Reviews by MathBrush

I like this game, and I've played it more than any other Ectocomp game, but it's designed in a way that fully exploring it is very difficult.

It's a timed game, where you have to get 30 different trinkets in a constrained amount of moves. You can still end the game without all 30, 30 is just the max. While playing, you discover a large number of amulets and eyestones. Each combination of amulets and eyestones results in different powers, ranging from faster movement to power over plants to time travel.

The map is large, as well. Without the time constraint, it would be a substantially hard game; with the time constraint, it throws optimization into the mix, especially since some amulets affect the time it takes to perform actions.

So, this game seems to me to be in the vein of Ryan Veeder's Fly Fishing, a game where you chip away at it over a long period of time rather than rushing to a conclusion. I never wrote a review for Fly Fishing because I never finished it (because I have difficulty sustaining focus if I move to other hobbies between play sessions), and I almost did the same thing for this game. But I think I've seen enough of it to say that it's enjoyable and well-written. I know at least one person has gotten 28/30 trinkets in a single go, which is very impressive.

I was making a game that had some thematic elements in common with this one, from what I'd heard, so I wanted to try it out.

Pretty much everything about this game is a spoiler, so I'll describe the non-spoilery parts first.

The idea is that you are a highschool boy who's long-time friend and neighbor Sayori has invited you to join a club with her and three other girls. When you do so, you find that all four members have their own insecurities, but are each in their own way soothed by your presence and attracted to you.

Like most visual novels, text is split up into short chunks with different character poses per chunk. In this specific novel, there is a pretty large gap between choices. I saved often, as I was clicking fast to keep the game's text speed around the same as my reading speed, but didn't want to use 'auto' or fast text due to some text that disappears quickly. The main forms of interaction are choosing the order to talk to people, choosing who to spend time with (rare), and writing poems.

Poem-writing takes the form of 20 or so pages of words. On the other side of the screen are chibis of several characters. When you click a word a character likes, they jump up excitedly. Once you've written your poem, whichever character jumped the most enjoys listening to it the most.

You have about a whole week's worth of meetings and poems and chances to get to know the person you're interested in. This is all part of Act 1 out of 4. There are hints that something else is going on; Monika, the leader, refers to some out-of-game concepts like saving and loading, and all of the girls in the club hint at some darker sides to their lives.

Spoiler time:

Moderate spoilers (gives away general concept and discusses act II and the dramatic end of Act I)

(Spoiler - click to show)
By the end of Act I, your neighbor Sayori ends up hanging herself, with the character of the music and game presentation distinctly changing.

In Act II, the game resets itself and you play again, but without Sayori. This causes some logical changes in the game world, but we also see more glitches, with some text replaced with a strange bold black font with pink background. The characters you interact with are shown in more and more awful situations.


Full spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)It turns out Monika, the president of the club, is aware of the fourth wall and of your existence as a player, and of the files in the game. She spurs the others to suicide and deletes their 'character files' from the game (as you can check in your OS). You end up floating in a void world with her unless you delete her own character file, which ends up setting up a new world that has its own problems in the brief act 4.


Discussion of the concepts:
(Spoiler - click to show)The game has a lot in common with other popular meta-games of the 2010's like Undertale that address the player directly and show awareness of existing in a game (although such games have existed for a long time). The long Act I, though, with very few 'unusual' events, requires a way to keep the player invested and involved. Ironically, then, in trying to make a good setup for a 'twist', the first act of this game is probably one of the better 'traditional' visual novels, especially since so many other popular visual novels have some kind of major twist in them.

To create horror, this game uses several techniques popular in game creepypastas and horror films, like:
-Use of realistic graphics when 'fake' graphics have been the norm
-making the player think their computer is glitching
-establishing norms for what characters can do and then breaking them (like 4th wall breaking)
-using content inappropriate for the rating level initially established (like strong profanity, sexual references, and graphic deaths and mutilation)

Overall, it was effective in the presentation of these concepts. There is some need to suspend disbelief, though; we see Monika primarily motivated by an annoyance that the player never chooses her; however, choosing her is not an option. This is mentioned in-game, though, so it's not exactly a plothole, more like a Greek tragedy.


