’s a long game written for windows. At first I wondered if it was another secret BJ Best game (in the past he’s entered a retro game under a fake name). After all, it has a cool animated loading screen and a neat pixel art inventory picture.

But the author has introduced himself elsewhere and it seems to be just a neat-looking original game by a new author.

So, this game is a mix of combat RPG and Scott Adams-style gameplay. The Scott Adams style is a fun one, but it had two features that I wasn’t used to: the location description is always at the top of the screen (unless you swap to inventory view), and if steps or a door are in the location you type GO STEPS or GO DOOR instead of any specific direction. These tripped me up a bit; especially not needing to LOOK, since LOOK gives a pretty unusual response in this game.

The idea is that a ferry you were on crashed and you need to explore. There is some combat, but most of it is with small and/or goofy things. Beyond that, you have to find a way to enter the city of Hawkstone and discover the secrets beneath it.

I played around without the walkthrough for a while, but had to peek at it to find the right command for dealing with the gate early on. After that, I found a lot more interesting things, and found a way to die.

After a while, I started getting pretty confused. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s going on, due to procedurally generated text. For instance, one action resulted in this (blocking out some names for spoilers, [REDACTED] is by me):

You attempt to unlock the [REDACTED] with the [REDACTED].
object is unlockable. You have a key.
You unlock the [REDACTED] with the [REDACTED]
You roll the dice on your stats and get.. +1 stamina.
Your Stats have increased!
You did a thing!
Something happened somewhere.
Argh!
A kerfuffle!
You are knocked over as a monkee jumps at you.
The monkee screeches as he runs away through the crevice..
You did a thing!
You did something!
Something happened somewhere.


After events like this, objects will be added to your inventory or appear in the room description.

The puzzles were fairly difficult, so I ended up using the walkthrough for a while. Even with the walkthrough, I took about two hours.

There are lots of compelling and interesting elements in the game, like a world you can substantially affect in various ways. There are a lot of silly and goofy things in the game, like buying things on the ‘net’. I’m not sure there’s a major resolution to the game; I followed the walkthrough and it seems to just peter out near the end, with there being some nice resolution to some plot points, but I think the game is intended to either have an open, exploration ending (or there’s more that isn’t in the walkthrough).

A lot of items have a generic description; looking at a woman hanging upside down by a rope says ‘That looks like a normal woman hanging upside down by a rope’. A lot of puzzles get repeated over and over (I’m looking at the bananas here). And, finally, there are several commands in the walkthrough that aren’t really described elsewhere in the game (like Q for Quests).

The overall user interface is great. The animations at the beginning are really neat, and the layout looks nice overall. I also liked the saga of the monkee character the most.

I played this game because it was a ‘longer than two hours’ parser adventure, so one that I would consider might be difficult to complete.

You play as an elf in a village that has suddenly been kidnapped en masse by a witch. You have to look through all the elves’ abandoned houses and workplaces and get the tools and items you need!

This game can be pretty tricky. I made two attempts in playing. In the first, I carefully explored, and discovered some locations where timing was essential. For instance, there is a mine with a lamp, and the lamp has a limited battery. I had to save and undo several times to get that right. Then there were a few other ways for objects to get lost forever.

Increasing the difficulty was a carrying limit, so I had to drop things at different times. There were a lot of containers I could throw things in, but those too had a carrying capacity. Sometimes containers got weird (I had a jug of mead and at one point I was carrying the mead outside of the jug). I’ve had my own issues implementing liquids in containers though so I know how it is!

Unfortunately, after I had escaped and got a bit stuck and turned to the walkthrough, I couldn’t find something mentioned in it while I was wandering up and down the river and, to my sadness, I hit the turn limit and died at about 50 points.

The turn limit seems like a fixed limit, around 600 moves, and so there was no way to undo far enough to keep going. I had to start over, and, fearing similar problems, followed the walkthrough precisely this time.

Before using the walkthrough, I encountered a maze that was actually pretty neat. It’s a ‘twisty little passages’ maze (i.e. a maze where all rooms are identical, or almost so, and going back the way you came doesn’t always take you forward), but the only directions are UP and DOWN, so you have to navigate your way through. I reminded me of the cramped/claustrophobic area in Andrew Plotkin’s So Far a bit.

Some of the puzzles after turning to the walkthrough seemed really hard to solve, especially the finale; I wonder if there are hints you can find elsewhere that can help you with them.

I’ve attached a transcript. It has some bugs in it I’ve marked here and there. Overall, I was glad to beat the witch!

I played this game because it was one of 2 on the Interactive Fiction Top 50 poll of 2023 and I had never played it before.

There are a lot of things that can be spoiled in the game, so I'm going to just describe the beginning here and some accessibility stuff, then put some mid-game stuff in spoilers, and leave out the endgame stuff.

The game starts like an idle game like Universal paperclips. You have a 'stoke the fire' button and, on another tab, a 'gather wood' button. A stranger wanders in, freezing in the cold.

Gameplay expands significantly as you go on, adding crafting mechanics and mild city-building. Eventually you do need movement keys and there are some parts I don't think would be accessible to screen readers.

For mid-game spoilers:

(Spoiler - click to show)Once you are able to craft a compass, you are able to explore a world map. This map contains a variety of outposts, and includes real-time combat that involves clicking, with some battles requiring intense clicking.

As you explore the map, you can make the world a safer place, eliminating threats as you go and establishing outposts. As you do so, you learn about the lore of the world.

Overall, the game is very polished, and while minimalistic it is descriptive. The interactivity worked well for me, although I found some endgame timed events very difficult. I found the game emotionally satisfying and could see myself revisiting it.

Some background: I wrote a game for Choice of Games a few years ago, but it did really poorly. I ended up playing and reviewing all the 100+ available COG titles at the time to figure out where I went wrong and ended up seeing a lot of different patterns in their titles and in what sells well.

At the same time, I kept seeing hints of a game by Emily Short coming out, who is one of the most respected IF authors with some of the most well-known games in her repertoire (Counterfeit Monkey, Galatea, etc.) But it was always delayed, and disappeared for years.

So I was excited to hear that it had been finished (with a little boost from Hannah Powell-Smith, another very popular author), I was excited to hear about it.

So for the game itself. My first go-to with a choicescript game is to look at its stats page. The best-selling games tend to have clearly defined and cleary differentiated stats, while the less popular ones often have confusing or overlapping stats. Here the stats are a bit overlapping: discretion vs self promotion, practicality vs daring, loyalty vs idealism, populism vs elitism. If you speak out to a billionaire and say you hate the wealthy (not an actual in game example), is that populism, idealism, or daring?

So in games where the stats are confusing, it can be hard to min/max, so I tend to just imagine a very specific persona and pick only what I think that person would do. This game responded to that very well, and I got a good story out of it, which is a good sign.

You play as a concierge to the rich. Billionaires ask the company you work for to arrange parties, trips, housekeeping, etc. Kind of like a fancy butler. I felt some connection with this theme as I work at a private school, and helped supervise a trip to Spain this summer, something I could not have afforded on my own. I don't work with billionaires, but sometimes with millionaires.

In the game, you encounter a series of challenging or intriguing clients. That's another aspect of this game compared to other CoG games: this is much more character focused than plot focused. I've heard some say it ends early; with a 500K wordcount, that's not really true. I did finish it in 3 hours or so, while I've had some CoG games take 10, but there are ones like Choice of Dragon that are finished in 30 minutes but don't feel like they end early. I think it's because the plot arc is fairly flat; there's not really a sense of continually rising drama with a dramatic climax; instead, there's a rolling succession of parallel character-focused subplots that each have their own rise and fall.

Going into more detail, rather than having dramatic overall events, we have things like examining in great detail the life of a trans billionaire who is uncomfortable with wealth; the life of a rich woman with a troublesome child; the life of fellow coworkers, bosses, etc. Much of the game is about reflecting on your views on them and life in general and on yourself and your feelings for them.

And reflecting is a key concept here in terms of other CoG games. The real big bestsellers tend to have actions have direct and dramatic consequences. Do you spare the life of the prisoner, or execute them? Do you take the evil crystal or smash it? On the other hand, a lot of the lower-selling games are reflective. Here's what you do: why do you do it? It's much more passive. This game is in between. You do get some pretty big choices, but a lot of things just happen to you and you reflect on how you feel about it.

This makes this game not really fit with the power fantasy that most Choice of Games fans look for. You're not stomping around destroying things. You're not constantly winning despite the odds. There are failures and takebacks (like a long sequence about a helicopter near the beginning) where you lose ground, something a lot of fans distinctly dislike.

But the games that do these things often win awards for writing, like Rent-a-Vice. Having the reflection, the failures, the character drama all are associated with games that have won awards. So if I had to predict anything about this game in the long run I'd wager that it will likely have middle-of-the-pack sales (definitely better than mine!) but be nominated for at least one writing award.

My particular narrative arc worked out well. I played a people pleaser who is mildly uncomfortable with the status quo but not enough to do anything about it. I ended up (Spoiler - click to show)becoming the CEO and marrying my coworker. I was interested enough to try another playthrough. I clicked through the first four chapters quickly trying to do bad. A lot of the early storyline was similar in the major plot points, although wildly different in the details (I somehow picked up an aunt I didn't have the first time). Later chapters were completely new material; in my first game I had several chapters about blackmail, while in my second I had a kind of international investigation storyline, which was very cool. Overall though I don't think it sells its branching very well; my first playthrough looked like I had hit up most major content, while the second was quite different. Signposting that more content exists is hard (more greyed out choices than we have here, chapter numbers with subletters, etc.).

I liked customization; I was able to refuse a drink and say it was because I was a latter-day saint, which I've never been able to do before.

Overall, this feels like a story about real people in real life situations. It feels like a biography more than a fantasy novel. I like to think of IF writers as opera composers and I've often thought of Emily Short as like Verdi, finding some similarities in their tones and settings. This is more like Beethoven though, with a clear aesthetic free of unnecessary clutter.

I don't think this will be a bestseller. But after having played more than 100 of these games, I think it's unique and high quality, and worth playing. I got really burnt out after playing them all and have started a few I never finished, but I played this all the way through in one setting, taking it to the library and reading it on my phone there, and even replayed it. I'm glad it was published; it would have been a terrible shame to leave this work incomplete and in storage.

This game was pretty fun; it honestly felt like an old AD&D campaign module. You have a magic user and a warrior with an enchanted blade, you have to buy equipment like rations, there's a miniquest in the middle with a mysterious city, then a couple of dungeons and a big scaly boss.

The idea is that you are on a quest to exterminate some rampaging lizard men. You have to travel through a long desert to do that. Also, along the way, you have to play both characters. This has a few slight drawbacks (mostly making it harder to save) but feels very dynamic, especially when infiltrating the city, and makes the game more enjoyable.

There is some randomized combat in places (so saving often is very useful).

In general the game seemed pretty fair; there were places where I had to reload a save to grab an item but each 'area' seemed mostly self-contained.

I did struggle with the parser from time to time; for me the hardest parts were the gate doors (Spoiler - click to show)I tried LOOK IN PORT, OPEN PORT, SEARCH PORT, PEEK IN PORT, etc. before the game suggested LOOK THROUGH PORT. Occasionally the game would say I hadn't done stuff that I actually had done; in those cases I reloaded the beginning of the area and ran through it again.

Overall, it was a big game, and one I can only recommend to someone with patience and the time to try and retry. But it was fun, and I would recommend it to such a person.

This game uses a parser that seems to be keyword based rather than grammar-based. It doesn't use a trained AI model, instead using the author's own custom engine that doesn't scrape internet data. I thought that was a lie since when I typed Overwatch it mentioned it was a Blizzard game, but I checked the github code and the author hand coded quite a few video games with their studio because it's the answer to a question in one of his games.

So this is a pretty unique thing. The author previously used this system in his game Thanatophobia.

This game has various background images and a 3d model of a girl wearing a dress. Later on, a young girl in a swimsuit pops up, although you can tell her to go away. The characters generally just perform random animations, usually not connected to the game.

The plot and puzzles are structured a lot like Blue Lacuna. Both games have a core element of key plot details, but they drag them out by making them timed in a sense; Blue Lacuna makes you wait until night, while this game will say 'I'll tell you more about that later', and you have to ask again later. Both games also include a lot of ambient nature stuff you can interact with while waiting for the core plot. Blue Lacuna has the island, while this game has random spots you can visit like monuments or national parks or even the sky. These usually don't contribute to the story, although sometimes they have interesting details. Both games last very long due to these mechanisms, while they could be far shorter without them (which could be a pro or con).

This game includes puzzles in two forms. First, there are random trivia questions. These aren't essential to the game, it's just something that pops up in the 'touristy' areas of the game.

Second, there are clues in the form of cryptograms. You click on a letter then type something to replace it with. It's actually a really nice system for cryptograms, lots more fun than doing it with paper because it allows for quick exploration. I usually deeply dislike cryptograms in games but this was fun.

Overall, I had fun for the first few hours typing 'in character', but for the last hour or so I just typed random junk to get through, like 'yes', 'i see', or even just every letter of the alphabet, although sometimes I commented more.

