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

Competitions IFComp
101

The Semantagician’s Assistant

This was a solidly coded and enjoyable game that I found just slightly under-clued.

In it, you play as someone who gets drawn into an interview to become the assistant to a word wizard, or semantagician. The interview is a locked room puzzle. You’re locked in the room, and need to get out. But there’s not even a door!

Your tools consist of a few objects you can find laying around in addition to a half-dozen or so implements that can alter words. Some of these are easy to figure out (like a ‘sawing in half’ table, although that one had a catch I didn’t quite get at first), while others are pretty obtuse (like the chimera box).

Helping you along the way is a cute rabbit named Weldon who can answer your questions.

The puzzles here are fun and funny. I liked how there were a lot of animals in the game but, instead of implementing lots of details about animal sound and behavior, etc., there was a lot of discussion about how these aren’t real but simulacra, and the strange implications that has philosophically.

I had a great time with the puzzles, but I did get lost pretty often. In a way, that became the puzzle. I did consult the walkthrough because I never thought of how to handle the robe. Opening it, I saw the solution to a couple of later things ahead of time.

I wonder if it could have used a little more guidance here and there. On the other hand, it’s a small, constrained environment and not too long a game, so there’s some wiggle room on how clear it needs to be. I guess it comes down to player preference. If you want a puzzle game and not have your hand held (but still have some hints in-game), this is great for you.

4 Likes
102

You Cannot Speak

Hmm, this game is almost entirely incomplete. While several games in this competition are unfinished at various levels or promise sequels, this game stops before any of the actual plot happens; it’s not a game with a sequel hook, it’s a prologue with the game missing.

You play as someone with sleep paralysis who wakes up in a hospital that seems to be on a space station. There are some weird objects in the room, and then an old man is standing outside your door. Then the game ends, and promises the Chapter 1 is coming soon.

So there’s really not anything to judge. The only thing in this game to talk about (for me) that isn’t a setup for some future, unknown payoff is that you have some options in what order to explore your room.

Yes, I’d like to see it finished.

3 Likes
103

Two games in translation

I enjoy playing the French, Spanish, and German games that crop each year (usually in French IFComp, Ectocomp, and the German Grand Prix respectively). Two games I had played in the past and enjoyed were translated this year.

whoami

I played and reviewed the Spanish version of this game before. When I play a game in another language, it has an air of mystique around it to me. Everything seems cooler when it’s in another language. But it’s harder.

Playing this game in English was an interesting change. It uses a lot of technobabble which was mostly incomprehensible when I played the Spanish version. Here I can understand it more, and turn a more critical eye on it. But the technobabble still holds up pretty well; the ideas used are at least plausible.

This game is about mind uploads. You don’t know that at first; the game simulates a file system like DOS or command line Linux. Navigating the file structure, you discover that a war is wiping out humanity. You are going to die. A brain upload might be what saves you.

The majority of the game is piecing together what is going on through navigating the file system and finding older documents.

Along the way, the game uses interesting mechanics, including a simulated Inform parser (written entirely in Twine) and a cheeky towers of Hanoi (cheeky because it’s a famously bad puzzle to put into an IF game, so much that several games mock the concept, like Wizard Sniffer that has a dumpster with towers of hanoi in it at the start. I don’t mind it too much here).

This game is visually rich and has subtle details that can really throw you for a loop and more explicit text that will help you connect the dots (I’m thinking here of checking the date before and after the upload. It gave me a realization that was later explicitly confirmed.

I liked it in Spanish, and I like it in English.

Fired

Olaf Nowacki is a popular figure in both English and German IF, with games like Schief/Wry and Fischstäbchen/Eat the Eldritch having made a splash in past years.

This game is fairly small and compact but has a strong voice and characterization. I’d describe it as anti-capitalist and just anti-work in general.

You play as a worker being fired from their crummy job and bent on revenge. But the evidence you meticulously collected has been stolen by your boss!

You have to recover it, in the process overcoming a ludicrously anti-worker building and boss’s lair (parts of which definitely reminded me of past jobs! I had a desk in a closet once) to defeat him.

There are multiple endings (with worse endings usually giving hints for better endings) and lots of funny commentary.

There are a couple of rough edges carried over from German; Forklift in German is Gabelstapler, which I thought was just a stapler when I first played, so I picked it up and tried to staple things with it (which makes for a very amusing picture in my mind, now). This version still lets you pick up the forklift, but I don’t think I found any other errors.

