Reviews by MathBrush

I was provided a review copy of this game.

This is one of the longest Hosted games, around a million words. It's packed full of characters, scenes, and equipment, with a lot of romances and little vignettes and a lot of visits to bootleg McDonalds.

You are a criminal in this game. You're inducted into a vigilante gang called the Archangels where everyone is assigned a codename themed around angels; you are a Raphael (one of several).

Gameplay is in a cycle where you plan a criminal event, then buy supplies, train, or hang out with friends and ROs, then enact the criminal event. Planning includes choosing people for a team, time of day of attacks, how risky to be, etc. Supplies include a long list of specific guns and ammunition, body armor, vehicles, first aid kits, etc. Training includes numerous skills like tactics, intelligence, accuracy, persuasion, and others. You get a huge number of opportunities to train skills. Hanging out gives you different vignettes with people; picking the same person repeatedly gets you a well-developed story.

The tone varies a lot. On one hand, your group is brutal. They will regularly shoot enemies in the face, including cops, security guards, rival gang members, and even restrained individuals. You can participate in multiple torture scenes.

On the other hand, the story often zooms into comical or farcical nature. Everyone bakes or makes tacos or goes to 'Mike Donalds' to have a 'Big Mike' (you can order from a huge menu; this happens a lot). You can choose not to kill a lot of people (your friends will still kill). People get shot over and over and get healed by a first aid kit. The most ludicrous was (Spoiler - click to show)someone being shot repeatedly point blank, then pinned down, their armor stripped off, then shot in the chest point blank over and over until there was a bloody hole, and they survived. This story has a planned sequel, so there may be an explanation (it is called out as unusual in the game). The zigzag tone was probably the one thing that I didn't like as much in the game, though it did make the violence more palatable.

Overall, the long length makes for a compelling story. Some complained that the 'main 3' characters of the gang (your supervisors) kind of steal the show from you in the latter half; while that's true, you still retain a great deal of individual freedom. It's clear why the game is so big and why the sequel has taken so long to make. I think there's a lot of replay value in the side stories here.

I was given a review copy of this game.

I am working on reviewing every Hosted Game, trying to see what makes them popular and not. I started with some of the highest rated (like Fallen Hero) and am now working on the lowest-rated.

Falrika the alchemist has a 2.5 star rating and only 5 total ratings since it came out. What's it like?

This game is 173,000 words, big to me (I generally write < 100K words) but small by Choicescript standards. However, most of those high wordcounts come from branching. Falrika has almost 0 branching. Most chapters are purely linear, with perhaps a choice or two that usually has consequences only a paragraph long.

That means that you read almost all the text in every playthrough, making this game longer to play than even some 1,000,000 word games I've played!

In it, you play as an alchemist who has opened an Atelier. You are sent quests to make items that have a list of ingredients that you can pay for or hunt. Along the way, you get vignettes of other characters having arguments or quests. Then, those characters appear, and join your party.

I was deeply confused by a lot of the worldbuilding, as there were so many implicit assumptions and unexplained phenomena. For instance, there is a level system that is publicly discussed, people are assigned to RPG classes, and Teleportation Feathers that transport you from place to place, and the items in the recipes are hyperspecific (like a 'Mug mark 539' or something) but result in items completely unrelated to what went in. Everything made so much more sense when someone pointed out that it is a fangame of the Atelier series, which has all of these aspects.

The game feels very long. I remember thinking I surely must have gone through 1/4 of the game and then I saw 'Chapter 2'. There are 20 Chapters! It is episodic in nature, so there is essentially no continuity between chapters besides characters joining your party. I did like the Law and Order fanfic chapter. The episodic nature of the game reminds me of a guy I taught creative writing to. Everyone else would try little stories each week or beginnings of sketches of characters, but this guy had an obsession with both cars and Tiny Toons. He would write out episodes of basically 'top gear but with Tiny Toon OCs' where they would travel to a town, pick out an old car, trick it out, race it, and move on. Each one was 10-30 pages of script, and he had over 200 scripts. No overall plot ever happened, and we'd read and critique it during sessions, but none of the critique really changed anything, he just really loved what he did. We begged him to further the romance between two characters, and he did make a slight change showing they liked each other.

