Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

I’m pretty disappointed in myself; I played this game for 3 days and 5-6 hours trying to beat it without hints and only got 18 out of 24 before beginning to look things up.

This is a parser game with a moderate-sized map filled with information. You play as an exorcist visiting an abandoned film studio, set on exorcising 24 ghosts that all died in different years. To do so, you must know their name, the year they died, and how they died.

Thus, you embark on your quest to gather up as many pieces of paper as you can find (and you can find a lot) and occasionally using your psychic abilities to examine objects’ pasts.

I generally try in my reviews to be encouraging to newer authors or people who seem like they could use encouragement, but to be more frank and open with people who are well-established. So I’d like to say that I am giving this game 5 stars and think it is great, and I’d like to spend the rest of this review analyzing the game’s design and play style without focusing on building it up with praise.

This game was directly influenced by numerous games I’ve never played, included Obra Dinn and Her Story. When I played it, I was strongly reminded of several other IF games, perhaps inspired by those same sources.

Superficially, I was reminded of Dr Horror’s House of Terror, a parser game that took 2nd place in 2021. It also featured a haunted film studio split into 5 buildings, each of which had its own cast of monsters and puzzles to be solved. I soon found that while the setting was similar, the gameplay was almost a polar opposite.

I next was reminded of Excalibur, a fantastic game from the same year (2021) that takes the form of a fake wiki database about a non-existent TV series. It’s self-aware, and even in-game it’s possible the series never existed and the whole wiki is a concoction of a fan. Similarly to Kinophobia, gameplay revolves around looking up cast members with connections to the occult.

The third is Type Help, a game released this year outside of competitions that then skyrocketed to 5th place of all time on IFDB. Like Kinophobia, it has a linear sequence of murders where the names and deaths of the victims must be pieced together, first by finding easily accessible info, then slowly learning the system and finding patterns.

The implementation in this game is paradoxically smooth. Most scenery mentioned in scenery descriptions is not implemented at all, usually a sign of a terrible parser game. Here, it’s just a sign to ignore it. The focus is entirely on the documents.

Similarly, some reasonable synonyms don’t work. “Q Landlord” doesn’t work. “Q The Landlord” does. But again, this isn’t a flaw; the game is about being as exact and specific as possible. You may think you have the exact right name, and a person with that name might exist, but it might not be the right person.

Unlike Dr Horror’s House of Terrors, which took a wry attitude, this game is generally sincere somber. This breaks down under the weight of the 24 suspects. Without hints, I re-read every document over 10 times, searched and researched names (curse you Annie Serpico) until the ambient messages became entirely pedestrian. “Oh? Light is reflected off an iris before me? How droll”. Combing the rooms became a tedious chore (I recommend using SCORE, as it tells you when you’re done exploring). Yet despite this, I put more hours into the game than I have into any other parser game this year (except for the French magnum opus (Le comte et la communiste). I simply enjoyed it, and I don’t think fixing its perceived flaws would ‘fix’ it; a lot of times the best experiences are the best precisely because of flaws that contrast with the rest of the game, and removing those flaws can result in anodyne experiences (I experienced that with Kingdom Hearts 3, which smoothed out the combat system so much that much of its combat feels like ‘press O to watch movie’).

Overall, this is an oddball game with a strong commitment to worldbuilding and nice (which I mean literally, not sarcastically) translation of video game mechanics into parser. I think most people will find something to like here.

I was looking through games in my wishlist with no ratings and this popped up.

This twine game from 2021 has two available routes. In one, you play as a male spy, and in the other as a female spy, both in nearby interrogation rooms.

In both paths, you can look around the cell or pick the lock and try to escape.

The game uses a lot of well-chosen illustrations, some from pixabay and others that look hand-made.

The game feels slightly unfinished; I found some exposed code errors and entered debug mode on accident at one or two points. And sometimes I had conflicting text on the screen that felt like I was seeing two paths at once. So I feel like if the author wanted to ever expand on the game or polish it a bit more, it could be more solid, but I had fun.

This game is from the same 2008 One-room game competition as Escapade!, a game I enjoyed in the past.

The Moon Watch is an Inform game with plenty of background images and sound, having a lot better multimedia experience than most games from that time.

