Reviews by MathBrush

This is my third and final Lamppost Projects game to play during this competition, and it is quite different than the rest in some ways.

All three games are set in a D&D-lite world with orcs, half-orcs, halflings, tieflings, magicians, and a setting a little later in European history than most fantasy I've dealt with (this one seems to be around 1600s or later, maybe even 1700s).

All three games also feature watercolor-looking art and a collection of four or more romanceable characters per game, of varying races and genders.

Where this game differs from the rest is that you have skills and animated dice rolls; the others had no randomness at all. The animated dice rolls look really satisfying and seeing the numbers and the target difficulty (and the way the game encourages you to try and fail and keep trying, just like a good GM) makes this a much more pleasant randomized experience for me than most.

You are a private investigator brought into to protect an opera from a threat of robbery. You have to meet the various performers and backstage people and take careful notes, while making use of the background knowledge you chose beforehand. I focused on observation but made myself clumsy, so I did great in conversations but pretty bad when trying to sneak peeks at things covertly.

One outstanding feature of the game is that you can guess the truth of the game at any time starting near act 1, and the game rolls with it if you get it right, which I did right at the end of act 2. You have to pick the right suspect, motive, means, etc. and what's great is that you only have to be mostly right (I had the wrong motive, but otherwise succeeded). If you succeed most of your rolls for your good skills, the villain is fairly obvious, but the target and motives eluded me at first.

I think I like this game best of the three despite a few rough edges (there is romance but it's all packed at the very end of the game and feels separate from the rest), because I have a personal fondness for detective stories, and deduction is very hard to model but this system is one I'll mention in the future when others ask about mystery game advice in the future.

I've played a lot of Stewart Baker's games, and I usually associate him with lighthearted longform narrative-focused choice-based games.

This is a more serious choice-based game with a complex world map and a lot of navigation and some light tracking of objects. To me, it feels like an experiment in shifting tones, and so I'm framing my review with that mindset. That may be an incorrect interpretation, which may render parts of this review less valid.

In this game, you are on a sea, your memories shattered into several (visible) pieces and you have to visit the important locations of your life to remember and revive that part of your life. You learn about your experiences as a youth and as a powerful wizard, and can visit the islands in any order. The world map is navigated with compass directions, as are the individual islands. In each memory, you wander around completing tasks, often tasked with going to specific parts in the map one at a time. Some memories are much shorter. As you complete memories, you have some leeway in how to end them, which raises your score in one of three attributes.

I think recovering your memories as a powerful but defeated creature is a solid trope and works well here. It reminds me of the game Dreamhold, a parser game where you are similarly navigate a space collecting your past memories of a life involving magic and power.

The most effective parts of the game to me were the heavily unusual parts, like what happened to our childhood schoolfriend and what lies hidden below the caves we explore. The author has a talent for describing the truly unusual in an unsettling way.

I was less enthusiastic about the world model and compass navigation. There were large swathes of maps that were essentially 'Hallway D' (but the outdoors equivalent'. I remember something Adam Cadre wrote in a review of Galatea:

In interviews I've been asked to give potential IF authors out there advice, and one of my usual lines is, "The pieces of text you write are the player's reward for thinking of the command that calls them up. So make them rewarding."

While this is choice-based and you don't need to think up commands, it still holds when it comes to discovering new text through exploration. Some of these descriptions could use some more excitement:

This hut is nothing special. Twenty strides by twenty, it holds whatever the village needs holding.

You can reach the veranda of your home to the south-east, while a dirt path leads south-west towards the main road.

This isn't universal advice; Wizard Sniffer has shockingly bare room descriptions and a lot of connecting hallways yet is still well-beloved, but that's mostly due to the large and lively cast that provides flavor in those rooms. (Sorry for the long digression!)

I chose to mostly focus on Despair, one of the three stats you start with. I enjoyed the freedom to choose what to focus on. I think there was one very minor bug near the end where, even though I had used despair the most (both getting and giving), the options I had to choose were ones the walkthrough indicated as applying to coldness. (Specifically, [spoiler]the trials I faced were fire and a rickety bridge, though my stats were 3 1 1 (D C R) and I spent 2 1 1 on the four islands.[/spoiler]

The overall plot is something I liked, and it felt like a replay would definitely be meaningful, since most islands have very different endings to the stories depending on you choice, and there's no back button (there are saves though). So I thought that part of the game was particularly well-constructed.

