Reviews by MathBrush

This game was part of Ryan Veeder's early explorations with unusual uses of Inform, which later branched out into things like twine/parser hybrids, collections of parser games that communicate with each other, dramatic graphical displays, etc.

The main interesting feature here is that the game saves automatically online and reloads your progress, and that the game differs depending on the day you play it. Two characters come and go based on the day of the week, and several actions require multiple days to complete.

Because of this, I frequently started the game before stopping due to forgetting to play again and intimidation. But I finally finished it!

The main idea of the game is that you're at a large pond, which represents most of the map. The pond itself is around 16 (Inform) rooms of water, and circling around it is a long series of rooms forming a circle. You get a fishing rod and a jacket, and the game lets you customize yourself quite a bit, down to a fear of bugs.

You are not given any defined goal. You are not even really able to fish. But as you explore, you begin to find both badges and a large variety of birds. In going out of your way to find badges or birds, you'll also discover a lot about the lives of the people who lived at and/or visited the pond.

The scope of the game is quite large. Even without the timed aspect, it took me around 10-11 hours to play and comment on the game in a forum thread, and so if only half of that was playing, it'd still be around 5 hours, and if only a third was playing, it'd still be 3-4 hours. This is substantial content.

The storytelling is mostly environmental storytelling. Many events are only alluded to. Careful notekeeping can be very helpful.

Overall, I genuinely enjoyed finishing this game off. It took me 6 years to get around to it (and I've had it open in a browser tab for one of those years), but it was worth it.

This game was originally made as a tabletop RPG and then converted into Twine years later.

It features a pretty great storyline about seven women who conceived children from a devil (or so rumours go), one of which is you. You have demonic power like using spectres and giving your blood to spirits for more power. Your goal is to find out the truth behind your birth and to determine your future.

The game is very complex, with multiple areas, each with their own encounters, and each encounter being a large puzzle.

There is art (handdrawn and then enhanced by AI, a process that makes it more coherent than pure AI), which helps the game quite a bit.

The big draw here, outside of the art and story, is the combat. And this is also why I'm giving a lower score than the other reviewers (but would be happy to revise upward if the author feels it's unfair).

You see, the way combat works is that you and your opponent(s) alternate turns. You have 2 actions (at first) and your opponent has a varying number of actions.

One action can be used to summon a spirit or spectre to help you. Doing so costs blood. Each spirit starts with one ability that costs a few 'control points' and one that costs all control points. It's helpful to save the 'all control' points one for last.

You can also spend you action using an item or attacking with a relic (a weapon).

The issue is that using your abilities gives yourself damage, and your enemy gives damage. That means you lose health very quickly. You have two rations in your inventory that can heal you, and occasionally you can rest, but essentially there is no way to just go out there and grind combat to level up. In 3 different attempted playthroughs on three different difficulties (completed only on easy) I wasn't able to level up myself (apparently there are classes?), barely levelled up one relic by paying for it, and never reached the level 2 abilities of the spirits. Every early enemy is very hard, each beatable alone but not 2 or 3 in a row.

Reading other reviews, it seems like everyone is in the same situation. Rovarsson beat it on hard with 5 fights by save scumming but mentions never having health. The other reviews on here also mention that as well.

Even on the easiest mode, there isn't really a way to heal, just skip fights.

Now, I'm sure there is some reasonable way to play through and hit up a lot of encounters and level up items. The author mentions some combos of attacks; there are spectres with abilities like 'boost next attack' and 'do triple damage' which could theoretically one-shot people. But all of that takes damage to summon the spirits.

I think this would work better as a TTRPG, as intended, because there the DM or player can 'fudge' things if it gets too intense. But for right now, as a computer game, I just don't see any way to play through and level up yourself or abilities. If the author provided a sample walkthrough for the first two chapters, like suggestions on who to fight first or how to get stronger, that would be interesting and helpful.

I sought out this game specifically by trying to find the worst-selling recent games published by Choice of Games. I'm working on making one right now, and I've had a really bad-selling one in the past, so I wanted to see what I could learn from playing it.

I used number of ratings as a metric for 'worst-selling'. On the Choice of Games app, it has the third-least ratings out of the 170 or so games listed.


Having played the whole thing, I can say that the storyline and setting are pretty solid, and the characters are great. But I have some theories as to why it may have struggled.

First of all, the game is called 'Escape From Death'. The cover art for the game is a cool-looking grim reaper. The first paragraph of the description is "Steal Death's power and break free of his corrupt realm! Hide your heartbeat from the dead as you harness soul magic, navigate political intrigue, determine the fate of the Afterlife—and perhaps even claim its throne yourself.".