This game reminded me of that, just 20 chapters of episodic Atelier game fanfiction by someone who clearly loves the game.

The most biting criticism I ever heard about an author was when someone said, 'He clearly has encountered humor, but doesn't know how it works'. This game feels like the author has encountered and enjoyed video game mechanics, but doesn't know what makes it fun. It constantly tracks the amount of money things cost, but you don't make choices on how to spend money and it's not tracked in stats. It uses hyperspecific quest items you have to get for alchemy, but you have no choice (except in super-rare instances) on what order to get them in or whether you choose to buy them or get them yourself. It offers choices occasionally, as if aware that a game should have them, but makes them completely blind, random choices, like 'Go left or Go right'. It has relationship bars to track stats, but they start at 1% and only go up to 7% or 9% by the end of the game, and they don't seem to have any impact on your choices (you can pick one of out of 4 people to romance, but that seems to come down to a single choice at the end).

All characters have similar voices. Everyone is sassy and makes quips, with most of the humor coming from being random. The author often stops the game to make long statements about social conditions, including social media bullying and several-page-long essays about how parents shouldn't be strict towards their kids. Monsters will do this, with giant slavering dragons bursting out of the ground to stop and say things like, 'Oh, you think you are so good! Self-righteous people make me sick. You probably negatively affect others with your down attitudes!' (not actual text, just the feel of it). On the other hand, it's implied that the setting is low-tech, with the first fast-food restaurant in history being opened (themed on the one in Pompeii).

There doesn't seem to be much logical connection between what characters can do and the way the world works. Sometimes they use teleportation feathers for instant travel, and sometimes they trek over a long time. They invent an instant slimming potion but add 'only use it in addition to diet and exercise!' and have to get it FDA approved and a stamp on it that says 'Not approved for medical use'. What makes it magic? You could just drink water and include diet and exercise and it would make you lose weight. I just feel that the implications of a magical society aren't integrated at all.

The positives of the game are that the length lets you get very familiar with the characters by the end. A couple of the later episodes were interesting, with the gang shootout being the best, I think.

The author states that this was an attempt to put a VN in novel form, and that that explains the long sections of non-interactivity and the short, choppy writing style. I've played several visual novels that I've enjoyed that have quite a bit of real interactivity (besides famous ones, I like the French indie VN La Faille), so I feel like saying it's VN style doesn't necessarily lead to no choices. And the short and choppy text is usually used to to a VN's small text window. Here, with a whole text screen open, I feel like it would lend itself better to larger paragraphs with full line breaks.

Overall, I think that either a more coherent plotline with rising stakes or including the hinted-at mechanics like money and letting you buy things would have significantly improved this game's reception. Several people have stated on reddit that it's not that bad, so people like a lot of aspects of it. It could just be tweaked.

This is the second game in the Fallen Hero series. I'll give a brief, spoiler-free description first, and then dive more into spoilers.

This game has significant branching, so my playthrough may have been very different from yours.

The first game in the series set you up as the former hero Sidestep, a telepath who used to use that ability to detect incoming attacks and 'sidestep' them, but is now (for unknown reasons that are revealed over both games) a villain who uses telepathy to control and manipulate others, including the body of a coma patient that you use as a decoy. Your old hero friends don't know the truth about you, leading to some crucial and stressful decisions when interacting with them.

The first game leads up to your villain debut, while the second one deals with the expansion of your power and the progress towards your ultimate goals. While the first has limited romantic options, the second has numerous options, including villains and heroes, old friends and old enemies, etc.

Okay, into the spoiler territory/my opinion territory.

While I recognized the high quality of the first game, it didn't resonate strongly with me. I generally like upbeat media or 'light conquers darkness despite suffering' media (which is most media). I was never interested in grimdark or villain-focused stories like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. Fortunately, Rebirth (the first game) had enough personalization options that I could be someone that fits my model more (not a full hero, but not a killer of innocents, for instance).

