Reviews by MathBrush

I like ghost stories, and mystery games, and circus settings, so this mystery game helping a ghost pass on set in a circus was enjoyable to me, though hard.

It's a choice-based game, and you move from location to location, trying to find all the information you can.

The game is randomized like Clue, with the murderer, location of the body, and murder weapon all chosen separately.

I at first thought I could play like some mystery games where it automatically records all pertinent information, so I didn't take notes, expecting the Notes tab would be an automatic collection of my thoughts. I was dismayed when I found that the notes was just a place for you to personally mark off what items you thought were most important! I played through a couple more times and used it then.

Another thing that makes the game difficult is that you have to visit areas repeatedly to see all info. Some things appear only on the second look-through.

Some of the randomized clues are much easier than others. The body location is the easiest (once you find it). Some of the murder weapon clues are much clearer than others. The person involved is the hardest; I was only really able to see what counted as an alibi and what doesn't by playing multiple times and comparing the two games.

So there are a few rough edges here and there, but I had enough fun to try it multiple times, and the art made by the artist (the author) contributed to the game.

This game was entered in Spring Thing 25, and it was a pleasure to play. It consists of three smaller games all tied together by a larger meta-story.

The first game I played was Sticks and Stones, which reminded me a lot of Tavern Crawler, an IFComp winner from a few years ago. This mini-game is played completely by arrow keys, with arrows serving both as navigation and as ways to interact. It includes combat, a money system, two protagonists, a variety of NPCs, and made me feel like I was playing a really enjoyable game (as Spring Thing organizer, I can reveal that this game actually came in 3rd in votes, and was only off by 1 vote).

I then played Treasures of the Deep, which I had seen someone else mention as short and linear, which it was. I saw the author mention in his postmortem that he went out of this comfort zone for the writing here, and I think it paid off. It gave the feeling of 'this is a person who often writes gripping stories' rather than 'this is this author's first time.'

I then played The Labyrinth, which I enjoyed but didn't like quite as much. The escape room model matches his other games, but the difficulty is reduced, so some of it felt like busy work (this is amplified by me playing all 4 people at once. I've only ever managed to pull off one multiplayer IF game.) I saw in his postmortem that new players got confused, so it wasn't super easy, but I think the real issue here is that it's important in a puzzly game to model early on the type of content and puzzles you're going to have. The Labyrinth has a lot of frustrating things (including early deaths) and content you can't interact with yet (like door riddles and the patterns on the well) before you reach the first sharable piece of information. I think it might have been better to have an optional early piece of information you can share that just gives the other players a thumbs up or encouragement or something so they can get the pattern down early. But I'm not sure.

I enjoyed the meta-puzzle at the end. I had expected it to be more subtle and had copied down patterns of gem-pushing in each game, sure that I'd have to do something like navigate to the menu to find a secret meta-puzzle by the order I push gems at the beginning. Instead, everything was quite clear and out in the open, which was fun.

Seeing only one review on IFDB, I assumed very few people had completed the game. I was really surprised to get to the end and see that over 30 people had recorded their names. I guess that really shows that the general rule of the internet applies (10 times as many people see something as interact, 10 times as many people interact as comment).

In this game, you play as an explorer searching in the ruins of a dystopian civilization. In this world, a cruel Caretaker manipulated both humans and animals, inserting cybernetic implants and controlling society.

The online play version has sound and AI-generated images. I originally played just the downloadable gblorb without the image features. While I typically don't find AI images enlightening, playing the version with graphics was useful as it gave me a quick reference point to know where I was and what the author thought was most important in a given room. It did break down at times, producing images that didn't really make sense in context.

Gameplay mostly revolves around exploration and conversation, with a few puzzles here and there. There are a ton of random deaths. I ragequit at one point because there is a timer on the surface that kills you if it's night and some kind of timer underground that kills you if you stay too long, even while wearing a disguise, so I ended up in an unwinnable state after a couple hours of play. I came here to review and saw other people mention graphics, so I tried the online version and completed it. I don't feel like the random deaths add much storywise. I also found a bug: (Spoiler - click to show)covering the solar panel doesn't give you the beetle until night has fallen I also felt that puzzle in particular was not enjoyable, as it relies purely on random coincidence; I prefer puzzles where you can see a goal and make a plan to achieve it yourself.

