Reviews by MathBrush

This is the second game in the (bug)folk series, although it is absolutely not necessary to have played the other one (they have common themes but different characters and continuity).

This is an ancient mythological story in the bug world about a musician bug with the prowess to play so beautifully that they can affect the world around them (it reminded me of the Anansi stories, or Navajo stories, or the Panchatantra).

Gameplay is ritualistic; it reminds me of the first Twine game I enjoyed, You Are Standing at a Crossroads, where you start in the center of a cross-shaped map and have to fulfill a quest in each of the four directions.

In this case, you have to string your bugdolin with various strings in order to convince 4 great musicians to follow you. As well, you have to solve a variety of puzzles. These vary from 'learning a system' to 'leap of intuition' but are mild enough to be solvable by most players (especially if using the hints).

Overall, a satisfying experience, good marriage of story and gameplay.

This is one of the latest games by Lamp Post Projects (another has come out by the time I review this), a relatively recent entrant to the world of IF who has put out numerous well-received games in a short time frame.

Like many of their other games, this features a fantasy world with multiple fantasy races and characters (complete with watercolor portraits) in non-combative settings (in this case: a symphony orchestra with singers).

You pick from a variety of strengths and talents and then investigate the mysterious case of dreams popping up among the symphony players.

I like mysteries, and the deduction system worked better for me here than for other recent mystery games (it was relatively easy but just enough not to be trivial, and there were some randomized results with other means of making up for the mistakes).

The writing worked well here, too.

Two things stuck with me as mild flaws. First was that I chose the +0 magic trait (so I could do magic checks but with no bonus). Twice I tried magic rolls and got a perfect score of 4, but the check difficulty was set at 5. I don't recall other magic checks in the game. This makes the +0 magic trait essentially useless.

The second thing is, and this has been true for several games in this setting, that the different races feel largely cosmetic. I've been thinking about it because I recently was brought on to help another author with a project and it largely has the same issue (in that world, there are fairies and sirens and centaurs but they all have mundane jobs and essentially no differences between each other). I can completely understand the desire to divorce oneself from the biological determinism and racism in human history and the ideas that different real-life ethnicities have associated stereotypes. On the other hand, one of the greatest parts of real-life ethnicities are the distinct cultures and vibrant diversity available. How could this be shown more in-game? The Gnomish Treasury game by this author did well, I think, showing the cultural background and differences in art and architecture, which is a great way of showing things (as opposed to heavy-handed or stereotyped techniques some past authors have used like heavy dialects or exotic/fetishized clothing). I guess it would be nice to see more of what makes each group unique (and could include things like an orc raised by dwarves who values his family but also wants to connect with his birth culture, although I swear the author did have something like that in one game).

This game reminded me a lot of the non-fighting parts in Chuk and the Arena by the same author (in a good way).

This game feels like a metaphor for over-implementation of AI in workforces. You are a lowly maintenance worker on a space station when your boss, the new Mr Green (who at the Old Mr Green) delivers a new robot that can literally do anything once its started up and trained (of course, after a few missing parts are implemented).

The map has a lot of things in it but is overall compact, with only 2 or 3 main locations each with a couple of side locations.

The game has quadratic complexity, with an inventory that can be used on any object present in the game world.

The main part of the game felt big at first and then fairly constrained and linear, which made it hard for me to see how 12 different endings could be achieved. After I found a few, though, I searched on the forums for some tips and saw that there were several creative things you could do hidden in the game, which I thought was awesome.

Overall, I liked the game and the sentiments in it.

I always look forward to the Senica thing each year, a collection of short Twine games written by students and associated adults.

This year features a wide range of stories. What I knew Senica thing for in the past was its collection of simple CYOA-style 'do you go into the cave or follow the trail into the forest' gameplay, with simple sentences and refreshing youthful writing, often with minor typos. I enjoyed it because it feels fresh and real and represents someone stretching and growing as an author.

This year sees some of that return, but also sees some games with slick UIs and overly perfect text that was very precise but never seemed to say much of anything. Whether this is an effect of AI (either in translation, writing or in planning) or something else, it did feel less exciting than the raw, heartfelt stories.

I liked the game with poisoning the king, and the one where I could become Spiderman. The adult's game about truth and justice made me think more about civil liberties and freedoms than I usually do. Overall, it's fun to see people embrace these tools and share their stories!

This is an unfinished TADS game with some good content and promise.

You get isekai'd by two weirdos into a purple portal. The world you enter has lots of pipes and knobs and rust (feels kind of mystlike) as well as a critter (doesn't feel Mystlike).

