Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is an ambitious game for a 4-hr speed competition. It messes with the direction system itself! A ghost steals your directions, and you have to find them to put them back.

I thought this was a fun idea. As a speed-IF, a lot of stuff was unimplemented (like the exits which are replaced by 'fog', which you can't interact with). The puzzles are all taking several objects in the game and looking IN, BEHIND, and UNDER them.

That part wasn't too bad, though a bit tedious. But once you solve it, the stuff gets scrambled, and you have to search everything again in the same way.

Then it happens again.

Unfortunately, that just wasn't fun for me. Some people like to put puzzles in the game where you have to search IN, UNDER, and BEHIND every object; ADRIFT authors in particular really enjoy making giant games with tons of objects where you have to search like that. Not once have I ever heard a player say they enjoy it.

So, I like the direction idea a lot, didn't like the puzzles. But in a speed-IF, the ideas are the key thing, so that's good.

This game was fun, though it is definitely a mixed bag.

Its starting premise reminds me of the old ‘my parents sold me to One Direction’ stories for some reason. You play as someone who is in a group that was throwing rocks at a house full of vampires, even though you yourself didn’t do it. But then it turns out your family needs a place to stay, and the vampires invite you in, while the beautiful daughter blackmails you into doing chores since you she saw what you were doing.

There’s a large part in the intro where you get settled in and have a few days at school interacting with both the vampire family and some new friends. Then the game shifts to a daily pattern where a bit of plot happens, then you can hang out with friends (advancing a romance counter), exercise, study, etc.

The characters are cool. I liked Malka, a goth a lot, though I didn’t learn how to earn more money, and she stopped hanging out with me when I didn’t buy goth clothes, so I may need to replay (I checked the code to read her final ending).

Because I didn’t get to the end of any romance scenes, the game just ends on a cliff. My grades didn’t matter; my athleticism didn’t matter. The story just says “You can’t think of anyone to take to the dance” and ends.

Overall, I liked the eager writing style, the way it leaned heavily into relationship tropes but doing them ‘right’ for my tastes, the way it handled a mortal gaining forbidden knowledge, and the daily pattern that helped me plan and strategize between different goals. It has tons of ratings on the app, likely due to its age but also to the fun storyline. I wish it had a better ending, though, for sure!

This was a brief game made in Ink with some dice-rolling mechanics, made in 4 hours or less for the La Petite Mort division.

You're sitting in a cafe, and you have to gather enough bravery to go outside. Your options are drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

Unfortunately, this game is set one month in the future of when it was released, the day after Spanish elections, and in this game the far-right parties are shown as having successfully formed a coalition. Discovering this can make you not want to go outside, rendering the check more difficult.

And that's it. Interesting to see if the prediction comes to pass or not.

I almost didn't play this game, since it mentions lewd ascii art and strong profanity, but I found it not really objectionable at all (in case anyone was putting it off because of that).

This game starts kind of like Type Help, in that you have an interface available and have to guess the initial commands.

Fortunately, the game gives good hints. In fact, many times during this game it felt like it was setting up complex and difficult puzzles only to bypass them by simply continuing to explore and read more. There were some puzzles, but mostly fairly simple. As an example, there is Scheme code for ascii art generation which you can copy and paste into a compiler (as I did) and edit out the bugs (as I did; the bugs are intentional typos), and get it to run, but it's not plot-relevant. Similarly, you never really have to guess at file names; I thought there'd be a puzzle about finding which profile has printer access or accessing phone lines, but that never happened. This is good; the game was mostly story-based, and if such puzzles had existed, it would have brought the momentum to a halt, so I appreciate how things worked out. I think the most complex puzzle is in the Fryday mini-game, but that one has a good reward.

The overall structure is complex, with email entries, diaries, a mini text-adventure, and real-life events. In some ways, it reminds me of past IFComp-winner And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Last One (or something; I didn't google the name), with its computer terminal, ascii art, separated time frame, etc.

The writing is the main focus of the game. It does a lot right, with varied character personalities, realistic period-specific dialogue, and so on.

Some things didn't land as well for me, and I can't really pin down why. Sometimes jokes just went over my head; for instance, there's an email from a Nigerian Prince (a common scam at the time) with the name Mahomboo Sukammer-Ono. I figured out that 'Sukammer' was 'scammer' and maybe 'Ono' was 'oh no', but I still don't understand Mahomboo (many of my students are Nigerian and it's not really formed like a Nigerian name, and googling it, it's not a real name.). Maybe it's "My humble scammer oh no"? But what would that mean?

Other times I got confused because I'm American. I thought Vivian was a girl's name and Wendel a boy's name, so when they talked about 'another woman' or 'that man' I got confused. And sometimes the game veered between being pulpy and over-the-top in writing and being serious and somber in writing, so I occasionally lost my suspension of disbelief before reinserting it.

But the story was interesting, the writing was often fun, the game was complex, and I think this is an impressive piece of work.

This game has a peculiarly interesting structure. It's kind of like the classic 'Verdeterre' gameplay style (popularized by Ryan Veeder's Captain Verdeterre's Plunder, this type of game has you try to collect as many treasures as possible in a limited amount of time, with multiple replays to get it right).