I didn't read the full description before playing. So I imagined some kind of gritty urban fantasy game, maybe like Wayhaven, where you play cat and mouse with the grim reaper.

The truth is very different. This game actually has very little to do with death and the afterlife. With just minor changes to the text, this is a (good) standard 'strange lands' fantasy/western Isekai, with more in common with Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Toolbooth, or Narnia than with any horror or thriller stories.


The grim reaper is actually a chill guy named Aaron that is part of a government and is appointed by a council. The position of Death is basically being President of the Afterlife. Souls that die come down and are transformed into Elite (who look human and treat memories from life as drugs) and Penitent (who are transformed into animals. There is unrest between the lower classes and the higher classes. The majority of the game is exploring the political factions and wheeling and dealing between them, exposing their corruption or helping their cause. There is very little mention of the living or the human world. Occasionally you get flashbacks to your life above, but they feel very disconnected from the game itself, and having been alive once in the above world doesn't come up. People even die down here, turning into vaguely sentient water or sand (something like that).

The author had been constructing this setting for a long time, and it shows in the game. The four side characters seem like old friends to the author, with very well-mapped-out personalities and interactions. At times, though, it would have been hard for me to know who counts as a main character without the stats screen.

Speaking of which, I think that's where the main difficulty with the game lies. I once wrote an essay after playing over a hundred Choice of Games games about patterns in good and bad ones, and I saw that something I call 'stat disease' is very common in lower-placing games. When I started playing this game and looked at the stat screen after 1 chapter, I instantly recognized 'stat disease'. Tons of sliders, almost all of which had barely budged since we started. All of my stats were in the mid-50s. Choices didn't clearly label which stat was involved and if it was being increased or tested. Some choices had overlap, etc.

So, for me, this game had strong characters and a cool setting, but it wasn't what I had imagined going in, and had trouble with the stats. I still had a good time, and the game had no bugs I could see, so I'm still giving it a high score. I wonder if the game I worked on will end up in a similar spot to this one, so I look at this not to criticize it, but to hopefully learn from its fate. This has the bones of a high-selling game. I just need to figure out what kept it from that destiny.

This game is a tie-in with the author's two published books, Quantum Time and The Quantum Contingent. All three deal with a spy agency and a quirky cast of characters.

In this game, you are a new agent arriving at headquarters, and you have to get your assignment from the chief of the spy agency you work for. Once you get it, you end up setting off on a jet to locations across the world where you can gather items, face danger, and help a quantum-entangled experiment.

Genre-wise it's similar to Zork set in the modern day, with a combination of science fiction and fantasy without much regard to how well they fit together; instead it follows the 'rule of cool'. So there are things like light sabers, magic, virtual reality, etc. It also contains detailed, enthusiastic descriptions of locations, especially in Oxford, which were fun to read and which gave me some googling to do.

The book tie-in setting here was both a blessing and a curse. The great part about it is that the world feels vibrant and alive, with characters connected to each other and backstory everywhere you look. The curse is that the game assumes you know this info. I started the game with no idea what to do; it said I needed to get my mission, but I was by a farmhouse. It was only by exploration and looking at a spoiler-free map that I discovered I was supposed to be trying to find the base. Early on the game mentioned Martin but I didn't know who that was. Near the end it was hard to know what my last tasks were (after fixing Cassandra's computer). It felt like the author had spent so much time in this world that some facts felt obvious or natural, but weren't to me as a casual reader. Nevertheless, the further I got and the more I learned about the world, the more all of the references and discussions made sense.

I think people will mostly enjoy this game if they like Zork-style humor and exploration. The game is both hard and easy; when there is a task you need to do, the game generally gives you a lot of hints and nudging on how to do it. Much of the points are optional (like finding treasures). The difficulties I did have were in figuring out how to type commands or what to do next. The most difficult thing for me was figuring out how to operate the jet (I tried TURN ON JET, ENTER COCKPIT, FLY JET, etc. It turned out I needed information found on another item).

The game is both superbly polished and unpolished. It is very polished because it has important nouns bolded and unimportant nouns in italics; has a list of Places and Things you've seen; has tons of things to talk to agents about, etc. It's unpolished because it is missing some background scenery (like the digital display in Cassandra's lab, which is not implemented despite being mentioned prominently); sometimes it just doesn't make sense (like the escape tunnel that says 'Martin has to show you the way first'); and sometimes it knows what you want to do but chooses to ignore it (like if you try to put something ON something and it says, 'No, you have to HOOK it'). All of these things are very normal in first games, and I have all confidence that the author's next games will be polished in every sense.

