Reviews by MathBrush

Adaptations in IF are generally very tricky. The list of failed or mediocre adaptations is long (including my own Sherlock Holmes game) while the list of good ones is very brief (such as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). The biggest problem is that novels and stories are 'on rails' and are centered on one pre-determined path, while Interactive Fiction invites exploration.

This one does well, I think. Part of that is due to the author's talent at adaptation. The other may be because the original tale includes parts that describe what 'would have happened', which can be incorporated into the text.

You play as Gawain, and the story follows the original tale pretty faithfully. A strange knight comes to Arthur's court and you are soon entangled in a quest. You find a strange castle where the host is kind and generous while the lady of the castle pursues you.

Variables are tracked in this game, but not that many stats seem to be. There is generally one ordained 'right path' but many scenes have multiple interpretations and solutions regardless of your desire (for instance, is it better to admit fear or not to have it at all?)

The game has strong themes of violence and sexuality, but treats both of them more as abstractions or threats or desires with moderate ​detail.

In both the online version and the downloaded version, the chapter headings were broken and I couldn't see what they were. That, and a stray typo, were the only bugs I saw.

I took several days to finish this because I kept getting distracted by work. The actual writing isn't that long, but I wasn't grabbed in by the text; or, perhaps, it was difficult to process my emotions about the strange tale (which applies to the original).

In any case, this exceeded my expectations and is one of the better adaptations I've ever played. I don't see myself revisiting it, as it resonated negatively with some personal experiences I had (by no fault of the author), but it is otherwise polished, descriptive, with good interactivity and emotional impact.

(Edit: I'm listting this as 2 hours, because I lingered over it, while others have said it took them only 1 hour going fast).

Given the popularity of Flexible Survival together with the excellent production values of this game, I predict that this game will find a lot of success with certain communities after the comp, perhaps ending up as the most-played game form this comp. I also think, though, that it has some features that will end up hurting it in this comp’s voting.

This is a hardnosed combat and storytelling game with furry characters (well, animal/human hybrids, including reptiles). It has very nice-looking screens, including an action video later on when an SUV pulls up that’s certainly the best-produced thing I’ve ever seen in IFComp.

You play as a series of characters in a run-down and dark world where mob bosses rule. Characters can pick up a variety of very specific weapons and ammo.

Gameplay is stat-based, with an initial point buy system and later gains. Every part of the game is turned into a puzzle that either depends on stats or correct choices. Even ‘click-reveals’ (when you click on a link and it expands) are gamified: you have to click them in the right order to get bonus points.

This game is difficult. Without God mode, you have to make very specific point buys to get past even the second challenge (when the truck comes by, if you don’t have quick feet or health, then you get hit for 0 damage, but your 0 health gets checked and results in death.

With God mode, I made it very far until I made a bad choice and got an instant death. I think I could have restored but I had the following bug:

"I can’t find a save slot named ‘AnimaliaBookI4’!►
I tried to save or load the game, but I couldn’t do it."

Overall, I actually like the writing quite a bit. The intense difficulty of the game will likely be a plus for the target audience, as I think this is meant to be a game you replay a lot and have strategy guides about, something like Sunless Skies or 80 Days.

For the comp, though, it makes it hard to play through in a short time, even with God Mode.

-Polish: Great production values, but bugs need fixing.
+Descriptiveness: Nice writing
+Interactivity: For the comp, it's no good, but I like the extra challenge for more replay value.
+Emotional impact: Yeah, I was invested.
+Would I play again? Yes, especially the finished version.

Felicity Banks has entered IFComp many times before with clever Choicescript games that contain themes like magic, alchemy, cats, and Australia (many of which show up in this game as well). Those games often get a post-comp release that is expanded and then put on Hosted Games.

This game is about a world where magic can be awakened in anyone through unknown means. It's treated like an infection, and society is built around blocking any access to magic-causing things, like using plastic plants instead of natural ones.

When magic awakens in you, the government enforcers come to get you and throw you into a magical prison/school where rival gangs attempt to fight or kill each other and people are sorted into magical categories (like elves, trolls, etc.) based on their abilities (I recommend reading the notes in the stats section).

Speaking of stats, I didn't check them during the game. Some games have really hard stat checks that constantly get in your way, but this game I just roleplayed and I generally did pretty good and only messed up once or twice.

The story and characters were fun, although some things really stretched my suspension of disbelief: (Spoiler - click to show)Are literally all of our friends non-magical people pretending to be magic? To be thrown into a prison? Where it's said that people die?? But they don't really die. Except people are fighting with bladed weapons and pretty much do get close to dying. Also magic has no visible drawbacks whatsoever but is locked down. It's the kind of story where hand-waving makes sense, but sometimes there was so much handwaving I almost thought *I'd* start flying!

I only used magic a couple of times. Besides my awakening, I only had one chance to learn more magic. I thought there'd be more, so I just focused on fiery magic, my strength. But no other chances to learn came up, and I'm not sure I ever actually used my charm. So if this gets a post-comp release, adding more magic-learning and magic-using opportunities and more time spent with friends/relationships would be great. What we have here fits well into the time constraints for the comp well.

I waited to play this until I had more time because I generally enjoy Felicity Banks's games and find them substantia, and I'm glad I did.

Dust is about a man in the Wild West who comes to town looking for his wife when he comes across trouble. It involves a lot of conversation and the use of a lot of tools.

This game was entered in the German IF Gran Prix earlier this year, where I personally found it the best game of the competition. I enjoyed the characters and the western setting.

I love foreign translations and foreign things in general (maybe I’m a xenophile?) so it’s always hard to know when playing a game in another language if it is the language that attracts me or the game itself.

In this case it’s a little bit of both. One reason I liked it in German was its simplicity, with descriptive but mostly non-figurative language and the use of menus in conversation and some actions. While in German it was brilliant for someone with a weak vocabulary in another language, in English I could have enjoyed some more complexity in writing, and perhaps a slightly expanded map.

But there’s a lot here that I loved in the original and now in the translation. I like how you collect various tools and apply them, giving the game a physical feel. I like the social dynamics, with the non-violent but still substantial threat of the sheriff holding onto your papers while you investigate, and the tavernkeeper urging you to grab a cookie. I also enjoyed the townsfolk popping in and out, from mean grandmas to ball-playing kids.

I helped test this game a little by reading through the English transcript looking for any errors (of which I found very few).

This is a longish parser game set in a time with horses, wagons, and captains but not electricity. In it, you play as a soldier who is ordered on a special mission involving the Triskelion, a powerful weapon.

The game is divided into two parts. First, there is a long linear opening sequence which the author has designated as 'training', and that's a good description, as it gets you used to basic verbs and actions. Then there is a longer exploration part in a graveyard.

The puzzles can be tricky at times but not too bad. I used the walkthrough a couple of times, but only one puzzle would, I think have been really hard without it (finding a certain key).

There are a lot of red herrings. I found numerous items that presaged more puzzles and adventures but which were ultimately useless. It did add to the worldbuilding, so that's a tradeoff.

Some of those items could be implemented a bit more. I had this exchange in one late part of the game:

What do you do? x cannister
The green cannister is three feet tall, six inches in diameter, and made of heavy metal. On the side of the cannister is a red warning label. The cannister has a turn-valve on its top but the handle is missing. The valve cannot be opened without the handle.

>
> What do you do? read label
> That is not something to read. Try examining it instead.
>
>
> What do you do? x it
> A bright red square with a picture of a yellow flame on it. Beneath that is the wording "Hazard: Extremely Flammable"
>
>
> What do you do? take it
> That's hardly portable.

Somethings can only be EXAMINEd while some can only be READ.