7 Likes
104

A Murder of Crows

This is a Twine game designed to be played in a relatively short time (I think someone mentioned that it will end after a certain number of moves).

You play as a group of crows, one of whose members, Noodle, has been injured recently. You can undertake various activities like taking revenge against humans, visiting a friendly human, and investigating a dog.

The crows are simple-minded and can be rude but seem like softies at heart. The language the game uses is simple and charming.

It was often difficult to know what actions I could do and where I could go next, or what plans to make. I suppose, like other reviewers have said, maybe that is indicative of life for a murder of crows, swarming around and trying different things over and over.

4 Likes
105

The Breakup Game

This game has good styling and coding. I think the author will do well in the future. I believe this game was written with a specific objective, and that the author did well on that objective.

That said, I think the objective is a misstep.

This game is about break-ups, and it coaches you through overcoming it. It may be helpful to someone currently going through a breakup, but I found it very poor at talking with me about a breakup that I had long ago and had worked through.

There is a real tonal mismatch. When I got my third achievement pop-up for, I think, being sad, I just paused and stared at the screen for a while. It feels so odd to me to have positive, upbeat, awarding achievements while coaching someone through a breakup. I just can’t see, say, my mom, putting gold stars on my shirt as I cry to her about a breakup.

The game assumes that you are right now in the depths of despair. Sometimes it gave way too many options to express myself (and allowed me to go back and add more before giving generic advice that revealed it didn’t really care about what I chose), and sometimes it gave ones that don’t at all reflect my thought process (like ‘That’s beautiful’ and ‘that’s sad’ as the only two reactions).

I think Chatgpt memes have ruined me. While I don’t particularly suspect AI use here (it’s possible but unimportant to me if it was used), there are a lot of memes about how AI has inordinately upbeat, generic and positive reactions to inappropriate things, like it’s own mistakes. “You deleted the codebase!” “Oopsy! Hee hee. You’re right. But we won’t give up, because you, you are special, and we will get through this together!” While the branches of this game were selected by a human, they felt to me also to have some inappropriateness in tone at times, like asking for specific details and then completely ignoring them while giving us an achievement for being a true warrior.

I do not feel like this game is awful or should be mocked. There is a great difference between someone doing a poor job at creating a game and someone doing a great job at making a game I simply didn’t like. This game has evidence of good craftmanship, but my personal, subjective reaction is that it didn’t work well as a mirror of my own feelings or as a coach through hard times.

6 Likes
106

Dead Sea

I enjoyed this game. Its intentionally minimalistic, with simple styling, short sentences, and brief paragraphs. I thought for a bit there that might be some consistent poetic meter or a syllable thing like haiku, but I don’t think there was.

You explore an afterlife with melancholic and strange characters. They have desires ranging from finding release from the pain of the loss of their loved ones to a desire for orange fanta (relatable).

The game progresses in different stages, each unlocked by crossing some barrier, like a guard who must be bribed or a river that must be crossed. While barriers are the bread and butter of location-based interactive fiction, I felt like they were good symbolism for stages of the afterlife (like ‘crossing over’); not that I identified any clearly distinct and symbolic stages, just that crossing over repeatedly felt symbolic.

There are multiple endings, some shorter than others. I got one named ‘true ending’ but was able to get into the lighthouse after that, but I couldn’t find any ending after that ending.

Gameplay revolves around picking up items (with a limited inventory) and then using them in different spots. One location has numeric codes.

3 Likes
107

Not so Happy Easter 2025

This is a ZX spectrum game that I played on an online emulator. It worked great; the only issue I had was that I have the habit of typing L for LOOK whenever I want to see if a room changed, but typing L in this game randomly scrambles your game by putting you in a random room with random objects.

Because of that, I used a walkthrough for everything after the first area.

You play as someone trying to help find some lost children. To your dismay, you soon find evidence that they were kidnapped, and you have to go on a dangerous easter egg hunt to find them.

The game has a helpful vocabulary list to help you get around, and has some classic tricky puzzles (like an object floating in a nearly-empty barrel that you just can’t quite reach). Some of the puzzles rely on things like examining objects twice and waiting for events to happen, and quite a few have adventure-game logic where you know you have to do something but couldn’t really predict the result (like the use of the ice cream, for instance).

Overall a solid, shorter adventure thoroughly grounded in Spectrum and Spectrum-era gaming nostalgia. For fans of the era, it will be a real treat. For people used to recent parser games, it may be less guided or player-friendly then what they’re accustomed to.