I didn't really enjoy the child-looking girls in skimpy outfits; especially when a romance option was available. The game even discusses the three forms of love (philos/eros/agape) but kind of picks one for you (I think? I refused at first but then relented later to see if it was story critical, which it seemed like it was).

The actual storyline is pretty good, about a young girl in the late 1800s who had the abilities of a medium, able to consult spirits. I actually really liked this main storyline.

There is a darker reveal later, and it contains some things I'm really uncomfortable with it, specifically (Spoiler - click to show)directly telling the player to kill themself. I know enough people that have (Spoiler - click to show)attempted suicide that I really don't want to see this kind of stuff in games; I think it can be handled in a sensitive way, but this isn't it (from my point of view).

Overall I was very impressed with this game, and thought about giving 4 stars. But I think the interactivity could use some tuning in regards to main plot vs side action. The types of characters I didn't care for but are normal for some types of VN games. And the content in the dark area was a little too dark for me. Technically, this game is very impressive, and I had fun with much of it.

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 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.

This game is set in the Little Match Girl universe, which is very different than what it sounds like (to me it sounds like a drab and depressing slice of life series based on Victorian London, whereas in actuality its about a time-travelling assassin).

In this one, you have to take down the Snow Queen and her army of henchmen spread out over many worlds. In the meantime, you can add members to your party (up to 5), gain powerful abilities and engage in turn based combat (none of which were features of the previous Little Match girl games).

I had two experiences with this game, one 'okay' and one great.

In my first experience, I just plopped in and started exploring. I got confused by the large number of exits, especially diagonal ones, and I had forgotten the key feature of Little Match girl games (remember below for anyone in a similar position). Once I figured out how to go to other worlds, I met people but no one would join me. I kept gaining more abilities on my own and I was worried I'd get through most of the game without ever finding someone to help me.

So I asked for help from the author, and restarted. My second experience was much better. The three things that helped me were:
1. Keeping an actual map (I could have gotten a fairly early companion if I hadn't missed a room)
2. Remembering the key feature of Little Match Girl games (very light spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)examining fire takes you to new places
3. Realizing the key to getting companions (moderate spoiler, got from author): (Spoiler - click to show)each companion requires one object from another world, and there's no companion in the first world.

With these in mind, I had a great time. There were some fun puzzles, and a variety of combat.

I'm actually interested in this a lot, because as an author I like to learn from these games, and they cover so many topics that at least something is always relevant to my current interests. The last little match girl game had an escape room that I liked, and I read it right when I was working on an escape room.

I play this game as I'm working on a combat mini-game. I had learned from someone else that having multiple antagonists made combat more interesting, and I was working on a system where you had a couple of robots with you you could program to fight.

So seeing how Ryan Veeder approached his combat was really interesting. Most randomized combat doesn't work well in IF, with Kerkerkruip being a major exception, but I think this one works well, especially with using HP to fuel attacks, even using HP to heal other's HP (but only one person being capable of it), as it can become a kind of resource management puzzle.

Overall, Vorple is working well here, with some surprises with sounds and colors. A couple of times when restarting or right after saving (maybe a coincidence?) the game automatically skipped through some cutscenes (like the very ending one), maybe because I had hit a lot of keys and there was a delay? Not sure, but I had to UNDO multiple times to see the ending correctly as it was just zooming past me. I'm almost sure it's something on my end but I'm putting it in the review in case it's useful for the author or happened to someone else.

I liked the plot threads about Ebenezabeth's overall growth and the ambiguity of her relationship with her father (is he possibly malicious?). I didn't really understand the overall storyline but I felt like it was supposed to have a lot of implied secrets (or maybe I accidentally skipped the opening?).

One of the areas (spoilered discussion about non-game stuff related to one area) (Spoiler - click to show)is a pink hotel in Hawaii, which is fun because I drove by that hotel a lot when I lived in Laie. It really stands out and for me was a big landmark in Hawaii, so I enjoyed seeing that).

This game really hit me in a weird spot because it coincided with an idea of mine in an amusing way.

In my own game, I wanted to come up with something to 'scare' the player, a horrible device so terrible that every player would run in fear, only for it to turn out to be a joke that can be solved in one move.

My device was called 'hideous contraption' and had random dice, twenty six levers, 8 strings corresponding to elements, Towers of hanoi, goat and cabbage, etc.

But it was all a joke.

This game is just like that. But not a joke. The most horrifying thing I could think of a game having, that's what this game is.

After a brief intro, you find yourself in a room with two switches, fives lamps, rope, a ladder that is movable, an exit, a chandelier, a button, a fitting, a track with fire on it, moveable scales, an egg timer, etc.

You have to manipulate all of these devices, plus far more. Oh, and your verbs are extremely limited to 2 or 3 at a time. Oh, and there's a turn limit. Multiple ones, in fact.

I just refused to play it. Hints wouldn't give the full experience for this game, and I just frankly didn't want to play this type of game. I like games where you don't need to take notes, just learning over time.

I said as much to Mike Russo, a tester of this game, and he said it wasn't that bad.

I drew a very extensive diagram of this game, took careful notes, and got 4 or 5 points by being careful and a sixth point by dumb luck. At that point I looked at the hints.

I don't like this game style and don't want to see games like this in the future, but that's my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the general populace, and should not be an impediment to future games in this genre. However, I do recognize the craft and polish that went into the game, and the storytelling is exquisitely good given the circumstances.

I played version zeta-3 of this story.

This review is a bit odd to write, as I'm approaching it from two points of view. On one side, this game is a definite artistic statement. The author writes in the overview:
"It's not a game. It's not interactive fiction. It's not a puzzle. It's not action-packed. It's not fun. If you're a gamer, you'll hate it and should not play it. It's not interactive fiction. If you like interactive fiction, you probably won't like it. The reason such people should not play Le Morte D'Arthur is that it violates all the norms of these firmly established genres."
And so as someone who does like interactive fiction and puzzles and action, I have to take that into account. It's essentially like a vegan reviewing a steakhouse, and so as someone not from the target audience, I wouldn't take my feedback to indicate necessary changes.

On the other hand, I also have to see how I feel about the game just as a game, as if I had found it out in the wild, even though it's impossible for me to be completely subjective.

In this game, you play as King Arthur. Most fantastic details have been removed; though I haven't seen it or read it, I'm reminded of the showrunners of Game of Thrones who reportedly stated that they tried to strip as many fantasy elements out of the show as possible, as 'We didn't want to just appeal to that type of fan'. Here, too, it seems like the author has strived to appeal to a broad audience. There is no magic, and the traditional systems of chivalry or witchcraft or even tragic noble love are generally missing here. Instead, the focus is on a life of poverty, sickness, animals, and decay after the exit of Rome.

Play is based on little storylets that happen one right after the other, with a few choices per page of text. The game is very large and mostly cyclical, with Arthur dealing with local disputes, having family discussions or issues, spending time with his dog or nature, fighting the Saxons, and discussing with Merlin in turn. Each of these elements progresses as time goes on.

The discussions with Merlin are a focal point for the author, and seem to be the central thread of the game. They are posed as Socratic dialogues, with Merlin asking you questions, generally correcting you for your mistakes.

Now I'll take about my five criteria for rating IF (which as the intro says, this game isn't designed for standard criteria, but I find it useful as a way to organize my thoughts):

Polish
The game is polished. While it is still being updated and there are some unfinished artwork, it is a very large game and has few issues for its size, and no bugs that I could see. The ending (Spoiler - click to show)has a surprise use of video, which was well done.

Descriptiveness
The game is very descriptive. It depicts a squalid and lawless world, with crude but humble people. It paints a picture of decay and loss, loss of culture from Rome and loss of life and land from the Saxons.

There were a lot of features I wasn't sure whether were historical or not, so I looked it up. For instance, battles tend to have very high casualties, so I looked up how common that was at the time. There is a great deal of rape and sexual interactions with young teenage girls in the first half of the game, so I looked up how common that was. There is a casual disregard for life and a system of slavery, so I looked up about that. Sometimes what I found agreed with the game, and sometime not, but there is a lot up in the air.

The text uses few archaisms but throws in some celtic curses. The language is brusque and casual, with references to farts and diarrhea but also tender family language. There were a few incongruities (one noble uses modern slurs to insult another as a (Spoiler - click to show)pu**y fa**ot).

Interactivity
The storylets are disconnected. Choices from one are generally not brought up later on. Instead (behind the scenes) incremental changes to overall stats are made, like Choice of Games. You need not worry if you make the wrong choice about who should lead a clan or who should be put to death, as it doesn't affect anything later down the road. That's only at first, though; the last 25% of the game has many important choices to make.

The interactivity does feel better as you go along. At first I felt like I could pick anything and it really didn't matter, while near the end it did matter more.

I had a very satisfying ending right until the last screen, where I was more or less informed I had been defeated (the code for my ending was (Spoiler - click to show)defeatresolution. I support being able to 'lose' in long games, but I think it can be done in a more satisfying way. In fact, the ending was pretty great; I think one or two lines might make it more satisfying. It's rough after playing a 6 hour game that takes quite a while to replay to hear 'you played wrong as a player' rather than 'your character made wrong choices', which are two different sentiments, and I'm getting more of the first sentiment.

As an accessibility note on the ending, (Spoiler - click to show)I had difficulty hearing the voice as I was in a public space on a quiet computer without headphones. Having a text transcription or subtitles of both sides of the conversation could be useful, even if it only appears after.

Emotional Impact
I started this game with a bad attitude, and felt justified as the game was often repetitive at the beginning with low stakes in most choices.

But, due to the slow buildup and epic length of the game, I began to know the characters a lot better, from the local doctor/healer to Mordred and others. It made the ending actually quite satisfying emotionally (outside of the very last few lines), and felt like there were real stakes in dealing with betrayals and friendships and loss.

Would I play again?
I might, although it is difficult to say. The game is very long, and the mechanics are more or less intentionally obfuscated. There is no real way to look at options and think, 'What is my strategy here?' Sometimes being bold pays off, sometimes it hurts you. I think that's a great way to introduce real-life ambiguity into a game, which was why I was so surprised to have 'you played right' and 'you played wrong' as endings. With all the micro choices over the course of the game and no indications as to what their effects are, I think there's room for endings that are equally valuable for the player, just varied in the actual results.

Overall, if I had found this game on its own, I would have thought it was a marvelous game. There are parts of it I don't agree with in terms of treatment of women and some language, but I am often an outlier in feelings of that sort and wouldn't base any decisions off of that. Due to that, and to my feelings about the combination of unclear consequences and strongly delineated endings, I'm giving 4 stars out of 5. I think most players who stick it out through the lengthy game will enjoy it, and I would consider it a success and one I can recommend to others in the future as an excellent historical fiction and military story.

This game was real surprise for me. I was looking for something short to play in the French Comp, but this ended up begin quite large.

You are in a bunker during a world problem (something like Covid but bigger, forcing many people underground in bunkers).

The game is split into two sections. The first is a complex computer system with areas like digital libraries, an encyclopedia, archived footage, etc. The second is the bunker itself, which you can explore, including lockers, a library, etc.

The system used is Moiki, and it looks great, with satisfying fonts, click effects, images, and music.

Overall, the story was quite complex. I had to use hints eventually (I didn't realize at first that you can't access later hints without accessing earlier hints). I feel like the ending I received didn't resolve all the narrative threads, but I liked it overall.

This game is a classic in the style of the period between Infocom and Inform. Those few years in the 90s saw the rise of several gigantic indie games, often with obtuse puzzles and nonsensical, Zork-like landscapes. The Unnkulia games were the most popular I know from then, with lots of silly Acme products.

This game seems influenced by the same era, with a lot of ACME products.

You are getting a shopping list for your aunt when you fall down a big hole. There you find a complex web of locations and buildings and teleporters that take you all around a house, a village, and the world.

This is the kind of game that's designed to be played on and off for months, possibly working together with others online and not necessarily designed to actually be solved. Often times the solution to a puzzle is something found far away in a different room.

There are many teleportation devices in the game, including one powered by geometric objects, another with different button presses, and another in the form of a wand. A lot of puzzles are coded messages, as well.

I played this game to clear it off my wishlist as one of the longest-running games on that list, but was surprised to see that this author is the same Jim MacBrayne that has recently released games in IFComp and Parsercomp. Those games are written with a Basic engine (and I think there is a version of this game that does that too), and they have very similar features to this game, including giant maps with many rooms called 'corridor' or 'path', and puzzles involving color-coded combinations and obtuse messages that must be interpreted correctly to pass.

I know several people have greatly enjoyed these recent games from Jim MacBrayne; if you're one of them, this older game has a lot of the same flavor, just longer and more difficult.

I don't know why I forgot to review this one when it came out.

This is one of the best Adventuron games I've played and also one of the most complex and rich mystery parser games in the last few years. You play as a young high school student whose aunt has gone mysteriously missing, and you have to check out her house.

The first half or so of the game is a mystery/drama as you investigate both your aunt's disappearance and a deadly party held at a farm, which is being investigated by your high school friend. Your sister is acting bizarre, as well.

Later on, as others have noted in their reviews, the game takes some decided twists, and becomes both more deadly and more surreal.

