Mathbrush reviews IFComp 2025 (Latest: Monkeys and Car Keys, done for now)

Competitions IFComp
41

Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata

Before I played this game, someone told me that it had significantly improved on the last two games, which I thought was pretty neat. After playing, I do agree that it’s the strongest of the three.

This is part of a series of three games involving hard-bitten detectives, drug rings, exotic dancers and organized crime–except, everything is candy or sweets: the people, the blood, the drugs, the river. Each game has a murder that you investigate, then track down the murderer and accuse them. I don’t completely recall everything from the other two games, but all the locations and many people this time seemed familiar. There’s a lot of new stuff, though.

The main features of this game are Jimmy Pinata, the strung-up, disemboweled victim (very normal for a pinata, but not normal for a sentient being); and blue rock candy, an ultra-pure drug that’s flooded the markets. You have to track these both down.

Gameplay is a mix of classic parser take/drop/lock/unlock and ask/tell/show conversation. The topics available are pretty robust, with most labelled in bold but allowing you to learn of a topic in one conversation and use it in another.

In the past, I associated these gumshoe games with having an incredible setting, a solid story, compelling characters, and kind of shaky implementation. The implementation has gotten substantially better over time, but I found myself fighting over synonyms for a lot of the game. I did try playing without the walkthrough (as opposed to my early ifcomp days where I’d use a walkthrough from the beginning to power through as many games as possible), and got really far, but there were a few times where I was foiled by lack of synonyms or alternative solutions not working (or, just being dumb!). I didn’t identify any bugs, though, and I’m sending a transcript to the author, so I suspect if you’re reading this from the mildly distant future that you may not have as much trouble as me (which, again, wasn’t really that bad. This is among my most enjoyed games this comp so far).

This gimmick is almost infinitely exploitable; you can put any hardboiled old story in here and make it work. You could branch out and do a candy version of the movie Vertigo, or modernize it and do a candy Bourne Ultimatum. This is essentially the IF version of the muppets, where you can do a take on any story and make it funnier, so I hope it continues.

7 Likes
42

Lady Thalia and the Case of Clephan

This is the latest entry in a longstanding series of Twine games featuring a lady thief protagonist, a series of stealth and theft puzzles, and conversations with different tacts.

In this game, our lady thief Thalia has reformed, and is now helping to run a detective agency with her will-she-won’t-she former police officer Mel. With no more thieving, Thalia is a bit down in the dumps. Things take a turn, though, when a new thief appears:

Lady Thalia. Another lady Thalia, that is. This case of stolen identity is resolved through four different chapters.

The main conversation system worked well for me in this entry. You pick between being Friendly, Direct, and Leading On, depending on the personality of your listener. If you pick the wrong one, it will give you verbal cues showing the problem with your approach, and you can adjust. I do admit I reloaded some saves (not necessary, just wanted to) to ‘fix’ some mistakes I had made, but it always felt fair.

The exploration portions include some code-finding for locks, some searching of rooms, etc. I did get confused a bit in one area because I didn’t map it out, but this fits the game itself, where paying close attention earlier and taking notes can give you big advantages later on.

It’s probably recency bias but I like this one more than my memory of liking the others in the series, and since I liked those, this must be pretty good!

(I have the feeling that I forgot to comment on some essential part of the game, but what it is has slipped my mind. If someone who’s played it feels I omitted something important, let me know!)

Edit: Maybe it was the fact that your persuasion doesn’t work on your love interest and that that is commented on in-game, which was a fun way to handle things and a commentary on the usual formula of ‘say five things this person likes and then you can make out’. I do like some games where it’s not what you say that someone likes but who you are, so as you make choices that adjust your personality, you fall in and out of the range of likability for the ROs. In this game I think your true nature is pretty fixed, and that’s what Mel likes.

Editedit: After some reminders, I remember what it was. With Mel on your side, you can now tag-team conversations, deciding who says what and in what order, which was really a huge amount of complexity (it felt like to me) but not punishing, so very nice.