5 Likes
108

Eight Last Signs in the Desert

This is a surreal game set in the desert where you examine eight different objects and make various choices concerning them, which are then sealed in. At times the game mentions connections between two items; for me they were the last two I had chosen each time, but I don’t know if that changes on different playthroughs.

It has lovely looking sand art that looked really hard to make but visually appealing.

When I say surreal I mean very surreal, like between The Wasteland and Finnegan’s Wake surreal. Here’s an excerpt:

What horizons can we reach with twining? The process is strict but has an end. She comes up with a new weave for her tale. It goes like this: sand. The weaving proceeds from absence to absence. This happens every Thursday. A kiosk is so very far from her. Oh, didn’t you know, she says? It is a strange affair.

It’s writing that willfully impedes understanding for effect, with just enough connections between sentences to trick your brain into thinking it knows what’s going on but an overall effect of something unfamiliar. It’s like the text equivalent of a Dali painting.

This beautiful and hard-wrought story that defies categories and quantification is, unfortunately, entered in to the ‘categorization and hard quantification of games by group vote’ competition, and so is subjected to numerical evaluation. But I think that the ranking of this particular game won’t really matter; what matters more imo is what people feel or experience while playing it.

8 Likes
109

I believe it Loads a saved game, with repeated uses taking you through all the saved games. But there are several saved game already on the tape, which makes for a weird experience!

2 Likes
110

Escape the Pale

This is a meaningful game written about a Jewish person escaping persecution from the Eastern Europe/Russian part of the world (in the early 1900s, I think, maybe late 1800s).

Most of the game is very bare-bones. I’m not sure what system it is; it might just be custom javascript. You select a number and then push SUBMIT to move on.

Gameplay is almost entirely buying items at a low price, going to a nearby city, and selling them at a high price. Each city only has a few its next to, so you can either map it out as a graph, or (what I did) just memorize the cities with the worst prices and don’t pick them. Near the end I got comfortable enough to travel 3 or 4 cities at a time to get a good price.

Behind its dour aesthetic, the game hides emotional moments written in terse text. Accidentally going beyond the ‘pale’ was terrifying, and my companion Ephraim didn’t make it in the end.

The starkness of the game contributes to its overall feeling, emphasizing the numbness you could feel in that scenario. On the other hand, it feels at times like it fights against the player. Having just a map connecting the stations might be nice, or more indication of the story to come. I guess it all depends on what effects the author is most interested in having on the audience.

7 Likes
111

Temptation in the Village

This author has been making solid parser games for decades now. This game is an adaptation of a Kafka work, one I had not read before, and is one of the more successful prose adaptations I’ve seen. Adaptations are very hard to get right in a parser game, since you have to match your text to the original author’s and allowing things ‘out of sequence’ requires inventing new storylines or tightly curtailing the player’s freedom. This game takes the latter approach but it makes sense in-world, as you are a stranger and not permitted to enter wherever you like or do whatever you want. And the text matches altogether very well, I think.

I like much of Kafka’s work, although on a recent vacation I stayed in an airbnb paid for by my school that had a huge library. I found a book by Kafka which was exciting, but all I read was a very long and kind of dull story written from the perspective of a dog. I got the impression that Kafka really, really enjoys thinking from a dog’s perspective.

Anyway, this game has you play the role of a stranger entering a village, trying to find a place to stay. There follows a series of innocuous happenings that seem normal but which leave you feeling embarrassed or unwelcome. Parts of it are really evocative, like the couple you never see that sit in the dark at a table in dim light, barely talking, lit glinting off something on the man’s chest.

The game is short and simple, but effective. This was a nice treat to play as I near the end of the games of the 2025 comp.

4 Likes
112

Rain Check-in

This game is a parser game where you end up parked at the end of a lonely road, ready to check into a room. Unfortunately, the airbnb (I think?) host you are working with has sent you poorly-translated instructions. You have to find your way in.

I found two endings, but peeking at the walkthrough shows there are some more including at least one area with a bar that I didn’t visit.

I found the house area to be descriptive, with the squeaking gate and the approaching thunderstorm. Like real life, I was mildly panicked about what to do with my draining phone battery.

I liked the puzzles involved. I did have some difficulty fighting with the parser in one part. Specifically, after putting the dial on the lockbox, X DIAL and TURN DIAL and TURN DIAL TO 1 didn’t work but TURN DIAL TO 123 got me to the menu.

