Reviews by MathBrush

The Last Voyage of the Warsaw Queen

I felt this game was an improvement over the last two Charles Ball games I played, and I had a good time. The world map was big and complex, and there were a lot of moving NPCs and multiple solutions and active scenes, but the hint system and provided map got me through.

In a way, it reminded me of what MT W's games could have been. That author would often have very complex games with multiple independent NPCs in interesting settings (including a riverboat accessed by time travel), but it was often underimplemented and hard to play without a guide. I often thought that, with more polish, they could be more successful, and I feel I'm seeing vindication of that here with this style of polished, complex game. Interestingly, this game also features the Necromonicon, which shows up in several MT W games. It's like an AU where all those games ended up fully fleshed out.

You play as a visitor to a steamboat-themed hotel who is sent back to the past by a medallion. You enter a steamboat, the Warsaw Queen, where you ancestor is up to no good. Everyone is a phantom, and moonlight makes them disappear. You are there for a long time and tons of events happen, especially gambling card games, and you can go in and out of 12 cabins and a big map of rooms on the ship. It is the night before the ship historically crashed and burst into flames, killing everyone. Can you stop it?

There were some flaws. The provided map doesn't cover all floors. In a rare instance of lack of polish, I was able to take the ship's wheel in the pilothouse. Some story parts don't make sense; why does our great grandfather keep going into the cabin and writing more in his journal, then leaving? And why when it says he comes out to join the game, does he disappear back into his room to write more? Maybe I missed a scripted event. The rules for when you can interact with each other are also inconsistent, but the story notices this and gives justification or points it out. It's easy to get lost in what you're doing.

Highlights include the alligator and plots by others to get the alligator, the descriptions of the medallion and evil symbols, the intricate period details (including the wallpaper reference). I also liked the hint system, which gave good nudges forward and provided puzzle solutions I wouldn't have conceived of (though they made sense in hindsight).

SCAVS

First, to get it out of the way: this game has the kind of flowery but generic, emotional but not the right emotional text that I have seen a lot more in the last year or two popping up:

(these are all from different parts of the game)

Jyn: And then, it starved in the very home that had let it thrive. Now there's just this: the ghost of a butterfly's wing, reaching out… I guess everything turns to dust here.

The land has begun to change. It's less volcanic, more sandstone and granite. Beautiful streaks of something here, almost crystalline, flecked with glints of purple… quartz maybe? Cracks run down the side. This place is being torn apart in slow-motion. Rapid freeze-thaw cycles have worn and eroded it away. The floor is covered with stones as if the mountain is just crumbling from old age. I guess none of that matters much – it's not Helium-3. But it's still interesting, right?

Jyn: Oh this feels eerie, and… kinda lonely. Giant mechanical monsters, all left to die. Great steel armatures looming out at strange angles. Like a giant construct just keeled over. Everything abandoned, twisted, corroded, and left creaking in the wind. Feels like… like the planet won. Everything dies eventually, doesn't matter how much Helium-3 there is around. This is what's left of us when everything's taken away.

Jyn: My mind… slides away because it knows where that leads. Pain drowns happiness – it's like a deep, black ocean and happiness can't swim.

There's nothing wrong with the writing, but after a while I came to realize that none of it really meant anything, so I could skim through without reading closely. Edit: the author has confirmed that the text is 100% human-written.

Beyond that, there's a lot of fun about this game. There is a cool opening intro with a spinning planet, and a dynamic notification system and map. Some parts of the system didn't quite make sense; for instance, we get alerts that there are new data logs, but clicking on the alerts doesn't send us to the logs, which would have been easy to do. The messages box only appears when new messages come in, so once you dismiss it you can't read new messages, but when it reappears it still has all the old ones. Edit: the author has confirmed that the info button provided access to messages at all times.

The game helps you a lot, with a map that upgrades over time and a list of points of interest.

The story is about you, an operator, commanding two different scavengers to pick up helium from the planet. You are told not to form an emotional attachment to them and are warned for doing so, but they frequently try to talk to you. This is played entirely straight, so there's definitely a 'good path' and a 'bad path'.

As you play and as you disobey orders, the backstories of the people involved slowly are unravelled until you reach a dramatic conclusion. There is a big twist. I don't know if it completely made sense, but I may need to replay.

I most enjoyed unlocking and exploring different areas of the map and creating new connections. That felt fun. The game also did a good job differentiating in the map exploration of the two main characters.

