Reviews by MathBrush

First, some long background not relevant to the gameplay itself much:

(Spoiler - click to show)At one time, I had played every Choice of Games game up until 2021, but after that I couldn't quite afford to play all of them. So I've only picked up a few over the years.

Having loved Vampire: the Masquerade -- Night Road, I was excited to try this game, even at its relatively high price point, since I knew how high quality this author was.

It said the game was mature and I had to verify age, which I hadn't had to do for most other Choice of Games games. I foolishly ignored that, and when I started playing I realized it was filled with constant strong profanity, which I don't really enjoy in games. I tried refunding it, but I had played too long, so I just hid it from my library.

Eventually, I wondered if I could access the code somehow and put a filter on.I messed around with it but couldn't figure it out. Then I realized I could transfer steam purchases to my choice of games account and play online, so I did that and got the filter in. It was really funny to see stuff like 'ruthless motherfreaker' but it got the job done.

The game itself is based on the ruleset for Werewolf: The Apocalypse. In that setting, you have a list of around 9 core attributes (like strength and intelligence) and a lot of skills like computers, aim, etc. You get opportunities to raise these skills at the end of each chapter. During chapters, you frequently get challenges where you test one attribute + one skill. For instance, strength+combat is frequently tested.

In addition, you have five or so damage markers and a maximum of five rage points. You also have five possible werewolf forms (ranging from fully human to hybrids to fully wolf). Shifting forms heals wounds and gives advantages in fights similar to passing challenges, but it costs 1 rage for each step of shifting you do. Running out of rage makes you lose the ability to transform. You can increase rage by getting hurt or at the end of each chapter. If your rage goes over 5, you go into a frenzy and kill all around you.

Like Night Road, the game has a few central chapters that occur in a fixed order interspersed with 'mission' chapters that can be done in any order. Throughout the game, you can meet allies and romantic partners (I romanced Nin, a wolf turned human who plays rock music) and gain gifts from spirits that let you do supernatural feats. You can also join a tribe which incurs advantages and prohibitions.

It can be difficult to keep track of all of this. I was completely overwhelmed with reading all the spirits texts'. It helped me a lot to realize that I can just try every one of them and most of them are out of reach (you need specific requirements for them). There's also DLC that unlocks new gifts, good for people who want to replay in a different style.

I was averse to the first chapter; I found it relentlessly negative to the point of parody, like an 'unfavored child' Gacha Life story, a genre of youtube video where a child is hated by their family until they're rescued by someone dreamy. In this game, you're poor, unhappy, on the run, the world is dying, everyone around you hates you and cusses you out and even attacks you and blames you for everything. It's a completely miserable life.

Fortunately, you quickly escape and move onto a land recovering from a devastating attack years ago that killed almost all werewolves and drove spirits into hiding. Your goal is to restore the nature around you while dealing with white supremacists, evil corporations, and a horrifying werewolf whose spirit ally can create convincing false worlds and who yearns for an end to all existence.

The characters are pretty diverse, from a posh British shadow lord werewolf to a bloodthirsty hacker werewolf to a non-binary reporter who gets into harms way a little too often.

Overall, the game is very weighty and complex. I was on vacation when I played, and would play a chapter at a time before doing a chore or task. It took me 4 days to beat it, putting it at around 15-20 hours (could be much faster if read without interruption and with clear focus). I played with storyteller mode on, which told me which choices tested which attributes.

I felt like Night Road had slightly better and more coherent content, while Book of Hungry Names had more total good content. I like these big, complex RPGs and find it difficult to finish IRL campaigns, so this is my shot to see what it would be like playing these settings.

I can recommend this to others for sure, with my caveat about profanity. There is also pervasive and constant violence but it doesn't dwell on it or seek to make it excruciating. You're werewolves; you kill things. It's what you do.

I intended on playing all of the FrenchComp 25 (or, more properly, the Concours de Fiction Interactive Francophone) games in a week or two, and then I found this game.

Altogether, it took me over a week to finish. This is quite a big game, with the unusual feature that almost every part of it is illustrated with beautiful ASCII art, including the inventory screen (showing our heroine and the things she carries), a map, and all of the NPCs and several important items.