Lady Thalia and the Case of Clephan

This is the latest entry in a longstanding series of Twine games featuring a lady thief protagonist, a series of stealth and theft puzzles, and conversations with different tacts.

In this game, our lady thief Thalia has reformed, and is now helping to run a detective agency with her will-she-won't-she former police officer Mel. With no more thieving, Thalia is a bit down in the dumps. Things take a turn, though, when a new thief appears:

Lady Thalia. Another lady Thalia, that is. This case of stolen identity is resolved through four different chapters.

The main conversation system worked well for me in this entry. You pick between being Friendly, Direct, and Leading On, depending on the personality of your listener. If you pick the wrong one, it will give you verbal cues showing the problem with your approach, and you can adjust. I do admit I reloaded some saves (not necessary, just wanted to) to 'fix' some mistakes I had made, but it always felt fair.

The exploration portions include some code-finding for locks, some searching of rooms, etc. I did get confused a bit in one area because I didn't map it out, but this fits the game itself, where paying close attention earlier and taking notes can give you big advantages later on.

It's probably recency bias but I like this one more than my memory of liking the others in the series, and since I liked those, this must be pretty good!

(I have the feeling that I forgot to comment on some essential part of the game, but what it is has slipped my mind. If someone who's played it feels I omitted something important, let me know!)

Edit: Maybe it was the fact that your persuasion doesn't work on your love interest and that that is commented on in-game, which was a fun way to handle things and a commentary on the usual formula of 'say five things this person likes and then you can make out'. I do like some games where it's not what you say that someone likes but who you are, so as you make choices that adjust your personality, you fall in and out of the range of likability for the ROs. In this game I think your true nature is pretty fixed, and that's what Mel likes.

Editedit: After some reminders, I remember what it was. With Mel on your side, you can now tag-team conversations, deciding who says what and in what order, which was really a huge amount of complexity (it felt like to me) but not punishing, so very nice.

Also, I felt the game was setting up a very obvious twist in the villain reveal, but it subverted it at the end in a way that made all the earlier clues still kind of make sense.

Before I played this game, someone told me that it had significantly improved on the last two games, which I thought was pretty neat. After playing, I do agree that it's the strongest of the three.

This is part of a series of three games involving hard-bitten detectives, drug rings, exotic dancers and organized crime--except, everything is candy or sweets: the people, the blood, the drugs, the river. Each game has a murder that you investigate, then track down the murderer and accuse them. I don't completely recall everything from the other two games, but all the locations and many people this time seemed familiar. There's a lot of new stuff, though.

The main features of this game are Jimmy Pinata, the strung-up, disemboweled victim (very normal for a pinata, but not normal for a sentient being); and blue rock candy, an ultra-pure drug that's flooded the markets. You have to track these both down.

Gameplay is a mix of classic parser take/drop/lock/unlock and ask/tell/show conversation. The topics available are pretty robust, with most labelled in bold but allowing you to learn of a topic in one conversation and use it in another.

In the past, I associated these gumshoe games with having an incredible setting, a solid story, compelling characters, and kind of shaky implementation. The implementation has gotten substantially better over time, but I found myself fighting over synonyms for a lot of the game. I did try playing without the walkthrough (as opposed to my early ifcomp days where I'd use a walkthrough from the beginning to power through as many games as possible), and got really far, but there were a few times where I was foiled by lack of synonyms or alternative solutions not working (or, just being dumb!). I didn't identify any bugs, though, and I'm sending a transcript to the author, so I suspect if you're reading this from the mildly distant future that you may not have as much trouble as me (which, again, wasn't really that bad. This is among my most enjoyed games this comp so far).

This gimmick is almost infinitely exploitable; you can put any hardboiled old story in here and make it work. You could branch out and do a candy version of the movie Vertigo, or modernize it and do a candy Bourne Ultimatum. This is essentially the IF version of the muppets, where you can do a take on any story and make it funnier, so I hope it continues.

