Reviews by MathBrush

Zeno Pillan has made several games in the past that were short, surreal parser games with cool ASCII art.

This game is much larger, with code at around 60K words. It's a party game; you're at a house with a ton of people in it and you can do things like watch youtube (where you physically enter into the videos), play a fighting game (with real attacks like special moves and stuff), talk to all the different friends, enter a world of books, etc.

The game also has four endings (and more if you read the code). Some endings are really easy to find, while the dance ending can take ton of work.

Overall, the atmosphere is wholesome and nostalgic, the ascii art is cool, and the different endings are a fun idea. The annotated code is fun to read in and of itself, with cool little doodles and such.

The only drawback I found was that the game seemed like it could use more time to get feedback from others and implement it, and to do some grammar and typo fixing. This isn't a 'the writing is bad' issue, the writing is fine, it's more stuff like capitalization errors and punctuation. One thing I like to do is run my text through a spellchecker like grammarly (although I usually ignore grammarly's more complicated suggestions). I know the author wrote this 60K (!) word game on his phone, so it might be harder there. Similarly, it can be hard to find beta testers. But if this had typos fixed and player feedback for bugs, I think this would be an amazing game. As it is, it's only a good, really fun game.

This is a German parser game where you have to leave your work after being fired but not before exposing your boss for all his crimes.

It's a comedy game, with gags like a slick ramp that makes you slide all the way to the bottom every time and nasty food left in the office microwave.

I thought at first that it was really buggy, as I had numerous commands that I found reasonable that had no response, and many errors. But...

I realized that there was just one small bug that I had found that caused all the others. As a non-native speaker, I only looked up words I didn't know. After already having found a hole punch, I then found a "gabelstapler". I thought, 'nice, a stapler!' and picked it up and went up stairs.

A gabelstapler is a forklift.

Having taken it up stairs, I turned it on and tried to get in, but I couldn't because I was holding it. I dropped it and got in and turned it on, but I couldn't drive anywhere by 'dreh linkrad' (or whatever) or going north. Trying to get out made me leave the whole building.

I started over and didn't put the forklift in my pocket. There was no problem!

So I won't take a point off for coding because it was my own fault for doing something stupid lol.

The game has a lot of possible variety, as you can end the game whenever you want by leaving out the front door. I 'won' with 16-18 points out of 25, so there's still a lot left to do. I found the game amusing!

It's interesting, I've seen Japanese-inspired games pop up in several non-English IF competitions in the last few years (I think Spanish had two), so it's kind of a mini-trend.

This was a fairly polished small game about two lovers separated by many miles and bad weather. You first play as the man, stricken by bad weather and looking for a place to rest.

You then play as the woman, seeking after her lost lover.

Gameplay is story-focused. There are puzzles, some I had trouble with (fortunately there are hints and a walkthrough), but they are all there to further the story, which is about the titular Snow Maiden.

I played to one ending out of 3. I did find some of the puzzles pretty hard, especially for a foreign-language speaker, as it required using some verbs I didn't know and examining, taking and using different background elements in ways that I couldn't have intuited on my own. I'd be interested in knowing from native speakers how hard they found these puzzles. I also felt a bit railroaded into actions I wouldn't have wanted to do in real life (this may be due to the ending I chose and there might be another path outside the walkthrough).

Overall, I liked the overall storyline and the beautiful imagery. I think most people who play German parser games would find it worth their while.

This French fantasy game is divided in both space and time. You have four days in which to act, and a large map where you can hop to different areas.

I found one ending, but I know how I could have gotten more.

The main idea is that a strange events has happened: the Gods that once ruled mortals have left, agreeing to deal with the human world no more. But some still cling to their worship.

Wandering around town, you follow clues that lead you to a conspiracy involving both gods and King. You must choose what to do with the news that you've learned.

Overall, it was fun. The giant map was intimidating, as well as the four days, but in the end most areas have nothing special and only one event of importance happens in one area each on days 2-4, making it a brief but interesting story with a large chunk of worldbuilding.

Like one comment said on itch, it would be fun to be able to order the tasty food described in the inns!

In this game, you are the lawyer or executor of Tatie Lucette and have to distribute her estate.

To do this, you examine each of the three objects (a fortune-granting golden scepter, a future-telling lamp, and some kind of weird sexual toy that transfers mind consciousness). You have to read many epistolary fragments of Tatie's history to figure out what she was like (a spy, a singer, actress, fighter, drug-user, extensive lover, and so on). Each of her 9 attributes maps on to one of the 3 artifacts.

In addition, there are 7 possible heirs (including a cat), each of which possesses differing amounts of those 9 traits.

So, it's pretty simple: find the three traits each object has, find the person who has those traits, and win!

Unfortunately, there is a time-limit, so you can't interrogate everyone. So you need to carefully pick what you'll ask who.

Or, like me, you can replay several times.

There are a ton of words in this. As a non-native speaker, it was a struggle to read a pageful or more for every choice when each of 8 different options on the screen leads to 8 or more options (so basically like a 50-100 page French book).

The game openly embraces drugs and sexuality, even having you show pornography to a minor at one point, which stuck out to me as something I didn't really feel comfortable with.

Overall, the writing was amusing and the puzzle structure was a good one that I could see being fun in future games as well.

This was a really clever game. It's currently implemented in Google Calendar, which means it may be ephemeral media; but the author is able to export a google calendar for download (player's can't as they don't have permissions to edit), so I hope they do so to keep this for future generations!

Playing the game means adding the google calendar to a google account (I used a burner account). You then look at appointments and the information in them. They link to real google earth locations and to youtube videos and, at the end, to pdfs.