This game, retribution, resonated with me much more, because what we find here is someone that deeply hates themself, that considers themself a fraud, an impostor, and is terrified of friends and others finding out. In some paths, Retribution can barely stand to look at themselves in the mirror.

I have major depression, which I have some support systems in place for, and I also tend to be my harshest critic, so this resonated really well with me. 'Oh, I'm pulling away from Ortega because if she knew what I was really like on the inside she would hate me and it would hurt her and I could never make her happy? Just like real life!' So instead of keeping the game character at a distance and treating it like watching a show, I instead immersed myself in the character and thought of it as therapy (which is easy, considering you go to therapy).

The puppet character is also a brilliant choice for an IF game. I may have said this in my review for the last game, but it makes it a lot easier to identify with the MC for any player, because we, the player, are playing a game as someone else and messing around with romantic options and ethical decisions with few consequences since our character isn't us. Similarly, our character has their own character/avatar that lets them explore relationships and actions safely.

I stuck with Dr. Mortum the whole time despite a fling with Lady Argent. I saw on a poll that Mortum is the least popular romantic option, but I had a great time. Romancing as the puppet and then getting closer together felt like making a throwaway reddit account that eventually becomes your main but you're stuck with a stupid username.

This game felt less strongly plot-driven and more open-worldish with significant threats (usually related to people learning about you). It's not actually open world, it just feels like there's a lot of time wandering around, talking to people, exploring, digging into things, etc.

The main plot points were great, it's like the author sets up "here's how we will manage your existence. Everything is precarious but we can barely make it through and live unless X happens." And then X happens. For me the biggest X moment was (remember I said this review had spoilers?) Ortega seeing me commit crimes. That was more terrifying to me as a player than my character getting in an accident. I know I have plot armor, but Ortega knowing about me could destroy the entire life I tried to build.

Like the last game, there is very little emphasis on failure through having too low of stats (though failure can definitely happen in a variety of other ways). That's got to be something I can incorporate into my next Choicescript game, though I'm not sure how; even seeing a great game like this up close and analyzing it, it's hard to figure out what to emulate from it, what makes it 'tick' or work so well.

One thing is for sure, it doesn't feel like there is 'one true path'. The long development time and high word count is due, I think, to the author taking different paths or character personalities and imagining what a full playthrough would look like with them at the center, so it feels like that's the 'real game'. This is in contrast to my own work and many other choicescript games, where you can, for instance, romance a side character, proclaim love for each other, and then they show up in normal game scenes acting the same as they do when you don't romance them. Retribution avoids that.

I look forward to the future games, but based on what I've seen here, it takes a lot of work to craft the different paths and it could easily be a decade or more before the series finishes. But that's fine; once it's done it's done forever.

I was provided a review copy of this game.

This is one of the most popular Hosted Games of all time, and, by extension, one of the most popular Choicescript games of all time. On the Choice of Games subreddit, it's a running joke that people will sincerely recommend Fallen Hero for literally every possible recommendation request that gets posted. Want to play a game with an older love interest? Fallen Hero. Experiencing meaningful gender transition during a game? Fallen Hero. Play as a villain? Fallen Hero.

So it's difficult approaching the game objectively, after hearing it built up so much (and also not having, at the time of this review, played the second game). But I can certainly say that if I had found it with no prior warning, I'd regard it as one of the best Choicescript games out there.

In this game, you play as a villain who was once the telepathic hero Sidestep. Due to a traumatic event in your past, played out in small flashbacks throughout the game, you have decided to go full villain and commit terrorist attacks in service of your true goal. Things get rough when the heroes that haunt your memories start crossing your path in real life.

Complicating things, you have a second body, a comatose individual that you pilot telepathically. You are boring; your other body is exciting. You try to hide; your other body tries to stand out. You can meet people in this other body. You can romance people in the other body.