Storywise, it's clear a lot here was written by AI with some parts seemingly handwritten and then restructured by AI as well. Fortunately, the author seems to have a strong vision in some parts and managed to write genuinely interesting stuff, but overall this has the same problems a lot of AI-written things do:
*overly-complex descriptions of boring and mundane things (if you are so bored by an object you have AI write the description completely, why have a description at all? The player won't want to read it either)
*misunderstanding of plot arcs and appropriate emotional responses (we find the main villain just chilling in the middle of the lair with no build-up. You can just wave hi as you walk by. Wild events are described mildly: "As the cyborg drags you away, you are filled with fear and defeat." and mild events are described wildly: "Your heart pounds as the projector accepts the sleek metal device, and the display fills with text."
*the story follows mostly generic plot beats. Is there any surprise that (Spoiler - click to show)the robot overlord is evil? Or that society (Spoiler - click to show)collapsed due to a rebellion?
*The logic is often off; at the end, we discover the (Spoiler - click to show)a spaceship is seemingly prepared for us to an uncomfortable extent: air, gravity, etc. It's clear we're being welcomed here and it's uncanny. But there's randomly a door that won't let us through unless we put on a tarp to block it? It completely spoils the whole 'walk into my lair' bit.
*The walkthrough contains a lot of weird self-analysis too, explaining in a list the various forms of irony the game presents. What is the purpose of this? To tell people how to feel about the game? Would my reviews be more enjoyable if I told people "This review is well thought-out. It uses critical analysis to highlight several failures of AI writing in a thoughtful and cheerful manner, inviting the reader to ponder on the benefits of original thought and action."?

It's clear a lot of work went into the coding, which is enjoyably smooth in most parts.

This game is written in Toki Pona, a minimalistic conlang (artificial language) designed to have only around 100 words. The whole dictionary can fit on one page, so it's possible to (slowly) play this game without any prior knowledge.

I first got an idea of how to play by reading a Let's Play on the intfiction forums. After I tried playing a bit, I found that you can TRANSLATE any bolded word you see, which translates the object, its description, and context. With that as a base, I found myself slowly able to translate lines one at a time.

However, there are some big text dumps where TRANSLATE doesn't work. For those, I searched online for a Toki Pona translator and only found LLMs that do it. I decided to use Copilot to translate big chunks. I vary in my feelings on AI usage, focusing mainly on whether the AI produces good work, is depriving others of work, and on resource usage. AI is pretty good at translation, there were no other ways to translate Toki Pona except by hand, so I was only concerned about resource usage, so tried to limit my use to very large pages where I was stuck. I also assumed the author would oppose AI usage and want people to pick up the language, so I did my best. It was fun to realize that some words were just english or romance languages adapted to the alphabet (like 'group' becoming 'kulupu').

Once I was done, I realized that while the translation was done in a cool way and the game by itself is fun (and has cool CSS), they don't mesh well. I play a ton of foreign language IF, and I've found that such games are easiest for foreigners when:
-Vocab is kept simple and most commands are given on the postcard or given in the text (I found it hard to figure out how to TAKE things in the game, as it's missing from the IF command postcard and only found in text. You have to KAMA JO something or JO something. Furthermore, you MUST put an E before the object of any verb. So you have to both somehow figure out you need to type JO and to put E before something. Also, the vocab is quite complex given the simple language, as we have mechanical devices and bizarre creatures).
-All connections and points of interest in the world model are clearly labelled (In this game, there is an important action and an important exit not mentioned in the text. The exit is hinted at in a very long text dump, but the action of (Spoiler - click to show)looking under the bed is one I only tried because it was a verb on the postcard).
-Talking is handled by menu, choices, or simple TALK TO (in this game, you can ask about different topics).
-Actions like unlocking and taking and dropping are handled implicitly.) (In this game, you have a two (!) item inventory limit!)