Also, I felt the game was setting up a very obvious twist in the villain reveal, but it subverted it at the end in a way that made all the earlier clues still kind of make sense.

7 Likes
43

My guess: the scenes where you got to see both Thalia and Mel’s perspective at the same time. It wasn’t ‘essential’, but it was cool to see, at least for me.

6 Likes
44

Thanks so much, and glad you enjoyed it!

3 Likes
45

Oh yeah, that and the final twist! I’ll go back and edit that

1 Like
46

A Day in A Hell Corp

This is a Twine game where you wake up in hell and things only go worse from there. But that’s because you work there. You wander around trying to torment souls efficiently. Depending on how you do, your boss rewards you.

There are different torment areas. Here’s the one for gluttons, for instance:

Whoa, that sweet tooth ward, man, it’s a real food paradise! Walls covered in big, dripping chocolate cakes and sticky caramel fountains. Wobbly carts full of treats everywhere, with little sweet-tooth devils running around, stealing cream puffs and licking their sticky fingers.

Nurses in ice cream-stained aprons trying to keep things straight, but they just end up slipping on banana peels or diving headfirst into whipped cream pools. Every corner’s full of laughs and sugary chaos, a place where even the devil can’t say no to another cookie.

Torture Level: [:smiling_face_with_horns::smiling_face_with_horns:]

Your trusty… assistant is here!

If you ask about the diet, it tells you:

Man, this week’s diet? It’s like, welcome to the sweet tooth ward of hell, where every meal’s a feast for those gluttony sinners! Day starts with pancakes stacked sky-high, buttery croissants, and hot chocolate thick as lava. Lunch? We’re talking towering cakes and chocolate fountains with marshmallows. Snack time? Cream puffs that explode in your mouth and cookies that just call your name. Dinner’s the grand finale, with mousse, tiramisu—Italy’s legendary coffee-infused dessert—and soufflés that look like magic on a plate. Every meal here’s a temptation you can’t resist! .

Call me crazy, but these descriptions don’t really scream ‘hell’ to me, especially for gluttons. In this case, we can add some medicine to mess up the food and increase the torture level.

The game was originally written in Italian it seems from the Twine code (which has all passages titled in Italian), which explains the very rare word in Italian that can be seen from time to time.

To me, the game felt like an exploration game, like Alice in Wonderland, just looking at things. That puzzles that are there aren’t too tricky; one was labelling things according to a table, most others just depended on the order you clicked links, so it wasn’t too bad.

I found that the writing of each sentence was pretty good, although it was kind of choppy with lots of m-dashes and emojis and asking itself questions (like ‘Lunch? We’re talking towering cakes!’). Different paragraphs didn’t seem closely connected, though, and different areas seemed altogether dissonant from each other. It was hard to see the unifying themes; what makes this place hell-like? Why are orcs here? How do the unusual accents of me and my coworker contribute to the game?

The use of colors for text was nice.

3 Likes
47

Agree with your analysis on the code: I have given a quick look (because Dante’s Inferno is well-known in US and UK… and even soviet/russian navy: everyone here was dumbfounded when was discovered that the “granitic citations” on walls inside soviet submarine bases wasn’t from Marx or Lenin, but from Dante !!!): the programmatical names looks indeed ones from an Italian, using english words when convenient (bed is shorter than letto, for example)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

1 Like
48

I was actually thinking about this too when playing Pharos Fidelis, but didn’t manage to cram any of those thoughts into my review – so instead I’m cramming them into your thread! It’s funny, I was a little disappointed by the way that Conversations in a Dark Room defanged its vampires, but the similar trope here, where the demons aren’t as bad as their reputation suggests, didn’t bother me. Partly I think that’s because it’s clear that there’s variation; some demons are more vicious and scary, and it’s also established that part of being a demon is being changeable, so it makes sense that being approached with compassion and curiosity would lead to a different outcome than rage an hate. It’s also the case that these demons aren’t actually established as being that bad – they’re not rebel angels, nor or they necessarily predatory like vampires (they are depicted as feeding on the soul-substance of other entities, but to me at least it wasn’t clear how sentient/sapient the “prey” was meant to be; at least to me it didn’t seem too far off from what meat-eating humans do!)