You play as a cosmonaut sent to a tiny, restrictive base on the moon. There is a red button you were told to never touch, but a call from leadership comes and you are told to press the red button. Then the game starts.

As others have noted, it can be pretty hard to get started in this game. I found some reading material, a phone, a drawer with interesting things in it, and I was able to open a door to the outside (looking back, I shouldn't have been surprised (Spoiler - click to show)I couldn't go through it, as this is a one-room game.) But I couldn't figure out to progress.

It turns out that a huge part of the game's programming and puzzles is based on (Spoiler - click to show)keyword-style text, where you type whatever you want and it searches your text for keywords. Even the very first puzzles are based on this.

There were just so many possibilities in the space of all commands that I had too much difficulty and had to run to a walkthrough. But the writing was interesting, although the ending took me by surprise.

This is another game I've had for many years on my wishlist. I've attempted it quite a few times but as it has many frequent death traps, randomized combat, no UNDO and no SAVE for the first chunk of the game, I never got very far in my attempts over the years.

This time, I finished it with the aid of David Welbourn's walkthrough.

Combat RPGs written in Inform are often unenjoyable in a way that CRPGs and TTRPGs are not. Kerkerkruip, Little Match Girl 3, and Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom are some examples of fun Inform RPGs, but most are pretty bleak. What gives?

For me at least, the fun of both TTRPGs and CRPGS is discovery, storytelling, and getting new gear or skills that makes previously-difficult challenges feasible. While TTRPGs ostensibly threaten player death, every time I've DMd or been in a group we work around that (a god revives you but requires a quest; the enemy leaves one of you alive and laughs at you, calling you weaklings who don't merit death, etc.). In CRPGs, you can restore and grind or walk around and at least try a new path or see new things.

With Inform, though, dying and retrying almost never produces new content or interesting story changes. You can just memorize the sequence of necessary moves and race through, not bothering to reread text for the 20th time. Endless, Nameless even makes fun of this in a way, letting you just RECORD a series of moves to REPLAY every time you reenter the world.

So we have a sequence of tedious moves. And authors frequently disable UNDO or SAVE to keep players from savescumming. Why? Because there's no reason not to savescum when you have boring gameplay.

The fun RPGs I mentioned above have one thing in common: they have a hierarchy of encounters where high ones kill you quickly but low ones leave powerups. So it becomes a strategy/puzzle game where you have to optimize your path through the encounters.

In the wider field of Choice-based IF, I've played plenty of great RPG games, of which I especially like VtM: Night Road and Werewolf: Book of Hungry Names (although I played with a profanity filter). These are more like the TTRPG approach mentioned above; you can theoretically die, but usually instead losing your health just gives you horrific in-game consequences like going on a rampage.

Anyway, this game doesn't do any of those fun things. It's a bog-standard Combat RPG with automatically-generated rounds of randomized dice roll, traps, and (a trope I quite earnestly dislike) a magic system that consumes your health. I don't think I've ever completed a game with that type of magic system on my own (like Chronicles of the Moorwakker). If there was a wondrous story that you could be rewarded with, that would be better, but it's just standard DnD with wry little twists (like a Were Spider instead of other were-creatures or a Wyvern instead of Dragons because this is called Woodpulp and Wyverns in-game).

Everything is polished and smooth; the line-by-line writing is good. It's just that these excellent authoring and programming skills were turned towards a goal which I don't much care for, and quite a few haven't cared for either.

For an RPG-adjacent game by Graham Nelson, I much prefer Balances.

This game has been on my wish list longer than any other game; I think it's been on there for years.

It comes from an interesting time in the IF community. While there are many different historical interactive fiction communities, the one I interact with the most can be traced back to IFComp, the two rec.*.if forums, and Infocom games. Between the end of Infocom and the beginning of Inform, there was a few-year 'interregnum' period with what I can only describe as pretty bad games that have not proven popular in later years.

Most of those were early TADS games (like the Unnkulia series) or AGT games (like this one). Among those are some standout gems, like Compuserve.

This game belongs firmly in the era it was published. It is an unabashed treasure hunt with a grab-bag setting and no literary aspirations. You are taking a test to get into a thieve's guild, so you wander a bunch of rooms that range from very boring (like the 'plain' room) to wacky like The Wizard of Oz, heaven and hell.