There is some content, especially violence and self-harm, that I generally am not comfortable with. In this case, I was well pre-warned, but had another factor that made it less shocking. I tend to immerse myself in characters in interactive fiction or text adventures, which makes shocking events more upsetting, but I did not identify with the main character at all here. He's written with a strong voice and makes a lot of comments and decisions I never would; I know that's common in a lot of games, but I feel like it was even stronger than usual in this game, as if we were never meant to identify with him. I felt at arms-length the whole game.

This game has high production values. I'd give it 5 stars, but I don't intend on replaying.

I've been playing through the most popular games I've never reviewed and this game has been at the top of that IFDB search for a while.

Playing through, I can see why it has been popular over the years. It is a parser game but has a list of all verbs and nouns for each location, and the puzzles are lighter than many other games at the time, making it a pretty easy experience to complete (though I did use a walkthrough at several points). It's also split up into 7 or so smaller adventures, so it's easier to plan out play sessions, and it has detailed pixel art and animations.

It's filled with a lot of pop culture references. Puns, Monty Python sketches, TV shows like Gilligan's Island and Fantasy Island, etc.

While the puzzles were generally fair, there were several points where items that you'd had and had seemed like gags for a long time turned out to be useful exactly then, which is probably where the greatest difficulty lies (remembering everything you've read or seen or picked up up to this point).

There are occasional point-and-click parts, the largest being a system of waterways to navigate.

Parts of the game are genuinely very amusing. As a whole, though, it is really reminiscent of 80's nerd humor, where women are primarily sex objects and non-American cultures are mostly there for jokes. This game has several jokes where rape is the punchline, and a lot of the drawings are of busty women whose clothes are falling off. Part of the game involves sneaking into a virgins' temple where you hope to see them nude, and the first virgin you see (not nude) is 15. There are stereotypes about Native Americans, and so on. All of this would come off as solidly normal, if a bit risque, in the 80s; the art style and jokes are very similar to softcore pornographic games my brother owned like Leisure Suit Larry (though no full nudity is there).

I enjoyed the difficulty level and gameplay, but I soured on the game more over time, especially after the sex-focused Olympus area, so I ended up just using a walkthrough to end it off. I did find the uses of all the magical objects you had gathered to be pretty funny, though!

I’m not finished with this game, but have played more than 2 hours. I’d be happy to finish it later, though!

I’ve seen this game before in the German Grand Prix. I had a goal to beat every game, but when I saw this very large puzzle fest with many complex German words I was overcome by the difficulty and gave up on the Grand Prix.

So it was nice to see an English translation! It also seems to have been updated with new puzzles and more points (2000 vs 810).

You play as a magician seeking a mystical jewel of life hidden in a master magician’s lair. Once you find it, though, you realize that getting out is a whole different problem.

The game has a humorous tone and a wide variety of puzzles. It leans a bit to the risque side, as the master has pornography and is known for seeking after young women.

Gameplay can vary between traditional parser and choice-based, depending on your settings. In choice-based mode, nouns have a drop-down menu with actions, some of which involve other nouns. There are many possibilities, which is good and bad; good because you have to think and can’t just lawnmower through all choices, but bad because it can be hard to find the right option.

I found the puzzles very interesting, especially those involving the stuffed animals. My biggest difficulties were with objects where you need to USE one object WITH another, but if you get the order wrong it doesn’t work (so, for instance, using a key with a door might work but not a door with a key).

There are some minor errors here and there that can be confusing. I had a problem with a snake that I messaged the author about but which I think might be soon fixed, so I’ll update once I get past that part. There is a very helpful hint system with three levels of hints, although occasionally some things don’t have hints or the hints aren’t a complete solution.

I think the only drawback some people may not like is the sheer number of options, with many rooms having many objects which have many interactions. Playing it as a parser game can help, but some objects don't respond to their in-game names (like 'left shelf' must be referred to as 'leftmost shelf', I think). I think the people who will like this most are people who like Steve Meretzky’s games (I feel like the tone and puzzles are similar) and are patient with working through puzzles involving a lot of careful examination.

I beta tested this game.

I have to say right now that I played this game twice, once in Chrome and once in Firefox, which I downloaded just for this purpose.