The author states that the text was grammar-corrected with chatgpt. It did feel like fluent English. While I oppose most uses of AI in games, it’s mostly for aesthetic rather than ideological purposes; most AI text is boring, all AI stories I’ve read have incoherent plot, most AI images don’t match the story and bloat file sizes, and, for one ideological purpose, if we use AI we can’t grow as writers. But the text here is written by the author, just spruced up, and I like the scenario he came up with. Grammar is a fairly mechanical thing, so I don’t mind its mechanical improvement here.

Even if you don’t use walkthroughs, I recommend checking out the walkthrough once you’re done to see the surreal and vibrant art.

3 Likes
113

The Transformations of Dr Watson

This game is a brief, mostly-linear story (with occasional parallel branches) about being Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories and having your mind shunted into different animals, each of which gets attacked in turn.

I love Sherlock Holmes stories, and have often considered Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing as the most gripping and interesting to me (but only in Sherlock Holmes; his other stories aren’t as interesting to me). Unfortunately, this has almost none of the interesting elements of Sherlock Holmes stories. Dr Watson is here a coroner, for some reason, and does the investigating himself. He discovers the criminal immediately (who for some reason has left the murder weapon in plain view while inviting a doctor to investigate the death and is shocked to get called out). The murderer also has no problem believing animals have sentience or malice and violently murders them and attacks children while a detective is in the house. Sherlock himself doesn’t do any kind of fancy deducing of any kind. This is exactly the kind of story AI tends to generate; this story itself might not be AI, but if it is human-made, it doesn’t rise above the level of what AI is capable of.

Each page has multiple ai-illustrated images, which, like the story, serve to show exactly what is described without anything greater. The text says parrot, so we see a parrot. The text says cat, so we see a cat. There isn’t any deeper theme or connection or symbolism, and the details of the pictures have no relevance to the story text.

3 Likes
114

Valley of Glass

This is a small Inform game that seems unfinished in some sense. It has a small map with one central area and four spokes. Travelling in each of the spoke directions tells you of a memory, except for one which seems to be your current life.

It seems like it might be setting up something interesting (polishing the fruit was fun, as was wondering why we’re wearing a night gown, and decompiling led me to try to BREAK OPEN the fruit), but it doesn’t pay off, instead ending abruptly. If it’s meant to be short and poetic, it might benefit from more careful attention to detail; if it’s meant to be part of something longer, I’d love to see it finished.

7 Likes
115

Your Very Last Words

This is a downloadable Unity game. In it, you stand before a firing squad, about to be killed during (I believe) the Mexican Revolution due to being on the opposite side from the soldiers.

There are two components of the game. One is a text component, where you move on to the next message with a right arrow, and options appear in a menu of 3 at a time. The other is ‘opening your eyes’, revealing a 3d-generated world you can view from a single fixed point, looking at the firing squad, the whole world in stark white lines on black.

You are to be executed, but are given a 10 minute reprieve to consider your last words. Thoughts fly through your mind, and you can pick which ones to remember. At the end, you can choose 3 to say (although my top choice didn’t work, for some reason).

The frenzied re-evaluation of an entire life was relatable, and the writing had pathos. The ending was chilling.

This game does use timed text at the start and a timer for the middle portion. Unfortunately, I mostly chose to get into IF because of the ease of pausing and doing other things. My childcare duties called me away from the computer multiple times, so I came back to see the execution had started without knowing if I could have seen more interesting text in the middle and no rewind. What I did see was worthwhile, though. This game led me to look up more about the revolution on Wikipedia.

4 Likes
116

The Burger Meme Personality Test

This was a salient game for the current job environment. It presents a fake version of an AI-run personality test (no real AI is used) where you are presented with different images and scenarios and your answer determine your employability.

This is a real thing that’s been going on; I’ve seen a lot of screenshots of job applicants that are taking tests featuring a 3d cartoon guy or girl in various scenarios with inane questions like ‘do you relate to this picture’ or something.

I failed the test, which is reasonable as I doubled down on being willing to sacrifice the CEO’s life to save the plebeians, even though I otherwise had expressed undying loyalty to the burger empire.

Pretty funny. The choices always felt fresh but the results turned a little stale by the time I finished this burger. Still, I can’t deny it was a good meal.

3 Likes
117

One Step Ahead

This is a brief Twine game about someone who becomes addicted to the use of AI.

It felt pretty realistic (until its turn in later chapters, although that’s not too unrealistic). I have some students who rely almost entirely on AI. A lot of the panic when things like the SAT or IB exams approach as its been so long since they did work unassisted that they’ve forgotten how. Thankfully most of the come to that realization early enough that they can lock in and start studying themselves.