The points above are not 'good game vs bad game', just 'games that are personally easier for me to play as a non-native speaker' vs 'harder for me'.

The story is pretty neat. To help any future players, here's a long explanation of what I encountered as I played (essentially complete spoilers):

(Spoiler - click to show)I woke up in a house and found a letter describing my affection for a dark-haired person named Penelopi. Penelopi went to the underworld. I wanted to follow. I looked under the bed and found a coin. I went outside and went to a forest. I saw plants and a bug that I remember Penelope liking. On a later playthrough, I saw a tree and had a memory of her being kind to a lizard while I flirted with her, and she suggested climbing the tree. Up in the tree I found a mechanical egg.

Later, I went (Spoiler - click to show)to a town where I went to a shop. On my first playthrough, I had no money, so I went out and talked to a guard at the mouth of a cave to the underworld. The guard wouldn't let me in and also had a copy of Counterfeit Monkey in a bag. They wanted to learn english to play it. I went and found the coin under the bed and spent it to buy an english dictionary. I gave it to the guard. He then let me into the underworld after warning that it was dangerous.

Once inside, (Spoiler - click to show)I fell down a broken floor and saw some cool CSS. I took a yellow flower. I then fell more and found Penelopi turned into a lizard monster. She saw the flower and like it so she ate me. I then replayed, looking at the game textdump uses glulx-strings and saw that there was a mechanical egg (that apparently has a neat distraction tool inside). I sold the egg and bought the ring and took the letter. This time I showed Penelope the letter and the ring, and she decided she liked me and that I could stay.

Overall, the frustrations with the difficult content in a conlang game made me want to rate 3/5, but making a game in a conlang feels like a 5/5 thing, so I'm giving 4/5.

Compared to the Gostak, this game has hard basic structure (remembering stuff like li and la and e was hard) but easy vocab ('jan wawa' isn't too hard to understand after a while), while the Gostak has easy basic structure (just English) with almost impossible vocab. Since the basic grammar structure is most of reading, I found the Gostak easier to read in a 'flow state' but this game easier to understand the overall narrative.

Charles Moore, Jr. is an author who I associate with very large, complex games with difficult puzzles.

This game is pretty big an puzzly, but not quite as hard as his others. The tutorial is very friendly and the cheat sheet is a great help together with the 'help' system, which I used a lot.

You are a bear in the woods, and you are very hungry. There are 12 different meals you can get, almost all from humans that you find. You lack most of the powers of a usual adventure protagonist like speech or fine motor control but you make up for it with fearsome presence, growls and brute strength.

The map is quite large and complex. I used a mental map and got through, but got lost many times partway through. Mapping would both help solve a ton of puzzles and make the game a lot easier.

The only drawbacks I found were that sometimes I had difficulty knowing what to type for a puzzle solution I already knew (for instance, I didn't know I had to (Spoiler - click to show)push the atv UNDER the beehive instead of just pushing it to the room.), and that sometimes the puzzles solutions involved a seemingly random combination of items from far across the map (especially the puzzles involving the (Spoiler - click to show)rubber duck and the flare gun). Other than that, I found this a well-written and enjoyable nature journey.

This game was entered in 2025 the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

In it, you wander around a makerspace with tools for sewing, cutting, soldering, etc. Along the way, you discover a broken time machine.

Repairing the machine takes you all over the makerspace and through time, helping you learn what everything does and interacting with the people there.

I got lost pretty early on as there are a ton of red herring items. As time went on there were less and less things I hadn't used yet and so it was simple to deduce what was next.

I really enjoyed learning about the makerspace!