This is a long Twine game about a family of 19 that visits a theme park that (to me) seems clearly Disney-influenced (due to things like a water-based ride that takes a picture of 8 people at a time for a souvenir, or a hall of american history).

The overall structure of this game reminds me of nothing more than the Wikipedia summary of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which has been voted the best movie of all time. I haven't seen it, but it's described as a very long, slow movie about a single mother who has a dull daily routine (including daily prostitution). Her day is shown in slow stillness over and over for hours, but then flaws enter her routine, and in the end she becomes violent and breaks out.

This game is similar. The beginning part emphasizes the chaotic and frustrating nature of a Disney (or Universal Studios) trip with 19 people. There are constant little arguments and clamoring from children and adults wanting to take a break and get a drink or food, etc. Like Jeanne Dielman, this story is (intentionally) paced painfully slowly, with large pages filled with large paragraphs of very similar, repetitive material. To me, this seems intentional, so that when the strange flaws begin to creep in (which I first noticed in a scene involving a mole), it becomes more shocking and strange.

There are two main protagonists I saw more than any other, Lou and a name you chose yourself (I chose Evelyn from Incredibles 2). I had great trouble distinguishing between the two at first, as speakers and act-ors change frequently in the middle of paragraphs, and spoken text is often written without italics or quotations. Here is an early sample:

The combination of smells only intensifies inside the park. Added to it now is the smell of melting rubber-shoe-soles, engine exhaust, caramel, horse manure, artificial vanilla. grandma is dying for a cup of coffee, does anyone else want anything? Three hands go up, two adults and one child. The two adults want coffee also, the child wants an ice cream cone. This earns a rebuke from her father. Ice cream! It’s eight in the morning! But grandma is quick, this is vacation! Let’s have ice cream!

While the protagonist whose name we choose is interesting and has some experiences meeting up with other local college students, I followed Lou more. Lou is older, a gay woman in her 30s, and not out to her homophobic family. As she ventures through the park and navigates interactions with her family, she also encounters a mysterious voice on a walkie-talkie channel, as well as an attractive bartender. The ending of her story was long, complex and unexpected.

I think the overall concept of this game is well-thought out, and it's clear the author has great skill at writing. In this case, they obtained the effect they desired, but I found it dense and not fully enjoyable. The suffocating feel of the large paragraphs, the confusion of switching perspectives and speech, it effectively simulated the 'big stressful vacation', but one maxim I've had over the years is "a perfect simulation of a boring or annoying situation is boring or annoying". However, I'm torn, because this same frustration in the early sections is needed for the setup for the big changes in the end. So I don't have any advice for this author, other than to give my own personal subjective experience.

Playing the game did make me reminisce a lot. For the last five years or so, me and my son have been part of a big family vacation to the mountains in Utah, where we wander around as a group of 17. Many parts of this game felt familiar, like navigating different political climates (some of my family are ardent Trump supporters, while others are lifelong Democrats) and the chaos of big groups and tracking down missing kids. Others were less familiar; we don't drink or have blow-out arguments, and we pick completely chill vacations without structure where we mostly swim. We do have closeted gay family, but the 'support' side is large and there is no open hate. None of this affects the verisimilitude of the game, and is likely not relevant to the author or other readers, but it's interesting to see how other people perceive the same life events as us. I have also, conversely been on non-family trips that had this exact suffocating feeling, desire to flee from everything, and buying a flight early. So a lot of this story rang true to me.

Another factor tied in to the whole 'frustrating setup, satisfying payoff' is that there isn't much freedom early on, and we only get freedom in choice as the protagonists themselves do. I was particularly frustrated early on where I had the choice to expose a family member's cruelty or not. I chose not to, but the game said something like, 'Yeah right! No, you do the other choice.'. Similarly, at the very end, for Lou's path, I had to choose between two major options. I chose the more cowardly option, and the game ended very abruptly, leaving me wondering if this was a 'fake' or 'bad' option and that I'd need to replay to see the other.

I commend the author's intense efforts and strong writing skill. For me, I felt a strong dislike for the world in the first half, but that was a reflection of the author's ability, and not the lack thereof.

In this game, you play as a severed hand that has regained the sentience and motility its owner once had, due perhaps to the experiments of Dr Frankenstein and his assistant Igor. As a hand, you have low mobility and can only carry one item at a time.