I found the overall plot to be the strongest point of the game, as well as the satisfying classic-style parser gameplay. I got frustrated a few times trying to figure out the right action, but overall I'd say this is a very successful and fun game.

Inspired by Kinetic Mouse Car's review, I tried this very long Twine game.

It is at its core a cycle of procedurally generated combat, with upgrades that can be bought by the player. Upgrades are earned by fighting, and the more you explore and fight the more areas you unlock, which have stronger enemies with stronger rewards.

You play as a Corrector, a figure with unknown properties and goals, and you have the ability to come back from death due to an AI that has access to a cloning mechanism. Both you and the AI are missing large chunks of memories that you have to recover.

This is done by finding microchips to plug into the computer to increase its capacity and give you upgrades. Small upgrades cost just a dozen or so chips, while the biggest upgrades can cost over 500,000 chips.

The storyline is complex, and reminiscent of shows like Avatar (James Cameron one). You interact with three factions: human, robot, and alien.

There are 15 endings, corresponding roughly to which factions you support. There are some romantic figures, lots of literary references, and some psychologically intense scenes.

Overall, I found it very satisfying, and it took me at least 4 hours to complete, much of which was through fairly repetitive combat. But it was enjoyable combat, due to the constant upgrades and escalations.

Like KMC commented, there are noticeable typos, which can be distracting, and I believe the armor plating doesn't actually work (one version of it does). But these are pretty slight faults in a large game.

This is a complex, rich game written using a custom parser-choice hybrid system similar to Robin Johnson's Gruescript, in which you have traditional parser actions like NESW movement, taking, and dropping, but all through a choice interface.

You've been trapped in hell too long, and want to get out. Fortunately, you are capable of transferring your consciousness between others, able to possess all but the lowest beings (gross!) and the highest beings (that's what got you into trouble in the first place).

The map is laid out visually on the screen in a perfect grid, and has several affordances to allow you to travel around the map.

This is primarily a puzzle-fest. For those who like parser puzzles (including me!) the ones here are excellent, with timing puzzles, pattern recognition, and required leaps of intuition. I got through most of the game but needed a major hint for finding the last 4 or 5 squares of the map.

Some of the best parts of the game involve finding a way to defeat all 7 arch demons, each representing a different sin. This part was very clever.

There is some sexual content in the game but very non-explicit, more just hinted at or left to the imagination.

The only drawback I found was the sparseness of the text. Minimalism in games isn't a bad thing; there are many minimalist games I've played that can evoke great effect. And some areas of this game were very well-developed. But I feel like some more parts or people in the game could have used a little more shine, especially since I've seen lots of bits of excellent description from this author both in parts of this game and in past games; I may not even have noticed the sparseness in, for instance, the statue rooms, if I didn't know what he's capable of.

Still, I think the broad majority of parser fans will like this one, it's very clever and fun.

This game is a fine game, one of the most complex and deep I've seen during Ectocomp. I may be making this up but I swear I heard the author say she was planning on entering this in IFcomp but decided to enter it into Ectocomp to allow for more polish time. This might not be true, but it would make sense, as this game has the kind of structure and polish that high-ranking IFComp parser games tend to have.

The idea is that you play as multiple player characters, each with their own chapter, but sharing a large map: a duke's castle, where the young duchess, only 15 years old, is struggling to please her older lord, and his anger has found its expression in unpleasant ways. The various chapters provide a solid narrative arc, from introduction to rising action to climax and denouement.

The story is based off a poem (whose name I'll omit, as the authors has), and has the feel of a richly researched game. Period-appropriate clothing, art, jewelry, architecture, horticulture, etc. are described in detail.

The game has a high ratio of words-to-action; new scenes will often have page-long introductions, and single actions will often set off large chunks of story. This is often paired with a short game, but this game is quite large, with a big map and many things to see and do. Instead, the game strikes balance by providing significant guidance for most events, a style that is more of a guided tour than a puzzlebox. (I've adopted similar a similar playstyle in some of my own games, including a Sherlock Holmes adaptation; it fits adaptations well, as it keeps players on the main narrative path).

This is an earthy game in a grim world, though happiness exists for some. Players encounter domestic abuse, rape, sexual abuse, degradation, intimidation, underage marriage, and psychological manipulation. Most characters are on the bottom tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, concerned about physical safety, food, and sexual desires, while a couple reach for love or even esteem, but none are situated well enough to reach for self-actualization.

The map is a large castle, hard to navigate at first but slowly becoming more familiar. By the end I could make my way well-enough, but I found out after finishing that there is a map available for download. I don't feel it was completely necessary, as the oppressively large castle and getting lost adds to the sense of fear or awe in the game. And getting lost is the main source of in-game hints, outside of talking to people.

Speaking of conversation, it's a topic-based system that works pretty well, especially since you're primed on how to speak early on. I think adding 'A' as a synonym for 'T' would be useful, because ASK/TELL is a fairly common IF trope and it's usual to implement both (just now, going back in the game, I see that T stands for TALK [Noun], not TELL [noun], which makes sense. It might be worth making A/ASK/TELL synonyms for TALK/T).

It's interesting to see the connections between this game and the authors' other games. The use of poetry, either author-written or as inspiration for the whole game is a strong pattern (at least 6 other poems have inspired games by this author, including 4 in a single game). The darker historical setting is also common in these games, although the exact time period varies. This game is unusual in that there are less puzzles and more roleplaying as a renaissance character.

Overall, a strong game and one that I think everyone should check out.

This is a very large IFComp parser game where you in a sort of simulation trying to find a 'kernel' of some sorts.

The main area is a giant tree, from which you can eventually find 8 sub-areas. Each sub-area is a simulation of a different part of the world, including the Amazon rainforest, Missouri, Elizabethean England, etc.

Gameplay consists of finding objects in one world and generally using them in another. It can be fun to try and think where one can be used.

Content-wise, everyone has things they like and don't like; while I enjoyed the mini worlds idea quite a bit and some of the sections like the Viking ones, I felt uncomfortable with some of the others. There's some sexual wish-fulfillment in play (like a dominatrix pirate and a harem of succubi), though nothing explicit seems to occur, and there are some cultural moments where I thought it wasn't an entirely respectful depiction or relied on surface-level depictions. At times I feel it reaches too hard (at one point, an extreme not repeated, it even says "they wander off[...]together to figure out what to do with the rest of the wreckage of their miserable lives (this is called "pathos", by the way)."

Overall, the level of polish is high; there were a few sticky situations (like how (Spoiler - click to show)ENTER BAOBAB works but (Spoiler - click to show)ENTER CRACK doesn't in the first room of the Savannah).

I messed around for about an hour on my own, accruing 11 points, then followed the walkthrough. Some of the later puzzles seem to require a great deal of mind-reading, but I suppose there may be more in-game hints if I had reached those points naturally.

Overall, it has a lot of satisfying parser elements. While the tone and characters didn't always reach me emotionally, there is a lot of craftmanship evident. I don't plan on revisiting it, but it is polished, descriptive, and has much good interactivity.

This is a large, custom-engine choice-based game that takes place in a surreal world like the Phantom Tollbooth or a Roald Dahl book.

The player is on a train that mysteriously stops in a giant field of corn. You get out and explore a town full of odd people.

It uses a custom javascript engine that relies on a map to get around; however, you can't click just anywhere on the map; you must click on an adjacent tile first.

Gameplay revolves around having a big notebook full of thoughts or ideas as well as a bag of items. Each location has some intro text, following which you can use the map or click on one of these ideas.

This is essentially quadratic in nature, then, with interactions of each item with each location. This was manageable at first but grew a bit out of hand for me. I also found the movement in the game extremely tedious as I had to click a location on the map, navigate its initial text for the dozenth time, then click on the next location, etc. especially when running back and forth to check for missed things.

After about 2 hours of gameplay I found trouble following the walkthrough, as a woman I had talked to earlier was supposed to appear in the Center-West Tram Station but never showed up.

Overall, I would be interested in seeing the rest of the game at some point, but the interactivity was pretty frustrating.

This author's game Skybreak! is one of the most popular games from 2019, even getting nominated for a Best Game XYZZY Award. I really enjoyed the game myself; it was procedurally generated, bouncing from planet to planet trying to complete various success criteria.

This game is a fantasy version of that (kind of like how Agnieszka Trzaska first made 4x4 Galaxy then 4x4 Archipelago). You are a dreamer exploring a vast ocean of procedurally generated towns and cities. You generally pick choices by typing capitalized words or selecting from a menu by typing a number. Some choices are always available to type, like STATUS.

What this game does well is replayability and freshness. Procedural generation here has dramatic effects on the story, and includes nice chunks of unique content. The setting is compelling, and there are many approaches to the game and customization of the character.

Where it's worse for me is in difficulty and polish. The game has you start with goods and food, and it's really hard to consistently replenish these. Very few locations sell both or either, and usually you can only do one action at a port. You can do pretty well without either, though, at least for a while. Getting injured in some way is very common.

Polish-wise there are occasional typos, once there was a popup error when starting a new character (something like (Spoiler - click to show)first dreamer has been removed), and there was a reoccurring bug where exits were listed that didn't actually exist (possibly if you try a wrong direction the game includes it in the list of exits? I'm not sure).

I ended with a score of 150, mostly made from Recording my secrets (as mentioned in the manual). I died (or won?) by repeatedly ignoring directions in a cool Fallen London style (specifically by (Spoiler - click to show)returning to a tower every night when told not to). This was a satisfying ending.

I'm sure there's tons more content, but for now I've seen enough for a (positive) review.

There are a ton of ways to author IF. One way I've seen is to experiment with different styles in an attempt to find what players like, and respond to feedback by making big changes in future games. Another style is to keep making exactly what you like, making games that are all alike, consistent with each other. There are other ways, too, of course.

The games by this author seem to fall in the latter category. Each of these games is written in qBasic by the same system and features a large building that contains different areas containing diverse historical or other themes, often accessed through portals, minimal descriptions of areas, potions or elixirs, riddles and codes, and multicolored devices. The idiosyncrasies remain the same as well, such as objects in containers not being 'in scope', so you can't examine or take things in an open container directly, instead requiring the command TAKE ALL FROM ____. The author has a type of game he enjoys making, and I appreciate the consistency.

I played around for 10 minutes or so then went to the walkthrough, as I knew from experience that this game would be hard to finish in two hours without doing so.

I ran into some trouble with the parser. For instance, 'STAND ON LADDER' or 'STEP ON LADDER' didn't work, but 'CLIMB LADDER' did. In a room described as having many books, X BOOKS said it didn't understand, while X BOOK said 'you don't see the small book', an object I had yet to encounter.

This game is best enjoyed by enthusiasts of text adventures that prefer the pixel art/command line look, like puzzles over story, and want something long and tricky but fair to digest. An author with a similar feel is Garry Francis, for those looking for even more.

I played this game for a couple of hours, but didn't find the ending. I ended up poking around in the code, though.

This is a choicescript game with some neat css styling. In it, your sibling has been abducted and you have to find them.

Gameplay consists of moving around quadrants. There are 100 quadrants, and it costs fuel to move between them, a small amount for adjacent quadrants and a large amount for distant quadrants. Each quadrant has 4 sectors, which costs battery power to move around.

The game is procedurally generated in a minimal sense; each planet has a randomly selected 'level', which determines how many shops and things there are. Then text in each shop is pre-determined with blank slots that have words chosen from a random list.

I quickly realized that almost everything on a planet was pointless except for the trading and refueling. You can buy info, but it's rarely helpful, usually talking about planets so far away that fuel costs eat into your rewards. Travel guides don't seem to do much.

So I just bought and sold and moved around. I found an asteroid and claimed it, and started improving it.

But there were significant bugs: for instance, mining never has anything in it. Peeking in the code, it's hard coded, line by line, for 350 lines, for there to be nothing in the mines.

More severely, there are separate variables for available cargo spaces and total cargo, and only one is updated when upgrading your asteroid, so every time you upgrade your asteroid you permanently lower your cargo capacity.

I saw in the code that you can find a cheeky companion (didn't see how), possibly get married, and that there is an ending coded, but I'm not sure I'll be able to find it.

Dialogue-wise, in the main story bit, the game has character, but it likes to play tricks on the player in the sense that the guy you're talking to will treat almost anything you say as something wrong. I wasn't used to that, but it worked overall.

I think this game needed a lot more playtesting, including by the author; it doesn't 'feel' like the author played through a complete game by himself, and I'd heartily recommend doing that a couple of times, tweaking the game to make it easier or harder as needed. I would definitely raise my star rating if that polishing happened!

This game placed well in the 2022 Parsercomp competition. It's in Basic, with a custom parser; most games written in Basic with a custom parser are pretty bad, but this one is good. It's only as I write this review that I realize I've played another game by this author, from last year, so it seems this parser has had plenty of time for polishing.

This is a time-travel adventure. Descriptions are sparse and leave a lot up to the imagination. Puzzles are often riddle-based or combination-based; individually, they are often obscure, but as a whole they have consistent internal logic.

The parser generally works well; it has a few oddities that I noted in my review of Somewhere, Somewhen, and which others have noted as well; since the author has been aware of them for some time, I doubt they will change, so won't note them here.

