Reviews by MathBrush
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Solve a splitting headache, March 25, 2024This brief Inform game has you waking up with temporary amnesia in a medical research facility with a door that has recently been welded shut.
It's a small game with about six rooms. There are two major tasks to take care of: getting some quiet and making things dark.
It is possible to lock yourself out of victory unwittingly, I believe. And one major puzzle requires some intuition that is not in the room description and which doesn't make sense based on earlier responses. In particular, (Spoiler - click to show)you have to turn off a radio, and TURN OFF RADIO says you can't turn it off and BREAK RADIO says you can't do anything to it, and it's too big to TAKE or PUSH. The solution is apparently to UNPLUG radio, despite the lack of a plug being mentioned.
Overall, it works as a small game to make to get used to Inform, but I prefer Sidewise by the same author.
Play a low-key roleplaying game while hanging out in a youth hostel, March 21, 2024This is a fun game with a little bit of recursiveness in it.
You are a youth and are trying to get into a youth hostel. Unfortunately, the person in charge is on break, so you're stuck hanging out with a bulletin board, three wild young men, and an intriguing girl reading a book.
The main part of the game is discussion with the girl, who wants to play a role-playing game with you where you challenge concepts about the real world, creating a fantasy world that is different.
The contrast between the wild fantasies of the game and the grungy, mundane but exciting (for a travelling youth) details of the youth hostel was fun. I imagined an antiseptic-smelling cold room with tile floors and a green color scheme.
The character you play as seems a bit hesitant, someone not used to the world (at one point they speculate on the ethnicities of someone's parents, and you can choose whether you find it odd or not that they might have parents of different races). Overall, I felt like I was exploring an urban world that was new to me.
This has good writing overall, more like what I'd expect from a published short story author.
I had some trouble figuring out how to progress, and at one point was worried I'd have to lawnmower everything, but thankfully I didn't, and I managed to have some fun. I still don't know exactly what triggers the ending, but it came at a good time.
Fight zombies in a game set in the real-life Vigamus video games museum, March 19, 2024In Rome there's a video game museum called Vigamus that's been around for a while. This game, which is an illustrated and translated version of the English game I originally played in the 2016 IFComp, is set in that museum and includes photographs of the actual museum.
The gameplay is intentionally simplistic. You start off in a room of the museum where zombies have poured out of an arcade machine. The game offers you items one at a time, each one solving a problem at hand. There is some non-linearity in that you find things before you need them and you have some choices in what order to use them. You use many items from video games, like the hammer from Donkey Kong, to win the day.
I had a little trouble figuring out what to do at times in French, so I had to play the English version to figure out how to get through some parts before coming back to French.
The game has a few small errors here and there (like not capitalizing 'salle' in one of the room names). Some of the parts that felt objectionable in the English version felt a little less so in the French, as the language barrier gave me some distance from the material. There is a lot of silly things here, but it makes sense as a game intended for visitors to Vigamus to play.
A sci fi (?) metaphor game for relationships, March 19, 2024This was difficult to understand as a non-native speaker. It's a story about a fictional spacefaring society that is written in a way that's meant to be obtuse and indeterminate at first before resolving later on.
Everyone has an 'ors' or 'orsimonous' that is visible that lets you understand certain things about the other person; what that is is up to interpretation, but can include parts of their past, their current feelings, etc.
Your father's ors has disappeared.
It happened after a big natural disaster.
The intent of this piece is to discuss how that happened.
At least, that's what I think. The writing is very indirect, saying the same thing multiple times but never outright. It's possible there are many allusions I missed here (is the 'shock' a metaphor for something like Covid? Is the 'orsimonous' a term used in other works of French fiction). But I liked the way the choices were presented and the work made me feel contemplative.
A symbolic adventuron game, March 17, 2024In this Adventuron game (which reminded me in some ways of Andrew Plotkin's Shade, but is sufficiently different), you play as a figure in a medieval castle who is tasked with staving off a great army. Unfortunately, you fail, but you 'respawn' the next day.
You must explore a castle in a vast wasteland of sand, watching as mysterious figures appear and disappear.
I got stuck a few times, but exploring everything helped (a tip I saw on the itch page by manonamora). One thing that really threw me off early on was that the room description is at the top but events occur on the bottom, and often an event occurs before moving to a new room, but you are intended to read the bottom first and then the top, which I found confusing.
Overall, I liked the story and the multimedia was honestly neat! I like surreal horror-ish games so this was fun.
