Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This is an exceptional story, a part of Fallen London that requires additional money and is more self-contained than the rest of the story.

The focus here is mostly on the writing and on piecing things together. Someone is on the lookout for a very old and special soul. The further you investigate, the more you realize that you are reading a retelling of an ancient greek myth.

This story has a lot of lore about devils and the means they take to shape souls ot have the 'flavour' they like. It also introduces some iron coins that force devils to tell a truth to whoever holds it.

Some other players found this story to be a bit short or to have a disappointing ending. I don't remember being unsatisfied.

This was a funny Exceptional Story from Fallen London. Exceptional Stories are paid stories that are more self-contained than most content in Fallen London and take a few hours to complete.

In this story, you've been asked to run a fashion boutique and to come up with different outfits based on increasingly ludicrous themes. As you have no prior experience and the clothing is genuinely kind of questionable, you have to wonder: what are the real motives behind your employment?

Gameplay mostly consists of wandering around London or your workshop to get ideas for the new clothes, plus some investigative sequences.

Overall, it was fun making the outfits (you can choose to keep one if you wish) and the newly revealed plot was fun.

This game is one of the most unusual commercial Choicescript games. It's much shorter than usual (at 90K words), is intended to be replayed several times for the full experience (rather than just finding different paths), and is self-referential.

In it, you play as one of five friends in a kind of 'outcasts' group. You work a dead-end job with an awful boss, struggle with grades at school and the lack of love at home, and play a haunted video game with your friends that can lead to death.

In this game about a haunted game you can also play an interactive fiction game about a haunted game, which is pretty neat.

The game does have a mystery component in it, and replaying alone isn't enough to solve it, so once you're ready for it it's a good idea to 'get help from others' as the game suggests.

Clever concept. Only issue I had was that the beginning somehow felt hard to get through, and I had to try three different times over a few months to get into it enough to finish it. Glad I'm did.

This game is written under extreme constraints. Specifically, it uses no quotation marks, including ones that would be used to give the game a title (so Inform defaults to 'Welcome').

So everything has to be deduced from the info you're given in object names and actions of those around you. Runtime errors are also a source of info.

This is quite tricky of a game. There are several layers of puzzle here. I solved a small chunk of the game on my own (around 20-30%) then went to David Welbourn's walkthrough, where I realized I hadn't understood any of the run-time errors.

Overall, this was a fun concept that was well-executed.

This is a large and complex game with several independent NPCs spread out through a large hospital. Someone has died, and you (a teen volunteer) want to both find out who and also get enough recommendations to be able to move on from the place.

I was impressed and overwhelmed with the size of the game. The hospital has four floors, each with a hallway with 3-5 spaces, with each space having doors to the north and south. In addition to that, there are a dozen or so NPCs and complex devices like elevators, safes and a walkman.

Gameplay mostly revolves around going into every area possible, identifying issues and collecting objects, then finding which objects solve which issues. There were two puzzles I couldn't figure out involving NPCs, and I ended up using invisiclues with them.

Overall, the story didn't land for me emotionally. The NPCs were varied, had interesting comments about each other, and had realistic relationships and plots, and the locations were varied, and there are some active events that are creepy or threatening, so all of those things are good. So I'm not actually sure what I felt was missing.

On the other hand, there was something about the mechanics that really appealed to me, which is hard to put into words. It was really satisfying unlocking different areas and using ideas, and there are multiple solutions.

There were a few times I was frustrated by synonyms or getting default responses (like (Spoiler - click to show)trying to push or pull the tile without the ladder). Overall, though, I think people who enjoy exploration and note-taking in parser games should like this.

This game is mostly a chore simulator. You are in a village, and all the villagers ask you to run errands for them, like grabbing nails or wood. They take time to teach you how to do each task. While condensing it all into one day feels pretty overwhelming and would probably be a nightmare for a kid, it makes more sense if you envision it as just being a lifestyle where everyone works hard and this tutoring replaces school.

The game is in three acts, each more active than the previous. The first is chores in a familiar location. The second is unfamiliar chores, with a magical surprise. The third is in the middle of combat.

This feels Norse-related, with ocean-themed life and wolf mythology, but it could be a lot of places.

Some people mentioned that this game seems like it's telling the wrong moral. To me, it seems like this game is saying 'Fit into society, obey, don't stray from the path and have honor'. This is in distinct contrast to many children's tales which are about the wonders of imagination and of accepting things outside of your culture. Both though describe the perils of breaking one's word with magical creatures.

I did have trouble figuring out commands in a few points.

This game is a surreal game with no overarching explanation or moral.

You play as an office worker who lives in suburbia. You do various things like waking up, showering, going to work and so on.

As you play, you encounter disturbing changes to what you thought reality was. Early examples include work you've never seen before showing up on your desk or lunch turning into a ball of rotten meat.

I enjoy this kind of surreality in games a lot. The only drawback is that you have to try all sorts of things at times to figure out what the next move is that will advance the game. Sometimes this can be really tricky, which detracts from the experience. It's not so much hard puzzles as 'there are 20 things you can do right now but only one is correct'.

I associate Anssi Räisänen with the ALAN system and with well thought-out puzzles in a relatively compact game setting. I generally enjoy these games.

This game was pretty fun but its main attraction was also its main drawback for me.
The idea is that in this game, proverbs are magic. So something like 'a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' could (theoretically) transform a bird in your hand into two in a nearby bush (this example isn't in the game).

This is a brilliant concept and when it works out it works out well. For me, though, I had trouble trying to sift through all such sayings, even when a list of many of them was given. Also such sayings have variations, many including apostrophes (which aren't allowed). For me, the 'search space' of all possible sayings was just too big.

I am glad I played, though. Also, there are a few chunks that have just normal puzzles without any sayings involved.