This is another facet of the game, which is that it allows truly villainous acts. But, since the game hides your true purpose, it allows you to imagine any justification for those acts. I was on board with almost everything my hero was doing until I was given the option to just straight-up murder innocent bystanders; I can't imagine any background that would justify that. The issue of deceiving others into romantic relationships with a fake body is also addressed. We can also manipulate people telepathically, and commit a whole assortment of crimes that are more common in fiction (theft, assault, embezzlement, violating OSHA, etc.)

I started playing the Hosted Games to see the contrast between them and the commissioned Choice of Games line. One thing that really stood out (and this was true for Wayhaven as well) is the lack of the classic CoG lineup of 4+ powers that are used in different encounters. Choice of Games style is to have a variety of attributes, including skills that go up and opposed personality attributes that go back and forth. A lot of CoG games (including both I worked on) tend to use these powers heavily, with a large number of encounters relying on you choosing your best 2-3 powers and using them each time. The best CoG games mix this up a lot more, adding unique flavors to each element (I loved how Choice of Magics gave a curse to each power), but I've struggled as an author on how to mix it up.

In this game, we only have 2 real 'power bars', and a small number of opposed stats. The vast majority of choices are just 'mixing it up', which in this case looks like strategizing and then carrying out a plan. Often there are just binary choices or 3 choices. The most common choices are to be risky or to be safe, or to affect a romantic interest (getting closer or pulling away). There are also moral choices like trolley problems (do you possess an innocent bystander to keep yourself safe?) and style choices (like the design of your villain outfit).

Perhaps the biggest positive aspect of the game as compared to the lowest-rated Choice of Games games is that there is almost no messaging of 'you, the player, messed up and failed'. Things definitely go wrong in this game, but it's usually due to outside circumstances. Other people's failures. You can make wrong choices; on one playthrough, I stole an item without a hitch and got an achievement; in another, I got critically and barely managed to scrape by and got an achievement. The achievements are part of that good design; you may have made risky or bad choices, but the game frames it as a cool thing that you did. And that's throughout the game. Compare this to my own game In the Service of Mrs Claus, where most choices, if you pick an option you're not good at, have failure text that makes it clear that you, the player, are at fault here. That failure text doesn't reward gameplay. Fallen Hero: Rebirth, on the other hand, doesn't divide the game into pass/fail; it divides into one version of a good story vs another version of a good story.

To be clear, I'm not saying that it's better than all official Choice of Games titles. It definitely ranks highly with them; but there are several high quality official games that share in some of the same qualities as this one. Here are some recommendations:

-For people who liked the edginess, ability to be a jerk, and darker/mature tone, Werewolf: The Apocalypse -- Book of Hungry Names would be a good choice. It has a very dark tone, with the ability to do things of dubious moral quality, and with heavy violence and a lot of relationships. While completely unrelated, the other Werewolves triology has similar good attributes.
-This game has a really strong central storyline that elevates the overall game quality, and which has the nature of a gritty hero's quest. Choice of Rebels, Vtm: Night Road, and Champion of the Gods have some similarly excellent storylines.
-This game lets you be a strong villainous character. The games Grand Academy For Future Villains (much less dark and more humorous) and Choice of Robots (allows you to be pretty ruthless) have good villain paths.
-For games that handle failure with grace and fun, I really enjoy both Creatures Such as We (which actually doesn't track stats at all) and Mask of the Plague Doctor (I loved the ending I got which would have been just a death/failure in other games but gave me a lengthy epilogue instead).

There are several other great games I didn't mention, but that's because they're good in different ways than Fallen Hero (for instance, Creme de la Creme has a huge selection of romantic interests, while Fallen Hero only has 2. They're great ones, but the focus is different).

Does the game live up to its reputation? Certainly. The story was gripping, the mechanics were seamless, and I look forward to the second book, which I've heard is even better.

In this game, you are an exorcist, shunned by normal people. After a compelling intro, you enter a small town with a grid-like map and spend 49 days exploring the map, hearing about ghost cases and solving problems.