The source code is huge (partly due to the art), currently the second-largest file I've personally ever opened in terms of words and the longest in terms of lines (in Inform 7).

But is it well-made and fun?

I think so. The idea is that you are a spy sent to pose as a laundrywoman in the mansion of a count rumored to be a Russian general in disguise. You have to infiltrate the mansion, gain everyone's trust, and do everything you can to promote the communist cause, with missions of increasing importance.

Gameplay is almost entirely choice-based, with numbered and lettered menu options. Occasionally it was fiddly; if you want to look at something you're holding, you must open the inventory before looking at it. Similarly, if you want to use an item you're holding, you have to open the inventory. Making the wrong choice can take a few turns to get back on track as you have to opt out of the menu you're in.

But once you get practice with the system, it works well.

I didn't encounter any major bugs. After 5 days of making progress on my own (real life days; in the game I was on night 3) I asked for hints from the author, who obliged. Following the hints got me stuck twice due to not doing the things that I should have done first ((Spoiler - click to show)I didn't find the elevator before getting the photographic kit, and I didn't open the crates before sabotaging them). However, I found cheat codes in the source text which let me skip exactly those parts.

There is a great deal of text in the game, most of it very interesting. The characters are nuanced and there is a lot of tension, especially with our spy handler who is also likely our lover.

Some puzzles were a bit hard to figure out, but it's hard to know whether that's due to me not knowing French or because the game is hard. Playing in a foreign language casts a rosy glow over a game for me, so a native speaker may find it less fun or more fun than I did, I suppose. I don't know!

The text presented in-game is thoroughly pro-communist, extolling the virtues of the worker and decrying the capitalist system. Growing up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I've read many texts by church leaders in the 1910's to 1980's that warned of communism as one of the greatest threats in the world, a godless conspiracy that killed millions and had the goal to destroy religion, abolish the nuclear family (since kids are raised communally in traditional communism) and so on. So it's interesting to hear full-throated explanations on both sides for why essentially the same actions are either a great evil or the greatest good.

Overall, puzzle highlights include using a wartime code-sender and operating (Spoiler - click to show)a tank and various old-fashioned tools.

A fun game. A long game; it takes place over 5 days and each day is basically a complete game. I thought that the first day would be about it (getting into the basement) and was shocked there was more; in fact, there was a lot more, I hadn't even seen half the map and seeing the whole map isn't even half the game! I'd say it's similar in size to Counterfeit Monkey and Anchorhead (maybe a bit smaller than Anchorhead, it's hard to tell. More dialogue, certainly).

I'm going to structure this review in two parts.

-A brief description
-Something for authors (players don't need to read)
-Something for prospective players (not intended for authors)

First, a description. This is a game that uses Vorple to combine nine other games. It was built around a code scheme that autosaves information from Inform and shares it with other games. Clicking links in one game autosaves your info and opens the other seamlessly, with a color-based transition. Two of the games are special: one is completely choice-based and the other is a hybrid parser like Gruescript (I believe it's in the author's custom language though).

The idea is that you are exploring an abandoned resort just for fun. As you explore further you realize that there is a rich group of other explorers and former workers that have both left clues and still explore to this day.

Okay, first for the authors:
(Spoiler - click to show)Congratulations! You all did something remarkable. Each area seemed like it was made with love. The writing was all good, all contributing to a feeling of decay and exploration and wonder and feeling. Something I loved about each area:
-Shore: I love language puzzles so this was fantastic. Favorite part of the game.
-Fortune teller: really clever meta puzzle, and the change of pace was relaxing and fun. Really adds to the piece.
-Tunnels: creepy. I love your work in general and the one easter egg reminded me of the chumba wumba earworm in your Cragne Manor piece. Best atmosphere imo.
-Gardens: I was so shocked during the big change in this area, great effect, and love how the area is initially so surprising in its change in interface.
-Moonlight Meadow: I felt like I was really there. I could smell the rotting, sodden tent in the pool, feel the plywood on the slide, feel the damp concrete under my feet, hear the creaking of old equipment in the wind, see the color of the sky. Great writing.
-Shopping Center: This had the most variety and reminded me of my favorite old parser games, especially Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina.
-Lunarcade: This had the most interactive content (imo) and felt like a really substantial complete game on its own. Most well-rounded area I think.
-Sanctuary hotel: the emotional centerpiece of the game, great character work and lovely feeling. Gross tangle of sheets in that one room.
-Monorail system: Loved the mechanical feeling. Reminded me of Fitter Happier from radiohead. The extra dials were neat.