It is MUCH better in Firefox, where every character is voice-acted. I would really strongly suggest only playing it that way.

This is a long choice-based game with full voice acting about a character who takes up photography as a 'bucket list' item while the apocalypse happens due to a zombie virus.

Your camera purchase serendipitously leads you to find your former childhood friend nekoni online, who you reconnect with, ending up in a discord of former childhood friends.

Playtime is split up into 4 seasons, with an intro, 3 days per the first three seasons, and one day for the final season.

In each day, you'll hang out with your dog, have the opportunity to go to one of several, then hang out in discord, choosing which friend to chat with, then chatting with your friend Neko in a voice call. Your mom also might call.

If you choose the same place to visit each day, it unlocks someone to help you during a crisis later. If you chat with the same friend each day, you unlock a special ending centered around them.

Playing twice gave me really different experiences; in my first one, I hung out with a snail guy at the park; in my second, I hung out with a heterochromia guy in a coffee shop. In my first, I chatted with Artemis the most; in the second, Rainer.

I'm glad I tried multiple paths. One of them (the [spoiler]Rainer[/spoiler] path) unlocks author commentary on the game.

In it, the author mentions that part of the game is about something e visualized for a long time, and this is a chance to experiment with it to see what it would be like.

I think that explains a lot about the plot and setting. Some say dreams are a way of the brain coming up with 'what if' scenarios and testing them out. That's what this game (at least partially) is!

So there is a zombie virus, but much of the game is about the past and discord drama. The virus can be seen as a stand-in for both Covid and for neurodivergence or coming out. The vast majority of characters are LGBTQ+ or allies and respect pronouns. Bad things still happen (at least two really dramatic events occur) but they aren't the norm. The protagonist can positively affect the lives of others.

Thinking about it, the game can be therapeutic. Both of the worst things that happen to you personally are the kind of scenario you can think of in the shower and stress out about, so writing or playing a game like this can be a nice way to work through it.

I liked the voice acting; on this playthrough, the mother's voice and neko's contributed the most. The pictures were great; I especially liked the papercraft.

Not everything is perfect about the game; it feels really long, and it's not apparent at first just how much freedom there is. Due to the personal nature of the game, some choices don't feel authentic to who I imagined myself to be. But it helped when I realized something; I read the Great Gatsby earlier this year. I used to really dislike it, but once I realized that the narrator wasn't intended to be perfect or for us to always agree with him, I liked it much more. It's the same here; I don't think Yancy is meant to be perfect. I think part of the idea is to see what happens to someone who is doing their best but sometimes messes up.

Overall, this game gave me a lot of food for thought. It made me a lot more sympathetic to aroace people, as, while I don't identify as such in the longterm sense, I realized that I have a lot of those feelings right now in my life. And the game helped me imagine different scenariosin my life as well. So a lot of food for thought!

Now, this is another game I tested, but, sad to say, I didn’t finish testing it at the time, because it’s actually pretty hard! I have finished it now, though.

This is a long, difficult Dialog parser game that uses Dialog’s hyperlink system to turn itself into a parser-choice hybrid.

In it, you play as a sidekick to a cowboy hero who is famous for saving people from villains. The secret is, though, that you are the one who is actually saving everyone!

The game is expansive, and largely revolves around getting Buck out of trouble, defeating henchmen, and investigating the outskirts of town.

Gameplay is very hard. You can lock yourself out of victory; to avoid that, you can set ‘winnable on’. If it’s in ‘easy’ mode, you’ll know right away that you messed up. If it’s in ‘hard’ mode, you’ll only find out a few turns later.

The solutions to all puzzles revolve around objects that are far away and that usually aren’t labelled or associated in any way with the area you need them in. Given that this is a big game, that means that the best way to progress is likely carefully mapping out the world and taking every object you can find, looking at what verbs it’s capable of, then trying out obstacles one at a time.

Alas, there is an inventory limit that comes into play fairly often. I think you might be able to carry some things in the knapsack, but I forgot to try that this playthrough.

As a side note, multiple puzzles require you to throw an object into an adjoining room, which isn’t standard in most Inform/Dialog games, so keep an eye out for that!

Overall, I think this game deserves a long, careful playtime that will likely exceed the two hour IFComp limit. So I recommend trying it out, and coming back to it after the comp if you like it!