I found it all generally pleasing. I almost never played text adventures as a kid, but there were two I played a lot in 5th grade in the 90s. I remember one of them being a Wonderland-like game that had gardens and interesting areas, and most puzzles were riddles. This game has very similar vibes to that era of game, and I found it charming.

Overall, this is a big game (I played about 4 hours and used a walkthrough about 11 times), and fun. I'm glad it was entered.

This is the 14th game by Larry Horsfield, counting all the ones listed in the credits, and is so think the fourth or so I’ve played. For years IFdB’s old recommendation algorithm would suggest Die Feuerfaust to me as the next game to play but I never got around to it.

One thing I’ve learned about his games s that they are written almost like movies. It’s like he sits down and thinks “what would be an awesome scene here? What would be a cool move?” and then fleshes the game around that and adds obfuscation. Not necessarily classical puzzles, in the sense that you use logic to figure out what to do, but obfuscation in the sense that things are hidden behind some layer of searching. For instance, this game has right almost identical rooms called Living Quarters, half of which the game has you leave automatically and the other half of which contain an important item hidden behind some combination of “search”+preposition+room object. I had fun trying this part without the walkthrough and felt proud that I found tons of stuff in the base after an hour or so.

But I had missed several key items and actions (like loosening the straps on the rucksack) and was only 10% of the way through the game. So I typed in the walkthrough and enjoyed the movie, which was actually entertaining.

I think it would be possible to eat this game without hints. For me, playing an hour or so a day, it would probably take a month and need the help of people online who were playing with me. However, I found ore satisfaction in this way of playing. Thanks for the game!

I played this game for quite a long time. This is a German Grand Prix competition game from 2022.

It's a downloadable executable that requires an up-to-date version of .NET. It's written in German, and is a custom parser game that contains 6 different windows, each with clickable links (one is the main story, one is constant links and directions, another is all objects in the room, another is inventory, another is a static room description).

The idea is that the whole game can be done either through typing or through link choices. Each object has its own set of links. Overall, it made play simpler, but frequently this led to an overabundance of links. For instance, most rooms had 7 or more furniture objects that did not matter in the gameplay. And many links were redundant. For instance, 'climb on top of' and 'get down' and 'go to' links were always there but never seemed to be used.

The story is that you are hunting Phoney, a 'hamberder' loving man who leaves behind bankruptcy claims and red hats to go through a portal where he rules an island through 'Phoneyvision'. Phoneyvision makes everything seem better than it really is. For instance, his wife is reality is a sticky blow-up doll, but in Phoneyvision she's a model.

Unfortunately, Phoneyvision only seems to work in two locations for most of the game. I had to restart once because I used phoneyvision in the wrong place and entered a void containing nothing but a rotten hamburger. I feel like it's a bit of a missed opportunity.

Gameplay mostly revolves around surviving a grim and darkly humorous world populated by parodies of Trump's associates, such as the cannibal ghoul that is also Trump's lawyer, or the poisoner/tax-collector named Middlefinger (not sure who this one's a reference to). Rotten food, mean-spirited pranks, and general filth and decay abound.

The UI has a replay option to allow you to go back to any time in your story, but every time I used it it got stuck in the first room of the replay. I tried saving, but when I closed the program and re-opened it my save wasn't there.

Overall, I think the engine is impressive but could be improved. This is part 1 of a four part story. I don't really enjoy mean-spirited humor, and felt frustrated with both my bad German and trying to understand the game's puzzles, but this game stuck in my brain so I played it for several days, getting help from the author. I'm rating it as '2-10 hours long' in my classification system, but a native speaker might finish it sooner.

There is a genre of game in Twine which is massive, sprawling, and focuses on stream-of-consciousness style text. Furkle's early games were the trendsetter, especially SPY INTRIGUE, and other games like Charlie the Robot and Dr Sourpuss have branched the genre out into many areas.

This game is unusual in that it employs the fever-dream word-flood format but is also an epic fantasy story.

It is difficult to piece together storyline in this genre of writing. In this specific story, sentences can sound like this:

"Azalea ersatz lunars crackled glowing over semitranslucent ambient films this headache brutally pounds out in stechschritt to a buzzing id blockage"

One sentence I measured was almost 600 words long.

Attempted plot summary:
(Spoiler - click to show)Other sentences have more coherence. As far as I can tell, the main thrust of the storyline (told over 27 chapters, some much shorter than others) is that you are a person in a water world who has made a theft or bad business deal, and ends up killing someone over it. You enlist at sea on a quest to visit the submergence. On the way, you fight a sea monster. Then you must ascend a type of tower, which wasn't an original stop. As you do so, you seek out the Vedas, who are either Gods or nobles or something else. You request to become a Veda, or something else more than you are, which comes with a name change. Your mother was a Veda. As part of the transformation you cut off your finger? Then you visit the submergence, and someone activates a world-breaking device.

At times it seems you are someone else, or maybe it just focuses on two members of the crew, but there are two people or gods or something with very similar names (like imimnemo and emimnemo), but this is also confusing because the main character of the main story has two names (like Leinur Emimnu) and different characters use different names.

Overall, there is an emphasis on pain or emptiness of life or the quest to escape existence. It ties into Eastern traditions with statements like:

"There is one question to which I do know the answer: who we are when they wish we were not:"

but also Western ideas like sin.

Overall, it's wearying to get through; the game says so itself and describes itself like a migraine. I had to rest several times while reading it, even though I was speedreading after the first 4-5 chapters. But I'm trying to build up tolerance for Finnegan's Wake some day (I made it through 30 pages once before giving up), so I felt like this was a good practice run.

Edit: At some point, characters are making up monsters and fights like a D&D game, narrating them to each other. It's possible this is the entire story, and it's possible it was just a side diversion among the crew.

This game reminds me of what you'd get if you mixed the 'buddies' movies (like Space Buddies) with Secret Life of Pets and Sherlock Holmes but both characters are Watson.

You are a dog on a leash. You like you're owner, but don't want to be on a leash. You escape, and eventually find another dog.

Then the game opens up into a huge map, with I swear 30+ locations. Many farcical situations arise, including things like kick-flips, ollies, pretending to be a dog mannequin, wearing a dog bow-tie, and an enormous chunk at the end where you (Spoiler - click to show)stop a burglary of a museum.

It's a very long Adventuron game, one of the most complex I've seen. It's charming and funny.

My biggest sticking point was just not knowing what to do. Different IF communities have different conventions on what's considered 'fair play'. Most games I spend a lot of time around with (like old IFComp games) tend to only use standard verbs or verbs directly mentioned in the text. In this game, I had to fiddle around for a while, especially with an embarrassingly long 20 minute session I had trying to solve the first puzzle. I didn't want to resort to hints, but after that, I used them copiously.

I especially used hints later on because the game often sets up and plays out hilariously funny scenes but with little motivation. As a hypothetical example (not in the game), it'd be like hearing an alien is attacking the city, and then you see a line of dominos leading into an alleyway. Pushing the dominoes would tumble them down, and then you'd discover there's a giant cannon in the alleyway which the dominos trigger, shooting and defeating the alien. This is an absurd example not in the game, but illustrates the kind of logic: it makes sense in hindsight, but otherwise it's kind of hard to guess that you need to do it.

This is a common issue with humor games, where you have to balance player participation with setting up good punchlines. For my part, I enjoyed the humor and am willing to sacrifice a little agency for it.

I did experience one difficult bug, near the end. When I had succeeded in the biggest task of the game, (Spoiler - click to show)foiling the robbery, I dragged the robber out of the water and tried to lead the police to the museum. I got lost though and accidentally re-triggered the water scene in an infinite loop. I got out of the infinite loop by reloading my browser window, which took me back to my previous turn, and going a different direction.

Overall, a fun romp, one of the most enjoyable long Adventuron games, and highly recommended.

There is a long tradition of big Lovecraftian games in IF (Theatre, Anchorhead, The King of Shreds and Patches, Lydia's Heart, Ecdysis, etc.) This is one of the most recent such entries, and one I beta tested.

The setting is that you are moving to a new city for a scholarship at a foreign university. You move into an old, isolated house and all sorts of strange occurrences start to happen.

This is a sprawling game, including big locations (including a town and a village), and includes complicated set-piece puzzles like big machines and run-ins with cultists.

Overall, there's a rich background and detailed writing. To me, the thing I struggled with the most was the pacing. Some major events take place as almost-instantaneous cutscenes, especially early on, while more mundane things get dragged out unnecessarily at times. Still, this is a solid and enjoyable game, and I can recommend it to people looking for more good Lovecraftian games.

It's become increasingly hard to review Ryan Veeder's games because they're generally all the same: 'This game does something very creative that I hadn't really seen before and is polished and funny. One of the best games I've seen in a while yada yada yada. If this game was by a new author, I'd think they're one of the best new authors out there.'

And that's all true here, too. This game does something I had once considered the 'holy grail' of modern IF, which is to combine parser choice in a logical way. In this game you use Twine in an overworld with a map, which leads to Inform 7/Vorple mini-games that seamlessly transition back into Twine. Its all hosted on the authors website using the autosave feature first used in his Fly Fishing game. My only concern is for preservation; is there a way to ensure the game could be saved for posterity?

Storywise, the framing story is the same as last year, a funny take on literary culture and the way we handle celebrity writers. It contains 5 (or so) mini stories:

Letavermilia: This is a linear (story-wise), puzzle-based space game. You play as a bounty hunter chasing after a criminal who is also named after a horrible plague. You chase them from world to world, with each world having a puzzle you must solve to find the 5-digit autopilot code needed to move on. Solutions range from exploration and mapping to a straight-up cryptogram (the latter being my least favorite activity of the whole game, but easily solved online and solvable by copious in-game hints). This game features some genuinely chilling moments and some funny ones as well, and demonstrates Veeder's predilection for deeply implementing unnecessary side systems. This one takes an hour or so to play.

Nyvo the Dolphin: This is a Metroidvania-style game where you as a dolphin explore a wreck filled with scientific equipment, which grants you increasing capabilities. This was horror in the sense of Beetlejuice or Addam's family, where our cheerful protagonist blithely navigates the remains of past human devastation and death. This one took about 30-45 minutes. I had a little trouble navigating, so mapping might have been good, but I enjoyed the power curve and the finale.

Singing for Me: this is a Lovecraftian (or maybe, more Blackwoodian or fae) small town living simulator, in many ways reminiscent of AKheon's recent Ascension of Limbs or titles like Stardew Valley. You play as a recent move-in in a cabin, and typing LOOK gives a list of places or people you can visit. Each visit takes the entire day. You can also buy stuff, where buying one thing takes the whole day, or sell many things at once. As you explore, you discover more locations and people. Like Stardew Valley, there are significant holidays that you can experience on a set schedule. Through these, the main story is developed in a classic 'creepy small town' style like Midsommar or The Village. I enjoyed this one; I was worried I wouldn't be able to see everything, but the game gives you plenty of time to focus on one or two goals that matter to you. I spent a couple of hours on this.

Visit Skuga Lake: This game had the most traditional gameplay but used a mechanic with quadratic complexity. Basically, you start locked in a closet, but soon break out with the help of (Spoiler - click to show)an amulet with an empowering eyestone. You then wander a large map, gaining two new classes of powerful items that interact with each other in an enormous amount of ways. I'll admit that I ended up 'lanwmowering' many options to find what worked, but it was also fun to experiment so it didn't really feel tedious. I played this for about an hour and a half.

Finale (called (Spoiler - click to show)Hunted): (Spoiler - click to show)This story was a bit confusing, but felt fast-paced and appropriate as an ending. It was Christmas-themed and felt like an action movie. Scenes focused on movement and basic take/use gameplay. It wasn't as compelling mechanically as the earlier pieces but story-wise and emotionally was satisfying. This took less than an hour.

Additional comments: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a secret fifth game. I was able in this one to read many books, see a family tree and look up people in it, make coffee, and find a nook, as well as talk to Allison Chase. I wasn't able to find any use of the nook or book or tree, so either I missed out on the point or this was just a 'chill and vibes' section like the end of Rope of Chalk. If the latter, I think it worked well.(Spoiler - click to show)

I've enjoyed all of the Vampire the Masquerade titles from Choice of Games.

The first game in the (loosely-connected) series, Night Road, won an XYZZY Best Game award and a had a very out-of-this-world style with cray labs, magicians, ancient vampires, and a CRPG-style quest structure you could pursue in multiple orders.

The next game, Out for Blood, featured a human protagonist in a small town and focused on running a shop, developing abilities like intuition or gaining weapons, and handling a small-town vampire clash. It was lower-powered and a smaller focus.

This game sits nicely between the two. You play as a powerful but out-of-shape vampire in Ottawa whose Prince has gone missing at the same time that Anarchs are raiding the city. You have to rediscover your old strength while solving multiple mysteries.

The number of stats is heavily decreased in this game compared to the other VtM games (and Choice of the Vampire). Now there are only 9 or so main stats. Disciplines can be used, which is my favorite part of VtM games, but you either have access to a discipline or not, no growing it. The disciplines basically operate like a 'be awesome' button that is later penalized by high hunger, which can take away your freedom to choose as your are forced to feed. I played as Toreador, and enjoyed using Auspex and Celerity the most.