A longish Moiki game about guarding a door that no one returns from, March 17, 2024This is one of the bigger complete games in the French Comp this year (2024).
You play in a fantasy world with two main races, one of which is white and in power and the other dark skinned and with less power. You are part of the latter group, and you have been called to be the guardian of a mysterious Door.
No one who goes through the door ever returns. As the guardian, you are given seven rules, including that you should try to dissuade anyone from entering, but can't physically prevent them.
The game has two main modes of interaction. One is recurring visits where you talk to a person and make decisions, some substantial. The other is exploration, which seems to stay roughly the same. There is a part where you need to solve a code; I made a guess based on my weak french and got it right on my first try (Spoiler - click to show)I thought 'ice, flower, sun, leaf' and put in 'hfsf'. I either got it right or it accepts anything.
I did get engaged over time seeing the evolution of the kingdom and the strange people entering the door. In the end, I chose to go through.
It said I only found 2 of 15 objects, and I only saw 300 or so of the 900 passages, so I assume it is very replayable.
An incomplete game based on Machiavelli's The Prince, March 16, 2024This game has you play as a prince-in-training at a prince factory where everyone must read and study Machiavelli.
It's not finished yet, but it has a money system (where you earn money by correctly identifying quotes from The Prince). You can spend that to hear tales from past princes or to buy witty retorts.
The combat system needs some fleshing out; it's very difficult not to instantly die and thus be locked out of combat forever. There is a non-combat ending which I didn't find but received copious in-game hints for (Spoiler - click to show)something about the flower you can buy giving voice to something and also 'ailleurs' being the magic word?
Some really cool ideas here, just needs some fleshing out. But honestly very innovative.
An unfinished gardening game with a twist, March 15, 2024This Moiki game puts you in the role of a young gardener (who I imagined as a woman, although I don't know if it's stated), living in a cottage in a clearing in the winds.
You have an old, mossy well and a loyal dog companion, as well as a neatly organized life, with a shed, a book on herbs, tools, etc.
I thought it might be a kind of strategy sim, but I found that I had time and energy to just about everything.
Later on, the game changes dramatically. I was intrigued with it.
There's still a lot left. I wonder if having some more significant choices in the first day might be fun (but if not, it's totally fine leaving it as just a story lead-in if more exciting stuff happens later). In any case, I found this well-written and easy to follow even for a non-native speaker.
A city-building and storytelling game with a deep mystery, March 14, 2024This is a long and complex Twine game with some interesting mechanics.
You come upon an abandoned place with a single resident. Together, you rebuild a mighty city, primarily by telling stories to attract new residents. This lets you build new buildings.
At night, you visit another city, one that is grand. But there is trouble...
The storytelling mechanics have you pick a genre, a format, and some sliders of emotions. You then get what seems like a randomized mini-review from one listener and then an overall critique based on your choices, as well as 15 money.
It was hard to find new genres at first, and money seems to never have any use, despite me building a bank and a marketplace (it said I needed to make an account, but never had a chance). So those parts seemed underdeveloped to me.
Overall, this is a rich story. It uses written French dialect, dropping several vowels, and has some circumlocutory tendencies. So I'm sure I missed a great deal of nuance. As far as I can tell:
(Spoiler - click to show)There was a large town dedicated to immortality through knowledge. They had a library that was a temple to a God, and one day that God and its sibling decided to destroy the city while its leader was out on a trip. They sent a dragon whose flame condemned the city to the dream world. Some of that flame lived on in the house of Luv, who tended it in their fireplace. Due to the flame's continued existence, the dream city was still falling apart, in due measure as the city grows. Luv represents something--maybe a reincarnation of the dream-city's leader, or maybe the dragon, or maybe a god, or something. Eventually you get the choice to extinguish the flame and return the city of old, or keep it).
It's one of the better games of the year I have played so far.
A reincarnation story that is hard to follow, March 13, 2024This French game has some problems. There is only one available choice on each page; some pages have other links but they are red/unclickable.
The text flows from thought to thought and it isn't always coherent. There are 'episodes' but it jumps from 1 to 6 and then back to 2. The point of view and names change frequently. After a few smaller passages there is one very large passage with no options.
The overall theme seems to be a person who has been or will be reincarnated many times over and over again, and who struggles with or against Gods.
Overall, it's possible this is an abstract, intentional art piece. If the author has some additional intent that I am missing, or a reader sees some hidden beauty in this gem, I'd be happy to rate it higher, but for now I'm giving it 1 star.
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