Overall, this felt like a very polished game based on well-worn tropes with a sprinkle of imaginative creative direction over the top. I wouldn't mind seeing more games like this or that had some of the fancier features of this game.

Doppelgangers

Man, this was kind of a bummer.

I've been pretty militantly anti-AI text adventures for a long time. I just think they're not that good, and lead to poorly made games. I do think some games I have enjoyed in this competition and ones earlier in this year contain text or plots that are AI-generated and human curated, and I believe some games I found mediocre have almost fully AI-written text. The writing has improved somewhat. But I still find most AI-designed games to be fairly poor.

At the same time, I have started using AI more in other areas of my life. I do like its ability to scan images and produce text from them, for instance a png of a manga panel and translating it into japanese, or asking it how to do a math problem not to trust its answer, but to see what method it reaches for and see if it's one I'm familiar with.

So I decided to give the LLM in this game a chance (you can choose to activate it or not to satisfy comp rules). I activated it. You have to sign in with an email. I don't trust AI sites with my email info so I made a burner gmail and used a rarely-used browser to log in.

Unfortunately, the LLM contributed essentially nothing, from what I saw of Mike Russo's playthrough.

The idea of this game is that you're wandering an asylum, while you have dementia, and you have to interact with others. You can talk to others to persuade them to do things. Occasionally, the game gives you persuasion checks. In non-AI mode, you always fail.

In AI mode, I guess you always fail. I tried many variations, including cajoling, threatening, reasoning, pointing out i was in a fictitious world. I couldn't find any way at all to pass the checks.

I did beat the game by being evil and killing everyone. But the LLM essentially contributed nothing; I don't see any reason to play with it on. Even with it on, it didn't print any AI-generated text, which was nice; instead, it chose between pre-written options based on the AI's decision.

The base game was janky; I dropped all in my room and got electroshock therapy; when I returned later, I couldn't see any items, but could TAKE ALL. Basic actions like taking your clothes are described in clunky ways. Many commands starting with TALK TO give the result of the game has the game say you can only go N, S, E, or W. There's a random maze at the end without much to redeem it.

I think the game could have benefitted a lot from seeing what other games can do in this space. Even if we kept the generic, stereotyped asylum setting, we had text games like Lunatix - The Insanity Circle from almost 30 years which had a rich custom parser, compelling characters and a fun plot.

The best redeeming feature of Doppelgangers is its interesting take on conversation and NPC independence, especially things like talking about other patients and things and the way that NPCs find bodies you don't hide well or take contraband into account. A game that combined these features with the polish and storyline of more mainstream IF games (if there is a mainstream for IF parser games) would be very solid.

By the way, I have been harsher in this review, and that's because I assume much of the coding and/or planning was AI generated, so is not due to the author's own inability, and can be more fairly pointed out.

Edit: I found out you can see the game code in the download, which is fascinating and fun to read, but is also clearly ai-influenced or written, unless the author puts emojis in the comments for fun. I do wonder if there is a bug with the LLM part, since I saw the prompt that gets sent to them and even following the prompt very closely I couldn't succeed in persuasion after logging in and using LLM mode.

It does hurt the game having such open-ended input with very little responsiveness to mistakes besides 'you failed'. You can't tell if you're failing because you need to alter your approach, or if the llm is broken, or if you need to capitalize letters, etc. That's one reason I don't really like LLMs in games in general, the hard boundaries of the world are often the most helpful, and tearing those down doesn't really enhance gameplay.

Ironically, while playing this mystery game about putting clues together, I had two moments of clarity where I thought 'ha, this reminds me of ____' and then put two and two together.

The first (which should have been obvious) was that I thought, 'man, this interface really reminds me of Paintball Wizard', which lead me to look up and realize that Doug Egan made Paintball Wizard.

The second moment was that I was enjoying the clue linking thing and thought, 'Ha! I used that for my game Color the Truth, and Erstwhile used it to. I'm glad to see someone else had the same idea.' Then after I beat the game, I saw in the credits that the author was originally planning on using the Color the Truth system before settling on Twine. I think the game is better for the Twine version; the menus and quick navigation significantly improved my experience.

This game is a goofy cartoonish comic hero mystery game with distinct characters and solid dialog. You play as a brain on a skateboard with no real way of interacting with the world. The leader of your superhero band, Captain Prodigious, has died, and you have to figure out who killed him.

Gameplay has 3 main systems. The first is talking to people, which gives clues. You can say those clues to every suspect, and can combine them to get better clues. The second is gaining more physical capabilities, such as pushing, taking, and getting keycards. The third is using those capabilities to obtain physical evidence.

