Reviews by MathBrush

I enjoyed this Choice of Games story. You play as the child of a former god. Her followers deposed her and stole her power, and she had to flee to a cave where she has raised you for the last few decades.

Now you have the chance to go back and restore her to power. But when you arrive at the big city, you discover the world is larger than you knew. There are many factions in play, and who gets power is up to you.

This game felt about 50/50 between 'cool magic stuff' and 'underhanded politics'. In the first category, you have things like collecting magic shards, blasting people with lightning, seeking immortality, learning the magic of the city itself, and dealing with your incredibly powerful mother.

The second category has things like siding with the cops, rebels and criminals, or current city leaders; running for election; dealing with the press; courting the favour of elected officials; and so on.

To me it felt like a weighty, rich game, and I'd play a chapter or two and let it sit in my mind for a few days. It's pretty long (at least if you take the time to think your choices through like I did).

I've only played once, so I don't know for sure how viable different paths are, but I had the impression that there was tons of variability. I played as a vengeful zealot who was completely committed to my tyrant mother and wanted her to come and destroy everyone. I always had options, which was nice. I also played as aro-ace which I regretted later on as there was a great romantic interest I wanted to pursue.

Definitely recommended for anyone who likes either of the themes (gaining powerful magic or navigating complex politics).

This game was once intended for Infocom (one of its authors wrote Suspended, among a few other Infocom games). When that didn't pan out, it was later repurposed for Cascade Mountain Publishing, a commercial imprint that was started by members of r*if and also published Once and Future.

The game's premise is that you are assisting a physics professor in finding a particle. Instead of finding it directly, you enter a visualization machine that represents everything as a surreal space, and if you find the particle in that space, it will let you find it in real life.

Structure-wise, it has a hub-and-spoke format, with a central 'lab' room connected to eight smaller passages. Your main goals are to find the particle and (in order to do that) to acquire five keys.

The game is solid overall in puzzles, with not too high of a difficulty and an extensive in-game hint system. Do note that there is one puzzle (a kite race) that requires copy-protection access.

Occasionally there are small bugs. I got locked out of victory by such once and had to reset. There are several non-bug ways to lock yourself out of victory, some of which are non-obvious.

The plot is a bit thin. The theme is generally about having fun, and while meditation is another theme the game doesn't dig into it very deeply.

I recommend reading the documentation ahead of time. I had fun with this game overall.

This game is a great example of a game that uses minimalist techniques to make a satisfyingly long game.

You start the game with a mission that's backwards of most kid's movies I watched in the 90s: you have to save ghosts in a mansion that's going to be demolished to turn into a rainforest!

There's no real attempt at storytelling in a traditional sense; it's more like Scott Adams' Adventureland in that regard. There are several locations in a kind of 3-d grid, each with a couple of interesting objects. Commands are done with 1-2 words each (although occasional 3-word commands are allowed). Art is blocky and pixelated with low resolution, but is interactive and creative in the use of color.

I explored the world and had a good time, but got really stuck at only one ghost solved. I was dismayed and used hints for a bit, only to find that I had just not know the verb to use for 3 of the ghosts: PUT. The game has a VERBS command, so I recommend using that. Once I realized that, I decided to set aside the hints and proceed normally, and I found the last 3 or 4 ghosts on my own.

The endings are pretty good. Overall, a great game if you just want a wide variety of fun puzzles.

I will say that a lot of times objects and puzzles in one location will have an effect on something in the distance, so it can be useful to explore after doing something that didn't seem important at the time.

In this game, you are tasked with finding treasure and investigating evil in an old abbey. As you explore, you find things like casks of pigs blood, evidence of violence, and a library that is a real maze. Eventually, I realized that this all seems familiar, because it's based on The Name of the Rose! When I found the 'finis africae' it was clear confirmation. There's a lot more added, and it doesn't follow the plot of the book, so it's not an adaptation, but it's pretty clearly inspired by it.

I played this the way I do many older adventures: I wandered around seeing how much I could achieve for a half hour or so, then used the walkthrough. For about half of the game I thought, "wow, this isn't that bad. Just mapping every room and taking everything you see should solve the majority of the puzzles". Then I got to a puzzle or two that I think I never would have solved on my own, but Rovarsson's review states that he solved it by dying and someone else said something similar, so that seems fair.

The overall atmosphere is spooky and fun, just like the source material it was based on, but intercut with silly jokes in a way reminiscent of other games in that post-Infocom and pre-Inform era (like Unnkulia).

Don't expect anything to be described. You could find (hypothetically) a miniature alien with a tattoo of the Queen of England in the middle of kissing a moldy tuna sandwich and the game would say:
'>X ALIEN

You see nothing interesting.'

