Reviews by MathBrush
more than 10 hours
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A real-time messaging game with an involved story and some rough patches, September 8, 2018I purchased Project Hyrax a month or two ago.
The design and formatting are well done. It's a text-based game where you receive messages from a time traveller.
The writing seems like it is not from a native speaker, with numerous typos and grammatical errors. Also, many of the choices are clearly irrelevant to what happens after, adding nothing to the gameplay, and only two choices are available at a time.
However, the timed messages and the length of the game drew it out to over a month as I tried to finish it to write a review. It eventually grew on me, and I found myself having a good time.
I would have given it 4 stars for that reason, but it froze on me after many, many choices, and I couldn't get it unfrozen.
A massive game of intense difficulty, April 11, 2018This game is the third by Mike Gerwat, after Hill 160 and Escape from Terra.
This is in the top tier of long parser games if played without a walkthrough. You play a version of the author, a former piano tuner who was born blind and is now deaf and tuned pianos for famous bands. You now go back through time to college and other places.
The gameplay length is increased by the difficulty. Some important room descriptions are only printed once. If you didn't see it the first time, you'll never see it again. Seemingly minor actions lead to game over's hundreds of moves later. Searching the code, there are 542 instances of the phrase "GAME OVER!", ranging from leaving the taps on when exiting the shower to using shoddy condoms.
The walkthrough is not completely accurate, either, leading to more random deaths. Random deaths cannot be undone, meaning that you must save constantly.
The game is split into four sections, the first and last of which have alternate paths. I was unable to complete the first section with either path, but I read through much of the game in the decompiled text strings.
I'm giving it three stars because it is descriptive, it is reasonably polished, and it seems to communicate the emotional feeling that the author was going for when adding in all of the pitfalls.
A sprawling RPG with color use, September 15, 2017This game is so different from Panks's other games. Panks's IFComp games were short and trivial, or mocking.
This game is really, really big, and reasonably well polished.
You can play a lot of mini games, visit tons of locations, order NPCs, etc.
The problem is that it was developed for a long time by one person with only a little input from others, meaning that several of the mechanics are just spotty.
The original, and one of the best depending on your likes, September 4, 2017Adventure was the very first text adventure of all time. It inspired the genre and its name.
The point of the game is to gather a variety of treasures and bring them back to a small building. The game is pretty accurately based on the Mammoth Caves, which explains the mazes and the fact that exits and entrances sometimes don't match up exactly (i.e. going west and then east may not leave you where you started).
For me, the most enjoyable way to play this game was to keep it at a slow pace, going back to it time and again while playing other games. I kept a numbered list of every room with all of its exits to other rooms. This made the game much easier. After several weeks, I got to a point where I couldn't get any further for several days. I finally looked up a walkthrough for the last three or four puzzles.
Once you get all the treasures, there is an endgame that is surprisingly good; it seems more like a modern deconstruction of the game than the very first game of all.
I played the 350 point version, and I found the game incredibly enjoyable. I admit that I used the wicker cage bug (as mentioned in another review), where you can carry everything in the wicker cage. To get full points, you must remove the items from the cage outside of the building before placing them in there.
Every Interactive Fiction player should play this game because so many other games reference it heavily.
A classic game with some difficulty due to randomization, August 15, 2017This is one of the best selling IF games ever. It has graphics and runs on Spectrum emulators (like Fuse).
It has graphics, and is intended to cover the same material as the book The Hobbit. It does so with a great deal of NPC independence, which ends up (to me) being somewhat frustrating. Back in the early days of text adventures, many of the companies (especially outside of Infocom) hadn't really thought about player guidance, and so games devolved into 'guess the verb' on every occasion.
Still, this game has a good deal of charm, and I've had fun exploring it.
An insanely hard puzzle game that is huge, July 16, 2017This MSDOS game, which I played in DOSBOX, is a collection of extraordinarily hard puzzles. You enter an intersection of hallways, with each direction in the hallway having a door with a puzzle. Past those puzzles are harder puzzles. Past those puzzles are...way too many puzzles.
This is one of the very largest adventure games, and even the easiest puzzles are way too hard for most people. If you are an adventure puzzle fanatic, you can try this game. Expect many, many, many random deaths. I'm giving it 3 stars for being polished, descriptive, and good at instilling an emotion: annoyance.
Andy Phillip's best game; a massive city spy thriller, July 1, 2017This game took me about 2500 moves to complete this game using the hints; this is an extremely long game, among the very longest I have ever played.
You are in a 40-story city, with about 20 of the stories implemented. Each story that's implemented has 3-4 puzzles.
The game is a spy thriller, with you as the spy. As usual for Andy Phillips games, there is a lot of action, a lot of 'guess what he's thinking', and some male gaze, although it is toned down from his other games.
This is an epic, sprawling game; I have no idea how this fit in the z-machine. It also has a very well executed plot twist that was almost as good as Spider and Web's.
This game took me about a month of playing 30-60 minutes a day. I could have played 20 IFComp games in the time it took me to beat this.
A Level 9 reworking of Adventure with an expanded endgame, July 1, 2017This game is a reworking of Adventure, and was released commercially by Level 9.
It's generally similar to Adventure, with the dragon puzzle made easier, but it has a much bigger endgame where you have to save hundreds of elves (but your actions save about a hundred at a time).
It has graphics that add a lot to the game, even though they are nowhere near as good as Magnetic Scrolls.
Gargoyle plays level 9 games, so if you want to try this out, it may be a fun way to play the original Adventure game.
Played in tame mode; a silly puzzlefest with great writing , June 25, 2017So, my experience in playing Phobos is atypical; I played in tame mode, and I just used a walkthrough, because I wasn't very interested in the game.
But the writing turned out to be quite good. The mishaps of my companion and the finale were some of the best things I've read in a while. This game ends up reading a lot like the meretzky-adams game Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Also similar to that game is the transportation syste, where you travel between disconnected worlds.
Even in tame mode, some dirty stuff sneaks through, but it is on the level of the movie Space Balls (e.g. a suggestive spaceship, a man or woman getting almost undressed against their will, etc.)
Using the walkthrough, the game seemed pretty hard. The copy protection in this game is achieved by having a horrible maze with horrible monsters, where you have to use two of the feeling to get through.
The game has the infamous t-removing machine, inspiration of future games such as Earl Grey and Counterfeit Monkey.
Overall, I'm not sure if I'll play it again. But I think meretzky does some of his best writing here (perhaps he was enthusiastic about the subject matter).
A massive spy thriller-type game with intricate, unfair puzzles, June 11, 2017Most of Andy Phillips games have the same bones with different overlays. In all of the games, you play a protagonist with some sort of special features (in this one, you're an intelligent accountant), a femme fatale, and cinematic scenes with really hard combinatorial puzzles.
The special features of this one are the setting (most of it in an abandoned boarding school), and the gruesomeness of it. It was a bit over the top, even compared to his other games.
If you haven't tried any of the other games, I really liked Heist and Time.
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