This is one of the last two games not to get ratings. Once I started it, it became crystal clear why that was so. Further play only strengthened my initial impression.

This is a fantastic game that seems deadset on making it very hard for the player to experience it. It has achingly slow text; double clicking can speed it up, but even when sped up, it was still deeply slow (I’d click 5-10 times per paragraph). In a short game, that can be a moderate annoyance, but this is one of the longest games in the competition.

You have 49 days to investigate different cases. Each day you have a possibility of receiving messages on your answering machine, telling you where to go on a map. You have the option to investigate a square, do divination at a square, go to the library, ward yourself, or rest.

Cases have timers; people can just die if you’re too slow. But cases also overlap, so you’ll get urgent messages each day. But, and I can’t stress this enough, picking the wrong option wastes an entire day with no way to undo or save. Compounding this is the fact that every few nights ghosts get closer and closer to your bed and will kill you if you don’t Ward yourself. So if you pick the wrong option on a case, you waste a day, someone may die in a case you didn’t pursue, you yourself have to ward again so that you don’t die, and a huge chunk of the game has passed.

Dying puts you back to a checkpoint. There was a strange coin button on my screen that I thought picked where my checkpoints were if I clicked on it, but I later realized it was a stray sprite left over from the divination.

All told, this makes this an very player-unfriendly game. I suspect that the time never played through the full game without using cheats of some kind; this kind of thing can usually be picked up on by people playing their own games repeatedly (if it’s not fun for you without cheats, it won’t be fun for players). And I’ve seen these kinds of design patterns before; there’s a fear that players will just skim your text and lawnmower your game, so one approach is to slow down text, remove saves, add harsh consequences, obscure choices (for instance, if you pick a wrong conversation path in the game, you can die or lose a case with no undo), etc. All of this makes it impossible to speed-read or lawnmower. But there are other ways to get engagement; the game already has multiple interesting goals and engaging puzzles. Just taking away the slow text and the night time deaths would make the game way more fun.

Behind all of these barriers mentioned above, the game itself is fantastic. Great hand-made art, really good writing with distinct characters and unique plotlines, and fun coin and map-based mechanics.

Getting to the end was excruciating. I’m not sure how many people will be willing to finish this game as-is. But if there were ever a new version that at least removed the slow text timer and added at least one more player friendly feature (like saves or a limited undo feature, or a guide or walkthrough, or taking away the random deaths), then I would be able to heartily recommend the excellent parts of this game.

This is a Larry Horsfield game, and his games follow a pretty specific pattern. There are 32 games listed on IFDB and 20 listed in-game as part of the series this game is in (and side-series). Larry is a prolific author of large games; if an author’s work was measured by the total sum of all moves necessary to win all games, he might be near the top (this game, while large by usual standards, is comparatively small, requiring only a few hundred moves rather than the thousands of some of his other games).

Like the others, this is an ADRIFT game, and it shares with them the classic opening castle setup that I now have memorized (a suite of rooms where extremely important items must be found by looking under beds or, a favorite place, on the mantelpiece of a fireplace), a building layout of east-west hallways connected by vertical stairs, the dungeon in the middle of the bottom floor, a long row of dungeon cells (which I was amused to see were being refurbished into guest rooms). Then a portal to a faraway land where we wander through a forest, town and castle.

I followed my normal protocol of playing as far as I can (in this case, I got to the dungeon with the ringbolts and got stuck) and then using the walkthrough for the rest. The game (as it says in the opening screen) requires you to frequently look on doors or at parts of the room not in the initial description (like walls or roof beams). That’s not unreasonable, but there are dozens or hundreds of rooms each with a lot of furniture. I went through tons of rooms looking at each door and closing each door and looking under every bed and every table. I later discovered my error was that I should have, in one specific room, (Spoiler - click to show)looked behind a door.