Here are my five criteria I use for judging when I'm not sure what score I want to give. Among all IF games I've ever played, I'd give this game 3 stars for great idea and mixed execution; for effort and as a first game, I could give it 4. So for the appearance of subjectivity I'll do the criteria:

-Polish: As described above, the game is very smooth in most respects but lacking in others. One area is quotation marks, which are absent in some text and at least once appeared gratuitously.
+Descriptiveness: The world felt very much alive and vibrant, with rich text.
-Interactivity: As described above, I often didn't know what to do and sometimes struggled to find the right command for the thing I wanted to do. Much of the interactivity was engaging.
+Emotional impact: I found the game amusing and entertaining. I plan on reading the books it belongs to when I find time.
+Would I play again? I would play a revised version of this game, and I look forward to future games by this author.

However, on reflection, I've decided to bump up to 4 stars.

I should preface this by saying that this game (and the game it’s a sequel to, set in Germany) are fantastic educational tools. My school’s IB history teacher plans on using them for assignments next year.

This game is a card-based simulation game where you take control of one faction of the new Russian government directly after the overthrow of the aristocracy.

You track stats like party support for all the parties, resources and budget, and so on. You can place ministers in different positions. You can affect food supply, propaganda, the war effort and more. You also react to frequent new events.

I think this is a fantastic game. My only reason for four stars instead of five is that even on easy setting the game is pretty overwhelming; with the German game I had some idea of the background and events but coming into this cold I felt confronted by a mass of new people and parties and policies, and it was hard to know what to do. My people starved and revolted and the Bolsheviks won.

I feel like the game is fair, and that repeated play would make what’s going on apparent, but I did like the emotional impact of seeing my empire crumble and it made me imagine the stress and fear early Russian officials must have felt.

I played this game over about two months during lunches at work. I kept thinking I was close to completing it, only to find that there was more.

There are two main gameplay phases of the game (although they aren't the whole game). In the first, you play as a new main character (not the match girl) who has a special key that opens portals in locked doors. You have to hand out five invitations, but a lot of the puzzle is figuring out who the invitations are for, how to deliver them, and what the event is. There are historical areas, fantasy areas, and sci-fi areas.

In the second phase, you command five PCs (!) all of whom can operate independently. I was quite shocked a second phase even existed, as the first phase was very long. This second phase includes a large and complex multi-story map, and each of the characters has unique properties.

Playing this in bits and pieces over weeks, it was easy to get lost, but each time I came back I operated on the assumption that the game was fair and logical and that if I explored and kept notes I could move forward. This worked, although I did have to ask the author about one puzzle involving distracting someone.

The story was full of good twists and turns, and I found enjoyment in the polish of the game and in the well-crafted storytelling. I feel like it has a lot of implications on the match-verse.

This game is currently the highest-rated game on IFDB for 2025. I decided to see what it was all about.

I had a little bit of a rocky start. There are two time intro segments, and during the second I went to go get a drink of water so I could read it all when I got back. When I returned, there was just an empty text box with no context. Reloading brought me to the same screen. Eventually I just did an incognito tab and got the game to run again, but it didn't have many instructions here either.

That's when I realized that the game name was also the instruction (and I think it does display it after the tutorial, I had just tried typing something and overwrote it):type HELP.

Anyway, from there on it was a fun ride. It turns out that you're reopening a case that had long stymied investigators. You have access to audio files for many individuals at a house on a certain night long ago. The investigator has organized these files in a peculiar classification system.

Your job is to find all the files. The game, then, becomes a task of discovering the pattern in the file names and recovering all possible files.

Interwoven into this task and inseparable from it is the story. Names, family relationships, overheard plans, all of these are key to solving the game's meta puzzle. You must comprehend the story to solve the game.

The story is an intriguing one. Our 'viewpoint character' of sorts arrives at a house after receiving an invitation. Peculiarly, no one seems to know the man who sent the invitation. Soon, a dead body is discovered.

The dynamics on display include jealousy, romantic love, dark family secrets, and curiosity.

I had a lot of fun. There were times when the game was extremely frustrating. I didn't resort to looking up hints but at times I was stuck for 10 or 15 minutes with no progress at all. I ended up playing so much that I missed two things I've done every day for a long time: going to bed at midnight (I stayed up for a half hour to finish) and drawing (first day I've missed in a year!)

So, while the game was extremely frustrating at times, it would be silly to rate a game that consumed my attention so much less than a 5, which I've done.

Edit:
As a side note, a lot of the 'best puzzles' as voted for in the XYZZY awards over the years are ones where you learn a new system, like a language or a machine. This puzzle set is a great example of that, where you have dawning realizations and where you actually become better at a skill over time (the skill of deducing the next files).

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.