This is kind of a more relaxed version of that. Oh, and instead of getting treasures, you're killing mobsters.

You're a ghost mobster accountant assigned by hell to kill your other mobster buddies in order to get your body back. You're sent out into a sprawling map with a ton of NPCs, locations and items, but the only way to interact with them all is to possess people. You only get a single shot to possess each person, and it comes with a counter. Once you're ejected, it's all over. You have guns of course, but as a ghost possessing someone your aim isn't good enough.

You have to be creative.

There are a lot of deaths. I flailed for a bit before I figured them out, then I got the train and wheelchair deaths, which felt appropriately cinematically dramatic. After that, I went to the walkthrough, as there seemed like so many possibilities, but only some of which were implemented.

Implementation was a tiny bit sketchy here and there. The only really noticeable thing was that "knock" and "knock door" had no response, while "knock on door" had a response (I know 'knock door' doesn't make sense, but works in a lot of games for some reason).

Other than that, the only real drawback I found in the game was that there were descriptions, quite a bit of them, but some of it just felt like it was there because it had to be there. Like the linen closet and dining room, it felt like 'a mansion would have these so I'll put them in," but I feel like they were lost potential, maybe for characterization of the MC's thoughts and experiences or something.

The structure is innovative, I haven't really seen of ton of 'kill people creatively' games with open-world, almost storylet-like mechanics. Really clever.

I used translation and the walkthrough for this.

This is a game in Ukrainian with a custom parser engine.

As I don't know basic commands in Ukrainian, I can't attest to how well the game handles random commands.

But the game itself is fairly simple. You open a cupboard or closet to find some phone numbers, then all other actions are either calling phone numbers or waiting.

The plot is interesting, but I didn't fully grasp it all; a kind of conflict between people where at least one can see dreams.

Overall, it feels like this is some cool progress with making a new system, but that's all I could find out.

This is the second toki pona game I've played. Toki pona is a conlang (constructed language) based on the idea of using as few words as possible, with around 100 or so canonical words and some extra ones people use (at least two of which make their way into this game, 'monsuta' for scary and a word for medicine I don't recall). There is a hieroglyph version of the language, which this game uses.

I found that easier to understand than the alphabet version, since the pictures give a kind of meaning and you can say things mentally like 'I see at inside cloth hole' and translate like that.

The last IFComp had a game by Daniel Stelzer that tries to teach you Sumerian through games, and carefully guides you through it, helping you learn as you go. Similarly, the game Suveh Nux teaches you a magical language, carefully, one word at a time.

Both toki pona games I've played (including this one) don't do that, they just dump it at you. Why? Is it just something they wanted to make, not caring what others experience? Is it due to a kind of overconfidence in how easy the language is? Or maybe it actually is easy. I got more comfortable with it by the end. Some parts of it were quite moving/emotional, like 'sound mouth him (is) broken little'.

I have thoughts on Toki Pona in general (that to use it for general purposes would require standardizing word combinations which would just make it a regular language without anything special) but I thought this game worked well. I don't know what the light line was. I generally had a page full of hieroglyphs and translations open on one side and the game on the other, and opened a google Gemini tab and said 'translate this' on each page after I did my best. That helped me with some connections like 'air' and 'spirit' being the same (which must be based on things like Greek 'pneuma').

In this visual novel, you play as a son of a cult leader who just assassinated him after he and his followers summoned a blood rain onto a city. You are planning on leaving, but encounter a variety of people in the meantime including police officers and a mysterious woman.

The game is set in Russia with several characters from France (and is written in Spanish), but the characters are decidedly non-human, with many characters having horns and one having a chest the size of a slightly smaller person.

There are no choices whatsoever in this story. The writing is loose, feeling natural and having a few typos here and there. The dialogue had a lot of common themes in writing for young adults, like feeling disaffected, wanting to distance oneself from parents, difficulty in being emotionally vulnerable, etc.

I thought it was a good story and the art was cool, especially the MC. I do enjoy more interactivity, but if I have to read a linear story, I'm glad that it was interesting.

As a non-native speaker, the text in this game felt descriptive and compelling, though I don't know how it would feel to a native reader.

You are called at 3:17 am to the scene of a murder. You have four or so different rooms you can walk through to examine things, but everything you examine gives you strange visions. Or are they memories?

There are a lot of options, but I ended up mainly 'lawnmowering' them (i.e. trying each one in order). I liked the surreal feel and the way the story ended, this surreal horror genre is definitely one of my favorites.

This Ink Spanish game has you as a character in a dark nightmare world with strange people and things. You mostly move backwards and forwards on a branching path, with different paths giving you different items or having you meet characters who ask for different things.

The dreamlike characters are interesting, like a fisherman with spiderwebs between his eyelids.

Many of the people represent facets of yourself in the nightmare world, and you have to confront things like insecurities about your appearance.

There's a lot of different branching. For instance, I was able to complete the game without finding food for a starving giant.

The game is polished, with slow text that's just fast enough not to be super annoying, and some flashing lights and sound effects.