Your goals are to explore and to try to figure out how you returned and what to do now. Along the way, the map opens up a bit and you're able to explore more of your world.

Also, all static descriptions are written in poem form, while varying text (such as for dropped items) and conversations are written in prose. The poetry often as ABAB structure and sometimes ABCB, and a few times has some internal rhymes as well, I think. I think that it was done pretty well, and that it (perhaps unintentionally) helps to highlight most important items (excluding some scenery), kind of like how in old 2d animation, objects that would move later in a scene were a different color from objects that were always part of the background.

Most of the puzzles are well-clued and smooth. There were a few instances of small bugs that caused me problems, and I ended up being locked out of victory due to a timer on an item, but I messaged the author about the bugs. I do recommend saving often just in case.

I couldn't really figure out the tone of the game, as it varies from mildly comedic or slightly dark humor to fairly gruesome to heartfelt. I felt like the overall plot arc was narratively satisfying and that overall it was a good story.

Adaptations are a fraught area of interactive fiction. How close do you stay to the original? Do you introduce choices by allowing people to select from previously existing scenes, or do you vary between the 'canon' story and your own selections?

This is a cyberpunk adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. It takes selected events from the book and replaces references to farm and country life to references to web connectivity, corporations, devices, and hacking.

In structure, it has long pages of text, usually with a 'next' button at the button, with larger choices happening a few times per chapter. The text per choice is much larger than is usual for Twine or Choicescript; for me, it was reminiscent of Chooseyourstory games, which often have the same 'several pages followed by a weighty choice' format.

I read Anne of Green Gables and watched shows about it a bit as a kid, but at the time I thought it was meant for even younger kids than me, so I didn't pay it much attention.

So, with vague memories of Anne of Green Gables, I read this interactive fiction game. At several points I thought, "How close is this to the original?" and looked up the Project Gutenberg copy. Reading through passages of it was a real delight. It's clear why this book has endured so long; the characterization and dialogue writing are exceptional, a generational talent. For my personal tastes, my favorite writer for voice and style has been Arthur Conan Doyle, but Anne of Green Gables compares very well with that. Other authors can have some mediocre 'local' writing that is supported by great global plot structure, but these two are great at the line by line writing.

This became a problem while playing the game, because while Brett is actually a good author (you should check out his other games!) I began comparing all of his additions directly to the real story, and they suffered by comparison. It's like having the star player of your local college play against MJ, or being tasked with adding a flying saucer and aliens to Van Gogh's Starry Night.

One example is when Anne meets Diana. In both versions, she declares that the two of them should be bosom friends and should declare their affection to each other by swearing an oath (all this after having exchanged less than five sentences with each other).

In this version, Anne says:
"We ought to make this vow over running water. I assume under the ground here are some water pipes. That'll do."

In the original, Anne says:
“We must join hands—so,” said Anne gravely. “It ought to be over running water. We’ll just imagine this path is running water."

The first one is amusing; taking a serious vow requirement and just halfway-ignoring it. The second is extremely amusing to me: Anne has just met this brand-new girl, instantly declared herself best friends, concocted a very elaborate oath, and then instantly says it's okay to ignore reality by using their imagination. This connects to the overall theme of a lot of the book, of Anne living in a realm of imagination and fantasy, being brought down to earth by Marilla. So this scene fulfills one useful narrative role in the game, but many roles in the book.

Similarly, other great passages from their book lose their weight in this world. Anne's flights of fancy in the original contrast with her mundane world; in this version, she's surrounded by the bizarre and fanciful at all times, with endless amounts of entertainment. In the original, Matthew's fate is a solemn capstone on the whole book, something that immediately and inescapably focuses Anne's life on reality. In this version, it's a somber event that is then succeeded by the 'true' finale, which is perhaps the most fanciful event of the story and teaches a different moral, that Anne does have agency against tragic events in life, that trying hard enough can overcome any obstacle, and that living in her fanciful realm is the true path.

When reading the directly adapted parts, I preferred looking up the original and reading that. When reading the newly-minted parts, I enjoyed learning more about the world and trying out the mechanics.