The '>' prompt has been changed to 'What do you do?', presumably to help new players, and I thought that was neat. Many error responses have been changed, most of which I liked. The one I didn't so much was the error for when you type something that's not there; the game says things like Seriously?? and You must be joking! which is mildly funny the first time, but wears thin over time.

The game did a good job with pacing the puzzles, as I didn't usually feel overwhelmed or not having anything to do. The exits bar at the top is key; many puzzles can be solved by exploring all exits.

I thought the ending was a little anticlimactic, but maybe there will be more Triskelion in the future; I'd like to see it.

I'm going to review all 3 acts here.

This a Baldur's Gate game. It is possible to play and generally understand it without having played the game (I'm in that scenario) but it generally builds off the associations, motivations, and understood characteristics of that game, which I've only partially absorbed through meme osmosis.

The story is that Astarion (here's where the pre-existing knowledge deficit kicks in) and you have been sucked into a nightmare world by a creature that feeds off of suffering. Astarion who, in the 'real world', has made great progress in escaping from an abusive vampire overlord, has now regressed and in his mind is back where he was at the start, hopeless and alone.

Gameplay in all three acts revolves around a combination of exploration and conversation. All significant actions cost energy, which you only have ten units of at a time. In the first two acts, energy is replenished every night, and you also level 3 skills of manifesting as a dream ghost: Speech, Sight, and Touch. In the third act, energy is replenished by finding secret 'gleams', and you can no longer level your attributes.

In all three days, Astarion has a health bar which, if it goes low enough, will cause him to die. Each day has other important meters as well, such as Astarion's mood, or the attention that can be drawn to you. Basically, this game is an Astarion Tamagachi.

For the first two days, the main goal it to keep him from dying. I discovered after some experimentation that the amount of health he loses or gains each day is based on his mood. I kept dying over and over early on from trying to max my stats first, but in fact there is plenty of time to boost stats with leftover actions. The main goal here is to please this man.

The main difference between the first and second days is that the second day adds more 'special' events with objects and intruders, while the first day just sets up the rhythm of the game as a whole.

The third day is very different, as you are pulled from encounter to encounter, where Astarion talks to people while you explore or interact.

This game is brutally hard (for me!). I died many times trying to complete Act I. There's just almost never enough actions to go around. I found it useful to save every day and reload if I don't achieve my goals. I made over 50 save files through all three acts.

The third act seemed impossibly hard and frustrating until another reviewer pointed out that you can get new actions by finding 'gleams'. I'd spoiler that but I think it's a fundamental part of gameplay and shouldn't be difficult to find in the first place. Finding that, and realizing the 'conversations' often stalled, giving you enough time to explore, helped this section work out better.

Visually and auditorially, the game is beautiful, with nice styling, transitions, fonts, colors, and sound choice.

Conceptually, while this game is symbiotic or even parasitic object, only able to exist in tandem with the resources provided by Baldur's gate, it still (to me) had a generally satisfying plot arc and some nice power progression.

Many ifcomp games are made for ifcomp. This seems like a passion project that just happened to be good enough to enter into Spring Thing and IFComp. I like it.

Well, this was a pleasure. It’s rare (to me) to find a long, well-paced, polished Twine game with nice presentation, few bugs, good characters and a satisfying story arc. Usually games have both significant strengths and significant flaws, but I really didn’t find any major flaws in this game, which was very pleasant. (Of course this might just be to my tastes, of course; other people may have a different reaction)

You play as a chef who has been hired on to cook every 5 days at a community canteen in a magical village. There are several characters you can interact with, each of which is going through their own issues and having their own successes. Your goal is to be able to stay as a chef permanently, with side goals of improving relations with others.

The majority of the game is part of a 4-action daily cycle, where you can choose to cook things to sell at the market and then to buy things at the market (probably the most common option), interact with your friends, make special meals for the community, buy seeds and books (useful early on), go foraging (useful later on, etc.).

Every 5 days you make a special meal which gets judged. Despite my best efforts, my first meal got 1 star, so I worked hard to get better. I ended up getting exactly the amount of stars I needed to ‘stay’ (having only played once, I don’t know if it’s designed always to play out that way or if it was due to my eggs-and-cheese heavy strategies of making deluxe meals).

Overall, the tone is pleasant. There are some stresses, especially with friends, but the tone is one of peace and warmth. It’s not overly cloying to me, when it could easily have been so, and the game doesn’t force you into specific actions of reproach or forgiveness, instead allowing you to chart your own path.

Overall, a great game for someone looking to relax and cook.

**The Den** by Ben Jackson.

It's been interesting tracking Ben Jackson's IF career. *The Kuolema* used Google Forms, a highly unusual format, and was choice-based but required text entry. It had lots of open exploration.

Then we had *Lunium*, a tightly constrained Twine escape room that also featured both choice and text entry, and included several visual puzzles. It kept most puzzles at all time.

Now we have *The Den*. While it keeps the choice and text entry hybrid of previous games, it has (in my mind) a stronger plot arc and better pacing than the other two, and features two protagonists, Aiden and Vee.

Our two heroes live in The Den, an underground area controlled tightly by Father. My first impression of the game was that it was similar to 10 Cloverfield Lane, where a tyrannical man imprisons others, and in this case was abducting children for experiments. I later decided that (Spoiler - click to show)this was some kind of lab with artificial beings and near the end it was clear that this was (Spoiler - click to show) a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve.

This game gave me big Subnautica vibes, with regards to storyline.

Puzzles in this game are the classic type you see in two-person games like Fire Boy and Water Girl, where one player opens passages for another or one player finds passwords for another.

There is also a Wordle mini-game, which I thought was amusing. I also found it a bit contrived, but that is later resolved.

The game is long, a bit more than 2 hours for me. I found the writing good; the two main characters manage to be neither cloying nor obnoxious, and the character of Father grew on me throughout the game.

The only things that I didn't much like during the game was how many options were 'Continue the story' or 'stop right now'. I usually didn't try the 'stop right now' choices, but once when I did the game ended (near the end) and another time it just ignored my choice, essentially (near the beginning). I understand the need to both move forward the plot and also maintain agency, but we usually reached those points by player commands in the first place, so I don't think we need additional confirmation so often. On the other hand, I'm not sure what the fix would be, as it's nice to have a little more interactivity like that. This is just a minor quibble; I think this game is great, and has the same high quality that proved popular in the author's earlier games.

Finally, I liked the use of all sense in the descriptions. There are a lot of smells and temperatures, along with the feel of wind, the hum of fans, the taste of food, and these sense come into play with the puzzles. I like that quite a bit and would like to incorporate that more into my own games.

What a fun little game!

This is a single-stroke parser game, a genre which I've seen a few of in the last year or two and not many more before then. So a single keypress becomes an entire command. It was disconcerting at times (especially trying to repeat past commands by hitting the up arrow, which maps to NORTH) but I eventually got the hold of it.

The idea is that you're kidnapped by aliens who submit you to nonsensical tests, until disaster strikes. Now they rely on you for help!

Gameplay is limited to only two action: eXamine and Touch. A few other commands like LOOK and WAIT also work. This may not seem like a lot to work with, but it's like the Library of Babel. That library is a conceptual idea where every possible 410-page book is in a library, containing essentially any novel that is ever written. Someone once pointed out that it's not as weird as you might think, as you could make your own 'library of babel' with two books that only have one page each (one with a 0 in it and one with a 1 in it); by reading them in the right order, you could reproduce any possible text.

So it's the same idea here. The simple two commands are made more complex by having cycling environmental elements, like buttons that do different things every time you touch them, or timers you can set off, or additional attributes you can acquire and then remove (which behave like extra verbs). So the limited command set is just a blind.