**The Bureau of Strange Happenings** by Phil Riley

This is a long, polished parser game that took me around 4 hours even using copious hints.

You play as an agent with they/them pronouns in the Bureau of Strange Happenings, a government agency that has recently been defunded due to political shenanigans. You end up in a small town strip mall and, even worse, all your devices have to be turned in and replaced.

Unfortunately, your phone has been locked inside your new desk. Getting it out is, in many ways, the big puzzle of the game.

I was excited to see a game about supernatural happenings, but I was kind of bummed because for the first 30-50 minutes I was met with a series of mundane challenges and events--trying to get into a laundromat, using a pawn shop, etc.

Using hints to get past that, I realized that it went so long without supernatural shenanigans because it was the prologue for a much bigger game. I remember after a couple hours of play landing in a large suburban town with over a dozen locations and thinking, 'okay, I'm going to bed, I'll handle this in the morning'. There's a lot of content, and it's super-polished; I didn't encounter any bugs.

I do think the entrance point for the supernatural was perhaps too obscure; I had to find one of many rooms, and in that room which had many objects examine something that was only briefly mentioned, and then go to a specific location to use it. I don't think I would have ever figured it out without either using hints or careful examination (which, to be fair, is true for a lot of parser games).

I enjoyed the unusual directions in this game. I also enjoyed several slow realizations about what is going on; this game really includes a lot of 'delayed punchline' or Chekhov's gun moments.

The difficulty level is high, and I relied very heavily on hints. There is a large proliferation of keys, knicknacks, red herrings, books, and so on.

Story-wise, it's heavy on atmosphere and world-building over pure plot. The game makes use of (Spoiler - click to show)lizard people as the main enemy; while some have used this concept as anti-semitic conspiracy in the past, that doesn't seem to be the case at all in this game, which has a much more X-Files feel.

To me, the roughest part of the game was frequently not knowing what to do. The best parts of the game were the innovative directions and compass system and the big suburban puzzle.

This is a long, worldbuilding-heavy, sincere fantasy Twine game about a world where dark magical creatures are born from mirrors. You play as a tired mother who is desperate and starving, looking for some kind of money for your family. You descend into the monster's caves to win wealth, learn about the monsters, or die.

The game is polished, and I didn't find any bugs. There are occasional illustrations and it makes use of different background colors.

I thought it was well-written. The creation myths were some of my favorite parts, as was interacting with the gods. Overall, this seems like a setting that would do well in fantasy book.

I had ups and downs with the plot. Up until the end of Act II, I felt like there was a definite progression, and could feel the tension rising. I reach what felt like the apex of the plot, but then...there was Act III, which felt like it let the wind out of the sails. (Spoiler - click to show)We get a new protagonist and repeat many of the same plot points. It's interesting too because with Act I and Act II I thought, 'This could be a great fantasy novel if it was expanded with more interactions with the characters, more door history, but the author probably didn't have enough time', and yet Act III itself is quite large. I would have preferred to have just Act I and Act II, fully fleshed out, and maybe Act III as a later sequel book.

But this is just quibbling and it's not like I can dictate that kind of thing. I liked the overall story and thought it was well done, I'm just recording the thoughts that passed through my head.

The choices were both good and bad. A large chunk of them fell into two categories:
1) Be nice vs Be mean
2) Injure yourself to discover something vs Be safe and learn nothing

I found little motivation to be mean early on, so usually just stuck with being nice. Later on, I found that there was more subtlety to some of those choices, but it would have been nice to have more options that weren't on the good/bad axis. The choices I liked most involved the gods, who had some great variety. The choices did provide the chance to feel like a hero, though, and were meaningful, often having significant-feeling effects. The game doesn't seem to branch too much but it does adjust itself based on your actions.

It was a long game. I played over two different evenings, and it took up a couple hours in each.

Overall, I can recommend it to players in generally, but most heartily to avid fantasy fans.

This was a long game! It took me around 3 to 4 hours to finish, possibly because clicking links wasn't quite as fast as typing, but it went well.

Two of the most enjoyable murder mysteries of the last ten years are Erstwhile, a twine game where a ghost has to try to solve his own murder, and Toby's Nose, a parser game where a dog has to aid Sherlock Holmes.