Focusing on a big mystery is a bit of a gamble in a big Choicescript game, since the player always knows the truth after one playthrough. This game deals with the issue by having many endings depending on what you do with that information and how you resolve the issue. In the end, there are several factions you can unite with. Also, there are many sub-mysteries to solve.

There are two romances for now, but each is fairly well-developed. The one I went with seemed much better integrated into the game than most romances, probably because the author was able to focus more deeply on each romance rather than fitting in a ton of different ones.

On an individual line-by-line basis, the writing is entertaining and flows well, and the pacing in scenes is well-done, with few slow spots, making this a page-turner.

I've written for CoG before and previously received a lot of review copies of CoG games for free, but this is one I bought myself for fun.

This game is a nice entry in a very under-represented niche of parser games: Westerns. While there have been some entries in this genre before (a Scott Adams Game, the puzzle game Hoosegow, etc.), it hasn't really attracted a lot of attention.

In this game, you play as a sort of singing cowboy, but your gun has been taken. You're on a quest to save a woman named Rosa from a band of bandits. All you have is your wits and your trusty guitar.

Along the way, you'll solve a lot of tricky puzzles. This game had some of the harder puzzles in the comp (from my point of view). There are complex mechanisms whose purpose you have to unravel as well as many physics-based puzzles involving (mild spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)heat, leverage, etc.

The story was pretty good. Like others have noted, it lacks the sense of urgency a drawn-out gun standoff tends to have in films once you start tooling around for the hundredth time. I'd prefer that over a turn limit, though! Second, there are some reasonable solutions that weren't implemented, particular when facing Whitey (I particularly would have appreciated responses saying I was on the right track for (Spoiler - click to show)putting hay in the barn and setting it on fire.).

The game has a lot of ties to real-life history with detailed notes at the end. The songs in-game include a lot of old classics that remind me of my grandfather who recently passed, and who loved singing cowboy songs. I think the game in general reminded me of him.

While the game did have minor flaws in the puzzles and story, I was overall impressed with it. Definitely would rank it at a higher difficulty rating than most games in the comp. I ended up using hints on only one of the puzzles, but the other two took me several days of on-and-off playing.

This long game is set on a movie set for a company that makes cheap horror films. After a harrowing experience with your boss, you have to explore five different studios to assemble a team to save your life...and the world!

Each studio generally represents one 'big' puzzle, and most have at least one mini-puzzle as well. The big puzzles range from using animals to complex timing puzzles to story-based puzzles and more. The grand finale is a puzzle with many strategies, many solutions and three distinct outcomes leading to three endings.

The writing is humorous. It is pretty gory (lots of blood and body parts) and violent (with the player initiating much of the violence). There was one instance of mild profanity. Conversation uses a simple menu system which seems to be custom (no Inform extensions are listed). There are quite a few characters to talk to, more than ten.

The game contains several linear action sequences that are predetermined, with only one sensible action available at a time (although that might be just an illusion). When I encountered two such sections (one at the beginning, the other at the end), I felt a bit railroaded, but each one opened up into a large puzzle, so it balanced out and felt great.

Some personal thoughts I had in relation to something I recently worked on (not really relevant): (Spoiler - click to show)I was especially interested in this game as I had just released a game with striking similarities, one I had intended to enter into IFComp. The two games are completely unrelated (this game has clearly been in production for a long time), but I too released a horror game where you wander an entertainment facility, solving big set-piece puzzles (including a lot of animals) and befriending the supernatural inhabitants of the park while it slowly transforms, culminating in an epic battle between two factions. I'm glad I didn't release my game in this comp, as Ade's game is better in every way. I love how he slathered plenty of story, conversation and characterization over everything, leaving very little 'filler' text, which is something I struggled with.

I had a great time playing it! I also enjoyed seeing tie-ins to Ade's other games, both mechanically (the puzzle involving (Spoiler - click to show)ghosts reminded me quite a bit of Map) and story-wise (the animals and their behavior is very reminiscent of Hard Puzzle 2, and other references are even stronger).

Edit: I should say that I worked really hard to solve this without hints. I almost never do that, and only tried because the work was engaging. My biggest mistake (that, once I fixed, solved most of my problems in the midgame) was thinking that (Spoiler - click to show)each studio puzzle could be solved by itself, but that's not always true.

Last year, the author released a game called 4x4 Galaxy, where you played a star fighter visiting 16 planets (arrranged on a grid), battling, gaining weapons, having different skills and different quests.

I really enjoyed it, but it got a bit tedious near the end of each playthrough.

This game is better than that one, though. This is a fantasy version and has more variety and more descriptive writing. Not only was I not burnt out by tediousness at the end, I was trying to find ways to extend my gameplay.

My character was a swashbuckler, and I focused a lot on combat. You start out with very few hitpoints and a couple of basic attacks, but enough to have some strategy (for instance, using a sword gives you the option to stun, while with a bow you can ignore damage reduction). By the end of the game, I had several legendary weapons, and could switch between sending out a half-dozen arrows from a giant's bow and using a finishing strike with 'the really really big sword'.

There are a ton of sidequests and they have excellent rewards. The main goal changes from game to game; mine was to assemble four pieces of a pirate's treasure map, and that involved things like becoming famous and defeating a pirate's ghost.

I did get really frustrated near the end of my several-hours playthrough when exploring the optional area (Spoiler - click to show)Coral Cove, which is a (Spoiler - click to show)maze with a kraken that attack randomly while walking around. I got very lost, and I gave up on it. In a future playthrough, I'd probably just map it out.

I don't think this game is for everyone; the opening is kind of overwhelming in terms of sheer number of options to try, and there is a lot of grinding, but I always enjoyed grinding fantasy RPGs as a kid.

There were a small number of errors. At one point </span> was used instead of <span>, leaving some raw code; a pirate threatened to conquer the land of [undefined], and a lot of dungeons that had events in their first room ended up overlapping the text compass. But these were minor in comparison to the very large amount of material in the game that worked great.

As a final note, the core gameplay here is similar to Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, so if you like one such game you might like the others.

This is a TADS game entered into IFComp 2021. It is a very large game, with dozens of locations and requiring many hours to play through.

There are three different opening scenarios, each giving you a slightly different backstory. In all 3, you're an injured and forgetful young man exploring a small town called Foghelm.

There are numerous NPCs to talk to and a big mystery to solve. There are at least 3 endings, some of which are bad endings which you can't undo out of, so make sure to save.

Gameplay requires the use of ASK, TELL, SHOW, and ASK FOR. Searching all around is also helpful, as is keeping a map, even if you usually don't.

I manage to beat the game with 32 points out of 50, meaning there are many optional things I didn't see. I also replayed with a different opening, and some areas were unlocked that I couldn't see the first time and others were blocked off.

Overall, this is a compelling and excellent game.

It's negative features, such as they are, are typos (a frequent typo is having both a period and a comma after speech), topics for conversation appearing before you'd really know about them, and the big world map making it hard to know what to do at times.

Very fun game, one of the most fun I've played in a long time.

This is Wonaglot's third IFComp game, the other two being the well-received Dungeon Detective games, both placing in the top 15 and both receiving XYZZY award nominations.

Mystery is one of my favorite genres, so I was excited to see a new mystery game by Wonaglot. Surprisingly, this one is a Quest-based mystery. Quest is a parser system that, like similar systems such as ADRIFT, provides a simple and intuitive system for making parser games with less overhead than Inform but a little less robustness.

The storyline is that you are an engineer with a set of special masks, asked to investigate a murder on a large private ship. This is a long game, the longest I've played so far in the comp.

This game has great concepts and could be described as ambitious. It has many NPCs spread out over dozens of rooms. The PCs respond to conversational topics and items shown and can move from room to room. There are multiple mysteries to solve, multiple subquests, and magic involved. There is even some animation involved. Perhaps most ambitious, there are 4 masks you can wear that affect how others see you and treat you, changing conversations.

While I completed the game and found it overall satisfying, the implementation wore thin in several places. The mask system was not intuitive; it was hard to figure out what effect each mask would have, and the first NPC I saw didn't react to it at all. In the end, the masks systems ends up pretty inconsistent; sometimes it changes what actions you can take; sometimes it changes a couple of lines of text in dialogue; sometimes it adds flavor text to room descriptions. It was difficult to make plans and execute them with the masks.

Similarly, the NPCs had so many different ways to interact with them (showing them things, asking about topics, and TALKing to) that most interactions ended up being not coded in at all, leading to a lot of 'I don't know anything about that,' a problem common to many parser mysteries.

And in the endings I got, it lists what happened to everyone, with a few saying 'you should have interacted with so and so more' when I had gotten to what seemed like the end of their quest, while people I didn't interact much with got a bigger ending.

I'm not sure that all of this could be or should be changed, though. In a recent game I wrote, I spent months writing out every possible response for every object, but all feedback I received about that was that the text seemed generic and bland (since writing 100s of lines gets repetitive). So leaving the player to only find the few key lines of text isn't a bad alternative. But in the end, I wished for more smoothness and understandability, especially for the mask system.

Overall:
-Polish
+Descriptiveness
-Interactivity
+Emotional impact
+I would play again

This game is the second in Choice of Games's deluxe series of Vampire the Masquerade games. It is long (the 12th longest CoG game), has at least a dozen high-quality character portraits, and uses the White Wolf system of attributes.

Inevitably, this game will draw comparisons with its (unrelated, story-wise) predecessor, Vampire: The Masquerade—Night Road. That game featured you as a solo vampire making their way up the ranks of the city's undead through elaborate and high-powered missions. This game, in contrast, focuses on a human protagonist inheriting an old shop in a small Illinois town that has a dark presence lingering. I can't think of a more apt comparison than Jojo's Bizarre Adventures. Night Road is more like seasons 1-3 of that story, big battles and crazy powers, while Out for Blood is more like season 4, a smaller story where we meet locals with different interests and abilities and the main enemy is a sort of lurking, hidden figure.

Mechanically, there are a lot of statistics to sink points into. This is an RPG, so we get a lot of experience points over 12 chapters. I sank most of my points into Intuition and the Occult. I found this satisfying, as I was able to get flashes of insight at different points (although I'm not sure if this was from my ability or built into the story), and I was able to use magic extensively to curse people, place wards, and to scry. Given the different achievements and options I saw, I'm sure I would have had a very different experience with a different stat build.

Mechanically, the game has a few distinct threads.
-You have ownership of your late grandfather's shop, and you can decide who to hire to work there, what to invest in, how to pay for it all, etc. It starts you off seeming like it will have numerous recurring options, like Metahuman Inc., but it never really circles back to it, so you only get one real shot at setting up the shot and then many sub-choices after to affect minor details.
-There are numerous romantic options, including the sultry vampire villain, a goth/punk human friend, a handsome disabled attorney friend, a friendly vampire hunter, etc. I had numerous romantic encounters with my chosen relationship and it seemed fleshed out better than many CoG games. Occasionally there were scenarios with my love that may have seemed out of place given our current history, but they were few and far between and none spring to mind immediately.
-(Early spoilers)(Spoiler - click to show)A wealthy and powerful vampire seems to have set up in town and is manipulating affairs. This thread forms the main plot.
-(Middle spoiler but not giving a lot away)(Spoiler - click to show)A group of weaker vampires is also in town.They form the second-biggest thread.
-A lot of complicated town history is also floating around.

The game definitely was affected by my choices, and I re-evaluated my viewpoint multiple times as I realized a group I trusted was pretty bad, etc. Near the end, I felt like the whole weight of complex machinery the game is built on began to break down, as I double-crossed a lot of people without too much punishment. But while it pushed up against disbelief, it never really crossed the line. I think a lot of things depend on the relationship statistic alone, and I had had a lot of built-up trust before the betrayals.

Overall, the game is very long, but many people have said it feels short. This is likely because the game has so many options and avenues mid-game that it doesn't really get a sense of building to something. The other VtM game, Night Road, had the regular structure of missions and payments and handled increasing tension well, but here it's hard to feel much progress until near the end. I don't think this game is short or small or linear, but I think it could be paced or structured a bit better to indicate its length. Someone in the CoG forums said it has 12 chapters and 12 endings, and that really helped me set appropriate expectations.

Overall, I would rank this as one of the better Choice of Games titles. I think it is worth its purchase price, and that fans of Vampire the Masquerade or White Wolf in general will be pleased, as well as fans of small-town stories. It's a story that I wish I had written, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I received a review copy of this game.

This game is very, very long, certainly the longest adventuron game I've seen. It's split up into 6 or so parts, and the first part alone is already one of the longest games in Parsercomp.

I'm going to go over my 5 point scale with it.