This is really hard to come up with puzzles for; I wrote a giant game last year with different areas, and one I specifically wanted to mimic Arthur DiBianca's style. It was by far the hardest to code, the most buggy, and the hardest to figure out, trying to wrassle tons of moving scenes and machine parts.

The puzzles in this game are similar to math research, where you just try to find patterns or loopholes and bang your head against a wall until you solve it. I got stuck in the middle, and was typing up a question to ask for help, but as I typed I figured it out. The final puzzle stymied me too; I had the right idea, but my timing was off.

The story is sparse but has funny parts. Everything familiar has a goofy name and everything goofy has a familiar name. Objects are clearly chosen so that they start with distinct letters of the alphabet (like 'yo-yo'). Overall the aliens reminded me of those in the movie Home.

I had fun with this. Several of the puzzles were very frustrating before I solved them and fun after.

This game is a long choice-based game where you build a character who is a hobbit and live through a year or so of local hobbit life.

It seems built on the same general model as Choicescript games, where your choices influence your stats and relationships with delayed effects in later chapters.

However, the effects of your choices are pretty opaque. Unlike Choicescript games, there is no stats page that I could find, and many of the options you can pick from are very similar. On top of that, several chapters are built up as a 'win/loss' scenario where you either make the right choices and get a good result or just fail. When I played every commercial Choicescript game a few years ago, those were all common things that made games more frustrating.

On the other hand, the characters and setting here are fun. A lot is taken directly from Lord of the Rings, but the individual characters are all new. There is also a lot of branching, especially with romances. I did two playthroughs, one pursuing Patty the 'witch' and one pursuing Lily the mayor's daughter. The last 3 of the 7 chapters in these playthroughs were very different from each other.

Everything is pretty low-stakes. Someone steals a sword and runs away with it, but not you. The most stress you have to deal with is social judgment and a pie contest.

So, I'd recommend this to fans of 'coffee shop AU' or Stardew Valley. I liked it enough to play it twice, and the price I paid (I think $3.99?) was definitely appropriate for the size (a lot of such games are $10 to $20 now).

This is the 8th entry in Andrew Schultz’s Pro-Rhyme Row series, which is truly astonishing; how there can be so many paired rhymes in the english language blows my mind.

I really enjoyed this one for the first half or so. There is a feast of remembrance among the gnomes, and you are chosen to prepare food for it. Most of the rhymes in the game deal with food or appliances of some kind.

There is a map with a central location and four branches. Each branch has objects in it which you must find a rhyming pair for (or for the room itself).

Compared to other games in the series, this game made it easy to identify what the puzzles were and had some fun responses.

Some of the words made me laugh. My juvenile response to ‘tree troop’ made me laugh (although it wasn’t recognized) and I had the wrong answer at first to getting out of the ‘stuck state’.

I did run into some bugs though, especially with some repeating text. It was enough to hamper my experience. I did see a call for testers before the competition so it’s at least partially my fault for not responding, but fortunately the bugs seem not too bad to fix.

This is an ADRIFT game, which I played by downloading the ADRIFT 5 Runner (There are like 3 versions you can download, and google flagged 2 of them as viruses but the third was fine).

This game has a cinematic opening and first few areas. An international space laboratory has been able to cure numerous diseases, but a test virus got out and infected everyone on board! You are chosen to try to clear the contamination (which threatens to infect earth due to an automated shipment) or to die trying.

The initial exploration of the ship was suitably mysterious. After a time, I began to get stuck pretty early on. I consulted the hints, and would a few more times, and found that careful examination of everything was usually the key.

However, a few times I missed some puzzles I don't think I would have gotten because the game gave some negative feedback early on. For instance, I knew that many ADRIFT games have puzzles where you have to (Spoiler - click to show)X something, LOOK UNDER it, SEARCH it, or LOOK BEHIND it, so I spent the first twenty minutes of the game trying all of those things and (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK UNDER IT consistently said I can't do that or there's nothing there. It turns out that very late on in a timed sequence you have to (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK UNDER (or have already done so) to a scenery item. It just doesn't make much sense to me to have an action that the whole game has told me to be useless (and I was only trying anyway because of past ADRIFT experience) turn out to be super important in the end.

The story was pretty fun, especially the beginning and ending, but I was a little disappointed in the middle. The space station inhabitants are Chinese, and two rooms have Chinese names on them, but one was just Mao Zedong and the other was a title like 'fellow Scientist'; I was looking forward to some thoughtfully chosen bespoke Chinese names, but maybe that was just a weird expectation.

The best part to me was the initial exploration.

This is both the highest-rated and most-rated game on IFDB that currently doesn't have any reviews. I played it in preparation for the IF playoffs.

This game is a downloadable executable. It simulates the look of old windowed (not windows!) computers, like Amiga style. It gives you a couple of programs, at first just messages and a way to connect to BBS (bulletin board systems, and old style of forum), and then more over time.

A major facet of the game is typing in numbers to connect to Bulletin Boards, some of which are very convoluted. A common experience in the game is typing in the local number for long distance lines, typing in a long distance card number, finding your card number is expired, typing in a different local line, getting more card numbers, typing in the long distance line number, typing in the new card number, finding its also invalid, typing in the long distance line number, typing in a second new card number, then typing in the long distance number you want to enter.

This is repeated several times in the game and is mind-numbing, a major drawback for me.

Outside of that, it's a great game. You encounter the wild word of the early web, before the public knew much about it, before there was really any government oversight, and even before it was actually a 'web'.

You meet tons of people arguing about things they care about, like Star Trek TNG vs TOS, or hacking Sprint phone lines. But you also meet a woman named Emilia, who writes poems and wants to learn more about you.

Eventually drama ensues, and the game expands in scope and genre.

Like Emily Short in her Game Developer review, I found it very effective that we never see 'our' messages, only the replies to them. The power of imagination helps us build up a relationship.

There was a point early on where I felt genuine panic and an urge to try and move quickly as possible. Right after that is when the game's pacing plummeted. But the content was good enough that I wanted to keep going.

This is an Ink game that takes a couple of hours to play. It's set in the world of Vampire: The Masquerade, where a powerful vampire asks you to help cover up a murder.

Along the way, you meet a lot of different groups of interest, a talented artists, several unusual and uncanny vampires, and a whole lot of trouble.

I'm a fan of the choice of games line of Vampire: The Masquerade titles. This one is smaller in scope than those, but has its own satisfying storyline.

I played as a Malkavian (sp?) and enjoyed numerous opportunities to use my abilities. That's usually my favorite part of these games, having a chance to flex supernatural powers.

I did encounter one bug, which I'll pass on to the authors, and I got confused at one point when the game wanted me to go back to places I had already 'completed' because it had added new material but didn't tell me that (so I thought it was bugged, asking me to complete something I already had).

The two parts of this game that shined out the most to me were the descriptions and the multitude of options.
-The descriptions, especially of the art, the occult shop, and the Malkavian visions, was really vibrant, like the textual equivalent of a Van Gogh painting with adjectives and senses slathered thickly on the canvas.
-The game gave me huge freedom near the end, including selling something really important to several different groups and whether to fight or run. I backed the anarchists all the way and ran.

But I think the large amount of groups was also a weakness, because each one was thinly developed. To really flesh out each group would make this game enormous (which is one reason Vampire: the Masquerade--Night Road is so big). By fleshing out, I mean that most of my interactions with any given faction were limited to one area, asking a few questions, and offering them something. Perhaps I'm being too greedy in asking for the factions to have more character, more interactions or side stories, etc., or perhaps I missed some content.