Most actions will say it's not understood. So for most of the game you'll be fine. There are a few actions near the end that are more complex, though.

Overall, a fun adventure and neat to see a game from an era that's not as common as others.

I had to play using the online link.

I've been playing all past Spring Thing games. Many of them are long parser games, longer than would be entered into IFComp, and this one is no exception.

It's a Lovecraftian game where you run a bookstore and need to stop someone from collecting an evil music libretto that would end the world.

The map is really large. Much of the game consists in walking across town, like from your house to your friend's house and back. It gives the city a bit more of a real feel. There are a lot of NPCs, too.

In the game you can read a book to learn spells, and randomized combat features in a couple of segments.

The storyline adheres closely to Lovecraftian ideas, incorporating things like ancient evil gods, cults, and mysteries from Africa, adhering to Lovecraft's idea of foreigners being creepy.

The game is quite long, with the walkthrough split into 9 chapters.

If there's one big deficiency, it's in providing more synonyms and descriptions. With a game this big it makes sense that things would fall through the cracks, and they do. In the last area I found people with descriptions like 'you don't see anything interesting about _____' and various items were the same. Some verbs don't have synonyms, so for a bottle of liquid SQUEEZE BOTTLE ONTO _____ works but PUT BOTTLE ON ______ doesn't.

This is part of a long series of Adrift games which generally consist of big maps, lots of NPCs, magical abilities, knights, wizards, etc. with traditional adventure puzzles. There have been some exceptions in the series (like a timed game and a small casual game) but this game is in the main vein of the series.

In it, you are on a quest to a magical labyrinth. To get there, you must first explore a forest, a strange and unusual world with things like (big spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)cars and asphalt, and finally the labyrinth itself.

There are usually 4-6 puzzles available at each moment, with not a lot of red herrings, so it's not too hard to solve most puzzles by experimentation, especially as there are a lot of hints given. On the other hand, each area has a puzzle or two which would be pretty hard to figure out without help. Sometimes implementation is lacking, like a (Spoiler - click to show)puzzle piece where (Spoiler - click to show)PUT PIECE ON PUZZLE or PUT PIECE IN PUZZLE don't work but (Spoiler - click to show)FINISH PUZZLE does.

Since each area has a puzzle that's hard due to either being a tricky puzzle or rough implementation, this game can take a long time to finish. I used a walkthrough for most of it. If you do do so, I'd recommend stopping once you get some spells and enter the labyrinth, as there's a fun segment that isn't as hard as the earlier parts and which would have been more fun without the walkthrough.

This long puzzler is an entrant in the 2024 Puny Comp, written in PunyInform and using the comp theme of the years around 1980.

It's basically like 4 games wrapped in one, increasing its length. The idea (which is complex so I may have it wrong) is that you're part of a series of spies who've taken the name Gromov as a way to be anonymous, and you and several other organizations are trying to change the history of the world. There are either 2 or 3 histories at play: one drone-filled world you start in, the normal world we live in, and a future where the US has been largely obliterated by nuclear weapons.

Most of the game is in the latter world. You explore three regions, each with their own themes, like clocks, music, and machinery. Then there is a final endgame.

The puzzles are quite difficult, and I was often stuck and reached out for help multiple times. You have to use intuition and experimentation, and it's not always clear what you should do. So this is great if you like carefully detailing notes and chewing on things for a long time, and less fun for casual players who just want to experience the story.

There were a lot of testers and implementation and writing were mostly smooth. I found a few small typos I passed onto the author, who has taken care of them. Outside of that, it's significantly polished.

Like it warns at the beginning, this game follows traditional viewpoints on WWII and the cold war, with the British as heroes and Nazi Germany (and later Soviet Russia) as the bad guys.

I found the beginning of this game to be somewhat unusual for a Jim Aikin game, but it later turned more into what I expected. I associate this author with complex puzzles in elaborately detailed worlds that contain fantastical elements.

The beginning of this game is a mostly exploration-based segment set in the real world with 4 friends exploring an island in Greece. You can chat about luggage, visit the seashore, and explore a town.

Later on, that changes, in a way that becomes apparent early on.

I enjoyed messing around for a while on my own, then peeked at hints before going on. I found that there were several actions I had missed which were things I don't think I would have guessed at. Things like looking in, searching, looking under, and looking behind various objects. I had tried such things early on, but found nothing, so assumed it wasn't that kind of game, but alas, it is the kind of game where you have to try every action in every room.