+Descriptiveness: The author does an excellent job of painting a rich and vibrant world. Everyone knows each other, and events in one location affect events far away. Rather than a Zork-like grab-bag of random magic and sci fi (like a lot of big puzzlers), everything is tightly inter-connected, like Anchorhead.
+Emotional impact: Unlike Anchorhead, and most horror IF games, this is based on Faerie magic. While you may or may not classify this game is horror, it certainly presents scenarios which would be strongly horrifying to those in them. I enjoyed the story, which is the main reason I persisted.
+-Interactivity and Polish: These two categories go hand in hand, and I kind of want to give half a star in each. More details below.
+-Polish: The author intentionally chose Adventuron as an engine to show what it could do in a long-form game. Through a great deal of effort, I think he was completely successful in what he wanted to achieve. However, one difficulty is with not always having useful parser responses when having the correct verb and wrong noun or correct noun and wrong verb. One frequent occurrence for me was using the right verb and the wrong noun (like saying 'mirror' instead of 'fragment') and having the game imply it knew what I was doing but that it wasn't helpful. I didn't even know the game couldn't recognize the noun until I looked at the hints or other people's discussion. This happened multiple times. Outside of that, the game is remarkably well-constructed for such a long game.
+-Interactivity: The puzzles are a mixed bag. Some are mundane (find and light candle), some are complex (operate a camera and develop the photos), some are very obscure (the game is filled with many details in every room, and four or five puzzles depend on examining such a detail, while all the others are red herrings). I enjoyed the complex procedures, the gathering ensembles. Perhaps the most fun was just grabbing everything along the way, wondering what it would all lead to. Also related to interactivity, there were numerous timed events to add flavor. These were well-written and interesting, but when repeated multiple times and in various settings with the same text, became surreal and blurred.
The game is ponderous, which a huge number of locations. To preserve realism, the game frequently has you 'wake up' with a few key items removed from your inventory and placed around you. This contributed to mimesis but also contributed to me wondering where on earth I set things.
+Would I play it again? Yes. This is a marvelous achievement of a game. I'd like to one day write something like it.

This game is a large treasure hunt that, like very early parser games, is a mishmash of fantasy and modern concepts put together for a treasure hunt.

There is a central hub with different 'mini-worlds' you can access. They are interconnected, in that the solution for one world is often found in another.

I played straight through with the walkthrough, as:
-the game is in QBasic, and no scrollback seems to be available, making it harder to keep track of things
-the author stated it may take weeks to accomplish
-I wasn't sure if the game was 'cruel' or not in the Zarfian sense (i.e. can you lock yourself out of victory without knowing it?)

After I won, I went back and tried to explore on my own and look for different paths. I found it 'parcelled out' fairly well.

The parser is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the author describes it (in a forum post) as being the product of 40 years of work, and that it is a 'very powerful parser'. It can understand pronouns and complex commands like 'drop everything except blah and blih and..'

However, it has some issues. Sometimes you can refer to a noun by its first name (like EYE for EYE of NEWT) but not its second (like NEWT); sometimes, it's the opposite (so SCRAP doesn't work for SCRAP of PAPER but PAPER does). Perhaps most oddly, it, as many people have pointed out, can't take items out of container without using the phrase TAKE X FROM Y. Given the 40 years of development and the otherwise complexity of the parser, I can only imagine this is a conscious stylistic choice.

The world is sprawling, with many rooms having multiple exits and the ordinal directions like NW, SW etc. being used extensively. Rooms are almost ideally generic, with most rooms being empty and having names like 'MIDDLE OF CORRIDOR', with most descriptions being 'The room is vaguely lit and hard to make out. There are bare walls and floor and ceiling and several exits, including one going down.'

There is at least one NPC, who is fairly responsive. Puzzles include codes, riddles, leaps of intuition, musical puzzles, etc. with many hint sources in-game as well as built-in hints and a walkthrough.

Every game is written for a purpose. Some purposes are to share your feelings with others, to emulate something you find worthy, to try to become famous, to make money, to fufill a request for others, etc.

Due to the author's desire to keep in the oddities of the parser, the general vagueness of the game and its Zork-like setting, the QBAsic64 environment, etc. my guess is that the game's purposes are to evoke nostalgia and to demonstrate the author's system. Evaluated for those purposes, I'd have to call it a success.

For my own liking, the game is very polished and has some clever puzzles, but I didn't enjoy the interactivity as much as I could have and felt emotionally distanced from the game.

In this game, you play as someone awoken from cryosleep near the end of a long journey when your spaceship encounters an alien vessel. You'll have to explore the vessel with your helpful artificial intelligence unit Io, discovering its origin and purpose and encountering some bizarre alien technology on the way.

I'm not sure where to rate this, so I'll use my 5 point scale:

+Polish: I've read reviews of the earlier versions, and it seems like the Inform version dealt with most of the issues. I definitely would consider this more polished and bug-free than most games I play. Most standard responses have been replaced, most error messages are helpful, and command suggestions are frequently handed out. The game includes complicated containers, text typing into various interfaces, talkative NPCs, etc.
+Descriptiveness: A lot of the text is vivid. The author is clearly enthusiastic about space and I think it pays off. I was able to get a clear visual idea of each room.
+Interactivity: I admit I liked the puzzles. Many recent old-school games I've tried haven't appealed to me, but this is more of a light Infocom style than the more difficult British games. There's a bit more hand holding than Infocom but I appreciate that as someone who prefers lighter puzzles. I did get stuck a couple of times and had to request help.
+Emotional impact: The storyline itself didn't grab me but my natural curiosity and interest in the setting and exploration was satisfied. I felt like there was always something to work on and overall found it similar to a crossword puzzle in satisfaction.
?Would I play it again? I'm torn. On the one hand, I don't think this will become a long-term favorite. On the other hand, it has a pleasant compactness and unity that I could see myself coming back to in the future, especially if there were a sequel (which the name suggests). So I'll award a point here.

To me this game compares most directly with Hugo Labrande's Tristam Island and Marco Innocenti's Andromeda games. They all have a fairly similar style of 'retro aesthetic with modern affordances', a playtime of several hours, and availability on multiple platforms.

I think this game succeeds in its apparent goal, which is to create a product that people who played adventure games in the 80's will recognize and enjoy. The availability on multiple retro platforms definitely helps with that feel. (I'm making guesses here since I didn't play IF until 2010).

There are two types of authors when it comes to feedback: growth-minded authors and marketing authors. Growth-minded authors are looking for ways to improve and eager to find flaws in their products, while marketing authors are hoping to make more sales/move more product and don't want anything negative.

Competition authors are usually growth-minded, but since this is a commercial game I don't know which type this author is, so I'll put the 'growth' comments in spoilers which can be ignored if not desired:
(Spoiler - click to show)Jon Ingold, a two-time XYZZY winning author and head of the Inkle company said recently that the PC should never take action that isn't somehow the direct result of a player's choice, and I think that's true. Too often our character here does something without input, like the data hub; we're told 'it's not powered on, so you decide not to put anything on it'. It just feels weird. I can think of more examples if you like.
(Spoiler - click to show)Also, IO provides very useful information but talking again just says you can't think of anything to talk about. Again it's
kind of making the decision for you, but more importantly it's hard to get the information again. It'd be nice if IO would summarize for you or if there was another way to repeat that information.

This is the kind of game that comes along only once every few years, especially recently: a polished parser game that lasts far longer than 2 hours.

The author is inspired by Anchorhead, Blue Lacuna, and City of Secrets. Of those 3, I find this game to be closest to City of Secrets in both play style and prose style.

You are a medical student trying to solve a mystery: a mysterious black plague is destroying people in your city, and you have to help them.

To solve this, you need to go through 4 acts (plus a beginning and interlude) to reach the depths of the mystery.

The map for this game is quite large, and it comes with an in-game graphical map that looks great.

Like Anchorhead and Blue Lacuna, gameplay is divided into days. Unlike those games, gameplay is narrowly funneled. This game reads more like a movie than a novel, with an emphasis on scripted conversations and scripted action scenes. Only rarely are there simultaneous puzzles, and the most difficult puzzle is generally learning to navigate the impressively large and responsive city environment, which has both randomized events and time-based changes.

This is a love story, too, with multiple love interests and multiple endings. Romance plays a key role in numerous scenes. It uses other movie-like techniques, including a lot of foreshadowing and an emphasis on visual and aural descriptions (okay, that's not just in movies, but it just feels like a movie).

There have been two really negative reviews of Anchorhead in recent years, criticizing that game for not being 'funneled' enough, for having too open of a world, too subtle of story, not enough romance, etc. This game directly addresses all of those issues, with its constrained gameplay and copious allowances (such as a GO TO feature, in-game map and journal with a list of goals). On the other hand, for fans of the open world, exploration, and difficult puzzles of Anchorhead, it may pose too slight of a challenge. Blue Lacuna was in a similar spot, and offered two versions: a story version and a puzzle version.

For me, though, I enjoyed playing through this game, and truly consider it a rare game. I think it will do well in the XYZZY awards for 2021, and makes me want to try my hand at something like this, although I expect it would take as many years as the author's original did.

The polish on this game is impeccable, the setting and prose is descriptive, I'd definitely play again, the interactivity is a bit narrow but has several fun puzzles (including [mild spoilers](Spoiler - click to show)a nice math one), and emotionally was satisfying. Recommended for fans of story-focused parser games. I spent around 5 hours on this game.

Review for 2017 Spring Thing preview:
This game is advertised as being incomplete, but a very large chunk of it is done. Playing it is like playing 'episode 1' of a large series.

The setting is unusual: you are in a large and decaying city where magic and science are blended together. Scalpels and anesthesia blend with goblins and soul magic.

I found the opening to be a bit constraining (which is something I do in my own games, too), but that after that the game was rich and rewarding. Locations have several interactible details, conversations feel natural, and I felt like a real detective.

I enjoyed the large feeling of the city, something difficult to do right in an interactive fiction game. I did get a bit lost from time to time. Locations were unique and vividly described.

I would love to see this finished.

When I had heard that JJ and Grim had been working on a huge Twine project, this isn't what I expected, but I enjoyed this nonetheless.

This is a fake wiki, a sprawling website with links to tons of different actors, directors, characters, episodes, and even fan theories. It reminds me of the wiki game Neurocracy, although I believe they're gated differently. In this game, the wiki is being updated as you go, with new links appearing after you explore others.

The beginning was, as another reviewer mentioned, a bit difficult; with so much information at once, I just sort of lawnmowered through it, saving the fun stuff for last. So I ended up reading the 'people' page, then 'characters', then 'planets' and then the episodes.

It was slow going, with no real plot beats in those first segments because they were order independent.

But it was fun for different reasons. This project seems to have several different goals: to be a sort of 'lost episode' creepypasta-type story, to be funny, to provide a window into 70's culture, to honor and parody Dr. Who and original Star Trek (among others), and to impersonate and parody fan wiki culture.

That's a lot to deal with. One interview snippet from the wiki is an apt description of the wiki itself (mild spoilers):
(Spoiler - click to show)"In the end, I think we were all just pulling in different directions. Carson and I wanted this quite serious Space Opera, if you like, edgy, with political undercurrents and elements of folklore. Jerry (Newbaum) wanted a children's show to compete with Doctor Who, and Derek Farland, well, he really should have been writing kitchen sink dramas. In the end, the show just sort of tore itself apart."

One issue with writing 'creepy' or 'weird' TV shows is that a lot of TV shows are both intentionally and unintentionally weird, and you run into Poe's Law.

There were three threads in the wiki about its own origins, of which I found two pretty compelling (heavy spoilers from here on out):
(Spoiler - click to show)I enjoyed the 'curse' aspect, where the crew enacted an unholy Crowley-based ritual in Glastonbury Tor, invoking the 'thelema' of the producer to enact his will, and thereby dooming the entire show to obscurity.

I also enjoyed the 'Tulpa' idea whereby the whole show (and possibly all of human existence, according to 'Hantises') is a form of haunting or mass delusion or collaborative psychic projection which, once disrupted, fades away forever. If you're a fan of this idea, I recommend this game itself (of course) and also SCP-3930 (http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-3930), a similarly masterful telling of this idea.

The least compelling to me was the idea that it was just a lie.

There's a lot of humor in the game. My favorite line was "It was later found that a fried lentil from a packet of Bombay Mix (Newell's favourite snack) had become lodged in the cavity left by the write-protect tab."

Like I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of insights about the 70's. I liked this line about that (spoilers for ending)(Spoiler - click to show)Strikes, shortages, sexism, and the Black and White Minstrel Show. Yet the way people talk now, anyone would think they were Britain's glorious heyday. And that's the point, you see. You can't go back to the way things were, because they never were like that in the first place. We create our own past, we invent it. We make it whatever we want it to be. But the reality of it is, there is only now. The eternal now.

The final theme of the wiki seems to be around (Spoiler - click to show)loss and the past, as that last quote describes. For me, the real 'ending' was when I read (Spoiler - click to show)about how the documentary-writer's friend had had an 'incident' and pulled away, in conjunction with the final episode summary about saving the world but no one remembering you. The actual ending itself was less satisfying, but I see its purpose as (Spoiler - click to show)you need an anchor point for people to say 'okay', I've seen the whole game. Perhaps I just didn't understand it. In any case, I enjoyed my own gradual realizations of the themes shortly before the true ending.