There were occasional grammar mistakes (the only ones I noticed were sentences that had an extra ‘be’ in them) but they kind of fit with the slow degeneration of the main character’s cognitive skills.

I liked the voice of the author and the creativity shown in the presentation.

1 Like
118

A Visit to the Human Resources Administration

I felt a strong connection to a lot of the material in this game. You are an alien visiting the Human Resources Administration to sign up for SNAP benefits. In the process, you learn a lot about how human bureaucracy impedes and hurts others.

When I was first married at 26, we got a little government income from a disability program my ex had been on before marriage. There were tons of restrictions; for instance, we weren’t allowed to have savings over around $500 or $1000 (so we had financial pressure to not establish any emergency savings and be more irresponsible). After almost a year, the government told us that we hadn’t properly reported my income and we had to pay back thousands of dollars. I told them that our bank account didn’t even have half of that, and they said, “Are you offering to pay off half of it now? If you do, we’ll forgive the rest.” So that worked out, but it was a real mess. We messed up reporting, they took forever checking.

Similarly, DMVs have always been old, decaying buildings (not enough tax money?) and hard to figure out. I ended up with a ‘Female’ marker on my Pennsylvania ID (which got me out of at least one speed trap as the officer found it amusing when I showed him my ID).

It’s not all dour out there, though. The low-rated post office in my area had a stand-out clerk who pointed out problems I had with my passport application before a work trip to Spain and saved me about a month of work and hundred dollars.

This mostly-linear game does a great job of showing just how messed up the world is by making the alien go through the whole process. But then it goes through and says all the same things much less effectively and without any subtext by having a ranting human explicitly lay down the moral. I think the first part was so effective by contrasting the cruelty and inhumanity of the system with the placid alien, and the second part just didn’t work as well for me. It’s kind of like when you’re drawing something and it looks good but you flip the mirror and the flaws just jump out at you; the first part was that ‘flipped reality’ for me.

The author’s end note mentioned working in this area, and I salute Jesse for the good work!

3 Likes
119

Uninteractive Fiction 2

The first thing that struck me is that the 2 is so bold and red. Then I noticed how jagged it is. Was it, I thought, just drawn in MS Paint?

I looked more closely. No, that doesn’t look like MS Paint. Instead, it looks more like a texture brush, like the ones procreate has that are fun to play around with but not really useful (I only use four brushes ever: flat brush, gel pen, round brush, and whatever pencil one I see first).

But no, I thought, something’s off. The 2 is really well-done. It wasn’t just sketched in a second (or maybe it was, in a moment of serendipity). Could it be–I thought–that this was actually a special font, like a ‘display’ google font, that was made large, bold, and rotated slightly? But it’s not a perfect 2 so the questions still remains: font, or sketch?

I zoomed in closer. The resolution on the 2 isn’t as high as the resolution on the other text. It was added later, after all. It could be scaled up from something. But if the author drew on it at full resolution, wouldn’t it have more details? A scaled up font makes more sense. But I tried tracing the movement of the 2 with my mouse, and it felt natural. This could be just a sketch drawn with a single gesture.

I tried a font-matching website (does it use AI? Probably a GAN but not an LLM). Nothing came up, but could be rotation.

We may never know.

Also the game just says ‘you win’ that’s it sorry for spoilers.

12 Likes
120

The Island Of Rhynin

This is a brief stat-based Twine game where you explore an island that has a civilization on it.

You are a renowned explorer joining an exploration team to check out an island. You can choose things like your weapon, whether to conserve or spend resources, how to deal with strangers, etc.

It has some interesting elements, but many of the mechanics don’t make sense and the story relies heavily on pre-existing tropes.

For instance, mechanically, we have the choice to build up our food supplies or rush on ahead. But the game is over in around 20 choices or less, and there’s no time to use supplies or not. Many choices are just straight up ‘right’ (stat boost) or ‘wrong’ (stat decrease) with no indication of which one is right.

Story-wise, the island has us hunting for food, crossing a decaying bridge, encountering a tribe, etc. There are a couple of twists but overall it could be stronger. There are a lot of plotholes (like the chieftain saying they’ve been aware of us for quite some time but we just barely arrived on the island). Like a few other games in this comp with ai-generated cover art, this is a story at the level of what AI is capable of writing (although it may have been human-written, it doesn’t exceed AI’s capability).

I think that with more time the author could develop these ideas into a more compelling narrative, if that is something that they’re interested in. The most impressive part was the smooth UI presentation with nice stat indicators.

2 Likes