This game has you play an autistic elf in the US called Delvyn, who eats pancakes and adventures into a spooky house.
I found this game fairly entertaining though buggy at first, but then I got stuck in the second pit, and reading on RGIF made me uncertain whether the game was even finishable, as Santoonie are notable trolls.
This TADS game has you play as a janitor in a lab where all the scientists are gone for the day. It's up to you to stop the terrorists.
The setting is pretty bland for a lab, and the room descriptions are minimal, but I didn't find any bugs.
There is an independent NPC and an animal that are fairly fun.
Anssi Raisanen has written several Alan games over the years with a certain sort of puzzly style, and I've grown to enjoy them.
This game has you escaping from a wine cellar in a castle, finding and helping a wizard, and rescuing a king.
Anssi's games have a very consistent style, so if you like one, you'll like them all. The Chasing is another good one.
In this game, you play as the president of the united states, and every room is a country of the world.
It was quite entertaining to see that I could travel to Mexico to the south and Canada to the north.
The writing and implementation was a bit spotty, though, and it was hard to guess what to do next.
This is an AGT game, a sort of parser used before TADS and Inform.
AGT games can be very good; however, this one has many issues, including grammar and spelling. Random text prints at the beginning of every verb, often instead of error messages.
I followed the walkthrough, but eventually found myself unable to complete it.
This was an entertaining game from IFcomp 2002.
You explore your house, looking for your notes. As you find notes, you have a sort of flashback or dream of a greek mythological figure.
I enjoyed these vignettes more than the house filled with greek mythology-named cats.
The game was a bit underclued, though, and it was hard to get invested.
This was David Whyld's first IFcomp game.
This game is just really, really big, with tons of conversations and features.
It's just too big; page after page of text dumps make it difficult to pay attention to what you're trying to do.
It involves a fantasy land where everyone references american pop culture and you learn DnD spells.
This game contains a wide variety of scenes that are not related to each other very much, except by a small thread at the end. It includes things as diverse as Dr Who and fantasy as well as American history.
Only the main thread of the game; anything else was not implemented (for instance, you can't PRAY at Mecca).
It was interesting, but ultimately incoherent.
This game is just terrible. In it, you are a misognyistic, sadistic, horrible man, whose goal is to make everyone's life worse.
The game jumps from genre to genre, and in my version, was unfinishable due to a bug near the end, but I wasn't interested in finishing it anyway.
This game placed near the bottom of the 2002 comp, and it's not hard to see why.
The game opens with an error message; typing 'walkthru' says 'insert walkthru here'. it says it was written for a 7 year old later, which could make sense, but it seems like the authors knew it wasn't anywhere near done, and gave up.
It has a huge, mazelike map with empty rooms all over. You are given goals, but the winning walkthru ignores all of those goals.
A truly bizarre game.