Later on, I found that game had quite a few other actions which were hard to guess. That was compounded by the game not understanding some synonyms which would have been useful (Spoiler - click to show)like 'furrows' for 'furrow' or 'knock door' for 'knock on door'.

Story-wise, I thought the game had great atmosphere and that the opening had a lot of character as well. As time went on, the puzzles seemed to lead the story and the plot became pretty muddled.

Overall, though, this is a long, polished puzzle parser mythology game for those interested.

I've been playing through old Spring Thing games, and several of them have been really large, which makes sense; Spring Thing was originally established in part to have a release venue for games too large for IFComp. Nowadays large games often get released in IFComp and the main draw of Spring Thing seems to be its non-ranked awards system and less intense competition.

This game is big. You're investigating a mage's tower, and just 1 or 2 levels alone would be a normal-sized IFComp game. I thought it was a 5-level tower, and felt that was long, but it's actually 9 levels, and they get harder as you go. And there are 3 class choices that change how you can act!

The gameplay resembles are more cheerful (but only slightly) version of Bronze, in that you are in a castle with servants bound by enchanted objects (in this case, crystal), all of whom you can free by breaking the crystals. Many of the captives are mystical nine-tailed cats forced into new bodies and with mouths fused shut.

Many of the puzzles are fair and interesting. As time goes on, though, I found several that I found a little unfair and others that were just too hard for me. There is a lot of work put into this game but with its expansive scope it just wasn't all 'filled in'. Conversation is a notable weak point, with exotic and wild creatures who just respond "I don't know much about that" when asked about themselves and things in their vicinity. There just wasn't enough polish to put in, which makes sense, as in a game this large it would have taken months and a small army of beta testers.

I played until I had rescued about 7 or 8 of 18 servants and found around 12 treasures, then used a walkthrough. I did the Mage path, and had fun with the spells. There is a lot of good content in this game, so I do recommend people play it, but to just remember that the odds are stacked against you finishing without a walkthrough due to missing synonyms for reasonable actions.

This game took me a week to get through, often using hints and cheats and occasionally a walkthrough.

This is a big game, and one of his earliest outside of mini-games like Fingertips. It's a sequel to Shuffling Around, his most popular game on IFDB and another anagram game.

This game follows the pattern of many of Andrew Schultz's games. It takes a wordplay theme (in this case, anagrams) and crams each room and object description with as many examples of that theme as possible (in this game, the opening rooms started out with fairly normal descriptions and only the later ones used a ton of anagrams). As in these other games, you navigate through various rooms encountering objects whose names fit into the theme, which you must then solve with wordplay. Typing the solved wordplay word changes the object in accordance with what you've typed. Many themes revolve around groups of people who are arrogant who must have their ego taken down a peg.

I think anagrams work well with this kind of gameplay, so I enjoyed the puzzles in this game more than usual. I do 'cheat' quite a bit, using online anagram solvers when stuck and so on. I used those the least when the areas had a 'theme' like conjunctions or adverbs.

Due to the proliferation in later text of anagrams for the sake of anagrams, some of the text became confusing. Here is an example piece of dialogue I had difficult understanding:

> "Opinions! That BS idea abides, biased!" Gunter glosses over Blue Frog Urbfogel, Bugler of Foulberg, and how he beat up monsters that came back anyway til he could beat her up? Talked to people who knew where hidden items like the horn-o-honor and gavel of Fogvale were. It was rigged! Now, with her dynamite, tidy name, oh, the soaring signora! Her vast harvest, her mystic chemistry-, her tact-chatter. Her lean elan's made Yorpwald go real galore--be aliver--a praised paradise--with her ReaLiv initiative for the Sunnier Unrisen Inner Us! From arsey years to so sane season! Had us voting her overnight the roving virgo then! Became a rowdy pal! Yorpwald was old, warpy, but now it's more wordy, pal! A Yapworld and Payworld! Oh, her good deeds!"

Because of that, I didn't try forming a mental model of the plot and instead just looked for obvious things to try making anagrams of, relying on the scanner first, then hints, then walkthrough if I got stuck.

Overall, I had a lot of fun. I did encounter a lot of bugs though. Both version 2 and 3 begin with a note from the author to himself to absolutely make sure to comment out beta testing commands and then lists them. At the very end of the game everything ends fast and it gives a yes/no questions, but answering YES ends up saying that there was a bug in the game or something didn't go right. There's a toaster that gives some buggy responses about xrays, as noted in the walkthrough (and which I experienced).

So, overall this game was great for me because I like trying to figure out anagrams, but I wouldn't recommend it in general except for other fans of anagrams, mostly due to the currently-existing bugs. I played it in my quest to play all Spring Thing games.