I initially was going to give this 4 stars, with a point taken off for the overly spread out info at the beginning, then 5 stars as I approached the end, then 4 again for the mild letdown I had with the actual ending. So I'll just go with my formula:

+Polished: Immensely polished. It doesn't really get better than this. Also appreciated the art, which I hadn't mentioned before.
+Descriptiveness: Incredibly detailed. More detailed than some real wikis I've tried to use to look up shows before.
+Interactivity: At first, not so much, but as it went on I enjoyed it more. A real wiki dive.
+Emotional impact: Left me quite thoughtful at the end.
+Would I play again? It doesn't really lend itself to replay. I was planning on making this a '-', but I love the story of Excalibur, and maybe one day I might (with the author's permission' do some fan fiction in the world, as it's truly delightful. But that would be far in the future.

This game is a 22-chapter work relating the story of Cleopatra in Egypt told with a dense, symbolic word style.

I am a fan of the play Antony and Cleopatra and interested in the history around that time period, and I also have at times enjoyed dense symbolic text.

That enjoyment didn't crystallize this time. The game describes its own writing very well:
"Pour pen terrene this dysnomia volta syschronicity to formendulate paragraphs smashed into spare fragments of evocative semiimagery, mimetic shards that don't quite cohere to any generative idea."

They really don't cohere to any generative idea.

When the portmanteaus include French and Latin it gets even less 'generative':
"drunken nothings fuzzed up to retend in the mode prior to resolution beatified immolution densigravitas of the decolor demolition, wickedness we entrenched cheri in jouissanceunteurre catapulted in the cancers cant,"

(I prefer when the game's language is simpler, such as 'Slurp you up a jello mistake.').

I think there are times when this writing style works wonders: when it is used to tell an brilliant and exciting story, hiding the details behind a wall of words; or when it is used in a very short game, like B Minus does, allowing the player to have time to digest and process.

But this story seems largely hung on the traditional story of Caesar, Octavian, Antony, and Cleopatra, almost as if the author wished to write as much as possible, and used the old story as a framework to drape their own words around. The end result is a like a wedding cake made of a wooden frame with heavy fondant draped over, no cake inside.

I found specific moments fun: (Spoiler - click to show)Octavian hiding, the birth of the twins, the deathloop. There are hints of a larger trans narrative, but only in the middle and later parts and even then just vaguely alluded to.

The book itself is well aware of these faults, the author offering to be attacked for the content. In the end, the best description of the book is the one given by the characters in the primer:

"Unfortunately, the finished work appears to have become a bizarre mess of unreadable nonsense. The author appears to have been far more interested in playing obscure word games than telling our story in a way that people could actually understand."

This game is like a text version of the Winchester mystery house. That house was built upon continually for over 30 years, with constant extensions added, some leading nowhere, others connecting with each other in strange patterns.

This game was one of the earliest Choicescript games, and with that has some of that early-choicescript strangeness (now manifested primarily in its large number of stats and the occasional habit of the narrator addressing the reader directly). Since then, though, it has been expanded on considerably. This game contains 4 sub-games, two of them free and two not. So it's simultaneously one of the oldest and one of the newest choicescript games.

Its overall structure is very different from other titles from CoG. It has a periodic narrative arc. Instead of tension rising to a peak and falling in one grand swoop, it features a single vampire moving about America throughout the 1800s, experiencing a variety of historical events in addition to dealing with vampire society and the curse of immortality.

This episodic structure gives a sense of deja vu and ennui to the main character, as you see so many historical fads and people come and go.

Just like the Winchester house, there are a lot of dead alleys and lost construction. I tried beta testing the game before, but died in the second sub-book. Playing it for this review, I died twice at the end of the fourth book. Similarly, there are huge chunks of the story that can be skipped out on, such as romances, and the opening is completely different depending on your chosen background.

In another departure from Choicescript games, this game addresses race in a very direct way. This game is largely a history of black people in America, with each chapter containing large segments in relation to black history: the liberation of Haiti, the Exodusters, Cuba, lynchings, vodou, the treatment of former slaves after the civil war, etc. Black characters speak in heavily accented text, and for most of the game they are the only ones to do so, with Germans, quakers, and Jews receiving some accents later on.

A game that deals so intimately with black history and black stories risks embracing stereotypes or profiting on stories that don't belong to the author. However, I've seen in the forums mention of several sensitivity readers, although I don't see them listed in the credits the way that Fox Spirit has done (might be worth considering). From what I've seen from PoC authors on Twitter, many consider sensitivity readers a way to make sure that PoC voices are heard, considered, and paid.

The history in this game is detailed and heavily researched, especially in the fourth chapter. If you're interested in silver arbitrage resulting from the Coinage Act of 1873 or the invention of the modern celebrity via Oscar Wilde, the 4th act should appeal to you heavily. The third act deals with a lot of letter-writing and numerous social engagements with other vampires leading to political maneuvering. The 2nd act deals with the Civil War and deprivation, while the first has the most material dealing with you, yourself, as a vampire, and your feelings about that decision.

This game will appeal to a certain type of reader, those who consider themselves interested in philosophy and history or fans of vampires in general.

The game is not yet complete, but due to its plot structure you can pick up and stop off just about anywhere in the journey. A unique choicescript game, huge and detailed.

I've noticed that most Choicescript games' quality matches up pretty well with the total and number of ratings on the omnibus app, with most of the lower-scored ones ending up being confusing or dissappointing.

This game proved the exception for me. While it had problems, especially near the start, I ended up enjoying it quite a bit especially the ending.

In this game, you play as a monk/scholar in 1000 AD who is entrusted with a book of marvelous prophecy called the Chronicon Apocalypticon. At the same time, you discover a disembodied hand running around. You embark on a quest to save (or destroy) England, meeting many weird characters and discovering the magical side of the world (with undead, elves, dragons, etc.)

The NPCs all are very different from each other and creative. They include a beekeeper and his special bee helper, a Joan-of-Arc type woman, a conflicted nun, a bard, and others.

I enjoyed the fact that 'being good at reading' is a superpower in this game. At least, it's a skill that can be used to save the world.

Overall, the main characteristics it has with other less popular CoG titles is its weaker/confusing stats and it's lack of flexibility when it comes to romances (there are romances, but gender of ROs is fixed and many will only specific types of romance or none at all).

By 'weak stats' I mean that I ended the game with almost all skills at 50%, one in the 60's and two in the 50's. This can cause a lot of problems, such as trying to figure out if you just screwed up your stats royally, or figuring out what's enough to pass challenges. My personal analogy for stat growth is that it's like walking speed in a 3d game: really low stat boosts are like having a character move at 1/10 of normal speed.

By 'confusing' stats, I mean that it can be really hard to figure out which stats are which; for instance, the game frequently asked me if I would do things myself or work as a team, but I cannot identify any skill that that corresponds to. On the other hand, there are many tracked stats that I can't for the life of me tell how they apply in the game.

Many people in reviews for this game mention difficulty with stat checks, which I think is a result of the above issues.

So that's a lot of time spent on the weaknesses. The good thing is that the game is at its worst at the beginning and only gets better with time. The final chapter was great, on par (in my opinion) with Heroes of Myth, another excellent Choicescript game. The actual last page was one of the best I've seen (in my playthrough).

As the game progresses, you can figure out the author's signposts for the stats. It's usually the simplest possible: he mentions the name of the stat in the choice.

As the game goes on, there are many factions you can choose between and many ways to influence the world. The choices are great. The whole game story was really compelling for me, better than most of the games I've played in the last few weeks.

I think this game most appealed to me because of my love for reading and my enjoyment of monastical, historical, and/or fae-based narratives with a bizarre cast of characters, as well as my patience for puzzling stats. If that sounds like you, you'll probably enjoy this game.

Jim Dattilo is a good interactive fiction author. He's great at creating a variety of characters.

The power to affect time is a fun subject in IF, and has a lot of potential.

However, I think this game misses at its aims a bit.

You play as an insurance salesman who one days realizes they can stop time. You can use this to enrich yourself or help others, and you can attract the attention of many might people or romantic interests.

I think where the trouble is is that Jim's strengths are a vibrant cast of NPCs and a superhero game's strength is the hero's growth, and they don't mesh well.

Your character in this game has almost no development; all the interesting personal plotlines are pushed on to other people. There is an enemy, but they enter pretty late in the story.

The problem is the NPCs with the interesting plotlines don't have powers, so the game basically alternates between two chunks: interesting, non-supernatural segments with NPC's personal lives, and exciting but aimless explorations of your powers. So, for instance, you might go to a party with someone and learn about their childhood, then go out to a park and decide to steal a bike or help a kid not scrape their knee. And that's the bulk of the game.

The writing is good, though, and over time I found the characters interesting. The workplace subplot is fascinating. I definitely feel like playing this game was not a waste of my time.

The other main problem I had was a 'sudden death' ending in Chapter 12. I don't mind sudden deaths in Choicescript games, but these are essentially 'hardmode' games where a death wipes your whole file and you have to restart. If there was some kind of denouement to your death (like in Mask of the Plague Doctor) or options to restart a given chapter (like Choice of Rebels or Cakes and Ale), it would be a lot less painful.

So I can't strongly recommend this game, but I can recommend it to fans of Dattilo's other work and fans of slice-of-life style superhero works (or corporate drama; honestly, if you're into that, that subplot alone is a pretty good game in and of itself).

This game is a bit different than I was expecting. Instead of being a game about, say, Norse gods or Zeus, it's something more like Avatar or similar shows. You are a constructed being in a race that has control over wind and water naturally, and fire and earth through technology.

The weather is out of control, so you have to stop it, along with a kind of sentient bio-organic robot servant and some human friends. You meet a human city controlled by 5 warring, corrupt houses and you also meet others of your kind (and their enemies).

The game opens strongly, with cool scenarios like jumping off a cliff to test your flight abilities.

The issue that I had with the game is that so many things are set up without being followed up on or resolved. Part of that, I believe, is that the author put some very important story beats into only a few of the possible playthroughs, making multiple playthroughs almost a necessity to really understand the game. That's not bad in itself, but it makes each playthrough a little weaker.

I didn't watch Game of Thrones, but I remember a lot of people talking about how the winter badguy had been built up for the whole show then was over in a surprisingly easy way that was disappointing. That happens here in many ways. In fact, your 'climactic battle' between whichever final opponent you choose is almost indistinguishable from every other battle in the game, and if anything seems less momentous and intense than the others (like fighting off an army of hundreds of robots).

Like other reviewers on other platforms have said, the individual writing is good. The worldbuilding was creative, to me, and the types of characters were varied. Like other parts of the stories, each character's arc felt unfinished in ways, but had enjoyable parts. I particularly enjoyed Humil's story arc.

Despite my mixed feelings, I overall enjoyed this game and definitely believe I'll play it again in the future.

I was prepared not to like this game at first. It's title seemed vague, and in the first chapter it almost felt like neutral sci-fi, like The Fleet without managing, or Choice of the Star Captain without weird humor and aliens, or I, Cyborg without all the crime.

But over time it actually really came together. Little hints about characters that would just be slight traits in other people became full-fledged storylines. Macguffins become actually plot-relevant. The people I found least interesting at first all had really well-put-together storylines.

The choices worked well for me later on, too. At first, there were a few annoying choices (like one where the game decides you must answer a distress call, and you pick the reason why, instead of whether you do it). But as you go on, the game becomes a lot more about managing who you spend time with and which of the many factions you support. One of the best things the game does with stats is tying the stats to storylines and people. So instead of 'pick which of these four options is the stat you maxed out at the beginning of the game', it's more like 'spend time with the doctor using your medical training or use your engineering training to make weapons'. Maybe it's just the same as other games under the hood, but I felt like I was making real choices.

I also appreciated the science aspect. Out of all the space games, I felt like this one dealt with realism the most. There are some handwavey aspects (like artificial gravity and the main Macguffin), but a trip across the solar system takes you months, and you have to use magnetic boots in a derelict spacecraft. I thought that was neat.

Overall, I'd say it's a great scifi game with a slow start but a great finish.

This game is one of the best Choicescript games I've given 4 stars to, but some of the interactivity dragged it down a bit for me.

This is a large game, at 330K words. In it, you play as (what felt to me) a cyborg version of Han Solo: you're a smuggler, you can charm, lie, shoot, and fly, you can choose how morally ambiguous you are, etc.

In gameplay, it almost feels like a wild west 'slice of life'. You spend a long time on a space station on the edges of civilization, dealing with 3 criminal syndicates (or 4, if you count the corrupt police), as well as an old flame who represents the more civilized side of life.

The man you were a copy of, though, has left a trail of spurned lovers and slighted enemies behind, causing you a lot of trouble. In addition, your sensory implant (which handles all of your input) is dying and replacements are scarce.

I think this game handles overall coherence pretty well. It's not too hard to get a feel for what the world is like and what you need to do. It can be hard to keep track of all the characters, but you get tons of opportunities to interact with everyone.

Choicewise and statwise, there's some good and some bad, at least the way I see it. What's good is that there are some areas where you get very significant choices, contributing to the game's large wordcount. For instance, there are different jobs you can take, factions you can join, etc.

What's a little rougher is that the main use of stats is pass/fail checks, but made pretty difficult. One chapter in particular involves a long impersonation attempt where you have to keep 4 or 5 factors in mind, and failing even one can get you busted.

