Reviews by MathBrush

This parser takes a bold and innovative direction, and while I think it struggles with the execution, it's nice to see people experimenting and having fun.

In this parser game, you rule a country, but instead of moving from room to room or working with menus, you just give orders. The game itself doesn't give you any real instructions besides 'type what an emperor might do'.

I tried talking to my advisor, who suggested reviewing military deployments. I typed 'REVIEW MILITARY DEPLOYMENTS' and got a list of troops and number of places. I decided to recruit more by typing RECRUIT TROOPS IN , but I ran out of money. So I tried RAISE TAXES, and that worked. Some barbarians attacked, so I tried ATTACK and that worked.

I kind of ran out of steam then. There are some random events that you can respond to, but by that point I couldn't think of anything else to do. I peeked at the walkthrough and saw a list of actions I could try like 'condemn' (although it didn't let me condemn most things I tried).

I then restarted and tried the actual walkthrough. It had a lot of actions I hadn't considered (especially since some were in response to random events I hadn't seen yet), and due to randomization the walkthrough didn't 'work' and I'm not sure there's any ending to the game. Although, as I type this, I decided to try and type z.z.z.z.z.z and copy it over and over again, and was able to get a bad ending as my capital was sacked.

I think the concept (you can type anything!) is exciting, and a lot is implemented, but without stated restrictions or guidance it felt like I was stumbling blindfolded around a large, mostly empty room, trying to find scattered objects placed here and there (here the large room is the state space of all possible parser commands and the objects are the implemented actions).

Every writer writes for different audiences, so I may or may not be the target, but I think I would have had more fun if I had an idea of my long-term goal and about the relative amounts and specificity of things (does raising taxes give lots of money or little? Do I tax everyone, only some people, or only some things?).

Outside of that, the game is smooth, well-polished, and the writing clearly communicated what had occurred.

This was a fun game. You play as a rock on a wilderness path. You are a talking rock.

At first, all you can do is have random encounters with people, at least one of whom definitely does not like talking rocks. Eventually, you learn more about the people and their inter-connectedness, and you gain the ability to call them to make them come.

The game has 20 endings, and you can accept any of them. There is an 'ultimate' ending you unlock by getting the others and a 'true' ending that happens if you've played long enough.

I played twice, because I ran out of time in the first one and accepted an ending. The second time, I skipped a few things, and I think that made it impossible to collect all endings, because several endings seem to only be offered once (specifically one of the florist's endings).

I also had big trouble finding out what the Freak's need was and how to solve it. I ended up looking into the code to figure it out, where I also read the final ending.

Any ending is fine. If someone plays this and finds five or more endings, as well as an ending that reveals more about your nature, that's the bulk of the game and you could probably comfortably stop there.

The writing is whimsical and goofy. There is a lot of absurdism, but the setting is consistent enough to make the absurd parts stick out and be funny instead of being a jumbled mish-mash.

It didn't stir my soul or change my life, but I was entertained while playing and enjoyed looking for endings.

This is the second Lamp Post Projects game that I've played this IFComp. Like the earlier one (The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens), it takes place in a fantasy world with orcs, half-orcs, humans, elves, half-elves, and others, and with scientists like botanists and astronomers.

In this game, a solar eclipse is scheduled to happen soon, and the path of totality will go over a set of standing stones that are holy to an ancient God. Anyone who is there when the eclipse happens will be granted a wish. You can play as a true believer, an adventurer, or an astronomer, with different bonuses and endgames. I played as a true believer.

Along your pilgrimage, you have the opportunity to meet with two sets of two other pilgrims, for a total of four. The first pair are sibling half-orcs, while the second are a halfling man and (eventually) an elf woman.

You can choose to go with the group or not. I ignored the half-orcs at first because I wasn't as interested in them, but I joined up with them later once I saw the halfling.

This is a 'cozy' setting, a particular type I've seen a few times where there's not very high stakes, everyone is nice to each other (introducing with pronouns, asking consent before personal questions), there is no threat of death or severe injury. Just five chill people headed to the stones and some magical creatures out for mischief.

Most of the game is conversation, and most conversation is having a few topics you can explore in any order, and within topics being able to react to NPC questions by generally being kind, neutral, or mean. There are also puzzle segments in the game (some very easy, others more tricky). You can romance any of the four NPCs, although it can feel very fast paced due to the time constraints of the game (true love in two weeks, for instance).