Some clues cannot be used in normal conversation, but are saved up for a big 'in the parlor' type meeting where you finally explain things to everyone. There, you pair up clues again.

I was worried that I'd be put off by the goofiness of the game (which continues throughout), but it's good-natured fun and it has serious undertones that were meaningful, like the desire for young adults to be treated with respect and the difficulties that married couples have in spending time with each other, or the way that disabled people can be neglected.

Like many of these clue-matching games, the midgame was the hardest, when you have the most unmatched clues and knowing what to do next is hard. I used one hint at the time. Other than that, the game did a great job of managing the quadratic clue-matching space by hinting at things like 'oh, this conversation topic was almost enough, you need more to convince this person' or 'you should try this with someone else'.

The game felt substantial. It felt more approachable to me than Paintball Wizard was. It does have a few rough edges; I think I remember someone mentioning that waiting for people to leave a room or be together was hard, but someone else pointed out that you can wait in the foyer, and I used that and it was great (until it disappeared near the very end before the summative thing, but by then I didn't need it anymore). Actually, that's the only real rough edge I had.

I'm really interested to see how this places. I love mysteries, and the good features in this game mean I wouldn't be surprised to see this in the top 5. However, I don't know how people will react to the interface and the goofy superhero genre, so I could see it placing somewhere else in the top 20. But I personally hope it gets higher than paintball wizard did! (which was 13th). I've played a lot of fun games this comp already, though, so I guess it's not overall placement that matters, but quality of game, and I think this game is really high quality.

Tales of Nivea: GRIP

I had a long emotional journey playing this game.

I at first worried it would be a boring AI game, given its well-made UI and its use of M-dashes, but as I played I found it had a fairly solid plot arc and escalation and continuity, and that characters were well-defined and interesting.

It's a game designed to make you question 'just following orders'. You live in a society with scarcity issues where people can be born with magical powers of different elemental types and strengths. Your job is to process ones flagged as dangerous or interesting to either send them to military conscription, permanent home arrest, or death.

There are criteria for each three, though I forgot them early on (it may be worth writing them down). Two are clear, but conscription was harder for me to know.

The game tracks your choices. I found it compelling to try to decide between them.

Less compelling was the rather opaque interface. I thought I had been a complying toady the whole time only to discover I received the 'rebellious' ending. Looking at the code, apparently every time you question the children at all, you gain 'doubt' points. So getting more content from the game hurts you without it alerting you to that fact. Other aspects are confusing at times; I kept getting notices at the end of cases that I hadn't compared two facts. I thought that was because I had selected the wrong messages to transcribe in my notebook, but apparently I was meant to click on that message and that would resolve it (I don't know if clicking on that message increases any counter).

Sometimes I felt the game was a bit too strong with the emotions, but other times it did a great job of selling powerful moments through understated text, which I liked. I think the author is talented at writing.

It reminded me of jury duty I had this year. The defendant was a young adult man. We found out that he was on trial for child molesting. A lot of us were thinking about how many years to give him (he had pleaded guilty and it could not be overturned, this was just a sentencing trial). Many of us at first seemed disposed to give him what felt like a large amount, like 20 or more years. As the trial progressed, it turned out he had abused numerous children, even infants, and had been on trial before and found guilty, and had gone to therapy but skipped out on most of the meetings, and then had signed up as a church youth counselor. He testified (against counsel) and said that he would likely do it again and it was something he did to relax when tense.

Even then, the jurors were split. I advocated that he be in jail long enough that even with parole he wouldn't get out while his victims were still children. One man said he'd only do life. Several people refused to do life or anything over 60 years, since it meant this guy's entire life would be gone by the time he went out.

We had restrictions. We were instructed to follow the law. We could assign a fine. Asked who the fine would be paid by and to, we were told that 'the law is before you, follow it' and were not given further instructions.

So, it was exactly the scenarios in these files. You have people, often repeat offenders, who are a hazard to the community. Do you deal with them as the law requires? Even if you feel the law is unjust?

Anyway, the memories of the trial came up during the game (I know this is heavy, but I'm making the connection of my own free will, so I hope the author doesn't feel obliged to step in and say 'that was awful!' or 'I'm sorry it made you remember that' because I think one of fiction's best uses is presenting our minds with unusual scenarios that help us process our thoughts, memories and emotions).

I do think some of the mechanics could be made more clear, and sometimes I felt the story expected me to remember more of earlier incidents than I did. Overall though I found this a thoughtful, well-constructed and worthwhile game.