Deviating from the walkthrough can cause problems. I got a pop-up ADRIFT error when I tried to DROP ALL because I had been carrying a non-droppable item since the beginning of the game (the (Spoiler - click to show)fossy whereas the walkthrough had instructed me to put it in my pocket. Similarly, I couldn’t (Spoiler - click to show)CLEAN or RUB a tombstone, I could only CLEAR the IVY on it. The games are completable without the walkthrough, as in other ways they are eminently fair (most areas don’t have much available so you can exhaustively search everything), it just requires quiet patience, a sense of enjoyment from trying different parser commands to discover the right ones (a VERBS list is helpful) and the willingness to try very many unhelpful searches while waiting to find the rare diamonds in the rough where it is valuable.

None of this is meant as criticism for the author to follow; with 20 games into the series and decades of stories in the universe, it’s clear this is a labor of love that will be made exactly as the author wants. It’s just a general description for players new to the Lazzahverse. I’ve never regretted playing these games, and generally give them fairly high ratings, because they do have a sense of adventure and of a living, evolving universe.

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.

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 is a Gruescript game mixing Total Recall with The Hobbit. It uses ai-generated pixel art.

It's quite long. It's listed as 1.5 hours, but I spent about that long on just the prelude. Altogether I think I spent 3 or 4 hours, with the last hour entirely spent peeking at the code to speed me along.

You play as a gross jerk of a human who hates and is cruel to his wife, doesn't care about sabotaging her medical care and avoids talking to women he deems ugly. This isn't plot relevant and so I guess it's supposed to be either funny or realistic, but I neither laughed nor saw a reflection of truth in it.

The first part of the game has you going to work at the toothpaste factory and scrounging up some money to go to Rekall, a location that allows you to get memories you want implanted. Like the original story of Total Recall, doing so prompts some memories that you have that are true, but buried.

The rest of the game is a parody of The Hobbit where gold has been replaced by toothpaste, the misty mountains are now a ski resort, the dwarves have disappeared, and the main badguy is toothpaste entrepreneur Tom Fallows.

Most non-Robin Johnson gruescript games I've played have been pretty buggy or poorly implemented (with a couple notable great exceptions, and now that I'm searching I'm surprised to see only 10 have only ever been released. And Dialog only has 22; wow)

There are parts of this game that I like and parts I dislike. I'm going to talk about both, and try to frame the dislikes (like the being a jerk to your wife part) as my reaction to something and not as an innate quality of the thing itself.

I like some of the imaginative puzzles. There's a lot of tricks going on with things like moving turnips to strategic locations, figuring out how to use the lemonade, timing, and the troll bag puzzle.

I didn't like getting stuck because I forget to look and grab an item a hundred turns ago. Fortunately I saved a lot! Also the random timers felt off a bit. The maze randomness I saw in the code wasn't something that I experienced joy from, nor waiting for the trolls to go to bed or the cat to wander into the kitchen.

Story-wise, I experienced the most happiness at the innate difficulty in establishing what's reality and what's the effect of Rekall, something I also enjoyed in total recall.

I didn't like the Tolkien elements as much, it felt kind of like it just took the summary story of the hobbit and tried to make an encounter matching each one without really caring about parodying the deeper themes. To be fair, that's a totally fine way to parody things; I parodided Chandler Groover's games in Grooverland with entirely surface-level references, so I can't complain. Maybe what I really would have liked is a more unified parody theme. Sometimes things have been updated to modern times, while other times the scenes play out almost exactly like the original. It could have been fun to have something tying it all together more.

The AI art was hit or miss. A couple of times I thought, "Okay, this looks cool," but then I realized, for instance, that our bedroom that looks like a hobbit house with first-floor window overlooking a forest is actually not the hobbit part of the game but our 2nd floor bedroom in the middle of a city. Similarly, styles change from room to room and so do seasons and so on. Just like the parody, without a consistent theme, it's not much more helpful to the game than just imagining each scene ourselves.

If I were the author, I'd be proud of assembling a very long gruescript game, perhaps the longest I've played (Detectiveland might be longer). All told it has few errors, a rarity for such a long game, and there were multiple places I found enjoyable.