It was a pleasant story, I felt I had agency (I skipped several conversations that didn't seem as interesting and focused more on a couple key characters) and it has replay value.

Retrograding

This is a downloadable visual novel written in Unity. It has an early branch point that essentially gives you two different games. I picked the second dossier, and got the second path.

This is a visually lush VN, with dozens of image credits listed at the end. Most (maybe all?) are realistic, with underground caves, steel factories, etc.

Grasping everything that was going on was a little tricky. I had the feeling that I had been invited to a long-running TTRPG session with a stellar DM and a close-knit group of friends, but without any explanation of what had gone on before or how we got here. So I'll say what I think is going on, which might be wrong (I'll put the opening without spoilers and the rest in spoilers):

We are a member of an intergalactic corporation/military organization/group that deals with trash on planets either by burning them up or by taking things off of them. I suspect it might be a very inefficient process, as we just take a single object every time, and I'm not sure how we choose where to land. We have a commanding officer type person (who was fun to interact with) and there is a digital friend/symbiote of ours that can talk to us, but whom no one else hears.

We aren't super high up in the system but we're working on it. We're given the option of working with two different people: a reckless racer with a death wish and a former top star at the company who's been rebellious and is being reeducated (I think).

I chose the latter.

[spoiler]We went on several missions together, where she talked about how she was special and hoped I was too. This might be referring to the AI that's with me, who seems to be both a god and a former person who was converted into digital matter. I picked material that was religious or ancient, and at the end the person I was with said she loved me and that she was kind of obsessed with me and we kissed.[/spoiler]

While I didn't always know what is going on, the vibes were immaculate, in the sense that the game felt polished, scenes had tension, characters were interesting, etc. I didn't feel compelled to try the other path, but would be interested in hearing from others who did.

Edit: As a side note, when screens are black you have to hit enter again, so keep an eye out for that!

There's a tradition in IF running through Anna Anthropy and Porpentine and carried on by others of writing body horror symbolic of the trans experience. This game is firmly and intentionally in that vein; the author explicitly says:

"Like many transgender artists, I tend to gravitate towards body horror as a reflection of my trans lived experience. For transgender players, I suspect the allegories present in PURE may resonate with personal experience."

In this parser story, you are accompanied by an heir (whom I saw as representative of wealth and power and possible romance) and two guards (who were often cruel or rough and who could represent society, police, the implied threat of violence) into a underground area of unspoken significance. You are filled with dread.

And well you should be. Like the progression of disturbing and dramatic rooms in the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, each room you go through presents you with some horror or dread, as well as symbolism. You perform symbolic acts like matching statues or solving riddles using items while simultaneously dealing with horrific bodily injuries to both you and those around you. Wording is intense and strong, but the text treats the violence in almost a holy light; this is not violence for violence's sake, but violence as a means of communicating the strength of someone's feeling.

Or, I could just be making it all up.

The game ends at a dramatic point, setting us up for part 1. It works as a standalone, though; if the author had written a few paragraphs of ending text, I would have seen this as a complete work.

There are some bugs and typos in the work, and I would definitely raise my rating if they were fixed. The errors I saw were things like default text printed after custom text (a common thing in Inform 7 when doing a 'before' rule but not putting 'instead' at the end of the last line) and typos like 'scone' for 'sconce'. There are some programming things the game does very well, like colored text, so I know the author must be good at coding.

This is a good work, and it's exactly the kind of thing that I think makes IFComp worth playing: personal, raw work that the author cares about and which tries to communicate something.

This is the author's first parser game, but lacks many of the bugs and rough edges that first games tend to have. I don't recall running into any errors during gameplay.

In this game, you're a warrior/poet who is visiting a coastal desert city. You have to sell your camel and find out where your enemy has fled, a professor with something called the mantablasphere.

The game has combat, with different items you can equip. Unlike some recent combat RPG games I've played recently that were extremely difficult with almost no room for error and few opportunities to heal, the combat in this game was fairly mild but still interesting, with a few opponents and multiple opportunities to heal. You can fight with weapons or use poetry to hurt others (this functions as a weapon but with humorous descriptions of the fight).

The world felt really big at first, but once I explored I saw it was manageable. The map accompanying the game helped. A couple of times I got stuck because I did examine room descriptions and people carefully enough.