That does lead back to your question of what makes the demons demons, in that case – is it just aesthetics and vibe? And I think yeah, it kinda maybe is, but that’s OK :slight_smile:

6 Likes
49

Mike, I still haven’t reviewed it, but IF the “philological analysis” of Mathbrush (and my “peer review”…) is correct, I suspect that I have figured one of the inspiration:

probable source of inspiration

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

50

Thank you so much for leaving such a lovely (and the first! :grinning_face: ) review on my game. I appreciate your encouragement and thoughts as always!

1 Like
51

Crescent Sea Story

I’ve played a lot of Stewart Baker’s games, and I usually associate him with lighthearted longform narrative-focused choice-based games.

This is a more serious choice-based game with a complex world map and a lot of navigation and some light tracking of objects. To me, it feels like an experiment in shifting tones, and so I’m framing my review with that mindset. That may be an incorrect interpretation, which may render parts of this review less valid.

In this game, you are on a sea, your memories shattered into several (visible) pieces and you have to visit the important locations of your life to remember and revive that part of your life. You learn about your experiences as a youth and as a powerful wizard, and can visit the islands in any order. The world map is navigated with compass directions, as are the individual islands. In each memory, you wander around completing tasks, often tasked with going to specific parts in the map one at a time. Some memories are much shorter. As you complete memories, you have some leeway in how to end them, which raises your score in one of three attributes.

I think recovering your memories as a powerful but defeated creature is a solid trope and works well here. It reminds me of the game Dreamhold, a parser game where you are similarly navigate a space collecting your past memories of a life involving magic and power.

The most effective parts of the game to me were the heavily unusual parts, like what happened to our childhood schoolfriend and what lies hidden below the caves we explore. The author has a talent for describing the truly unusual in an unsettling way.

I was less enthusiastic about the world model and compass navigation. There were large swathes of maps that were essentially ‘Hallway D’ (but the outdoors equivalent’. I remember something Adam Cadre wrote in a review of Galatea:

In interviews I’ve been asked to give potential IF authors out there advice, and one of my usual lines is, “The pieces of text you write are the player’s reward for thinking of the command that calls them up. So make them rewarding.”

While this is choice-based and you don’t need to think up commands, it still holds when it comes to discovering new text through exploration. Some of these descriptions could use some more excitement:

This hut is nothing special. Twenty strides by twenty, it holds whatever the village needs holding.

You can reach the veranda of your home to the south-east, while a dirt path leads south-west towards the main road.

This isn’t universal advice; Wizard Sniffer has shockingly bare room descriptions and a lot of connecting hallways yet is still well-beloved, but that’s mostly due to the large and lively cast that provides flavor in those rooms. (Sorry for the long digression!)

I chose to mostly focus on Despair, one of the three stats you start with. I enjoyed the freedom to choose what to focus on. I think there was one very minor bug near the end where, even though I had used despair the most (both getting and giving), the options I had to choose were ones the walkthrough indicated as applying to coldness. (Specifically, the trials I faced were fire and a rickety bridge, though my stats were 3 1 1 (D C R) and I spent 2 1 1 on the four islands.

The overall plot is something I liked, and it felt like a replay would definitely be meaningful, since most islands have very different endings to the stories depending on you choice, and there’s no back button (there are saves though). So I thought that part of the game was particularly well-constructed.

4 Likes
52

Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade

This is my third and final Lamppost Projects game to play during this competition, and it is quite different than the rest in some ways.

All three games are set in a D&D-lite world with orcs, half-orcs, halflings, tieflings, magicians, and a setting a little later in European history than most fantasy I’ve dealt with (this one seems to be around 1600s or later, maybe even 1700s).