Overall, though, I think this was a successful game. It might be slightly less accessible to those who aren't fans of VtM but it does a good job of explaining core concepts.

Alltarach is a well-polished Twine game that tells the tale of a young woman whose only close family member, a brother, has left their island home to travel to the mainland of Ireland.

This young woman has to travel to chase after him and find out why he left. Along the way, she meets a variety of pagan and Christian Irish folk and a number of mythological figures.

The story feels like a modern translation of the Odyssey or Iliad, where gods can appear to mortals but some see them as just people while others get a hint of the truth. It also (for obvious reasons) reminded me in a good way of a book of Irish legends I read in college; I really enjoyed the myths about Cuchulain (sp?) and was excited to see him reappear here.

The game features numerous words from the Irish language and has a handy pronunciation/translation mouseover for each. I've learned many languages in my life, but the first I ever tried to learn was Irish; I bought books for it, but unfortunately I remember nothing (except little tidbits that I've butchered like 'Is mise Sean o Brian' or 'Ta me i mo chonai i uimhir tri sraid bhor, arasan a do'). So it was fun to see that here.

The story had a lot of humanity. It felt gritty/grimy, like it would have a grey filter if filmed for TV. The art contributed to the overall feel. A world of grim beauty undercut by humor.

I didn't like the prolifity of the F-word, featured frequently on many pages. It may very well be historically accurate and fits the personalities of the characters, yet I didn't like it personally. Everyone has their own taste; to me its like raw red onions are to Scott Conant.

Overall, great production, fun game, nice art.

This game is the first three chapters of a potentially longer game. Still, it is very hefty as is, and took a couple of hours to play for me.

The worldbuilding is strong here, which makes sense as it is set in the same world as a previous game (although it stood alone, for me). There are several kingdoms in conflict with each other, and you are employed by one of them due to your royal blood.

However, fate brings you into contact with the Kitherin (sp?), a mystical group that connect magically with mythical animals.

Most of the game so far revolves around meeting the other Kitherin and engaging in training with them.

It was interesting playing this game after recently touring a Daoist temple, with multiple shrines to different Gods, as well as the Summer Palace near Beijing, with its symbolic mystical animals. I felt like the setting in this game would be very much in place there, especially with the Phoenix and Dragon connections.

This is a Heart's Choice game, so the emphasis is on romance. I don't want explicit sex scenes in a game, but the characters were lovable, so I was glad to be able to fine tune my choices (cuddling, nothing sexual). I spent the most time with Rae, and found a lot of content with her, and I declined content with others, and saw less, which sounds like it should be normal but a lot of games get that wrong (constantly pressuring you to interact with people you don't like).

There is a lot of detail here and it can be kind of hard to keep track of which ridiculously attractive temple-goer is which; it helps that they contrast in experience/age and in jobs (like rune-maker), so mentioning those things helps me keep track.

I don't feel like the opening really meshes well with the rest. I had a bird companion and was excited to be close to it, so when I found out I could bound with animals, I thought, 'I can bond with my bird!' but actually you bound and become close with another animal you just met. Similarly, the intro part feels much more low-fantasy while the rest feels high-fantasy. I like the latter part more, and in fact started the game a couple of times and put it down before pushing through the intro to what I think of as 'the good parts'.

I think this will be a fun game when finished. For now, a slightly lower score due to its incomplete state.

This review is for the Twine version. The original review is down below.

The Twine version of Kuolema was perhaps the biggest rewrite out of any New Game Plus game of Spring Thing, as it was completely ported to a new system and had a complex system of passwords, etc.

Surprisingly, it plays very similar to the original. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find what was different about it gameplay-wise. Visually, there are added animations and timers which are used sparingly to great effect (although occasionally I switched to another tab to read something while waiting for it to finish).

The main gameplay things that I didn't remember from the first time around were the hints when getting text entry wrong, and also maybe there were more options for the ending? But I enjoyed playing all the way through. There also is a new story version which reduces the puzzles that I didn't try, which was also likely a major part of the rewrite.


Original version:

This was a nice, mostly-grounded thriller on a ship. A lot of games like this with a dark, abandoned ship at night devolve into Lovcraftian horror (which I love), but it was nice to have a change of pace this time.

This game is written in google forms and relies entirely on passwords and, occasionally, branching for state tracking. This means that if you right everything down, you can come back to the game much later and speed through everything. It reminded me a bit of playing NES/SNES games like Mike Tyson's Punchout and Willow; we had a wooden beam near our living room we'd write down passwords on.

Overall, the speed and responsiveness was pretty good; the system doesn't work all that bad, except when I tried to open the walkthrough in another tab and everything got reset. Fortunately I had my notes, so it was very easy to catch back up. I ended up opening the walkthrough in another tab.

I'd say that writing and storytelling is very strong for my likes, with crisp and clear imagery and a slow-burn thriller plotline. Some parts didn't make too much sense, mostly serving as excuses to find more passwords, but there were a lot of dramatic moments.

The final parts really felt like an action movie. I lost momentum at one point trying to figure out how to activate the next portion of the narrative, but overall it worked well.

Love to see experimentation work out.

This game was entered in the Text Adventure literacy jam. It includes a brief tutorial where you take a nap, encounter a violent earthquake and are led to another world lying underneath yours!

The gameplay revolves around exploring the fantasy world, picking up items, often magical, and using them, frequently through the use of riddles.

The game makes heavy use of AI art to provide location images. It provides vivid and detailed images, but due to lack of consistent themes it made it difficult to really imagine the way things were.

I found the gameplay both polished and unpolished. On the one hand, several puzzles were well-clued and suggested the commands to be used. On the other hand, some simple things were difficult to do (to go to sleep, I couldn't SLEEP or ENTER BED but had to LIE DOWN ON BED, for instance). A frequent issue I encountered was that the solution to one problem was often very far away from the problem itself, which meant that a lot of the game involved just grabbing everything and hoping it would eventually be useful. You may say, 'but all games are like that! Zork! Adventureland!' and that is true, so if you liked the gameplay in those games you may like this style. I played about 1/3 on my own and used a walkthrough for the rest.

Somehow the story and setting felt like it was consistent in each scene but not consistent altogether. There is an overarching story with recurring characters, but outside of that a lot is random. The world is accessed through a ravine in your world, so it's like a 'portal' story. But then you go through another portal, so it's like an isekai within an isekai, but the second portal journy isn't really remarked on. You go from unused stairways to a city and from descending a dungeon area to being outdoors. Things like a pirate are included, but why? Plot points are repeated, like your cat running off and you rescuing her. Nevertheless, each component was fun.

Overall, it was interesting, and felt a lot like a playthrough of AI dungeon, except it's a single story, not a collection of them. So the best part of the game for me was the sense that everything would be new and unexpected in each new area, but I missed a sense of cohesiveness and purpose.

This is an interesting game, entered into the Text Adventure Literacy Jam. It explores a small village and hotel in rural Japan, and includes a variety of Japanese monsters.

The emphasis here is definitely on introducing aspects of Japan to outsiders; I see the author has, on the itch page, credited others with help on being accurate, which is nice. The game goes into loving detail over the names of different mats, cabinets, etc. and includes a notepad with interesting terms and an encyclopedia/dictionary to look them up in.

My favorite part was the ending reveal, which I didn't see coming at all but seemed clear in retrospect.

The game does suffer a bit in implementation. Many objects are referred to by names that you cannot use for them (like 'friend' for your friend) and you can only CONSULT BOOK ABOUT _____ instead of LOOK UP _____ IN BOOK (which I could have sworn was Inform's default behavior anyway). A few interactions weren't clear to me (at one point I had no money, but once I did it didn't show up in inventory and I could buy tons of different things).