The game ends before anything super exciting happens. And the world seems a fairly generic representative of fantasy. It varies from goofy (like having food named after tv and movie creatures like the mogwai) to serious (a guard asks you to report crimes for money). Creatures like goblins and elves inhabit the world without any real exploration of what their presence means. An inn is just an inn; a castle just a castle; a merchant is just a merchant; a church is just a reason to have a cemetery; pirates and thieves work together but there's no hint of why or their purpose. Each part of the game locally makes sense and work, but if you step back globally it's hard to see a bigger picture.

Because of the smooth programming, I'm glad I played the game. For the next installment, it would be fun to see more of what makes this world unique.

I've been going through the cheapest Hosted Games, which are self-published games hosted on the Choice of Games platform.

This game has you play as a young adult in a war-torn kingdom who bounces between rival factions for the government while escaping a cult and gathering magic items.

The core concept of the game is a good one, and there is some fun in using magic spells and working with your one-eyed friend/romantic option partner to face off against enemies, and there are some mysteries set up with satisfying payoffs.

It needs a lot of work, though. There are numerous typos, including on the first full page of text. The pacing in terms of paragraph breaks, reactions to significant events, page breaks and word choices is really off. In four succeeding paragraphs, the player can have a loved one violently die, train for a week to buy a horse, ride it for a couple of days, then leave it behind, all while cracking jokes. Your partner can randomly offer you sex 'with no strings' despite very little other romance happening in the game. For some reason, the country map is a map of Turkey.

I think the author is capable of making this very solid; typos can be fixed with more beta testing, and the pacing whiplash could be solved by putting each major event on its own screen and fleshing it out with some more reactions by the player or descriptions of the surroundings or events. This definitely seems like the talent is there, but more time could be invested.

At 4900 words, this is the shortest game you can purchase from Choice of Games, and is listed under its Hosted Games label.

It’s a gauntlet-style game with two chapters and no save. At any point, most options will kill you and make you restart the game. I replayed around six to seven times.

You wake up next to a dead body in your bed and need to figure out what happened. I was able to reach an ending where I was alive and powerful but never really discovered the truth.

The writing is terse and characters, plot and themes are underdeveloped. However, it’s not horrible, and can be played for free after an ad. It’s managed to get a 3.9/5 rating on the app (around 20th from the bottom) and hundreds of ratings.

This is the third-least rated game on the Hosted Games app. While some games have tens of thousands of ratings, this one has had 9 ratings in 5 years.

It’s a puzzle game. There are six or seven chapters, and each chapter has a “correct” path and multiple dying paths. Making it through one chapter means that you don’t have to replay it if you die.

The game is surreal, with a forest full of shadows and ghosts and demons.

The writing had some good descriptions but seemed more intent on atmosphere than communicating helpful descriptions. We are constantly becoming disoriented and confused, the trees are always full of shadows, there are strange sounds and growls; all good elements, but it can become kind of repetitive. There are also a lot of typos. I myself have a lot of typos in my own writing, but I try to use spellcheck and get friends to read the game to look for mistakes, and I think that would be helpful here.

It eventually ties into some (Spoiler - click to show)Mayan mythology, which was an interesting twist.

The puzzles include mazes, repeating actions, finding keys, etc. It is difficult to predict the effects of your actions. The main verb in most choices is “Percept”, which I looked up and is a noun (different than precept), but in the game it seems to be used like “perceive”.

Overall, it has a lot of rough edges, but I didn’t regret my playtime and I feel like the author must have learned a lot by writing it.

In this game, you have to move words around with a special SWAP command. The opening move, in fact, can be deduced from the name of the game.

Part of the game is figuring out what to do, so I'll put the rest of the discussion of the game and story in spoilers.

(Spoiler - click to show)
This is a series of increasingly complex sentences where some words have been swapped with each other.

So, you're trying to get words in the right order. This is made a bit easier by the fact that only words of the same size can be swapped, and by capitalization rules.

It honestly must have been hard to ensure that words weren't duplicated (which could have caused some issues with commands being well-defined).

I was spoiled by an online review about the plot, but it's okay, because that's what made me want to play.

The plot is slowly revealed that transposition technology can swap the minds of living things around. This can, however, cause cognitive decline. The messed-up order of words can be seen as both representative of the wand and of the cognitive decline.

Near the end, sentences come faster and less-well-formed.

The final choice was interesting. I found two endings.

I liked the understated creeping dread of this game, great work.