The key interesting feature is a portable hole that lets you travel through walls in every direction, making it helpful to map things out and guess where rooms might be. There are also a wide variety of strange devices.

Like most games of this era, this was designed to be tough, take a long time to replay, and require several playthroughs to time things right. I stopped and went to walkthroughs after I got stock in Oz (although later I found out I could have gotten out. But there's a plant that seems to eat you if you pass it too many times. But there's a way around that. So maybe you can beat it in one playthrough). Anyway, it's long and difficult. Club Floyd didn't finish it, and neither did one walkthrough writer.

It makes sense for its time; there were less games total, and one of this length and humor would have been difficult to find, so having something that would take forever to complete would be worthwhile. And collaborative play was more common then, with players posting hint requests on usenet. I could see this game making a great Let's Play nowawadays.

There's a lot of good in this game, so I thought of giving it a 4, but there's also a lot of silly arbitrary stuff and instant deaths, so I gave it a 3. I do think it's one of the best games in between Infocom and Inform that I personally have played.

This game has been on my wishlist longer than almost anything else, and I no longer remember why I put it on there, but it was fun.

It's a mini-IF, made for a speed competition, one of the earliest I know of (held in 1998, the same year as the first of the long-running Speed-IF competiitions).

Despite being short, what's here is surprisingly detailed. You're a young girl with a crush on Randy and the two of you happen to be playing a board game together. While you hold the key to victory at any time, the other girls suggest you let Randy win so that he'll be more open to your romantic overtures. "Boys like to win," they say.

There are at least two endings to the game, which was a condition of the original competition. I thought it was a pretty grimly humorous depiction of a lot of guys I know. I knew this one guy in college who dated my sister and he would get so genuinely upset when he lost at card or board games that we would all let him win just to avoid his temper tantrums.

Overall this was pretty great. It's small, but not rushed. It can be won very quickly, but has a lot of great detail.

I beta tested this game so I saved it for last.

This is a puzzle-filled comedic parser game about recovering your car keys from a bunch of monkeys in the jungle.

Notably, this is one of many games in this competition that involve translating a language. In this case, the language is: monkey language!

By searching around the compact starting area, you can find ways to understand that language better. Once you do, you can get involved with some shenanigans in order to get back your stuff.

I'd say this is one of the harder games in the competition. Even having tested it a couple of times I couldn't remember how to solve one especially complex puzzle. Examining everything and exploring everywhere are important, and it's good to save if you think you're near the end, as the endgame has a few 'bad' endings.

This game reminds me of a more HD version of Baby Tree, one of the games I most frequently show to people to tell them what interactive fiction is. It's also a minimalist game prominently featuring a bed and a child and some agonizing decisions.

In this game you play a single parent, on a bed, with your child interminably crying. All you can do is crawl around your bed, not enough energy to do more. It's a multiple-location bed, something I haven't seen much before. After finding some appropriate reading material (which is coincidentally something I've been discussing with my students a lot recently since it's assigned reading), you have some parent-to-baby discourse on your hopes and dreams and fears.

It was easy for me to vividly imagine this game because in some non-zero measure I was there. The day we took my son home from the hospital, I helped my exhausted and injured wife into bed in a dark bedroom, took a look at my son, and panicked.

For the first time, I realized that our life as we knew it was over. We couldn't just stroll out of the house to get Taco Bell or whatever. I couldn't just hop into the car to go see parents without planning. There was a helpless human being in our car and from now until the (it felt like) rest of our lives, one of us will have to be with that person at all times.

It was daunting, especially after the painful c-section. It didn't help that I both forgot the baby in the car when stopping at CVS that day (for five minutes, and panicked that I would get arrested) and that I let him roll off the bed and hit the ground after rushing outside to grab a credit card for my wife when an aggressive and convincing scammer called.

So this game really hit home. Our protagonist has to deal with all of that, but also alone. There are also concerns about whether they can relate to each other in terms of gender and orientation. I hope that all parents out there know that things can work out well, that there can be many good times mixed in with the bad (although for some people it really is hard all the time so take that with a grain of salt!)

This game reminds me of a more HD version of Baby Tree, one of the games I most frequently show to people to tell them what interactive fiction is. It's also a minimalist game prominently featuring a bed and a child and some agonizing decisions.

