This game placed low in IFComp 2016. It is in Inklewriter, a beautiful story-focused engine that is now being discontinued.
Snake's Game has several variants depending on the play through, but most seem to deal with a world where time and space can be warped at will, taking you to hell and a variety of other places.
It's fairly short, and the writing felt unpolished, but the other had a lot of heart, making this game more emotionally powerful than most low-ranking games, to me.
This game was coded in 2.5 days by a first time author with one beta tester. It requires what is generally an annoying way of interacting with a game. By all standards, it should be a fairly horrible game.
But it placed 19th out of 35, and wasn't really that bad. I like fairly campy, psychological horror, and this game provides it. It had great descriptions, and spookily changing descriptions.
This is a very short game. I liked it, in the end.
Saving John is a Twine 1 game with the standard CSS and formatting. In it, you find yourself in a dangerous situation and have the opportunity to construct a backstory for what happened.
The backstories involves jealousy, betrayal, love, profanity, and so on. The game is fairly short, but can be replayed several times.
The writing was descriptive, and the interactivity worked, but the story just didn't click with me, and It didn't feel all the way polished.
This game was created in 2012, and uploaded recently by someone besides Porpentine. It was created at least as early as March of that year, since it's mentioned in an AdventureCow forum.
It is the shortest of the early experiments (which include Myriad and a few others). However, it contains a lot of Porpentine's signature style, including body transformation and horror, protagonists which evoke multiple emotions simultaneously, and surrealism.
This is not the kind of game I imagine Porpentine would release today, but it's interesting as a historical insight.
This is one of the short Twine games for the nanobots They Might Be Giants tribute album.
You play as a slowly evolving hive mind created in MIT by accident. You have several choices as to how the hive mind will evolve and adapt.
It made me smile, and I found it fun.
This is an ultrashort game, written for the nanobots They Might Be Giants tribute album.
The major idea of it is that (Spoiler - click to show)there is a single sentence
where every word is a link; each word that you click takes you to the same sentence, about decisions. It seems like a commentary/joke on the nature of choices.
This game is a sort of shaggy dog story that tells the origin of a certain Halloween tradition.
It's presented in a tragic way rather than a comedic way. You are a juggler in a medieval court where laughter is forbidden, and whose father was banished or killed because of that rule. It's worth trying out.
This game can't do anything past the first move. It was written for Ectocomp, but it seems not to have been tested at all.
In general, it seems like it would be a creepy game where you play a stalker, possibly having a humorous turn later.
This game uses some of the more cinematic qualities of Adrift.
It's a speed-IF, so it was written in just 3 hours. But it has really fun animations and text effects. The death shack becomes a recurring character that destroys all in its path. I especially laughed at the hotel scene.
This game was entered in Ectocomp 2011.
It is a speed-IF, so it has many of speed-IF's usual problems. in this case, I was unable to finish the game due to not knowing where to place an object. I also had difficulty finding things and guessing verbs.