For prospective players:
(Spoiler - click to show)This game has a lot of great content but it's spread out and mixed with red herrings and unnecessary or empty parts. Think of it like the best drink you've ever had that fills a glass, poured into a pitcher and filled with water to reach the top.

The beginning is just a vast empty void where you do little besides find room after room where you can do nothing. Objects in one area are used far away in areas you might not even conceive of.

Room descriptions are vital. Important exits can lurk in the middle of dense paragraphs. Over and over again key items and objects are named in inconspicuous places. Sometimes you just have to hit every room over and over to see if new things you have are useful.

This game is best enjoyed by those who enjoy detailed maps and careful lists of inventory and unsolved puzzles. Running through recklessly is futile, especially with tons of non-intuitive map connections and diagonal or vertical directions.

Is it worth it in the end? The journey is the real goal, here; the ending is neat but not substantially more than the rest of the game, so I'd take your time and enjoy the roses.

I'm going through and finding which games are on my 'played' list but not reviewed, and this is one of them.

AI Dungeon was a novelty when it came out 5 years ago. It was a large language model trained on the Chooseyourstory website's CYOA games. Due to the early days of ChatGPT, it frequently would go off on ludicrous tangents.

Nowadays it's been rewritten several times, and I'm not sure it can be said to have been one product over the years, which makes it distinctly hard to review.

Trying out the newest version, I played a couple of the main storylines. I first checked to see if it still has a lot of weird junk in its training data (it did; it knows who Harry Potter's friends are) and if it can obey commands (kind of; it resisted me trying to summon demons and summoned an animal instead, but when I said all of my wishes eventually came true, it allowed the original summoning to take effect).

The storyline just wanders off. In one scenario where there was an AI called Persephone ruling the land, I asked to be taken to see her and they took me into a temple. Then the tapestries started writhing and a guy in them called the Marquise started calling me out and wanting to talk to me, not mentioning Persephone at all. I ordered the game to ignore him and walk in to see Persephone, then I ordered it to let me win immediately. It got more and more resistant until it just said 'error, you need to pay to continue'.

The interactivity is 'soft': you can do mostly anything, and the game will remember it for a moment. The real interactivity isn't discovering what world awaits you; its trying to respond to or outthink or encourage the language model. It's less of a game with a real world setting and more of a conversation between two people.

Checking the AI Dungeon subreddit, it looks like many people just use it for pornography.

Overall, I think the audience for this and the audience for most IFComp-style parser games are pretty different. The joy for me for IFComp games is seeing what the author has come up with, while the joy in this game is mostly seeing what the player can come up with; but when I come up with a game, I like to just actually write one.

So, this game is not for me, but I can understand why people would enjoy it.

I beta tested this game a couple of times, although I only did a part at a time and never completed it, while on the other hand the author did a lot of testing for me, so I definitely owe him a lot!

This game is wildly ambitious in its concept: take the work of Douglas Adams (one of the best humorists of all time) and the work of Infocom (one of the best group of IF writers of all time) and write a sequel to their works with a lot of original synthesis and do it all in ZIL (one of the less-known IF languages) and make it roughly comparable in scope to the original (within an order of magnitude).

Oh, and do it as your first game.

To produce anything in this scenario would be a feat. I think that the end result is much more than ‘anything’.

You start this game right where the old one leaves off, on the planet of Magrathea, with the other ship members from the Heart of Gold. Your end goal is…hmm, I’m not quite sure. Explore? In the end it involves a lot of exploring Milliways and trying to gain access to a fancy ship.

In the meantime, the game is centered on a hub-spoke structure, with a central ‘darkness’ room imitating the first game, where different senses lead to different areas.

