Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

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!

Well, it was fun to load up this game and see the font adjust itself slightly. "Bisquixe does that too," I thought. And it turns out this game uses Bisquixe! And a lot of the features, too, like hyperlinks and CSS adjustments. So it was fun to see someone use my extension, it made my day.

The coding of the hyperlinks lets you examine different objects and try out various interactions with them (some of it reminds me of some sample code Drew Cook posted a while back with a list of sense you could use; that example crashed in one interpreter but that interpreter bug has been fixed since then). There are also some more tricky hyperlinks where the linked text is very different from the action that you end up doing.

So overall I'm very happy with the technical side of this game. On the other hand, the story is pretty thin; most of the game is either a sudden bird poop-induced ending or walking past several almost-identical rooms. There are some kind family moments near the end but there's not a big build up. So I'd see (from my obviously biased perspective) this game as a successful tech demo that could be the foundation of an even stronger future story, but it would likely take a while to develop such a story.

This is the third and last Sophia Zhao game I'm playing this competition. The other two were fantastic, and this is now an author I'll keep an eye out for in the future.

This is the shortest game, and while it has a great gut-punch ending, it's the weakest of the group to me (but it has some very strong competition, so that's not saying much).

You play as someone grabbing some groceries in a store. Money's tight; I thought this was a reference to recent tariffs in the US at first, what with poor quality onions for $2.

Things descend a bit from there, and there's a lot of strong profanity (which matches the strong, bitter taste of the onion, I suppose). It's when we got to dairy that I started getting what was going on (despite strong hints earlier).

The ending was a really creative take on the event it described, I'd never seen anyone describe something like it before, so I thought that part was really neat.

The reason I think the other games are stronger is that this game was fairly one-note, while the other two Sophia Zhao games were a great study in using contrasting tones and evoking a variety of emotions.

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)

This is a brief stat-based Twine game where you explore an island that has a civilization on it.

You are a renowned explorer joining an exploration team to check out an island. You can choose things like your weapon, whether to conserve or spend resources, how to deal with strangers, etc.

It has some interesting elements, but many of the mechanics don't make sense and the story relies heavily on pre-existing tropes.

For instance, mechanically, we have the choice to build up our food supplies or rush on ahead. But the game is over in around 20 choices or less, and there's no time to use supplies or not. Many choices are just straight up 'right' (stat boost) or 'wrong' (stat decrease) with no indication of which one is right.

Story-wise, the island has us hunting for food, crossing a decaying bridge, encountering a tribe, etc. There are a couple of twists but overall it could be stronger. There are a lot of plotholes (like the (Spoiler - click to show)chieftain saying they've been aware of us for quite some time but we just barely arrived on the island).

I think that with more time the author could develop these ideas into a more compelling narrative, if that is something that they're interested in. The most impressive part was the smooth UI presentation with nice stat indicators.

The first thing that struck me is that the 2 is so bold and red. Then I noticed how jagged it is. Was it, I thought, just drawn in MS Paint?

I looked more closely. No, that doesn't look like MS Paint. Instead, it looks more like a texture brush, like the ones procreate has that are fun to play around with but not really useful (I only use four brushes ever: flat brush, gel pen, round brush, and whatever pencil one I see first).

But no, I thought, something's off. The 2 is really well-done. It wasn't just sketched in a second (or maybe it was, in a moment of serendipity). Could it be--I thought--that this was actually a special font, like a 'display' google font, that was made large, bold, and rotated slightly? But it's not a perfect 2 so the questions still remains: font, or sketch?

I zoomed in closer. The resolution on the 2 isn't as high as the resolution on the other text. It was added later, after all. It could be scaled up from something. But if the author drew on it at full resolution, wouldn't it have more details? A scaled up font makes more sense. But I tried tracing the movement of the 2 with my mouse, and it felt natural. This could be just a sketch drawn with a single gesture.

I tried a font-matching website (does it use AI? Probably a GAN but not an LLM). Nothing came up, but could be rotation.

We may never know.

Also the game just says 'you win' that's it sorry for spoilers.