Reviews by MathBrush
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An alchemy parser game on a retro platform, March 30, 2024This French game is designed to run on an Amstrad CPC emulator. It comes with pixel art.
This was tough; I often struggle with old-school games, and playing in French wasn't helping! I did find 2 out of 5 endings, and feel satisfied with that.
You are asked by an oracle in your village to explore an old chapel and find a monk named Hermes. You must solve a series of puzzles to figure out how to save your land!
The biggest puzzles revolve around creating potions. I never found amanita mushrooms, one of the ingredients, so I likely missed the best ending. But I managed to brew two of the others.
I enjoy games that have two worlds, and this game does that. The pixel art is interesting. The only thing that was grating was the slow fake 'loading' the emulator does every screen. Yes, I remember playing games in the 90s where the PC would chug and slowly load each screen. It was nostalgic the first 50 times. But as the game goes on it certainly loses its charm!
Apparently there's a way to win the game in one move, which is interesting!
The intro to a longer game about revolutionary radio, March 29, 2024This is a prologue to a humor sci fi game written in Moiki.
In it, you play as a radio repairman in a futuristic world. A transgender celebrity comes to visit you, and more importantly, a strike is going on and the radio station that supports it is in trouble!
The text comes in very short bursts, just a sentence or two per page in many cases. There are several character portraits designed with, I assume, AI art (many games in this comp have used it and it has that kind of style, although I could be wrong!).
The game has a kind of animated feel/vibe, like the Jetsons mixed with characters from the Spiderman newspaper comic.
The story's not complete, which makes sense, as I felt like it kind of jumped around and was a bit confusing at times.
A surreal game set in a dream, March 29, 2024In this game, you fall asleep, and wake up trapped in a strange dream world.
The game is choice-based, using Moiki, but it has a strong world model, with most interactions based on finding and using items, movement, and working with NPCs.
It's pretty short, but took me a while to work through, as there are many options. The writing was a highlight, with humorous quips, strong metaphors, and some just straight-up weirdness (like licking the horizon and discovering it is yogurt).
Overall, it was nice to have a short, kind of goofy break. There are almost certainly parts that went over my head; I bet if I were a native French speaker I'd appreciate it even more.
I did find a portion that resembled a parser game pretty funny, especially since it was a 'prairie informe', where inform can either mean the language or, in this situation, 'shapeless'.
A databse search game with revolutionary poets, March 29, 2024This game took me a while to figure out. There's a text box to enter stuff, but hitting enter just goes to a new line.
Eventually I realized it was a search feature with a bit of a delay; you type in a word and it brings up all elements in its database that match that word. I think the game Her Story might be similar (?)
The stuff that comes up includes text message conversations, journal notes, images, schematics, interviews, etc.
It was written in four hours, but there's some impressive stuff here. The idea is that two women who live together have been arrested after police suspected them of dangerous revolutionary activity, and you have to determine on a scale of 0-2 how dangerous they are.
Pretty neat stuff! I wish I learned just a bit more about them and what was going on, since the worldbuilding was so fun.
An easy-to-play and intriguing IF mystery set in a small town, March 27, 2024This Ink game was fun. You play as someone who received a note to come and investigate a town on behalf of a countess who has had to make herself scarce.
Most links involve either moving to a new location or performing an action in a location, most commonly talking to someone.
There are a diverse cast of characters. To me, the most evocative parts were the location descriptions; it's really nice to think of the bar with a back patio that is set on stilts overlooking a river. Sounds really beautiful!
The investigation was slightly tricky for me, being in French, but the game keeps things simple and it's not too hard to solve just by clicking around, although you may get stuck if you don't stop and think things through just a little.
Definitely enjoyed this one, and easy enough for a foreigner like me. I wondered about the motivations of the characters, though; I feel like they were as detailed as the settings were. Except for the priest, who I felt was very well characterized. Overall I like this, though; this is just some little nitpicks.
A fantasy mystery traversed through a map , March 25, 2024This is my first time playing an OpenAdventure game, and it was interesting. I didn't get it at first, so I tried a tutorial game, and then it made more sense.
This game at first appears highly non-linear, but it becomes apparent that everything is laid out for you step by step. The way the game works is that you have a map, a list of places on it, a list of people, and rumors on the bottom. You can click on many of these things. Each time you do, you get a paragraph or two of information. Very occasionally, you can click within that paragraph to unlock more areas, or type in a password of sorts to get to a new area or even an entirely new map (there are 2 maps in this game).