The game is intentionally hard. In another thread, the author laid down the following rules:

*NPCs are hard to get right, include less of them but make them worth it.
*Story comes after puzzles. That’s how my cookie crumbles.
*DEFINITELY make the game cruel. It’s more interesting that way.
Randomisation? Obviously! Otherwise it becomes a follow-the-walkthrough-if-you-get-stuck kind of game with no brain involved. I usually end up becoming that kind of person.

This game features all of these things, although it actually has several NPCs. The game is quite cruel, and has many randomised codes and things that make a straightforward walkthrough impossible. Just about every area has some kind of randomization, from randomized exits in a small maze to a game of hide and seek with a randomized shapeshifter.

The most frequent way this shows up is the darkness thing. I never figured it out while beta testing, just flailing around until I got out of the darkness, and then with the walkthrough playing today I realized that you have to wait a bit first and then perform the appropriate action, but was frustrated when I kept getting sent to the same area over and over (due to randomization). I finally realized that you can just ‘wait’ until you get the area you want.

For me what shines the most are the settings and the big set-piece puzzles. The settings include Milliway’s itself, Dirk Gently’s office, and other areas from Adams’ writing. The game of hide and seek I mentioned earlier was a lot of fun, as were some of the interactions around disguising yourself and walking around Milliways.

There is some trouble; my game very frequently crashed, often after examining something, when using the Gargoyle interpreter. I took some notes at first but it was so frequent that I just started saving a lot. I’m sure it’s something ZIL related, as I have almost never had Inform games crash. It could be due to window size or something. Edit: No one else seems to be reporting this, so I believe it may be an interpreter issue.

Other than that, the main thing I would have liked more of was a guided conversation system that suggested things to talk about.

Overall, this is much better than it could have been. I remember someone entered a text port of one of the graphical Infocom adventures into IFcomp many years ago and it was a real slog to get through. Pretty much most of the unofficial sequels to Infocom games I’ve played have been bland, outside of some highlights like Scroll Thief. So to see a game that is vibrant with interesting puzzles and which follow in the first games footsteps in many ways is quite impressive. I don’t think it achieves the heights of the first game in terms of polish or writing, but that’s like saying that my work as a mathematician didn’t achieve the heights of Newton or Gauss. This game aimed high, and so I’m impressed where it landed. I look forward to any future work.

I’m pretty sure this is the largest TADS game ever made and one of the top 2 largest parser games (with Flexible Survival, the furry game, being larger). It has a map and puzzle list rivaling games like Cragne Manor, and actions frequently generate over a page of text, often multiple pages when dramatic events happen.

The story is that you have been assigned to make the young prince Quisborne into a man, basically, instead of the wishy-washy pampered prince he is. To do that, you need to explore the world, chase down dark secrets, and help out a great deal of people.

I tested this game, although I used a walkthrough for much of it. I also replayed part of it before this review, which I’ll come back to later.

I think a great deal of IF taste comes down to the first game you played that hooked you in. For me (and a few others, like Mike Spivey), our first big game was Curses. For people like Robin Johnson, those games were (I believe) Scott Adams. For people like Zarf, Infocom and Myst were big influences; for Garry Francis and others, type-in games and illustrated adventures were big.

Each of these influences leave a mark on us. For me, I like dry humor, exploration with a lot of varied experiences and consistent backstory, literary aspirations, etc. Robin Johnson took principles from Scott Adams games (and others) to make his successful parser hybrid games. Zarf made several amazing games that drew on Myst’s complex mechanical puzzles (especially So Far), and so on.

John Ziegler has cited the Unnkulia games as an inspiration. These were early TADS games, perhaps the biggest/most popular amateur text games that were released while Infocom was dying and before Inform came out. They feature games with lots of gags and names that were puns or jokes. They have a lot of background banter, and feature large outdoor areas with woods, taverns, etc. They have puzzles involving looking behind scenery things or repeating actions, lots of diagonal directions, etc. I replayed a bit of the first Unnkulia game before writing this review and these things stuck out to me.

I find a lot of similar elements in Prince Quisborne. We have an expansive world map that involves a lot of beautiful nature and sweeping expanses. We have puzzles that involve looking behind scenery things or trying actions multiple times. We have many names involving puns or jokes. We have maps with organic, diagonal directions. We have a plethora of taverns. We have the use of TADS. Some of these are stretches, of course, but I really feel like a lot of authors (including me) are perpetually chasing that feeling of the games that drew them into IF.

