Mathphobia

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.