Reviews by MathBrush

This game was entered in the Short Games Showcase. It's a choicescript game and begins with a lengthy opportunity to pick your gender, outfit, romantic interests, strengths, etc. before beginning with the main story.

The setup is that you're in a kind of trashy forest town where the woods are haunted with what the elders call angels. Your town has a lot of rules set up to help you avoid them, but you all are braving them during the school dance.

Your town has its share of bullies, and one of them is on the hunt for you due to events out of your control. All of this comes together at the dance.

I enjoyed the setup/premise and liked the characters and writing. I was a tiny bit disappointed with the ending, as I was hoping more for a survival story while I felt it was leaning more for an urban (or, in this case, rural) fantasy. Overall though this works as a complete whole.

This game was entered as part of the short games showcase for games under a half hour, but it is quite a bit longer than that. It's part of a larger, projected Choicescript game.

The setting for this game is a magical fantasy world where women can be born as powerful sorceresses associated to different elements and men can become Guardians who have anti-magic powers and can defend sorceress or fight them.

You play as a fire sorceress, but can choose your specialty within fire. There is an extensive amount of early customization, not just for your character, but also for the game itself. I found this a bit overwhelming as I was expecting a small chunk of game for the competition, but it makes sense as part of a larger work.

The game has an extended intro section where you meet characters and explore. There doesn't seem to be much long-term effect of your choices here, besides setting a couple of romantic options. It's more flavor, but it's well-written flavor.

Later on the game hops into an investigation mode which I think has close to twenty subsections (which again shows how large this game is, as to fit under thirty minutes each subsection would have to take less than a minute to read). In this section, you can investigate three suspects' rooms with a time limit, and also different areas of the castle. In between investigation segments, you must attend a party, with choices of who to dance or flirt with.

Some investigation options let you use magic to solve them. This consumes the magic.

I was able to solve the puzzle the first try, although I wasn't sure until later on, and I thought the game did a good job of steadily building clues.

In this game, you are a teenager who was so focused on playing arcade games in the mall that you ended up locked in after hours.

It seems set in the 80s, with the arcade having Galaga and the character not having any cell phone (looking back, the game description actually says this explicitly). It includes other 80s signs like a poster of Madonna.

Gameplay is mostly classic adventure gameplay, moving objects, searching, codes, etc. The game is coded well, and the abandoned mall vibe has some great moments, especially with encountering things that frighten you.

It kind of felt like the protagonist was getting more and more into trouble, starting with just being in an area they shouldn't be and ending up being a kind of teenage vandal, in a funny way. It would make for a pretty good TV episode.

I did feel a bit frustrated with the lock, as it's intended that you brute force it (once you get some more info), but other than that the puzzles were fair.

This game was written by one of the co-developers of PunyInform, and it shows off a lot of programming complexity.

You wake up in the aftermath of a party, and need to make sure that the evidence is taken care of. I found this the most difficult part of the game, requiring multiple attempts and close inspection.

The rest of the game is a timed series of events. You are required to act in certain roles throughout the day, and you have to be in the right place at roughly the right time. You have a variety of choices in how to act using menu-based conversation.

I was deeply impressed by the tricky programming. The NPCs all have their own agenda, their conversation topics change throughout the day, you can give orders to NPCs, and so on.

This complexity was also a bit overwhelming. Even though the solution turned out to be simple, I felt intimidated by the timer and had trouble engaging emotionally with the game because of that.

Overall, though, the game was impressive and I've added it to my TV and Film list.

This PunyComp game had a nice concept and was pretty fun, with a few caveats. It looks to be the first game by this author, which is pretty impressive if true and I would definitely play more games if they choose to write more.

You play as a paranormal investigator who comes up on the scene of a crime. Your goal is to figure out who died, how, and what to do about it.

You're equipped with two helpful sidekicks (who are later contactable by radio) and a protective amulet and an EMF reader. You explore a big mansion, solving a variety of puzzles and interacting with a few 'unusual' characters.

I was impressed by the implementation of things like the characters and a lot of the default messages. There were two big sticking points for me, though:

1-The game has an extremely small inventory limit. I was trying to carry around the 'default' gear the game gave me (radio, EMF reader, and amulet), and I could only pick up 3 items. I know some people go for realism, but these items are things like a lighter, sage, cigarettes, a pocketknife--I could easily carry all these things in real life, especially with pockets! I'd give a full point higher score if the inventory limit were removed or doubled or if a backpack were provided, or even if the amulet and/or meter were 'wearable'.