The craft is, in my opinion, much higher in this game than in Unnkulia. The poems are well-written, the puzzles can be exceptional, and so on.

When I first played, I got overwhelmed by the large amount of text. I ended up having to follow the walkthrough and couldn’t figure out how anyone could navigate the tons of text, many room exits, tons of open quests, etc.

I replayed today, and I got to 75 points in 4 hours, out of 300. I got 50 of those points without hints, which was nice, but I really got stuck on the chess puzzle, which I had never solved on my own before. I also needed hints crossing the ferry, and I got some ‘solve’ help with some logic puzzles because I had already played through them twice (but some I did anyway because I like them).

I found it so much easier this time. What I did was, the first time I played, I read all the text carefully. All the pages and pages of backstory, the little jokes and character building moments of the game.

But this time, I just ignored it all. I just went through and saw the puzzle structure. I spacebarred through all the text and looked twice at each room to get the shorter room description.

With this simpler version, the map coalesced. I realized how much of it was closed off, and the rest was strongly guided. I was able to do a lot more of the puzzles this way.

However, it only made sense to do this because I had read the text once before. Without the text, some puzzles won’t make sense.

Fortunately, I found the NUDGE system really helpful. It helped me know what to focus on, and cut down on the time I was lost so much. It didn’t even feel like cheating; honestly, playing the whole game doing NUDGE a lot may not be a bad idea.

The other reason it’s good to read all the text is because it provides its own experience, its own plot and storyline, much of which is wholly unconnected with gameplay. It tells a story of a young man who grows wiser and older. Many reviews have found parts of this offputting, and I did too at first, as the character seemed so wishywashy. But the later parts of the game really pay off with all of that intro character framing.

I spoke about tastes earlier. Some of the puzzle style isn’t to my taste in terms of difficulty. I have some habits in my own games I do specifically to avoid things I find frustrating in others. I lay out almost all of my rooms in rectangular grids and make sure to clearly label exits, because I don’t like hidden exits; I try to keep my text short and make it clear what matters in each room; I like to make it so that all important text occurs at the end of paragraphs; if a puzzle requires multiple items, I try to keep them together in physical proximity or provide clear markings showing they belong somewhere else (which is something I like about Curses, and something Cragne Manor does in a way); and so on. Quisborne violates almost all of my personal rules, and this makes it, in my opinion, even longer and more difficult than a game of its size would otherwise be.

But I had fun replaying the first 4th of the game tonight, doing it in my weird way of having already read all the text and used a walkthrough and now stumbling through with occasional hints. I don’t think that’s how the game was intended to be played. But I like it a lot. There are a select few other big polished parser games out there and many of them have not gotten the attention of smaller games; I recently have been replaying all IFDB games with 100+ ratings, and the only real ‘mega’ game on there is Blue Lacuna, which is the easiest giant game. Curses is on there, which is pretty big. But the other games, like Mulldoon Legacy, Finding Martin, Inside Woman, Lydia’s Heart, Worlds Apart, Cragne Manor, etc. tend to get few but high ratings. So will Prince Quisborne become popular and well liked by many, or just become the treasured love a few? Even the Unnkulia games which inspired John sit at less than 10 ratings on IFDB each. But I am a fan of this game, love the craft that went into it, and believe it fulfilled the author’s goals of making some exquisite.

Phew! This was a long game. I took a break from playing the other parsercomp games for 4 days to finish playing this one; and that was just by using the walkthrough, which spans 8 pages of 3-columned text.

The idea of this game is that you are at a party at a large mansion where a murder has been discovered. It is your job to stop that murder!

The presentation and the writing are of high quality, which some nice visual effects with regards to headings and fonts, and very incisive and biting wit. There are many characters that are generally well differentiated, although almost every character frequently expresses very strong sexual urges in non-explicit ways, so it can blend together when the 5th or 6th man talks about how hot the widow is.

I played for about an hour or two to get a feel for the game. I got maybe 23 out of the 250+ points, then decided to use the walkthrough.