Overall, the enthusiasm of the author in presenting Japan feels like a big positive. My only drawbacks were some of the above-mentioned implementation issues, and a moderate lack of variation in the narrator's emotional tone, but they were enough to limit my overall enjoyment.

I was talking to someone about Quest games, and searched for the top rated Quest games of all time. It brought this up as number 1, a game by two-time IFComp winner Steph Cherrywell! I had seen it before, but never got around to playing it.

I strongly recommend downloading Quest to play this. Online, it gets slower and slower and eventually halts altogether. Offline, it worked great.

In this game, you play as a magical student coming back to your academy after a break. This is a small-scale school; less Harry Potter, more like X-Men school sized.

You have a spellbook with you, but it's blank! You can encounter up to five different spells.

Gameplay revolves around rescuing your friends (and maybe some not friends) who've been struck by various magical curses. I remembered Jenny Yoshida from Brain Guzzler's from beyond, and then Mary Jane, before looking it up and realizing that the two games share much of the same cast (though they are set in different universes). Each student comes with a well-drawn profile picture.

The puzzles were tricky for me. All were well-clued, and generally revolved around finding uses for each item or spell you find. But a lot of error messages aren't helpful if you almost get the right answer but not quite. The hardest part for me was (Spoiler - click to show)carving the jack o lantern(Spoiler - click to show). I tried (Spoiler - click to show)CUT PUMPKIN, CUT PUMPKIN WITH KNIFE, CARVE PUMPKIN, etc. So struggling with the parser adds to the difficulty. I ended up consulting a walkthrough several times.

The writing and setting is very charming, making this game overall very fun to play, despite my struggles. I'm glad the author went on to make hit after hit.

This French game is designed to run on an Amstrad CPC emulator. It comes with pixel art.

This was tough; I often struggle with old-school games, and playing in French wasn't helping! I did find 2 out of 5 endings, and feel satisfied with that.

You are asked by an oracle in your village to explore an old chapel and find a monk named Hermes. You must solve a series of puzzles to figure out how to save your land!

The biggest puzzles revolve around creating potions. I never found amanita mushrooms, one of the ingredients, so I likely missed the best ending. But I managed to brew two of the others.

I enjoy games that have two worlds, and this game does that. The pixel art is interesting. The only thing that was grating was the slow fake 'loading' the emulator does every screen. Yes, I remember playing games in the 90s where the PC would chug and slowly load each screen. It was nostalgic the first 50 times. But as the game goes on it certainly loses its charm!

Apparently there's a way to win the game in one move, which is interesting!

This is a long and complex Twine game with some interesting mechanics.

You come upon an abandoned place with a single resident. Together, you rebuild a mighty city, primarily by telling stories to attract new residents. This lets you build new buildings.

At night, you visit another city, one that is grand. But there is trouble...

The storytelling mechanics have you pick a genre, a format, and some sliders of emotions. You then get what seems like a randomized mini-review from one listener and then an overall critique based on your choices, as well as 15 money.

It was hard to find new genres at first, and money seems to never have any use, despite me building a bank and a marketplace (it said I needed to make an account, but never had a chance). So those parts seemed underdeveloped to me.

Overall, this is a rich story. It uses written French dialect, dropping several vowels, and has some circumlocutory tendencies. So I'm sure I missed a great deal of nuance. As far as I can tell:
(Spoiler - click to show)There was a large town dedicated to immortality through knowledge. They had a library that was a temple to a God, and one day that God and its sibling decided to destroy the city while its leader was out on a trip. They sent a dragon whose flame condemned the city to the dream world. Some of that flame lived on in the house of Luv, who tended it in their fireplace. Due to the flame's continued existence, the dream city was still falling apart, in due measure as the city grows. Luv represents something--maybe a reincarnation of the dream-city's leader, or maybe the dragon, or maybe a god, or something. Eventually you get the choice to extinguish the flame and return the city of old, or keep it).

It's one of the better games of the year I have played so far.

Whew! This game strained my poor Anglophone brain, as it is written in a fancy style of French and a cursive font. There is a very large amount of text as well, so I had to use all my forces to persevere!

But the story itself was interesting enough to carry on. It consists of letters written between two women, although I believe every letter is from the point of view of Isabella, a woman who became a doctor in Paris before being ejected and forced to return to the village of her home. Her lover, Olympia, is left behind. Isabella must face the disapproval and suspicions of the villagers, as well as Olympia's jealousies when the pale, anemic, and beautiful Alice moves in next door.

Gameplay is a bit curious; as at least one other person noted on the forums, it bears some resemblance to The First Draft of the Revolution, where you select different cycling variations before confirming and moving on.

However, there are very large chunks of text between choices (large for me, maybe not for native speaker). These large gaps, and my suspicion that the choices didn't change much of the game, led me to assign a mental score of 4.

However, I had early on, in a separate window, clicked through quickly to see how long the game would be, and received an ending with a clear choice (to (Spoiler - click to show)destroy your letters or not). I was surprised when, in my real playthrough, I never encountered that passage. I used saves and found 2 endings in my own playthrough, and they were quite interesting. So when it became clear that this was actually fairly complex, I upgraded to five stars.

This story is based on classic gamebooks and fantasy tropes. You play as a dwarf in a village of dwarves, and can choose which class to play, which affects your stats. I chose to be a miner with high perception.

This game is already quite large, requiring a couple hours of play, and it's largely unfinished, with only two of three cities available (and, beyond that, there would likely be even more in a full game). There are a lot of randomized checks and things.

The art is, I believe, AI art, as zooming in on some scenes revealed oddities like three legs. However, it is unobtrusive and aesthetically worked overall (not discussing here the ethics of AI). Edit: Nightcafe is listed in credits for artwork.

The one currently finished city has a ton of different districts. There is a map, but instead of being used for navigation, it just serves as a visual cue while you actually select from a list of districts adjacent to your current one.

As you walk around, mini-stories fire off, providing you with new encounters like whether to chase down a missing guardsman or not.

Two things I would have preferred to be different: the map takes a while to load, making movement slow. I would have preferred the map to be optimized to load more quickly. Second, every time I entered the front gate a thief stole my purse and fighting it would just kill me, even if I loaded and tried again. It was really frustrating not having any chance to keep my money on me. And I found it difficult to find ways to heal; I thought maybe resting at my quarters could work, but couldn't find any. I eventually healed as the story progressed.

Overall, I thought the mushroom-brain thing was an interesting storyline, and the political aspects gave the game some complexity.

This game is the kind of thing Steph Cherrywell is known for: smooth humor, a large, easily navigable map, genre tropes pursued to their logical end, plenty of polish, and vivid characters.

I found this game's puzzles more logical than some other Cherrywell games, though I had trouble with one particular artist. Looking back, I ignored many, many, hints.

You play as a flapper (with all the 20's lingo) who's desperate for a drink. But it's all been soaked up by ghosts, so you have to hunt them down one by one!

I really enjoyed this game, and I think that it has a great chance of wining this year's comp.

This game was designed to fit into 90 kb, a tiny amount of space even for an interactive fiction game.

It has 6 small games with similar themes in it, each from different time periods or genres of interactive fiction.

I'll put the description of the games in spoilers, as I describe some things you might prefer to find on your own. I'll put the description of the final game in separate spoilers, as it's slightly different and more of a spoiler.

This is a complex game, and while I felt and experienced many things, I had the sense that I hadn't grasped everything, so this review may neglect some core themes or content.