At the end of each map there is a self-graded quiz where you type in the answer to various questions. Then, instead of checking your answer, it tells you the truth. I've seen this way of doing mysteries before and it works fairly well here, although it limits your opportunity to correct yourself when wrong or to work on improving a partial answer.
The storyline is that a goddess has a magic cauldron in your village that has an awful curse put on it against any villager who steals it. Yet, it has been stolen. You, a bard, have to figure out who did it and why!
There was a lot of text in this game. I try to avoid using google translate but leaned on it at some points. It seems well-written in french. Due to the quirks of language translation, I had to laugh at google's attempt at translating this (to no fault of the author):
Original: "Il semble que vous allez devoir mouiller vos braies pour continuer la traque..."
Translation: "It looks like you're going to have to wet your pants to continue the hunt..."
Overall, this format seems like it has some clear advantages for mystery games. I'd be interested in seeing how it would work for other genres.
Solve a splitting headache, March 25, 2024This brief Inform game has you waking up with temporary amnesia in a medical research facility with a door that has recently been welded shut.
It's a small game with about six rooms. There are two major tasks to take care of: getting some quiet and making things dark.
It is possible to lock yourself out of victory unwittingly, I believe. And one major puzzle requires some intuition that is not in the room description and which doesn't make sense based on earlier responses. In particular, (Spoiler - click to show)you have to turn off a radio, and TURN OFF RADIO says you can't turn it off and BREAK RADIO says you can't do anything to it, and it's too big to TAKE or PUSH. The solution is apparently to UNPLUG radio, despite the lack of a plug being mentioned.
Overall, it works as a small game to make to get used to Inform, but I prefer Sidewise by the same author.
Play a low-key roleplaying game while hanging out in a youth hostel, March 21, 2024This is a fun game with a little bit of recursiveness in it.
You are a youth and are trying to get into a youth hostel. Unfortunately, the person in charge is on break, so you're stuck hanging out with a bulletin board, three wild young men, and an intriguing girl reading a book.
The main part of the game is discussion with the girl, who wants to play a role-playing game with you where you challenge concepts about the real world, creating a fantasy world that is different.
The contrast between the wild fantasies of the game and the grungy, mundane but exciting (for a travelling youth) details of the youth hostel was fun. I imagined an antiseptic-smelling cold room with tile floors and a green color scheme.
The character you play as seems a bit hesitant, someone not used to the world (at one point they speculate on the ethnicities of someone's parents, and you can choose whether you find it odd or not that they might have parents of different races). Overall, I felt like I was exploring an urban world that was new to me.
This has good writing overall, more like what I'd expect from a published short story author.
I had some trouble figuring out how to progress, and at one point was worried I'd have to lawnmower everything, but thankfully I didn't, and I managed to have some fun. I still don't know exactly what triggers the ending, but it came at a good time.
Fight zombies in a game set in the real-life Vigamus video games museum, March 19, 2024In Rome there's a video game museum called Vigamus that's been around for a while. This game, which is an illustrated and translated version of the English game I originally played in the 2016 IFComp, is set in that museum and includes photographs of the actual museum.
The gameplay is intentionally simplistic. You start off in a room of the museum where zombies have poured out of an arcade machine. The game offers you items one at a time, each one solving a problem at hand. There is some non-linearity in that you find things before you need them and you have some choices in what order to use them. You use many items from video games, like the hammer from Donkey Kong, to win the day.
I had a little trouble figuring out what to do at times in French, so I had to play the English version to figure out how to get through some parts before coming back to French.
The game has a few small errors here and there (like not capitalizing 'salle' in one of the room names). Some of the parts that felt objectionable in the English version felt a little less so in the French, as the language barrier gave me some distance from the material. There is a lot of silly things here, but it makes sense as a game intended for visitors to Vigamus to play.
A sci fi (?) metaphor game for relationships, March 19, 2024This was difficult to understand as a non-native speaker. It's a story about a fictional spacefaring society that is written in a way that's meant to be obtuse and indeterminate at first before resolving later on.
Everyone has an 'ors' or 'orsimonous' that is visible that lets you understand certain things about the other person; what that is is up to interpretation, but can include parts of their past, their current feelings, etc.
Your father's ors has disappeared.
It happened after a big natural disaster.
The intent of this piece is to discuss how that happened.
At least, that's what I think. The writing is very indirect, saying the same thing multiple times but never outright. It's possible there are many allusions I missed here (is the 'shock' a metaphor for something like Covid? Is the 'orsimonous' a term used in other works of French fiction). But I liked the way the choices were presented and the work made me feel contemplative.
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