This game combines the two! It's a parser-choice hybrid where you are a ghost that has to influence your dog to solve your own crime.

The setup is a classic murder mystery: you have died in the middle of the night, and four people stand to inherit from you. Each suspect has to be cleared or convicted before the day is through.

The game relies heavily on physics and on the five senses, as well as interactions with the neighboring humans.

Overall I found it very fun. I'd like to describe some nitpicks with the puzzles but those should come with the caveat that I had a good time!

The thing with some of the puzzles is that I could conceive of many possible solutions to problems but couldn't tell what the game was looking for or what effect things would have. How much do lights illuminate things? How far does sound travel? How does a dog communicate with a human?

I grew a bit frustrated, but a light bulb went off when I realized how few red herrings the game has (although they're there!). I changed from *deductive* reasoning to *inductive* reasoning. Instead of making a plan and trying to figure out how to achieve it, I looked at the items, actions and locations I hadn't used yet and thought, 'How can I do something with this?'

Occasionally there were plotlines that stretched my disbelief (especially the amount of things the dog got away with) but not so much more so than a normal mystery book.

Overall, I enjoyed the high level of polish. I realized later on that the 'find ____' options were actually really good at zipping you through the map quickly; if you remember where something is, you can just type it in and click on the 'find such and such' link and go there immediately. I also liked the characters of Watson and Davis.

The hint system works very well. The game has some automatic hints at the beginning which were a bit too spoilery for me, but fortunately the author has added a way to turn those off; the normal hints, on the other hand, can be accessed at any time.

This game occupied all of my play time today. It's really quite large, which is fitting for a game with 34 contributors. Most entries are puzzleless, so it's not so never-ending as Cragne Manor, but it has a similar variety of experiences.

This game feels like a text version of MeowWolf. MeowWolf is an unusual art exhibit that exists in at least two locations (New Mexico and Texas). I visited one with a group of students and happened to live next to the second one that was built. It's a kind of art museum that has a central theme (a family's two-story home, recreated inside of the museum, has been affected by twistings in space and time, leaving clues behind as to the family's fate) with a variety of unusual and bizarre art rooms connected by creative things like tunnels behind refrigerators or cast iron spiral stairways. Each of the art rooms is just (as I understand it) given to a local artist who decorates it in any way they like, from sculptures of meat robots to videos of beaches to a secret club venue for bands to play in. The whole thing is an elaborate maze.

This game has the same feel. You play as someone stuck in The Maze Gallery, which is a bizarre exhibit. You pass through rooms filled with moving inkblots, eggs painted like clowns, vicious fashion designers, tiny paintings etched on rice, and more.

Some of the 'exhibits' are actually encounters spread throughout the game written by single authors, like a series of diary entries or a loving couple that shows up time and time again.

Parts I especially liked include some of the (Spoiler - click to show)presidents, the four humors, the de(void), the clown alley, the talking paintings, the wing of bad art, and Jo's cafe.

The only time I really encountered friction was in a maze-like part where you need to pick the right path from three options. I didn't distinguish that it had a separate ruleset from the rest of the park and couldn't figure out it's mechanism, so my experience was mostly a voice getting more and more frustrated and annoyed at me until I got kicked out.

The consistent css and art style and placard images managed to keep the tone remarkably consistent. A game like this usually feels very distinct in voice, but this one could almost conceivably have been written by one very creative author. The poetry segments and Zizi!!! are perhaps the most distinct.

I was hesitant at first that this game would be impossibly large, but it's in a fairly compact 4 act structure and not all content is visible on first play. I got lost once, but looking at a directory showed me the path forward.

I felt satisfaction at reaching the ending and enjoyed feeling more oriented in life, in a way; like the game presented a wide variety of viewpoints and feelings and gave me more of a sense of where I am mentally in relation to a sea of others. That was even a theme of one of the rooms, where (Spoiler - click to show)a mirror shatters representing you and you can only grab for some of the pieces, holding onto what is most essential and hoping that you grabbed what was important.

There were several other wonderful parts of the maze that I wasn't able to fit into this review (like the Hungry room and the ladder and so on) so thanks to everyone that participated!