(Spoiler - click to show)First: A choose your own adventure book, which goes a bit beyond pure branching by letting you perform actions through addition of numbers. You are exploring a mostly empty desert, and you must overcome your fears and think cleverly to find your true goal.

Second: An adventure in the style of Scott Adams, set in the same desert (or is it the same?). You have found an oasis city, but you can't get in. Themes include unachievable goals and building your own happiness.

Third: A classic-style text adventure. This one is quite complex, as you are able to enter and explore a large city. The tone is darker here, as you are either constrained to slog for the machine or to be punished for your individuality. The items of key and shovel, which appeared in earlier iterations, take on new meanings in this world, emblems of money/greed and (fruitless) labor.

Fourth: A hyperlink game (but without hyperlinks, requiring you to type instead). You have become powerful and have many people to help you, but none of you can withstand a storm that is withering and destroying your city. Here and in the last game or so, you begin to get glimpses of the real world person behind the games. This story and the last also mention a beautiful male lover.

Fifth: A Quality Based Narrative game, like Dendry or Storynexus. You have stats, and your available stats determine what scenes you view next and what actions you have available. The story is one of a wanderer, as if the ancient emperor in the Ozymandias poem was stuck in the landscape of his ruin. The real world bleeds in explicitly in the end.

Sixth (stronger spoilers):(Spoiler - click to show)This isn't a world, it's just deleting a bunch of files, but you can't since some have unresolved issues. You choose the writing block by block, using text from earlier in the game, almost like Aaron's earlier game 18 Cadence. In the end, you get the option to delete or save the poem you have created.

There is a strong sense of loss in the game, of futility and helplessness, but also of the desire to create something beautiful that doesn't remove the loss but provides comfort. It's almost a Quixotic point of view, which also ties in with the use of mirrors and illusions.

I found it a beautiful game. Like I said, I don't think I grasped it all. I may need to replay. But I also admired its technical work.

This is a compact sci-fi game where you hop between dimensions in order to keep all universes from being destroyed.

The gameplay is classic Inform 7 style: wander a mostly empty building and pick up different objects on the way, unlock a safe, operate a machine, meet an NPC or two, etc.

The story is that you have been newly hired at a tech company when an explosion goes off. Going in to investigate, you soon learn that the company has quite a bit of unusual history...

The game makes references to the (Spoiler - click to show)Mandela effect, with famous examples like the (Spoiler - click to show)Berenstein vs Berenstain bears.

It's fairly polished, even including images and sound. There are occasional punctuation errors, like quotes being left off at the end of dialogue.

The overall gameplay is pretty satisfying. A few puzzles I thought were underclued, especially (Spoiler - click to show)opening the research door. That one I had to string dump the game for, discovering I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)use the magnet to open it.

The game has multiple levels of ending success. There are several ways you can lock yourself out of victory, but those are well-clued. Getting a perfect ending is a little underclued, though, and may require a few attempts.

Overall, I'd recommend this game to fans of classic-style parser puzzlers or to fans of time travel games.

This game is a participatory game, an MMO masquerading as an MMO.

The conceit is that you are playing an old, defunct MMO which you discover is (Spoiler - click to show)connected to multiple universes. As you play, you find messages left by others. You have the option to leave a message, and doing so lets other people really see it.

I saw messages from real people I know, but they all soon disappeared. I wandered through an empty maze, seeing messages by people that could be real or fake. I left a message everywhere I went. Overkill, maybe? Shouting into the void? It's hard to know.

Very fun concept. Large game.

This large and multi-faceted game has you start off trapped in a closet in a motel room--not an auspicious beginning for a game of great mystical power.

The idea here is that you are someone possessed of magical powers. This power can be exercised through the use of amulets representing different animals; however, the amulets are not enough. You also need gemstones to power them.

And that's where the game really opens up. There are a lot of amulets; there are a lot of gemstones. Each combination gives you different powers, and each power can be used in different places. This gives essentially cubic complexity to the game!

Which means you may want to experiment a lot and take notes. The game is kind, giving you a lot of leeway and plenty of optional paths.

I first played this as part of Castle Balderstone, and then played the newer version. While it was probably in the original, I didn't realize the first time that you can (spoilers for very end) (Spoiler - click to show)open portals to tons of different dimensions. I thought it was pretty cool, to be honest. Really loved this game.

This game is an Inform murder mystery by thesleuthacademy, who has written numerous reviews for mysteries on IFDB in the last year or so. It’s nice to see a game by them!

Mysteries are one of my favorite genres of game, so I was interested to see how it plays out here. There are several standard ways to run a mystery in interactive fiction:
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This game is a mix of 3 and 4. You have to collect enough physical evidence to proceed to a quiz, and then pass the quiz to beat the game.

The storyline is simple. A man was found alone in his room in a pool of blood with no visible wounds. You must examine this single room to discover the clues.

This game boasts a large number of beta testers, which is nice. I struggled with some of the setup, however. Many of the ‘standard responses’ for Inform were not helpful. For instance, there were some ear plugs that I tried to take and it said ‘That is not portable’. Some commands that might have had useful responses didn’t work; for instance, TALK TO didn’t have any message like ‘Conversation in this game is handled by ASKING’ (although that was mentioned in the help system!) and PLAY PIANO had no response.

There are some very helpful responses, though, like SEARCH and LOOK UNDER saying you only need to ‘examine’.

At the quiz at the end, I really struggled with the third question. I guessed it but then decompiled the game to see how I could have gotten there. It seems that the conversation system is a lot larger than I had expected. I had gotten stuck since SHOW (something) TO (someone) often didn’t have a response, so I assumed asking about those things wouldn’t be helpful.

There is one puzzle of a type I haven’t seen before in a parser mystery, involving a grid. I thought that was pretty clever.

Overall, I felt like tightening up some of the standard responses and adding more synonyms and actions like TALK TO and PLAY PIANO would make this an excellent short mystery adventure.

This is another game I tested, a hybrid of Twine and TADS.

The idea is that you are an adult (or teen) woman with a boyfriend/partner. Your father is dying of cancer, and could go at any time. You find out that your partner has been working with him on a game (written in TADS) to present to you, years after he started.

The TADS game consists of a house filled with materials for a party. You have to gather up enough stuff to enter the party: a costume, a thing to share, and an invitation. There are 5 ways to satisfy each category. Parts of the house additionally contain journal entries reflecting real-world issues the father had over time.

I really liked the concept of sandwiching a TADS game between twine games, and I like that it works both online and in downloads.

As a beta tester, I’m not sure how effective I was. I found 1 or 2 of the paths (I especially focused on the board game in testing), but that means I neglected 3 or 4.

And that’s both the blessing and the curse of this game: the multiple paths are very clever, allowing people to bypass a lot of puzzles and get to the end, contributing to a more relaxed atmosphere and helping casual people play.

On the other hand, that means that players (and inadequate testers like me) will only see 20-40% of the game. I’ve written before about how having ‘hidden bonus content’ in your game can make the game very very rewarding for those who find it, but overall tends to drag down the score as most people don’t see the hard work you do (Hanon’s game Transparent I think is a good example, where it’s a beautifully complex and rich game that hides most of it below the surface).

I enjoyed on this second playthrough figuring out the computer/radio problem, although I used hints several times. There was a minor hiccup at the end. I did find the puzzle fun and like the solution, though.

The twine scenes are, I think, descriptive and emotional. This kind of writing, with end of life care, can be really hard to write because everyone mourns in a different way. It’s almost impossible to provide options that meet everyone’s way of dealing with grief; one alternative is to write a strong personality for your protagonist and just provide options that are believable for that personality.