All three games also feature watercolor-looking art and a collection of four or more romanceable characters per game, of varying races and genders.

Where this game differs from the rest is that you have skills and animated dice rolls; the others had no randomness at all. The animated dice rolls look really satisfying and seeing the numbers and the target difficulty (and the way the game encourages you to try and fail and keep trying, just like a good GM) makes this a much more pleasant randomized experience for me than most.

You are a private investigator brought into to protect an opera from a threat of robbery. You have to meet the various performers and backstage people and take careful notes, while making use of the background knowledge you chose beforehand. I focused on observation but made myself clumsy, so I did great in conversations but pretty bad when trying to sneak peeks at things covertly.

One outstanding feature of the game is that you can guess the truth of the game at any time starting near act 1, and the game rolls with it if you get it right, which I did right at the end of act 2. You have to pick the right suspect, motive, means, etc. and what’s great is that you only have to be mostly right (I had the wrong motive, but otherwise succeeded). If you succeed most of your rolls for your good skills, the villain is fairly obvious, but the target and motives eluded me at first.

I think I like this game best of the three despite a few rough edges (there is romance but it’s all packed at the very end of the game and feels separate from the rest), because I have a personal fondness for detective stories, and deduction is very hard to model but this system is one I’ll mention in the future when others ask about mystery game advice in the future. I also like opera quite a bit, so this appealed to me in several ways.

5 Likes
53

On Just Two Wishes:

Small detail, but I’m pretty sure the PC is the mom – there’s a mention of being a widow.

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54

Thanks for the heads up, looks like my implicit bias strikes again!

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55

Not that it necessarily applies to this game, but happiness can be very evil indeed. Imagine making a serial killer happy, or an egomaniacal dictator, or a cult leader. Sometimes (far too often) happiness is derived from enormous suffering.

Maybe you’d object that such happiness isn’t “true” happiness, but I’d say that it is – and that’s at the heart of the question: what is a demon?

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56

Thanks, Brian–I always appreciate your insights and careful attention to detail! (I will have to take a look at what’s going on with that bug. )

1 Like
57

Thank you so, so much for taking the time to play all three of my entries, and sharing your impressions of each! Really appreciate your reviews. I’m especially glad to hear that the mystery design and skill checks were effective for you in “Fantasy Opera.”

Nice to hear that you like opera, as well! This game’s setting is essentially alternate-universe 1600s Venice, and it was very much inspired by the music of that period (which I love) and informed by my own background as an opera composer-librettist :musical_score:

6 Likes
58

I completed the game, but I don’t think I saw this reveal? Can you tell me what it was? (Or perhaps I failed to understand it, since I literally know nothing about the X-men except what was in this game.)

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59

Ah, it requires outside knowledge. the man in green is Dr Doom, who is arrogant and thinks himself better than everyone else, but who famously is completely smitten by Storm.

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60

Thank you so much for your review and for taking the time to play A Day in a Hell Corp and share it on the forum.
As for the different areas, I chose not to link them together so they could be played in any order, without restrictions.
The game exists in two versions, Italian and English. For the English one—especially for content related to local products—I had help from a native speaker who lived in California for many years. For me, it was also a way to relive memories from my younger days in San José, San Francisco, and other places. In some parts, I preferred to have it reviewed by a native speaker to make it flow more smoothly.
I’ve participated in the past, and once again, it’s been a really enjoyable experience.
And yes… the game is kind of a parody (a slightly exaggerated one!) of my work environment: orcs, devils, and other creatures are metaphors for the “types” of people I have the pleasure… ahem… of spending my days with—especially the boss! :smiling_face_with_horns: .

P.S. As for desserts, there’s a saying we have back home — I’m not sure of the exact translation in English — but it’s something like: “Non è tutt’or quel che luccica!”, 'All that glitters is not gold.’

2 Likes