Mathphobia

As a math teacher, I had to try this game first.

'Mathphobia?' I said, my nostrils flaring in mingled rage and excitement. 'Is this an ANTI-MATH game????'

Fortunately, it's not. Well, kind of...

You play as a kid who is forced to do 500 math problems on Halloween since you didn't go trick or treating to get candy for your teacher.

But you soon are transported to a magical land like phantom tollbooth where monsters such as the Specter of Subtraction try to attack you.

All challenges are defeated by use of math, starting with extremely easy problems (like 8 plus 4) and moving to harder problems like sequence finding, number factoring, fraction simplification and trick problems.

I proudly conquered each problem by hand except one where I suspected a trick, plugged it into calculator to check, then confirmed the trick (so I failed at doing it all myself!).

This game is much longer than it first appeared, with 5 main antagonists and sections between antagonists with 4 or more puzzles.

Outside of the math puzzles, the game seems completely linear. Going back and entering some answers incorrectly, it looks like it gives you another chance.

This was fun. I sent it to another math teacher to try out.

Mathphobia is a decadent puzzle fest of a text-adventure.
While your classmate rejoice in the Halloween break counting their candies, you are stuck at home solving a metric-ton amount of maths problems. As the night progress, and you are no closer to be done on time (it’s due in the morning!), you are visited by a strange character, who takes on an adventure in a faraway fantasy land, terrorised by Archfiend of Arithmetic, and… where maths is the only way to defeat them.

So you go on this adventure, where maths solves everything under the sun, travelling the land, helping folks with their measurement problems, and defeating in each region a villain specialised in one type of arithmetic (subtractions, divisions, multiplications…). The calculations starts off pretty easy, amping up in difficulty when moving to a new section of the game. While some of the latter problems may be difficult (or annoying/impossible to solve if you are mathphobic), you get as many tries as you need (or check the cheat-sheet - which I’ve done for the last-ish problems)!

The premise is really silly (but down-right tortuous for this poor child!), but the writing hooks you so easily (even if, like me, solving maths puzzles isn’t a fun time). The humour is full of charm and levity, and of puns (especially the villains, that cracked me up). It’s was downright impossible for me not to cheer for the kid, and do my best to help them save the land. And by the end, weirdly satisfying to actually solve that many maths problems without help.

Anyway, it was silly fun (that made me do maths against my will, gasp)! I’d even recommend it to tweens.