I feel like this game leans towards the second choice. Our protagonist has been deeply impacted by the trauma of cancer, and many options hover between ‘soldier through stoically’ and ‘allow sorrow to briefly overcome you’. This provides a contrast to the upbeat, cheery and often child-like TADS game. I think that the reactions of the protagonist are realistic, for a certain type of person and personality; yet at the same time, there is, in me, perhaps a longing for a positive and direct reconciliation and expression of appreciation that the game does not afford. There is in me a desire to have happy endings for games, but also to write games that do not have happy endings (my original ending for Grooverland was to have the main character frozen as a statue forever in a theme park, but CMG talked me out of it as too depressing).

Overall, I find the complex systems and puzzles of the TADS part and the dialogue and descriptiveness of the Twine part to be the best aspects of the game.

I like this game, one that I tested it. Even though it’s longer, I replayed the whole thing before this review, and one of the hardest puzzles in my current WIP was influenced by a puzzle in this game that I really liked.

It’s a Twine game with a parser influence. Like Scott Adams style games, the screen is split into an upper and lower part, but unlike them, the bottom remains mostly static while the top changes. The game has quadratic complexity, as you choose an action and then choose a noun to apply it to, which can be an object in -game or yourself on the sidebar.

Gameplay revolves around discovering and using new spells, which are in a two-syllable format. Over time, the spell system develops some complexity and richness.

Story-wise, you are an initiate in a fraternity of wizards, completing your final initiation: a magical paintball tournament. You have to defeat your brothers while also coming to know them.

I’ve seen some concerns in other reviews about the way you get to know them: by casting a spell that lets you live out other people’s memories, generally their most traumatic. The original version of the game did not include explicit consent for that action, while the most recent does.

From my point of view (which is subjective), this game is clearly fantasy. Not just wizards and spells fantasy (though it has that), but also a fantasy of friendship and understanding. The dream of having a circle of friends so close that you can share anything between you. In fact, there are a lot of clues in the paintball game itself that the whole thing is kind of a setup, a way for people to get to know you; it’s really quite possible that this mind sharing was intended.

Except…parts of the game indicate that the mind spell is newly rediscovered and exciting.

But that’s one aspect of the game I only really noticed now as a player. It’s really trying hard to tell three different stories at once:
1-A goofy game of paintball between fraternity friends with whacky spells and silly pledge rules
2-A dark and serious exploration of humanity’s injustice to those who are different from them
3-A heartwarming tale of acceptance and overcoming insecurity.

So I think part of the problem other reviewers identified isn’t so much that the idea of furrowing through someone’s mind is inherently bad for a story, but that the significance of events and characters takes on really different shades of meaning depending on which part of the story they’re in. Riptide, the frat brother in a treehouse, is a comic individual; Riptide, the oppressed child who essentially experienced torture, is not (I think that was the right character, but I’m not sure).

Overall, though, I enjoyed each subplot separately and found them worthwhile, but I’m not sure they coalesce into a greater whole (something I’ve been concerned about with my own game, which has a similar mix of the flippant and the dark).

Puzzle-wise, it’s outstanding, but also very difficult. I’d likely chalk up the low number of reviews to the puzzles, which are among the most difficult I’ve seen for choice based games of this size, requiring several leaps of intuition and a lot of experimentation. I had to get help several times on my first playthrough, but none this time around.

Overall, I found this satisfying.

This game by Arthur DiBianca has you exploring a multi-layered dungeon while collecting glowing gems of mysterious power (which are attached to the titular Vambrace).

Its big innovation is that there is no need to hit enter; one key is one action. This isn’t the very first game I’ve seen do this (there was a game in this year’s Parsercomp with the same concept), but I think the execution is great here. I feel like care was made to make the commands easier to remember, and I like the gradual reveal of more and more powers/keys.

Making a game like this takes a lot of talent and skill. I recently tried adding a ‘limited command’ section in my own game, specifically emulating Arthur DiBianca, and it was by far the hardest part to code: coming up with interesting puzzles, doing a lot of timing and such. It’s quite hard.

But it comes off great here. Most of the puzzles involve defeating foes or traps in a multi-layer dungeon, and my favorite type of puzzles in the game is where you come across a foe or trap and think, ‘I know exactly what I need to solve this, but I don’t have the capability.’ Then later, you get a new power, and you can run back to the earlier area and solve it.

This author has a lot of good games, but I’d put this in the top third or fourth of all his games.

This game is not archived, but I’m only reviewing it by request. (although technically it’s open on github so I guess that’s the same thing!)

There have been several multiplayer IF games in recent years, many of them by this author. Approaches to multiplayer IF have varied; there are parser games where codes must be passed back and forth and collaboration is key; twine games where codes are passed back and forth but no other communication is meant to be made; and games like this that utilize a server.

This is a very well written and technically proficient game. I think I’m going to divide my thoughts on this game into three areas: the story/writing, the mechanics, and the multiplayer aspect. Because this game works well and the author is proficient, I’m going to be a bit more critical than I would with a newer author, since I think this author values thoughtful criticism (and I hope I’m thoughtful!)

Story and writing

The main storyline is that you are Antony and Cleopatra, with Antony being the Vice President (I assume of the US) and Cleopatra being the Queen of Egypt (I wonder what it would be like if the vice president in real life was married to a monarch of another state. That’d be pretty interesting!). The two of you have been asked to solve the murder of Marlon Brando. You have around two weeks to gather clues, conduct interviews and investigations, and to make an accusation.

The story has varied suspects with differing motivations and interests. I’ve played a lot of other detective games where everyone just kind of blends together, a lot of rich white british people who have no distinguishing characteristics. But in this game, each character is very different. Interviewing Rasputin was memorable, and Vitruvius was very different from James Dean, who was very different from the General.

You’ll notice all the names are taken from famous characters in history. That’s part of the conceit here; kind of like Clone High or Fate Grand Order (neither of which I’ve watched or played), all of the characters are characters from history, modified to fit into a single scenario. For instance, Marlon Brando and James Dean both work at Raytheon.

This is clever, but to me the influence of the character’s historical figure is like La Croix; it’s not really there, just a hint of it. For most of the characters you could have swapped them with some other historical figure and there would be little difference. If it has been Queen Victoria instead of Queen Cleopatra, much of the game could have remained the same, outside of the Blood Diamonds bit. James Dean could have been Timothy Chalamet, etc. The only character that seemed heavily influenced by their historical counterpart is Rasputin. For the others, it mostly seemed like the name was just tacked on with a reference or two (Napoleon’s coat) with the mental associations meant to be developed by the reader.

But that’s not to say the characters aren’t developed; they’re very well developed! Just not in ways that strongly justify the unusual character choices.

The storyline itself was really interesting, and I liked seeing how things developed out and new storylines emerged.

Mechanics

You’re given a calendar with several blank days, each day with two appointments to make. You can schedule interviews or visiting locations (I thought you had to do one of each at first, but later I doubled up on appointments once I realized you can do so). Once in a meeting, you can mostly just click every link, although there are occasional choices you can make that make a difference. So the real strategy lies not in each individual interview, but in which interviews to schedule.

I found that satisfying in the long run, as time began running out and I had to guess which meetings were most important to schedule.

I’ve mentioned before my informal classification of mystery IF:

1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This is a type 3 murder mystery. At the end you have to pick who did it and why.

I got it wrong, mostly because I psyched myself out about a character I hadn’t had a chance to interview. But the solution was logical!

Multiplayer aspect

I played this game twice, first as part of the Seatlle IF Meetup and then again on my own.

In the meetup, we only got through the first day after 30 minutes of playing. On my own, it took me over an hour to finish.