Ryan Veeder's Agatha Christie's the Murder on the Orient Express

This is Schroedinger's game to me, an uncollapsed wavefunction of a game that is simultaneously vexatious and amusing.

First the vexatious. I had formed an image in my mind of what this game could be, and this was not it. The game also did some things that I thought games and stories should not do. However, this was a pre-conceived rubric imposed by my own desires that does not respect an author's creative expression; it is as if I had decided what I thought a 'proper adventure' was and yelled at others for not reaching my arbitrary standards.

Let me enumerate my unfounded complaints. The game is a Poirot parody/pastiche, but I've heard it said (and agree) that parodies are most enjoyable when they evince an affection or love for the original material. This game gives me the impression that the author despises Poirot. It focuses on little except his exceptional arrogance and pride, his belittlement of women, his membership in an elite ruling class that he treats with favoritism. His manner of speaking is more Veeder than Christie; it reminds me of a recent X skit I saw where a couple were haunted by the ghost of Michael Jackson, but the ghost wasn't really MJ and didn't know him well so he speaks with a Puerto Rican accent and says "Pingpung" instead of 'hee hee'.

The other main issue is that the game discards traditional elements of mysteries. Instead of finding clues we find 'clues', which, like Fallen London, have no real description and just serve as a virtual currency. Also, there is no true ending to the game, as we can (Spoiler - click to show)simply accuse anyone we want of murder and have it be true, robbing us of real agency and showing the game never had a real plot.

BUT!

What if my norms didn't matter? What if I had never heard of this author, and I had played very few adventure games or read much Christie, and I saw this game. What would I think?

The game is very well polished. At one point I tried talking to myself and it had a great custom response, and I realized how many actions it had covered. The numerous endings are all individually well done. The thought that went into the transportation and movement system is also apparent.

Yes, the game Poirot is very little like the real one, but that makes it like Little Match Girl, which bears essentially no resemblance to the Hans Christian Andersen original. We even have a similar mechanic whereby we teleport to different locations depending on which train car we leave from. This game then becomes more like Agatha Christie La Croix, with the original serving as a vague guiding direction for the story. This makes the ending mechanism a clever twist on the ending of the original game.

The 'clue' system becomes a funny way of implementing a kind of clicker game/metroidvania (okay, it's not like either of those, but still I needed something involving plain numbers and gated doors) where you just make number go up to go through locked gates.

I enjoyed the variety of puzzles and the running gags such as the corpse-related clues. I appreciate how the author was able to make 'high class socialite that is Poirot's dearest friend' into so many distinct and interesting characters. I loved the writing and the map structure.

So I could either stick to my desired ideal form of 'game' and think of this game as flawed, or abandon my preconceptions and enjoy the game. I'm reminded by a quote from the song Giorgio by Daft Punk:

Once you free your mind about a concept of
Harmony and of music being "correct"
You can do whatever you want
So, nobody told me what to do
And there was no preconception of what to do

Edit: I did find one more ending that could be considered true, but it doesn't substantially change my feelings above.

I looked forward to playing this game, as I know Phil Riley tends to make polished, well-written games. I found this game to have all the main ingredients I like in parser games: interesting/systematic puzzles, lots of conversation (including in German (!)), a well-made hint system and lots of descriptions.

You play as an Indiana Jones-type character fighting the Nazis during WWII. Jumping out of a plane, you parachute down to a desert where the ruins of a fascinating civilization jut out of the rocks. Interspersed with your nazi fighting, you have flashbacks to the beautiful woman you left behind.

The game was good, but my brain didn't interface with it properly. I died a lot because I misunderstood what was going on. A couple of times I thought I had locked myself out of victory 50 turns before and reloaded an old save (once I was wrong, but I'm not sure about the other). Even in the opening, I tried a lot of commands that didn't work (X DARK, LOOK FOR SIGNAL, X DESERT), and for some reason I couldn't make a mental map of the opening areas, most of which is empty rooms (though almost all rooms had a purpose in the end). And near the end I used all hints for several things but still didn't understand what I was meant to do due to weird choices I could make.

But, I suspect others will not encounter this. I tend to play by the seat of my pants, not making a map and not taking notes or planning carefully. Those who do such things will likely avoid the pitfalls I found.

Ruined Temple

This game is exactly what I'd expect from an Alex Crossley game based on the last two. A straightforward fantasy game that promises complex and interesting mechanics but mostly has one main path worked out and is generally underimplemented and under-hinted.