With all of this said, I still think this is one of the better adaptations of pre-existing text I've seen. All adaptations run into the issues I've mentioned; I wrote a Sherlock Holmes game with text from Arthur Conan Doyle, and I had the same issue of my own text contrasting poorly with Doyle's, and struggling to balance linearity/faithfulness with branching/new material. I think that Anne of Green Cables succeeds better than my own game, or than Graham Nelson's The Tempest. But its greatest effect on me was making me want to read through the whole book (or listen to audiobook; it seems like it would be great in that format).

Andrew Schultz's wordplay games can be presented on a spectrum between "the wordplay puzzles are extremely hard to guess without automated tools and/or lawnmowering" and "the entire game is trivial". This game is one of several that hit a sweet spot in the middle, closer to (but not on!) the easier side.

The mechanic here (which I won't reveal for spoilers) has small complexity and can be sounded out most of the time, making it not too bad. Another of this author's games, Wipe Out, is his third-highest rated game on IFDB, and I expect this one to end up high on that list as well.

I happily plowed through much of the early game and got about 35 out of 64 points on my own. After that, I had to consult the guide about 3-4 times. The main times I had to consult it were for puzzles that went beyond wordplay and required leaps of insight or finding patterns. I think those extra puzzles were interesting, and I wonder if I could have worked them out if I had been more diligent.

The plot is mostly held together by a common food-based theme. I enjoyed the help system and found it easier to use than some other games by this author, and I thought the ending was fun, though.

This was a longer, thoughtful Twine game with a clickable world map and heavy inventory use. The inventory occupies a side bar, and different elements light up in red and become clickable when in the appropriate location, allowing for some complexity.

The story is about a future where carbon dioxide is so prevalent that the air is poisonous to humans. Everyone lives underground while above-ground scientists work to purify the air. The purification plant has stopped working, though, and so you, a young girl, have been sent to the above-ground lands to try to get it working again.

The writing is melancholic and wistful. Simultaneously, I was excited by the writing style but found it hard to focus on. You have to click to make each line appear for some pages, which wasn’t too bad, but the slightly slower pace and the desolation of each passage made it easier for my mind to drift away from the game.

Mechanically, you basically plow through the map (I love being able to click directly on the map to skip to a room I’d been in before), and there are rooms with obstacles and rooms with obstacle removers (like locks and keys, for instance). There is a timer of sorts (your oxygen tank) but I think it’s cued to story beats and not to your actions, which is great. Near the end there are some trickier puzzles, but the puzzles in general aren’t too hard, allowing the story to take center stage.

I think this game nailed the atmosphere it was going for (no pun intended). The design UI is great. Something about the whole project didn’t draw me in fully, but that’s a completely subjective experience, and I did find it above-average for an IF-game.

I often leave Arthur DiBianca's games to the end as a treat, but I decided to play this one early as part of my effort to play longer IFComp games.

You play as a hacker with a device that lets you hook into any system that has a certain kind of computer component. Your goal is to infiltrate a building and wreak havoc on an Agency, following a list of objectives. I'd definitely take inventory first in this game!

This game took me 2 hours, with 1 hour for a single puzzle (one of the last ones) and 1 hour for all the rest put together. I also ended up using the walkthrough for that puzzle.

This game is a limited parser game where all puzzles involve moving a character around a screen. There are a variety of mini-puzzles, although almost all have blurred in my mind after the time spent on that one puzzle. Many of them require optimization, memorization, and experimentation. Gameplay is closer to Baba is You or Adventures of Lolo than standard interactive fiction gameplay. This is a series of graphical games written in Inform connected by an interactive fiction overworld.

Some of the subgames involve clever gimmicks that require some sideways thinking. Others can become tedious; one such game was a game where you have to memorize a map before navigating it in the dark, with any mistake sending you to the front. The first few of these were really fun, while the last few felt like homework with copying down lists of commands.

One of the very last puzzles had a countdown timer based on moves, and that's the one I spent an hour on. It's an optimization puzzle with a very large set of parameters. I attempted it from a lot of different mental angles, trying different strategies and approaches. I often got within a single move or two of the finale, after shaving off ten or twenty moves from my first approach. In the end, I followed the walkthrough, and there were just a few moves off of my approach.

I think most of the game was pretty fun, and I enjoyed the final door puzzle especially.