In other places, events that could have been written in as outside circumstances are instead made to be player choices that are forced on you. For instance, I didn't like the Sphinx character much, but the game assumed I'd be their buddy at least a little.

Perhaps most distressing is that there are quite a few choices you make where the game immediately says, 'but actually, instead of what you just chose, this happens instead'.

Overall, I'm glad I played it. I can recommend it conditionally for sci-fi fans, especially for those interested in ai questions. If you ever liked a Data-centric or Doctor Hologram-centric episode of Star Trek, you'll probably love this.

Having played (almost) all of Kyle Marquis's games, I can say that there are some definite trends. They tend to be very long, with complicated skill checks and intricate worldbuilding.

In particular, the worlds he constructs have certain similarities, almost like half-remembered versions of the same fever dream. The worlds tend to be man-made by ancient, superior versions of humans, who are now gone, and have bio-mechanical or magic-scifi hybrid.

I like all of his games, but I think this one works particularly well (although his Vampire the Masquerade game is, I think, his best). Years ago, a group of heroes saved the world, and two of them had you as a child. When news of a foreign army comes, you have to travel across a huge continent and a variety of locales to warn others of what is to come. In the end, you have to travel to the Great Southern Labyrinth to get aid.

I can only describe the structure of this game as 'baroque', in the sense of being almost excessively elaborate. You have statistics for personal skills, as well as statistics for things you are trained in. There are many subplots running through the game (such as the fear of the gods, a lengthy murder mystery, political intrigue, your character's backstory, control over temple worship, an artifact that possesses creatures, etc.) and 4-5 villains, each of which would work fine as a main villain. It's over the top, maybe even overwhelming at times, especially given the size of the game. The great labyrinth itself is huge, but it's only in one or two chapters.

There are a lot of ways to fail in this game, both due to bad stat checks and due to built-in-failure.

I found your two main travelling companions (who also serve as ROs) interesting and varied.

Overall, a game I'd recommend if you've liked the author's other work or if you try out the free demo and enjoy.

I received a review copy of this game.

This game is pretty much exactly what you would imagine a 400K-word game about being a masked plague doctor would be like.

It's a fairly grim tale. You are a travelling doctor forced by the crown to enter a city in quarantine due to the Waking Death, a plague which makes its bearers sleep-deprived until they die.

You work with two others, a man wearing a boar mask and a woman wearing a fox mask. The town is surrounded by starving soldiers who want to sack it, is run by a despot mayor, and has at least two insurgent groups inside and multiple religious sects.

Although many exciting things happen in this game, the writing is slow-paced and dense. Here is a description of stars, for instance:
"The stonework of the courtyard fountain feels cold and uncomfortable against your back, as you gaze up at the sky. A persistent wind, the same one that caused you to bundle up your robes and seek shelter behind the stone structure, has left cracks in the relentless march of clouds, allowing occasional points of light to blink through. You ignore the creeping ache as the winter night assails your bones, focusing instead on those distant glimmers. Are they miniature suns? The faraway eyes of watching deities? Or simply another act of nature, like the snow, or the rain?"

I enjoy this style of writing. Given the large wordcount of the game and the dense prose, it took me several evenings to finish this game. And it branches quite a bit. My playthrough went against the grain, so to speak, as I supported the despot mayor at every opportunity and sought after (and found, to my detriment) the forbidden knowledge at the heart of the town.

Despite my 'losing' ending, it was written very well, with a lengthy epilogue that made the game very satisfying. It's always a huge bummer to get to the very end of a choicescript game only to have an abrupt 'you lost' ending, so having this 'you lost and here's what happened to the shattered wreck of your mind and body, and all those you loved' is definitely refreshing.

Also, I found it fun to roleplay as SCP-049 in this game.

Comparing this to Heart of the House, another long, slow-burn horror game, I'd say that Mask of the Plague Doctor is more like The Haunting of Hill House or The Turn of the Screw (more philosophical with more implied/ambiguous horror) and that The Heart of the House is more like a Stephen King novel or Dracula (events that are clearly supernatural and terrifying). Fans of both games may also like Blood Money, which has you playing a more cutthroat character.

I received a review copy of this game.

This is a great game. I've played 4 Kyle Marquis games now and have noticed a pattern. They tend to be very large games with intricate worldbuilding, have high stakes (usually involving the creation or destruction of the world), have a large cast of characters and feature some kind of alternate tech timeline.

In this game, you are in an alternate world where the Byzantium Empire is dominant during what would be Victoria's reign instead of the British Empire. The world features more domes than spires and more bronze and gold than iron and steel.

This world is very different than ours, with explicit Gods and a history numbered in the thousands of years. But an experiment changes everything, plunging you into prehistory.

There, you enter a village where you can play a sort of 'city simulator', deciding to focus on arts or defenses or trading. In the meantime, you have to deal with rival civilizations, some of them non-human, and with the threat of an enormous silver mountain in the sky coming to destroy the world.

The game did feel a bit bogged down in the middle and the climactic battle at my village was over just an action or two faster than I thought it would be, but it was fun. I also had fun investing a lot of relationship time with Vecla when I though she was an old worm before discovering that wasn't the case.

Finally, this is a very long game. Took me well over 2 hours to finish, reading fast, and it is definitely replayable.

When I was a kid, I read tons of Dragonlance books. My brother and I owned over 100, read them, laminated them.

I always liked them better than Forgotten Realms because the Dragonlance characters were more human. At the beginning of the Dragons of Autumn Twilight, everyone is pretty low level. Raistlin doesn't even know fireball.

But the Forgotten Realms books were always super over-powered. A character murders gods and becomes a god. Elminster goes to a fireball competition and explodes a fireball the size of the sun. Stuff like that.

This game is more like Forgotten realms. You play as an incredibly powerful archmage (much more powerful than a level 20 D&D character) who is ready to ascend to Godhood, but someone is sabotaging your plans. You have to find a way to keep yourself alive and in power long enough to ascend (or to take over the world, or many other goals).

There is intense worldbuilding, with dozens of characters, creatures, spells, artifacts, etc. in a traditional RPG style setting (dragons, plane shifting, wizards, bards, knights, etc.)

I'm usually all over this kind of thing, but as I said earlier, there a couple of flaws for me.

-The narrative arc is flat. There's no real growth; you start out as super-powerful, then become more super-powerful, then even more super-powerful. By the later chapters, it makes more sense, and feels better, but the first few chapters made me feel like I had nowhere to go and no real stakes since I started out having already 'won'.

-The character is pretty much evil or close to it, but I didn't really get a motivation for it. I can compare this game to Endmaster's Eternal in some ways, a game I recently played that also has a notably villainous PC (although Eternal is much darker overall), and even though Eternal had an even more evil protagonist, it's motivated more because you're a servant sworn to work for a master. In this game, you answer to no one and nothing. Many of your choices are just evil for evil's sake. I guess it's the difference between being an anti-hero (like in Eternal or Champion of the Gods or Metahuman, Inc. or even Megamind) vs being a straight-up villain.

But these are minor quibbles. The writing is clearly good. The game is very large, one of the longest (in playtime) that I've played for Choice of Games, and most of the problems I mention go away after the first few chapters.

So if you play the demo and enjoy it, it only gets better from there and is worth the price.

As a final note, the game does a brilliant job with changing the stats screen to reflect your situation, and I wish there was some 'best stats screen' or 'coolest Choicescript trick' award I could give the game for that.

I've been exploring the ChooseYourStory catalogue a bit and taking the advice of previous commenters to check the content warnings so I don't complain about things I should have known about ahead of time.

This game was really interesting and really hard. I don't usually review games without finishing them, but I think it might be a long time before I beat this one (unless I just use the walkthrough).

You play as someone who wanders into a Walmart right when it's taken over by terrorists. You have to explore the various departments and collect items to help you and others escape.

I've probably only reached 1/3-1/2 of the game after a few hours and checking the beginning of the walkthrough. There are tons of items that you can pick up and manipulate, and the game is defiitely 'cruel' on the Zarfian scale, meaning you can irrevocably mess yourself up without knowing.

It reminds me of some of the Infocom games like Deadline or the one where you're a scuba diver, where you have to hit things in just the right sequence or you'll miss out on something important.

There's some grammatical and writing inconsistencies, which is why I'm doing 4 stars instead of 5, but I would definitely recommend this to fans of games that require careful note taking, experimentation, logic, and a lot of replay.

This game reminds me of nothing more than picking up some epic fantasy series like Wheel of Time or Thomas Covenant, one of those books that has a huge scope, intricate backstory, and tons of characters. It's a different feel than standalone fiction, and I haven't found a new series like that in a while.

Seeing it in Choicescript is great. This is a very large game. I remember thinking "Wow, this game is gigantic, took me a long time to play," and then realizing that I was just near the end of Chapter 2 (out of 4).

It's split into four chapters:

In Chapter 1, you establish your backstory and much of the worldbuilding and start your rebellion.

Chapter 2 is a long chapter spread out over weeks where you try to survive over a difficult winter. I had a very hard time with this, as I wanted to not steal, but it meant letting people die. Really good tradeoff in goals here, love to see this kind of interactivity.

Chapter 3 involves meeting a diverse group of people and discovering problems in your midst.

And Chapter 4 is the climactic battle, from planning to execution to aftermath.

This game has many ways to fail, but mercifully has a 'redo this chapter button', which I was glad for when I died on my first run through Chapter 4.

Playing the first chapter will let you know right away if this is your kind of game or not. What I love about this game is how the stats are completely just there to show the game remembers you, and passing or failing stat checks is less about solving a puzzle or getting rewarded/punished and more about building a story based on your choices.

Relationships occupy a lot of the game. There are characters with great depth who can never be seen if you just kill them off bat. All of the main characters show up enough that they get meaningful development and you know exactly what kind of things might offend them or please them, and they frequently are in conflict so you can't get everything you want but still feel good about your choices.

I liked this game, but fair warning it does take a long time to play. The author intends on writing 4 more books but it stands well on its own, especially when compared with other good Choicescript games that are essentially '1-shot' TTRPG adventures. I liked those too, but this is more like a whole campaign with solid backstory.

I've long heard rumours about the quality of this Exceptional Story, and that made me hesitant to play it, as I didn't want to be disappointed.

I shouldn't have worried. This exceptional story is of high enough quality that I thought at one point 'this is the first time I've seen a real story in a Fallen London game'.

Now, that's not quite true, as there are great stories throughout Fallen London and Sunless Skies. But the format usually favors a series of vague allusions that come together in the end to give you an overall impression, although very little is said in each bit.

Cricket, Anyone? is different. It's very large, for one thing. I swear I spent over 80 actions on it, and anxiously waited to refresh my actions throughout the day.

The structure is intriguing as well. Once you get through a couple brief opening storylets, you enter a long cricket match where you make strategic options and, in between inning, investigating the bizarre machinations of the different teams and the trainer.

The story unfolded beautifully; the structure and writing rival a lot of the great sci-fi, fantasy, or modern lit short stories I've read before. There are a series of reveals that individually feel small until you realize what it's building up to and you see that it should have been clear all along. This happens several ways, with the stakes being upped over and over until it's some of the weightiest lore material in the Fallen London canon.

I came in with everybody saying this is the best Exceptional Story ever and was both skeptical and nervous about being disappointed, and I can only say that they were right.

This is an unusual parser game in that a lot of its development went into making it accessible on a variety of platforms, including Apple II, Atari, Gameboy, TI-84 and Dreamcast.

This puts some pretty extreme constraints on a game, which explains a bit why this is in a .z3 format. It would also suggest that this game would have to be under-implemented or small.

But Labrande has fit quite a lot of game into this small package, and that's what took this from a 4-star game for me to a 5-star game.

You land on an island after a plane crash and have to both survive and investigate the mystery of the island.

Gameplay takes place in several portions, each of which involves increasingly sophisticated objects and devices.

The first, survival-focused, portion was fairly linear, which was odd to me, and then once it opened up more I realized that this was just a very large game so its opening, linear segment was larger than most.

This game is at its best when it presents mysteries. When the game first mentioned Tristam Island by name I was instantly intrigued. That was my driving force in playing.

The feel is more like Infocom in that you have large maps with a few useful items in each area. This map reminded me a bit of Planetfall, which had several empty rooms to serve for realism's sake.

The biggest divergences from Infocom are in NPCs and in 'pizazz'. There are few opportunities to interact with others in this game, lending it a quiter feel. And Infocom games tended to be over-the-top, with wild circuses or exciting spy thrillers or time travel. This game is completely grounded in reality, and in fact seems to have entailed a great deal of research.

There are some troubles here and there in terms of responses or synonyms, which is why I would have given 4 stars. But much or all of that is explained by the oppressive constraints one has to deal with to fit a game this complex into a small package.

If you are a fan of retro gaming, I can't think of anything better than to play this on your platform of choice. For fans of parser games in general, I can give this a positive recommendation as something longer than any game in this year's IFComp, and polished.

(Note: I used the provided hints, messaging the author and even decompiling to complete this game. With all those aids, it still took me several hours).