I enjoy DnD quite a bit, and spent years as a kid collecting books for 2nd and 3rd edition and even earlier reading 1st edition in bed late at night. I remember getting the Epic levels book for 3rd edition the same day I rode in a convertible for the first time, and the epic book was the coolest thing that had happened to me for a long time.

This game has all the outward signs of the things I love in DnD, but few of the inward things. I enjoy characters with compelling stories. I love ambient storytelling. There is some of that in this game but it is all kind of generic. There's no personaltiy, no big boss, no spell list. As a parser game, there are many special interactions but none are documented.

I do appreciate having the walkthrough, and the 4 characters having their own rules and roles. The game does have several in-game hints that are quite useful, and the mechanic of 'here is an obstacle, figure out which of these four characters is most likely able to solve it' is fun. I would have enjoyed more plot and more story, more character conversation and expression.

The Two Seasons: Encounter With A Vampire

This game is a very well polished parser game. It's rare to see a game with this level of smoothness, with custom responses to most things, multicolor text, two protagonists, NPCs that respond actively, etc. Very well done.

Storywise, you play as Matty and Maddy, two friends in a band who discover that their teacher is a vampire. The name of the game somewhat implies more adventures in the future, and that would make sense. Together, they have to solve vaguely educational puzzles to collect the items they need to kill a vampire.

This author's last game, All That Shimmers..., had been described as a straightforward old-fashioned adventure. This one also has a lot of that in common. It lacks much of the irony and self-reflection of IFComp games of the past.

Instead, it feels very firmly like a game created in the culture of the 80s, specifically 80s children's work. Nerds are mocked, bullies are big and tough, the janitor gets drunk, teachers have romances, the boy's bathroom is gross and the girl's bathroom is clean, kissing is yucky, schools have computer labs (though, running Minecraft), history is boring, no cell phones in sight, teens are allowed to wander around without supervision, all of it feels like my childhood in terms of storytelling. The setting is definitely intended to be modern, though.

The game does involve a chapel and raiding it with Christ mentioned in a completely neutral fashion, which is something I've rarely seen (usually games involving Christianity tend to portray it negatively or, rarely, positively).

If you're looking for a parser game that provides traditional puzzles and which is not buggy, this is a good one. The hint system is excellent as well.

This game by improvmonster is a good game but suffers a bit by competition. Slappy the Squirrel by the same author is genuinely one of the funniest games I've played (not just recently, but ever) for my sense of humor. This game doesn't reach that level, but it's not bad; in fact, I think the overall trend line is still pointing up, with games getting more fun over time.

I think it just needed a bit more time to cook. With a postcomp update (or during-Comp update) adding a few more synonyms and tweaking a couple puzzles, I think it would be a very good game.

You play as a classic dumb but noble barbarian on a quest to defeat a wizard and rescue a princess. Along the way, you'll encounter ogres, trolls, pirates, and more.

The game is humourously crude, like Shrek, with fart- and belch-based puzzles and slapstick combat. I liked a lot of the jokes, such as the different penny interactions (getting it in the first place, giving it to people before they offer anything, etc).

The puzzles as intended are a combination of classics (find a shovel, dig a suspiciously shovel-ready spot) and slapstick (like the singing puzzles or the grate puzzle). I enjoy the participatory comedy.

Three things stuck out to me as things I struggled with.

First, the help system is a clever new feature, but can be difficult to use. It requires you to type HELP WITH followed by something in scope. However, several puzzles have timers that kill you in the presence of the thing you need help with, so it's easy to die while fumbling around trying to find the right thing to ask for help with.

Second, there was a bit of an issue with scope and synonyms. For instance, when ASKing people about things, if I ASK ABOUT the sorceror, it asks if I mean 'sorceror' or 'the sorceror'. Same with the castle, I think (I put my transcript in the hints thread). This made asking a bit hard. Other times I struggled to find the correct words, for instance, when solving the puzzle of the barber's chair.

Finally, some of the puzzles allow you to lock yourself out of victory with them without clear warning, such as the beans. Once you know the game has consumable resources that cannot be renewed, it's easy to know when to UNDO (just undo whenever you use up something without advancing the game). But that's not very common gameplay structure these days, so it may be worth giving a heads up about it.

That's a lot of space dedicated to criticism, but it's precisely because the game has great potential that I put it. If there's ever enough time to work on those things, I think this is a funny game that many would enjoy. Even without them, I suspect people will like this (especially if someone puts together a walkthrough.)