The cool thing about the game is all the mushrooms (which you can take multiple chunks of for each fungus). Through experimentation and consultation you can determine the unique properties of each, which are quite complex. The game models liquids, multiple objects, movable 'door'-like objects, and NPCs.

A more full version would definitely benefit from hints and from a general pass of bugfixes and better implementation. I had to read two people's transcripts to see how to progress. Overall though I had a good time, it feels like fun interaction.

This is a collection of poems in French, mostly written with lines of similar length and not much rhyming (which is pretty normal for most French poetry I've read/memorized). Most of it seems self-reflective and analyzing.

I think the line I like best is "...car j'aime peu de choses, pour des raisons que je ne partage avec personne." It means something like '...since I don't like many things, for reasons that I share with no one'. I like the sentiment and the way it sounds in French.

I don't know if I saw the whole amount of content but it looped a couple of times. There were poems with cursive text and blue background about cats, black and white poems about technology (I think), a list of ages and things that happened at each age.

The variety of presentations and uncertainty of the link structure made me feel engaged by the content, more so than if it were a standard collection of printed poetry.

(I wrote a review for this before but now can't find it anywhere)

This game takes place in the afterlife. You are a train enthusiast at a stop, and you can take the train anywhere (using text entry).

You are intended to type in the names of some big French cities at first, after which you can narrow it down. I started with Paris (of course) and used a Wikipedia page of the largest French cities, going down them.

As it goes on, you get more unusual choices that you can't get from a list of French cities. The final one is quite difficult, requiring some general googling beyond city names.

I liked the writing in this a lot. Some parts of it were very meaningful, and all the characters were interesting and rounded-out.

In this Javascript parser game, you play as a blind professor with a guide that shows you around, describing things for you.

This is a great way to establish a parser voice. Furthermore, the setup (you, an archaeology professor, discover a hidden secret area in a museum) is pretty cool.

I did have several troubles, though. The parser seems to be disconnected from the main thread of parser history, and commands like "NORTH" or "N" don't work ("GO NORTH" does, though). Sometimes it didn't accept my commands; to get VERBLIST to work, I'd have to type it twice in a row. Text was often repeated in places it shouldn't be, like discovering an object over and over or coming into a room from another direction. Sometimes you had to hit spacebar to continue and sometimes not, making it easier to stumble over typing.

A lot of these issues can be corrected by testing, but it lists 3 testers and that it had a couple of months of testing, so it might just be a difference of opinion on what polish in a game looks like or maybe the author just hasn't seen the capabilities of most modern parsers. A lot of this is coded from scratch though so that's pretty impressive.

This game is the first parser game by Lamp Post Projects, whose other works that I played have been watercolor-illustrated fantasy choice-based games, often with mystery elements.

This game is in the same setting, I believe. You play as a gnome working at a museum for a kingdom that recently received a crate of artifacts from a neighboring kingdom who had stolen some of your works. The artifacts are broken and/or disassembled.

Your job is to take a list of artifacts, find the pieces corresponding to them, assemble them, label them, and display them. The puzzles are not overly difficult and generally very on-the-nose, but there were a couple of nice twists and the overall interaction mechanism used the core parser game cycle of X-TAKE-DROP/USE very well.

The game is well-implemented, and I rarely if ever had to fight the parser.

Story-wise, the lore felt consistent and relevant to the game and was parceled out in manageable chunks. The kingdoms and characters felt realistic, and I could identify with the protagonist through suspension of disbelief.

Like several other games in this archaeology-themed competition, this has a mash-up of different cultures, with a Sherpa guiding us into an Egypt-like crypt that includes Meso-American iconography.

It uses what seems to be a custom system used once before by this author (MAD Candy Interactive Fiction Studio). It has several good features (visually nice-looking, can save etc.) but could use some more strong features (like being able to easily repeat commands).

The game centers around the same puzzles 4 or so times in a row with slight variations each time. I was surprised that the difficulty didn't increase and that there wasn't as much variety. There was a hard puzzle for me, but that's because I didn't examine all scenery and had trouble with the parser.

I did have some struggle with the parser, especially with things like the piano keys (the F key, for instance, can't be called F or Key or F Key but has to be called F Bone).

Overall, I feel pretty neutral about the game. There's a consistent plot but not a strong plot arc; there's helpful parser features but some basic parser elements that are weak; there are interesting puzzles but most are rendered moot by using the same elements over and over. So, pretty much neutral.