These are brief notes, in the order I played the games. My scores are indicated after the game title.
In general I enjoyed all the games; they were an interesting mix of different formats. In retrospect my scores seem I little low for a couple of them; I enjoyed them more than my scores might indicate.
There are a few spoilers here, but I've tried to keep that to a minimum.
This game is a sequel to "Back to Life... Unfortunately" (which I have played and found amusing). Here, though, the object is not to kill off the PC (as it was there), although you can die and get the same sort of responses. Doing this will lower your score, though, and can prevent an optimal ending. As a result I ended up undoing my deaths (although it is amusing to see how the environment changes after various deaths). But that isn't really the point here...
I enjoy playing unusual PC's and here the PC is an eyeball. This is handled reasonably well (although the lack of a body did seem to be drummed in a bit too much at the beginning), and leads to a number of novel approaches to puzzles. And this game is mostly about puzzles (which I like). For the most part the puzzles are reasonable and have sometimes amusing solutions. One thing that did irritate me a bit is that you have to pretty much examine everything to find some clues (and make sure to "read" as well as "examine"), and there was one place (in the hole) where two words which I initially took to be synonyms turned out be distinct things which needed to be examined separately.
I did get totally stuck at one point because I didn't know one of the necessary commands (rot13: ohzc). Maybe this was hinted somewhere that I missed, but the other eyeball-specific commands seemed to be clued pretty clearly.
I was let down a bit by the ending sequence, which involved reading a lot of conversation topics and making a few choices to decide the fate of the kingdom. A few of these you make explicitly (and need to use some hints found by examining everything earlier), but some of them are made for you automatically during during conversation nodes. Maybe this just illustrates the lack of utility of an eyeball...
There were a couple of parser problems (but many seem to have been anticipated); having to refer to "crumpled pieces of paper" took me a long time to realize. I also got a number of scoring messages at the end to the effect that my score had increased by a certain number of points to a total of 100 (I suspect this may be an ADRIFT issue due to the score being updated before any messages are printed or something).
Overall I enjoyed this a lot; it's light-hearted and the puzzles are interesting.
It's clear from the title that this is going to be a superhero game, although this isn't clear from the beginning of the game. I found the beginning a bit dry and railroading, although this changes once the "main game" begins. There at least was an ostensible goal, even if this turns out to be unrelated to the main game.
The majority of the game is a figure-out-what's-going-on-here thing. I enjoyed the puzzles here; they all seemed to have intuitive and natural solutions, and many have multiple solutions, a nice feature. Some of the solutions seemed a little bit cliche (I *knew* when I found a stethoscope what I was probably going to need it for...), and there was one irritating piece of information hidden in a random spot (and no real indication otherwise that meticulous examination was necessary). I also personally dislike having to both "examine" and "search" things, which is necessary here. The place where I encountered the most trouble was at the end; one of the "powers" which must be used did not seem at all clued (the other one was pretty clearly).
What disappointed me the most was that your superpowers, such as they are, do not really come into play until the very end, and in fact your character doesn't seem particularly interested in figuring out what is happening to her and what powers she has. In one ending (where you leave without figuring out what's going on) there isn't really any comment about them at all.
There were a few bugs (possible spoilers here): if you don't exit through the office door and return to your room through the window without finding everything, and then unlock Darcy, she will prevent you from returning to the office (she won't let you back out the window). There are also some responses from Darcy printed even when she hasn't been released yet (if you try to leave through the gate, for instance). I also found several "a stethoscope is here" messages when I had it in my inventory (and there didn't seem to be a second one).
Overall I found the game enjoyable, but felt it needed a bit more polish. Certainly worth playing.
This game has a lot of backstory and character descriptions, and takes the novel approach of letting you explore in the personae of several different characters before beginning the main game. Unfortunately, I didn't find this exploration particularly directed, since it wasn't at all clear which of this information was going to be useful to me later, or if I should be *doing* anything at this point (in fact, it wasn't really possible to do anything significant at this point).
And once the main game starts, most of the backstory is irrelevant to the main plot. The main plot is a fairly generic space story (rhymes with "car wreck"), although vaguely interesting. But I felt a bit let down that I didn't really need to use the information I found while exploring.
The gameplay also was not that exciting. It mainly involved waiting repeatedly until a few points where you could take action or make choices; trying to do anything except at these points was futile. Your perspective changes among the various characters during this sequence, which is fairly well done (but there are several points where this is not handled properly, such as one point where, as Danny, I am told "The pilot, Danny, is gazing out at space.").
My overall impression of the game was that there were too many long text dumps with very few places to take initiative; the story could have been more interesting if more of the backstory were incorporated into the main game and there was more interaction.
This was my favorite of this year's entries, and I suspect it will get the most discussion. You play a woman about to give birth who has the option to change her unborn baby's fate through magical (and morally questionable) means.
There are some puzzles, but they do not seem to be the primary focus of the game, and they seem pretty clearly clued. Several of them involve making the right sequence of choices in conversational menus; as far as I could tell you never cut yourself off from "solving" these, though, and the game is primarily a matter of determining what you are willing to do to improve your child's fate.
Several of the menu choices are about what you will do but rather about how you will do it. That is, they basically allow you to express your attitudes and motivations. I haven't played the author's previous game (The Baron), but I gather this is featured in that work to an even greater extent. The game itself doesn't always provide any response to these choices (several of the final menus, for instance, do not provide any response before the game ends).
At first I wasn't sure if I liked this approach (and I'm still not entirely sure), but in retrospect I find it strangely effective. In games where there are a lot of possible outcomes and each choice provides a description of the results of your choice, I tend to obsessively play through all of the choices to find out the results. As a result I often end up not feeling particularly attached to any of the choices. With minimal external feedback, though, I felt more inclined to provide internal feedback; hence I actually found that I felt more invested in my choice. I'm not sure how effective this would be if I encountered it frequently, but I certainly found it novel.
Another interesting effect is that, rather than providing a description of the outcome at the end of the game (as is typical) you can basically find out the current outcome as the game is happening (through the crystal ball). In fact, to a large extent this the only time you are told about the outcome; this summary of the future is not repeated at the end of the game. This also makes it clear that the focus is on determining what choices you want to make, since much of the mystery about the outcomes is removed.
One weakness I found was that I did not always feel much remorse at the actions I needed to take to improve the child's fate. I found that I felt more uneasy about harming the non-humans (the pixie and the goat) than about harming people (including myself). Rarely do I develop great emotional attachment to characters in IF, so the fact that I did feel qualms about making some choices is impressive; still, I would love to see more games which were able to instill enough attachment that I genuinely agonized about harming a character.
Finally, the game is very cleanly implemented; I don't recall any bugs or typos. I would definitely recommend it; probably not everyone will enjoy it (I have some mixed feelings about its ultimate successfulness myself), but it stretches the boundaries. I certainly hope to see more works by the author.