2-The game is missing a lot of scenery objects and synonyms. One really noticeable example is that the beginning of the game (so not really a spoiler) tells you that you see a lot of blood. But "X BLOOD" has no response. This is a frequent issue throughout the game, where the text prominently mentions an object but doesn't implement it.

Outside of these two factors, I enjoyed the game a lot, as I like supernatural things and mysteries. I especially liked the ambient messages about the radio and the overall thematic unity of the house.

This game is quite unusual in its structure. You can start out reading intros for different characters. While playing the game, you often switch between characters. The walkthrough has many segments that are just waiting, as this game alternates between being on rails and requiring you to guess the action that most interestingly continues the story. Fortunately, there are parts where it gives you bolded options to move forward.

The idea is that you are different people on a starship that is being hailed by opposing ships. You have to figure out what the other ships want and deal with their demands.

The game is interesting but a bit confusing and hard to play. I am glad I played it, though, and think it shows that the author put a lot of good work into this.

This game seems to be designed to be as mundane as possible while subtly poking fun at it. Here's a typical line:

"My job is to analyse how authorities can meet the challenge of sustainable development by putting people at the centre and turning current examples of good practice into established common practice, to achieve a better quality of life for all."

"I see... What does that mean?" Yasmin looks doubtful.

You work in The Unit in The Department at The Agency for a government. The game just has you talk to people, open doors, get new keys, get new cards, go to meetings, etc. It's just a depiction of average office life, complete with mergers and coffee rooms, etc.

As a concept it's pretty funny; I definitely think the writer did this all intentionally. There are some occasional flaws in the implementation (mostly the game saying 'Try something else' in situations where that's probably not best). I beat it without hints.

This parser game was meant as Episode 1 of a longer story, but this is the only entry listed on IFDB. The author had several later games that I played and enjoyed, though.

It starts with a big setup of backstory. The author paints his vision of a utopia, where highly educated people don't have kids, the Rothschilds have been rejected in favor of a bank run by Tesla (not the Elon Musk company, but the original Tesla) who has a corporation that employs 80% of Americans and supplies free power. There is teleportation and probability/parallel world adjustments, including rival worlds. This is an alternate world different than most others I had read of, and reminds me of Atlas Shrugged a bit.

The idea of the gameplay is that you are a chicken farmer. You harvest eggs, teleport them back to base for money, then buy new chickens, new food, new water, and new chickenwire. The latter is needed because ghost foxes randomly rip into your fences and eat chickens. The game ends when you make $1000.

I played around for a while, but was unable to find the key that lets you unlock the room that has a basket and the money maker, so I ended up reading a winning transcript.

Overall, it's an interesting idea and very unusual. I didn't feel deeply compelled by the mechanics and story, but if the storyline had been continued it would have been interesting.

This is a pdf that gives the rules for a collaborative storytelling game.

The basic idea is that you need an antagonist who ultimately loses and a protagonist who ultimately wins. People can add details at any time to the game but important details like character names have to be nominated and approved.

The game also includes some base ideas you can work with, including a list of character names. I thought "Johnald Pregnant" was the most amusing antagonist game.

This whole game is thoroughly described, but there's not really a lot to it. I'd imagine that someone focused on storytelling wouldn't need all the rules, and someone really into rules would want more meat. The people I see benefitting from this the most are a mid-sized group of people on a vacation trip where there's not much to do and they want to do storytelling but have a couple of obnoxious people in the group so they lay some rules down on how to proceed.

I had a few different revelations while playing this game. First thoughts: interesting mix of hyperlinks and parser. Second: is this vorple? No, Dialog. Third: a joke about Peano arithmetic? This is someone who's really familiar with parser games and math, I have to know this person. But I didn't recognize the itch name until I went to their page and saw it was Draconis!

This game is very polished. I had no idea it was meant for Petite Morte, as it would fit in just fine in IFComp. I'd say I had a 10/10 experience in the beginning, 7/10 in the middle, and 8/10 in the end.

It's a limited-verb game where you, a kind of homonculus or familiar, gain new verbs by absorbing other homunculi or familiars. These can give powers ranging from eyesight to motion to strange alchemical powers.

The game is educational as well as fun, with references to chemistry, tuning, literature, math, etc.

I was proud of not needing hints until I got stuck on a certain puzzle. I eventually realized I wasn't closely reading the results of all my actions, but only after hints. "Nudge" was useful, but for a large chunk of the game my nudge was 'gong', so I kept assuming I had to do something *to* it. That lost period was my 7/10 section.

Two things that could have been clued a bit more were what can be 'cached' and the rules surrounding the security familiar in all its uses.

Overall, very good, exactly the kind of stuff I hope for when I play interactive fiction.