In this game you play a single parent, on a bed, with your child interminably crying. All you can do is crawl around your bed, not enough energy to do more. It's a multiple-location bed, something I haven't seen much before. After finding some appropriate reading material (which is coincidentally something I've been discussing with my students a lot recently since it's assigned reading), you have some parent-to-baby discourse on your hopes and dreams and fears.

It was easy for me to vividly imagine this game because in some non-zero measure I was there. The day we took my son home from the hospital, I helped my exhausted and injured wife into bed in a dark bedroom, took a look at my son, and panicked.

For the first time, I realized that our life as we knew it was over. We couldn't just stroll out of the house to get Taco Bell or whatever. I couldn't just hop into the car to go see parents without planning. There was a helpless human being in our car and from now until the (it felt like) rest of our lives, one of us will have to be with that person at all times.

It was daunting, especially after the painful c-section. It didn't help that I both forgot the baby in the car when stopping at CVS that day (for five minutes, and panicked that I would get arrested) and that I let him roll off the bed and hit the ground after rushing outside to grab a credit card for my wife when an aggressive and convincing scammer called.

So this game really hit home. Our protagonist has to deal with all of that, but also alone. There are also concerns about whether they can relate to each other in terms of gender and orientation. I hope that all parents out there know that things can work out well, that there can be many good times mixed in with the bad (although for some people it really is hard all the time so take that with a grain of salt!)

Presentation-wise, the game has a lot of rough-edges. Here is a sample:

Top of the bed
You have dragged yourself up, digging your nails into the bedcovers, to the top of the bed. Here you can reach what is on your bedside table.

You can see your phone and a glass of water here.

The baby looks tired. You are tired too.

>x table
You can't see any such thing.

>drink water
There's nothing suitable to drink here.

The baby takes a quick and wheezing breath, only to continue crying.

>take water
Taken.

The baby's high pitched crying turns even more high pitched.

>drink it
There's nothing suitable to drink here.

You feel your own vocal cords contracting and stinging, asif you are the one who has been crying all this time.

>x it
You take a sip of water from your glass.

Your baby's cries become even louder.

So the implementation could definitely use some work, but the message resonates.

I thought this was a touching game. I have listened with anxiety to news reports of famine and destruction of homes in Palestine over the summer, and fervently hope and pray for peace.

In this game, you are an olive tree that needs to be nourished in order to produce. You add more water and leaves to balance your growth, and then use it up to produce. Expending some energy to survive, and more to create the next 'generation'.

Simultaneously, outside of your control, a story plays out of a Palestinian farmer helping you grow and passing you on to his daughter. Like him, you experience hard times and lack of the resources you need to live. Each 'season' is actually a large amount of years.

Like the olive tree in the name, being a symbol of peace, I hope for peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.

I remember the Fascism: Off Topic intfiction thread from earlier this year and I had heard about this game cooking up for a long time so I somehow imagined that it would be a twine game with a fake model of intficiton where you participate in a thread but you have to argue with increasingly irrational people. I had such a strong imagination of what I thought this game was that I thought it was real.

Instead, I was shocked to open it and find a well-implemented (well, that part wasn't surprising) parser game set in a grungy subway with graffiti on the wall and an arguing couple. Where was the thread? What was the reference?

Playing around and examining things, seeing some well-written descriptions, I tried talking to people, and that's when I discovered the mechanic:

You can talk, but if you do, the game ends. You only have one thing to say, a one-note parrot's catchphrase. It might be relevant to the current conversation; it might not. It doesn't matter.

It reminds me of the Introcomp game Gallery Gal, where you have the superpower to turn into an art gallery, but only once, and permanently. You go through a normal game and choose to end it whenever you want to, crushing all those around you as you assume your true art gallery form.

Similarly, you can at any time interrupt the conversation of those around you with your irrelevant comment.

Because of my pre-conceived notions, it's taking me a bit to suss out the message. I had imagined (in my fake mental version) that the game was originally pro-discussion of fascism, and that we would be playing the role of someone who was pointing out the rise of nationalism in the world and that others would poo-poo our notions and shut us down. This game seems to be the opposite, where it paints out the discussion of fascism as an obnoxious interruption to others' conversation.

Whatever the true meaning of the game, it's well-put-together. My apologies to the author for fabricating a fake game from whole cloth and spending half of my review discussing it, and thanks for entering!