It soon became apparent just why the walkthrough was so long. The map is large, especially a garden area which is a maze with several almost-identical areas. The vast bulk of the game, around 75%, consists of some character asking you to give something to or ask something of another character. So you have about 10 or 12 moves navigating the garden maze and going into the mansion and finding your target. That character then says they can only do that if you bring them something else. So you type 10 or 12 moves going there and doing that, and so on and so on till you reach the end of the chain. Then you report back to people in reverse order, with the same maze navigation between every chain.

Due to this the plot really kind of stopped taking off. At first I felt like I was really getting somewhere (finding the widow! searching the murder room!) but if you charted the plot intensity with regards to time it would look like a giant snake that had just eaten a string of 30 rats. Flat plot progression for a long time, with a little bump of action, followed by more flat plot progression, with a little bump of action.

The writing was constantly of high quality in the genre it had set out to follow, a kind of bawdy, everyone-is-rotten nobles vs commoners dark comedy.

Outside of the fetch quests, the game consisted of finding objects in random and unusual ways. The kind of thing where touch a glass pane and it reveals a trapdoor which takes you on a chute ride to find an oubliette where you overhear two thieves talking and one drops a potato crisp. (this example isn't necessarily in the game).

When I wasn't following the walkthrough I had a bit of trouble. An early quest needed me to find some cream buns. I saw food on a table and tried X FOOD. That didn't work so I went into the kitchen and tried X FOOD. I figured maybe they were there but not in the description so I tried TAKE FOOD and TAKE BUNS. It turns out I needed to X COUNTER instead to find them.

So given that the discovery of objects was often difficult with the parser, and that seemingly unrelated actions were necessary to find the objects, and that almost each step of each task required navigation of almost-identical maze rooms, and that the game was as long as Curses and other huge text adventures, I think it's no surprise I turned to the walkthrough. There are copious clues though for those who prefer more gentle hints.

I've played several Larry Horsfield games, and I generally have the impression that they'll be extremely long ADRIFT games that require you to look in every nook and cranny and often put you in 'dead man walking' scenarios because you forgot something 400 moves ago.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could solve the game. I started in a magician's room, and I tried looking behind an armchair, looking under a stool, etc. But there was nothing there, so I explored more and found some more reasonable puzzles: a light puzzle, grabbing a book, etc. Then I went to another area, grabbed a lot of stuff; the game even warned me that I hadn't grabbed everything! I explored a dungeon, and got really very far.

I thought to myself, 'Man, this game is awesome. It's a lot smaller than other Larry Horsfield games, and seems more focused on clever puzzles instead of hiding random stuff.'

At one point, the game said I needed a tinderbox, which I hadn't grabbed, so I peeked at the walkthrough, and found out that I had missed it at the beginning. Apparently instead of looking under the stool or the armchair I needed to stand on the stool and it would reveal some stuff to me.

Fortunately the earlier areas were still accessible so I went back to go grab it.

But then I ended up solving what I thought was the final area of the game. It actually ended up sending me to a nexus of areas. The SCORE command revealed that I only had 90 out of 500 points. And the door locked behind me. I thought, 'well, I'll still try on my own'. But getting in a boat told me I should be wearing my war belt. With the door shut, there was no way to get back. So I loaded an earlier save. Unfortunately, there was a bug where going back to get the warbelt meant I couldn't leave for some reason.

I restarted completely, deciding to just blindly follow the walkthrough. But it's missing a command early on and I ended up with a bug situation where there were two 'thin books' in the same room that I couldn't disambiguate between.

So I restarted again, fixed that problem, and just rode the walkthrough the rest of the time. I found out there was tons of stuff I had missed earlier because I hadn't looked under a desk or behind a door, etc.

There were fun things to see on the way, like various foods and desserts. There was also some depictions of East Asian culture that were a bit suspect. There were some words I didn't recognize which wikipedia said are considered offensive (like a name for a kind of Chinese hat). The people are a blend of Asian motifs and generic europeans (they speak the same language as the protagonist and are offended by burping, which isn't very common in east asian cultures). At one point they're singing a sing with the lyrics 'ying tong ting tong' or something, which seemed wildly inappropriate to me, but apparently it's an old song by a group called the goons which has nothing to do with Asian culture. But then why is it featured in this area? Kind of weird.

