Reviews by manonamora

This was my introduction to Andrew's rhyme game series, Prime Pro-Rhyme Row, and it took me a while to "get" it - as in, I went to download the walkthrough because I had no idea what I had gotten myself into. Like other games in this series (which I have not played as of the writing of this review), the gist of the game is to... make rhymes. Word plays is at the centre of it all, with commands having to match the name of the room to progress, rather than your run-of-the-mill parser commands (examine, take, etc...).

On top of the quirky gameplay, the premise of the game is very silly, which makes sense considering the commands you need to input to solve the "puzzles" and progress through the game. The writing, in the rooms and the responses to commands, is pretty funny as well!

Though quite difficult*, the alliterations are pretty fun - see the title of the game for an example. And if you love rhymes and puns, this is probably a joy to go through. If you are not good at those, or if English is your second language, it will not be a simple walk in the park.
*cries in ESL, it was so freakin' hard.

Since it was done in such short amount of time, the only help you will find will be in the external walkthrough (if you don't want to keep guessing forever). Though, I did run into an issue where a command would not work, blocking the trigger for the next "event" to clear.

Final score: 14+1/23

This was a fairly short light-horror interactive poem about walking in the woods, with a bit of a Romantic vibe to the style. I found the different lengths of the lines making the cadence while reading them a bit wrong, which adds to the horror setting. Since the stanzas are consistent, it kinda makes things a bit uneasy to read through.

Through your walk, you are given different choices, which will lead you to the different endings. Depending not just on your choices but their order, you may or may not find your path out of the forest... or be corrupted forever. It took me a handful of tries before I could reach a different ending to my first playthrough (I even questioned whether there were other endings at all).

I thought that having a fear meter in the on the main page felt a bit distracting, as the poem holds on its own just fine. Keeping it only in the stats panel would have been better.

A little bit Frankenstein, a little bit Build-a-bear, a little bit of making the body your own. It is both creepy and strangely soothing, ans you get to pick and choose how you want your body to look like. Kind of like any character creators, but a bit more spooky and personal.

Though the underline is fairly sad and a bit depressing, the responses of your choices are still quite playful and with lots of charm. It's pretty fun to reload the game and try a new body, getting as close as possible to becoming a specific kind of “monster”, or mix-and-matching the different parts given. The stats at the end sort of taunt you to min-max them, which is fun!

While part of me wishes it was longer (control yourself with this new body and interact with other people), it is also quite perfect the way it is now.

Now, that was something different! Instead of going through a dungeon, fighting your way through waves of monsters, and solving crazy puzzles, all for a measly reward... you shape up the maze and fix up some traps to stop some annoying adventurers from desecrating your place of work (and avoid loosing your job).

This is the kind of game that is deceptively small (and so darn hard!), the kind you could spend hours trying out different combinations of maze formation and traps location, to stop adventurers from getting to the treasure. It is both a great brain-picker and a time-waster...

How this was done in only 4h is a mystery. Even with freely available extensions, which were mostly made by the author, the amount of content and writing within the game is impressive, and honestly insane. Do you have access to some time-wrap or something? Can you share?

Anyway, I'm going back to try to foil the adventurer's plans again...

This is a short but a bit of an obtuse parser (definitely not beginner friendly), working as a survival entry in a creepy cult-like village. It took me restarting a few times to manage reaching the end (the first time, I managed to move about, exiting blocked spots and maze, by chance more than anything, before finding myself stuck again).

The lack of hints or walkthrough made some puzzle a bit convoluted to solve. Some actions require specific words, whose usual synonyms were not implemented (e.g. drink for glass), and it feels like there was supposed to be more places to explore or more puzzles to solve? As a whole, story-wise, your escape relies quite a bit on luck...

But if you look at everything, explore every room, and take everything you can find, you may be able to reach the end... somewhat unscathed.

In an alien abduction sci-fi setting, this game takes on the Game Theory/Prisoner's dilemma, discussing ethics and morals. After a short interrogation, you are brought into a room with other abductees to take part into an experiment, where your actions could mean life or death (for you or others).

I managed to “save” everyone on my first play (maybe I'm too much of a goody-two-shoes, but it was pretty easy), but It is possible to reach a state where the others turn on you, or you are the only one left standing.

Though the game starts with quite a bit of text, it ends up pretty bare after the experiment starts. Out of the 11 rounds, I was asked only two questions (in the first two rounds), and the rest was met with little reactions. This imbalance of text amount makes it feel like the game is incomplete, especially since you can't do much aside from following the directives (pass the plate or press the button), and the background of the other prisoners does not ever come into play either (not sure if those descriptions were much needed?).

A cute and short parser, with the Dee Cooke (tm) graphics and vibes, a sequel to last year's entry, with simple and limited commands. Listen to some spoopy tales around the campfire with your friends, but watch out, some are more dangerous than it seems...

Though it might not be obvious, there is a way to get to a winning state. I had tried a bunch of actions but only reached a bad ending, which was frustrating (it felt like there was no way to "win"). But there is one combination of conditions that will work. Talking to your friends before the story starts is the way...

This entry took a subtle approach to horror, using the rambling of an older woman through a voice message to her son. Complaining about everything and nothing around her, the message verges by the end of the piece close to paranoia (or full on paranoia depending on the path taken). While there might actually be something wrong with the woman's surroundings, she also seems not to be of sound mind either. Some paths will make you question whether the woman might just be out of touch, or whether her neighbours are as difficult as she portrays them to be, or the reason why M left...

If I were her son, I would honestly have deleted her message (if she sends it first, that is...

Dungeon crawlers, my other nemesis. The difficulty of this one is not understated - not for the commands, as it uses the basics cardinal directions, attack, examine, and take; or the size of it, as it is pretty small; but for the combat part. It is quite difficult, and you might need the RNG God on your side (or maybe undo-scum). There is an order to which the rooms should be visited to avoid getting hit by the monster guarding it (and it is possible to avoid killing some of them to win). I've died A LOT and not managed to pick up more than 40 gold pieces.

Though it is hard, the game takes a more humorous approach in its writing. You are some sort of adventurer wanting to steal all the gold of a vampire in that dungeon. and won't back out until you reach it (or die). It's silly, but fun!

I kinda wish you could include more images in parser, because that cover is pretty dope.

This was quite a difficult parser to play, not much because it is a parser (and those are usually difficult for me), but more so because of the subject of the game. It is about dementia. But more so, it is about experiencing advance dementia.

Honestly, I think not being good with parsers makes the experience all the more compelling and heartbreaking. It helped me, at least, understand the game better, through my frustration, through my fighting the needed commands. Like the PC, I felt like I did not have control over what I was doing, what I wanted to do was wrong (error messages), and what I managed to do brought hurt. I felt like I didn't understand what I was supposed to do next, what I could expect after doing something, or couldn't remember what word to use. [Type hint at any point, see what you want/need to do]

You know there is a fork on the table, but you can't use the word fork here, it's a pointy thing you can grab and stab other with, because this is the only thing that makes sense to you right now. You know there is a TV in the corner, but you don't remember what it was called or its purpose, and you don't understand what the shrilled noise are saying, and it's confusing you, and you want it to just stop! What can you even do?

This confusion and frustration felt throughout the game does just work narratively and interactively. The game manages to capture the psychosis in a way I've never seen before: it is real, it is raw, and it hurts.