I didn't enjoy the text, which seemed mostly AI generated. I found this odd, as I have enjoyed Richard Pettigrew's terse but witty style in his earlier games. Now, it may not be AI generated, but if it was hand-written, the author was remarkably repetitive and unhelpful. Almost everything is 'a testament to the hours/years/minutes of love/labor/etc. of its users'. Every item 'radiates usefulness' or 'hints at a special meaning' etc. Every room has several nouns mentioned in its description which aren't there at all, which defeats the purpose of a text adventure where the text is the game (it would be like a 3d game that randomly placed guns, powerup icons, medkits and quest icons but all of them were fake and did nothing). I eventually realized I could completely ignore all text except item names, as the AI text never provided any use or interest for me. I feel like I would have had more fun just reading the prompts that were used and imagining it myself.

Also, for some reason my character would randomly burp and fart for some reason throughout the game.

I liked the story progression and the ending. My favorite part, though, was the satisfying crafting process.

This game has you star as the dashing captain of a time-travelling ship piloted by a helpful Mother AI. An enemy faction is travelling to the past to sabotage your present, and you have to stop them.

There are 4 or so main time periods you travel to, each with its own set of puzzles as well as some recurring characters. Names of things in the game are often references; one whole area is a giant reference to steins;gate.

In between those areas, you can explore the large ship you pilot, with several crew members who can help you can give you advice.

The game has few bugs, although I did lock myself out of victory once by returning to my quarters before I finished a section, triggering a cutscene too early.

The story has good story beats but felt a little less descriptive in the middle, possibly because the author could vividly picture things due to the references but I couldn't due to not knowing the games.

Overall, this is a substantial game and I played it here and there over several nights.

This was quite a difficult French IFComp game for me to finish, as it's a wordplay game and involves several words that I don't know well.

It's a (mostly) one-room game where you arrive at an old professor friend's lab to find yourself locked inside! All that you have with you are the random objects that you can scrounge up as well as the professor's amazing machine that can manipulate letters.

The main rules are that you can take away one letter from an object (which transforms the object) and you can apply that letter to another object. You can only ever store up one letter at a time.

While the main story is a little thin, the setting is amusing and has a lot of nice little details. Though of course hard for me as a non-native speaker, the wordplay was fun, and there are help commands like 'penser' that are a real lifesaver.

The game is not too long, with 3 or so main puzzles to get through and a few sidequests you can do.

If you like wordplay and French, this is a great game for you.

Exceptional stories are extra bits of bonus content in Fallen London that tell their own stories.

This is one of the earliest ever put in the game. It introduces some great lore that gets used a lot later on (and which I'm glad I finally got the origin story of) and has an awesome benefit (you can buy mirrorcatch boxes any time you want), but it's a lot shorter and mechanically a bit less interesting than later stories.

The idea is that people are selling sunlight in illegal mirrored boxes, and you can end up interacting with the people doing the selling. Sunlight can be illegal; living in Fallen London can make sunlight deadly to you, so this is very dangerous contraband.

The issue is that it's also making people see things. Because, as the title says, it's been cut with Moonlight. And moonlight makes you see things in a very different way.

The best part is exploring the 'alternate london' that occurs when you've consumed the moonlight. Very fun.

Fallen London has a large number (one a month for years) of 'Exceptional Stories' that you can pay extra for to get more of a self-contained narrative than the usual plotline.

Over the years, this has consistently been one of the more popular ones. In Fallen London, there are 4 'menaces' that, if they grow to big, take you to a penalty area you have to hang out in for a while. They are jail, an asylum, social exile, and, lastly, death, represented by a dark river where a boatman is rowing to the other side, and you have to persuade him to turn back.

This story is about the boatman. Three revolutionaries have blown themselves up. Since death is temporary in this game, you could just wait for them to come back, but the damage is severe. So you are tasked by the police with going to the river of the dead and investigating them there.

While there, Death lets you take a turn at the oars, letting you become the ferryman of the dead. It becomes your task to find the three criminals, row them across, listen to their story, and decide whether they should return to life or not.

There's a lot of lore here, with connections to Parabola, the Masters, the Calendar Council, parts of the Nemesis ambition, and others. A great story for those looking to get into Exceptional Stories in general.