Gameplay for me consisted of a lot of searching of names and keywords. The game is clever and makes some posts only consist of symbols to keep you from seeing everything at once by searching for 'le' or something like that (although basic words like that don't work anyway).

The story is science fiction and is non-linear in nature, and I experienced some ending things before some middle things. Themes include relationships, loss, liminal spaces, the Backrooms (?), and more. A lot of fun to experiment with. I don't think it holds much replay value but that's not intended anyway, I think.

Google translate works great for this game, very easy to copy and paste into another window and many of the links and some words are in English.

This French game in Concours de Fiction Interactive Francophone 2025 was a delight to play. It's a puzzle-focused Vorple game with extensive parser illustrations. Puzzles are fairly simple (although my lack of knowledge of a few words caused me some problems).

While the game doesn't feel small, each part of the game is pretty constrained so there aren't too many options and you are free to experiment till you figure out what to do next. There was one poem that was a bit hard to figure out, and I had the biggest trouble figuring out how to put something on something because I was bad at French (fortunately there are a lot of synonyms!).

The plot is that you are accompanying your master, a detective, to visit a monastery. You have to help him get in, then, the next day, solve a series of mysterious occurrences.

The game does take a pretty dramatic shift in what's possible in the very last act that surprised me, but the art for that part was also very nice. Overall, one of the more fun games I've played in a while.

This game was apparently the tutorial game in Aaron Reed's book on writing games in Inform 7, which is pretty neat.

It features a disaffected native American youth who is having school, family, and girl problems and ends up blacking out and driving fifteen miles off the road and into the desert. When you crash, you find that bad weather is coming, and you have to figure out how to either keep safe or get back.

The game has a lot of symbolic/bizarre scenes as well as a spooky abandoned place to explore.

It's completely believable that this is a tutorial game, as it shows off a wide variety of Inform tools (such as things that can be opened or closed or pushed or pulled, smelling, darkness, listening, hidden objects, conversation, etc.). Speaking of conversation, it uses 'suggested topics' which it seems was controversial when the first reviews came out but is now pretty common and generally accepted (such as in Counterfeit Monkey).

Others have pointed out that the polish is a little thing when it comes to custom responses or synonyms. I do generally dislike this in games but as a tutorial game it makes sense; you don't want to overwhelm a new author with the immense amount of custom declarations you need to make to make a game 100% polished.

I liked the storyline overall. I don't see too many Native American IF stories, and while the author doesn't seem to be (?? maybe I'm making assumptions here) firmly rooted in that culture, neither does our protagonist, who specifically struggles with being placed in between three or four different kinds of culture and tradition. I liked this, and I'm glad it was recommended for the Player's choice tournament.

This game kind of threw me out of whack for a while and is one reason I was late playing Shufflecomp games.

I started this Gruescript game (which is parser-like but with buttons for actions and inventory items). In it, you play as someone in a post-apocalyptic world that has been flooded and where most people seem to be dead or gone. You invite a neighbor over for coffee, and they offer you drugs that enhance your memory.

I had fun in my initial experience with the game, running through it and getting into my first memory. But I got really stuck after that. The game says (early, light spoilers) that the pills give you memories when (Spoiler - click to show)you smell two things. But it didn't say you had to do that simultaneously, so I just thought the pills were good for 2 memories. I got super stuck.

I eventually tried the hints, and saw the file was big, so I got overwhelmed and put off both this game and the whole shufflecomp. I ended up playing this one last, expecting it to be huge, but it wasn't overwhelming. Each memory is just a couple of rooms. Even with the walkthrough, I tried to just guess what needed to happen, but even my best guesses were often wrong, so difficulty-wise this game kicked my butt. (Also, wouldn't (Spoiler - click to show)potato chips and (Spoiler - click to show)mashed potatoes have almost the same smell? The texture is the biggest difference to me).

Writing-wise this game is exactly the kind of game I like. Very cool Inception-style plot (a bit more literally than the term is usually used but not quite). Lots of revealed mysteries and a great ending that ties it all together.

Someone else may not have the weird intro I did, especially if you realize you need to have (Spoiler - click to show)simultaneous combinations of two smells.

My view on this game seesawed wildly over time.

I played it while going through the short game showcase in fairly rapid order. I felt dismay at seeing the large chunk of text in the first passage. Then I clicked through as fast as I could without reading to estimate the size of the game (since most choice-based games lack such indications, although this one turned out to be in acts). I found out that it was essentially 'click to move forward', and I sighed; the sigh deepened when I realized each page had many 'aside' links that went to several-page long linear texts.

So this, in the end, is just a long story, with mild nonlinearity. That means that, rather than judging it against all interactive fiction, where bad writing can be made up for by clever mechanics, I would instead be comparing it to all written stories.

And in that vein, it is good, getting better as it goes on, due to its slow buildup. But I feel like the narrators could have been more strongly differentiated in voice (all felt pretty refined, educated, resigned and frank, despite describing very different events) and that more of a plot arc could have been built up; the climax seemed sudden with no denouement.

I do believe this is just a matter of taste; I prefer more pulpy/genre fiction than literary fiction, and I can think of several people I could recommend this to who would deeply enjoy it. For me, I don't think my time was wasted and I'm glad the author has made it, but I missed the things mentioned above and, as a work of IF, I would have loved more involvement.

On a side note, the 'restart' button is in the lower right corner, and the 'move on' button was right next to it, and sometimes the way to move on was clicking a word, so I ended up clicking 'restart' on accident several times, often when the passages were most exciting. I feel like this is more my fault than the author's fault, so I'm only mentioning this so that others can avoid being dumb like me.