Overall, if this game had been just the first area up to the dungeon, I might have given it 5 stars; I like the puzzle direction and the writing. But after that point it just becomes so easy to get into 'walking dead' situations.

I'd usually say beta testing could help with these kind of things, but Larry Horsfield has been writing games for fourty years and has been requesting testers recently, which haven't been found. I think the issue is that the core game design itself makes testing difficult; there are so many places to check, so many places to look, so many possible combinations of items. The game is huge but it also includes mechanics designed to make short games longer, like forcing replaying due to missing items or having tightly controlled sequences that are easy to fail. These combined, it makes playing the game without a walkthrough take days or weeks, including for testers. And the games are produced at such a rate (there were three entered in this same Parser Comp competition, although one was withdrawn) that there's wouldn't be enough time to test one thoroughly before the next came out.

The author is aware of these issues; on intfiction.org, there are posts going back to 2014 discussing how this author has trouble getting beta testers and why.

I started going through my wishlist on IFDB, and this game has been on their longer than any other, because it was so intimidating I put it off. I ended up playing the ifarchive version, which uses local browser storage for saves.

I played for a while, using in-game hints and getting < 20 points out of 365, then used a walkthrough and maps from several different sites, including CASA. Even then, it was difficult to follow and required solving some puzzles independently.

If you had to play just one IF game for a very long time and didn't have access to any other, but could talk to other people, this would be a great game, because it's designed for long-term group play.

Many factors make it large. First, it has a giant map with many diagonal connections and cycles in the graph structure, and doesn't list exits automatically (unless I missed a command to turn that on; I just used the EXITS command), and this giant map exists in multiple time periods at once.

Second, many of the puzzles rely on pun-based commands, requiring a leap of intuition that can't be solved with just brute force.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, many actions have long-delayed consequences, and many items are used in scenarios quite different from the ones they're found in.

None of these are bad game-design wise, but they mean that you will spend a great deal of time on this game in order to experience its content, while many current IF games are designed to be completed in one or two sessions with little 'friction', due to the multitude of competing games and other reasons.

The plotline is buried at first but becomes stronger and stronger, especially once time travel is allowed. If the author created the first areas first, it would explain why the game starts with a mishmash of silly things (including a tortoise and a hare on a Moebius strip a suspension bridge that suspends you). Later areas have strong thematic consistency, especially the future world. There are a few other threads of plot that weave through the game consistently, like the use of opiates to expand the mind and a meteorite that makes several appearances.

The game isn't mean; it increases difficulty in generally fair ways. Hints are provided in most rooms, and a helpful friend gives you more and more commands over time that help out in a meta way (I loved FIND [ITEM] because it moves you to that room, enabling fast travel).

This would be a great game for a let's play or other group-based activity, since finding the right phrasing is good.

I don't think I'll play it again, because I just struggle with its style of expansiveness, but I enjoyed my time with it and think many others would as well.

This game is a sequel to Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, a game a couple decades old. When I first played IF in 2010, I downloaded the Frotz app and played all the main games that come with it. After I found how fun big puzzle games like Curses! are, I searched for other games that were like it and found Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina. I ended up really enjoying the game a lot.

This sequel so far lives up to the original. Per IFComp rules, I've only played 2 hours, getting 20 out of 250 points and unlocking much of the map.

You play as a parent (I think a mother?) that is trying to get a prom dress for your daughter. There is a large mall that is mostly abandoned due to a parade. It's a 3-story mall, with many stores per floor and other areas outside.

It's a puzzle-based game, with a variety of puzzles, including conversation, codes, machines, animals, etc.

Like the original game, it has a huge map and is (eventually) very nonlinear. Unlike the original, it contains extensive in-game help systems and suggestions that smooth out the player experience. In particular, the (very mild early spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)texts from your daughter help point you to the next available puzzle. I turned to the hints once, when I felt like I had a reasonable solution to something but it just wasn't working; it turned out I had just thought of it differently than the author, and the progressive hints gave me just the hint I needed.

The first two hours have been fun, and I look forward to the rest. I was just going to power through with the walkthru, but I think this is fun enough I'd like to take it slow later.