Overall, I usually play IF around other events in my life like meals, childcare, work, tutoring, etc. and so it’s pretty hard to find time to meet up with others to play IF. That’s why I tend to prefer multiplayer IF that has small amounts of text and short gameplay (like Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip by the same author).

This game has a lot of text and long gameplay! There was also one time while (when playing with two browsers on the same computer) it said I was losing connection and might have everything reset without saving.

That says to me that this type of game may be more appropriate for a ‘multiple people in one room’ setting, like a TTRPG or boardgame, but digitally.

This feeling was strengthened once I realized that there’s not really special abilities for each of the two protagonists or information only one receives. There are certainly little details here and there and there are some witnessses where you get substantially different options, but by and large most of the multiplayer aspect is ‘do the two of you agree on this course of action’, which again to me sounds better for a cooperative game played by people in the same room.

Overall

This was a strong game, well made, and I enjoyed it. The multiplayer aspect and the historical figures weren’t compelling to me, and I believe the game could have retained much of its enjoyability without either one. But I’m glad it encouraged me to work with others and I’m glad I spent time with this.

I really enjoyed this escape room game.

While you’d think there’d be a big overlap in escape rooms and interactive fiction, the two have very distinct flavors (at least ifcomp-style interactive fiction). I wonder if its because escape rooms often rely heavily on visual clues? (like this game does).

In any case, this has the hallmarks of an escape room: a contrived scenario with codes, color schemes, passwords, chains, etc. where its clear the story (while strong) is in service to the puzzles.

You wake up, chained and forgetful, in a room filled with locks, drawers, safes, keys, etc.

Most of gameplay revolves around trying to figure out correct passphrases to type into boxes. The passphrases represent you having ‘done the work’ of solving.

I knew once I started this that it was pretty hard, probably too hard for me. I also knew that for this type of game, getting hints would probably significantly diminish the experience. So I persevered for quite a while, and finally solved it without hints! That was very satisfying.

There do seem to be several red herrings.

I do think this game defies a lot of conventions of IFComp games, with its fairly contrived story and emphasis on visual-only clues and passwords. However, it executed this at a high level of skill, and I really liked it.

I’ve seen a few people saying they felt out of the loop with this game since they didn’t play the earlier little match girl games. I can say (having played the first 3 but not the offshoots) that the only thing important from the first games is in the recap. This game does continuity kind of like early Adventure Time, with mostly ‘adventure of the week’ stuff with occasional throwbacks.

The game features some beautiful styling, with nice location descriptions, music, and scrolling text. I missed some of the intro timed text since my son asked me for help with something; timed text isn’t so much of a pet peeve as it is something that just doesn’t fit into my play style of fitting in games around the corners of my life. Fortunately the ending could be scrolled back if missed!

Apparently this game has a ton in common with Metroid Prime. I’ve never played that game, but I looked it up and there are quite a few similarities, even some cameos, if you can call it that.

The overall structure, like most of the Matchgirl games, is that looking into any source of fire (outside of the nighttime stars) will teleport the player to one of five or so worlds. There’s some nice variety here, including space, dinosaurs, wild west, etc. The Pirates of Penzance had a strong presence.

Each area has some kind of powerup that helps you explore other areas. In the meantime, there are different diversions (such as helping a goldfish or doing a time typing game).

I found the structure and side quests engaging and fun. The writing was flawless for me and had its moments of gravitas. I observed how it was done with interest, as my current WIP is structure much like this one, with different worlds or dimensions leading to some emotional moments. I liked how it worked here, so it gave me more confidence.

I did get stuck once. I suspected I had missed some exit. I used location based hints and quickly realized I hadn’t noticed an exit, and then solved the game soon after that.

I can see the weight of a long series making it hard for people to get invested in playing a game, but this one as a standalone might as well be the introduction to the series, as continuity isn’t really a major feature of the games. They can be played in just about any order.

It’s nice to see high quality in the comp. Between Ryan Veeder, JJ Guest, BJ Best, we have three former winners entering well-done games, as well as newcomers producing polished games of great value.

This is a great-looking Inform game. Inform has the capacity to make ‘website templates’ that people can share with each other to make projects look nicer, but people rarely use them. I don’t know if this one uses a custom template or just had css/html edited manually, but it looks great.

The concept is really funny, too. What if IKEA instructions were summoning rituals for ancient Gods?

Actual gameplay revolves around following IKEA instructions closely. I found that fun, as I like both assembling and deassembling IKEA furniture. My school had to throw out some cabinets recently that had gotten old/bug-ridden, and I had a hammer and just deconstructed it from memory (remove the thin bar, then pry the back panelling, then remove the edge pieces, then break out the last bit of wood with the hammer, etc.)

Anyway, this game scratched that itch, which was nice. Most of the puzzles revolve around clever ways to use the instructions. The game was a little smaller than I first imagined, but in a good way, as it was beginning to get overwhelming.

I did have some trouble with phrasing. It was hard to find (Spoiler - click to show)an antonym for ‘insert’. The transcript shows my flailing about. I ended up also using hints for what I’d consider the biggest puzzle of the game, but it was entirely fair, I just was getting close to the 2 hour limit.

This was a nice, substantial puzzler parser game with some fun hand-drawn sketches.

It starts with a large chunk of made-up names which was a bit hard to parse at first, but that quickly settled down. Next, I got confused by the directions, but fortunately the map made that a breeze.

Then it settled down into a sequence of puzzles. You play as a foreigner on an airship whose brother has been accused of murder. Its your job to navigate the ship and collect evidence!

The game could have easily gotten overwhelming if not for the helpful tablet which kept clues and to-do tasks. I consulted it frequently.

I got halfway through the game without consulting hints. The second half, I had to consult hints for. It turns out that every time I needed hints, the answer was the exact same.

With one last note on the story, I did find it a bit odd how much we can do without getting in trouble. Like wandering into places we clearly should not be. So I had to suspend disbelief a bit. On the other hand, I enjoyed the many layers of information and the multiple endings and plots within plots. So I’ll be rating it highly.

This is a parser game about making a bargain with the devil. I decided to put Der Freischütz 1 in the background for its devil-dealing music.

This game was polished and well-thought through. You are a mad scientist/demonologist in the vein of Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Faust. You have summoned the devil in order to bargain the secrets of life from him. But, the cost may be too great…

Everything worked seamlessly in this game. At no point did I encounter anything I would consider a bug or a typo or bad puzzle design. At times it was leaning a little against my religious sensibilities but it always backed off before getting too harsh.

The writing is funny, with a fake-old-time language for an ancient grimoire that was able to contrast modern tropes with older grammar forms. All the NPCs, including the Devil, were played with a nice mix of intelligence and stupidity, just smart enough to oppose you and plenty dumb enough to fall for your tricks.

The puzzles seemed very hard at first, but through simple exploration I was able to make some guesses on what to do, and so while I had to think a lot, I never needed hints or a map.

The conversation system worked well, with both general topics and individual topics. It felt seamless for me.

So, I thought it was a great game. Very nice work!

This is a complex and rich puzzle game written in Twine.

In it, you are tasked with recovering 14 different puppets from a studio that is about to shut down. It seems like a mix of Muppets and Disney, with a studio next to a giant theme park and all the old history about to be demolished.

You, a former puppeteer, are tasked with stealing the puppets with the help of an anonymous accomplice. The twist is (revealed very early on), when you find a puppet, they come to life! Each puppet has different features that can help you in different situations.

Opposing you are evil puppets that stalk through the halls or vents. They can steal puppets from you. I always used ‘undo’, so I don’t know if you can get them back. If you don’t have a puppet, they just kick you out, which can actually be a nice shortcut!

There are four main areas. I finished 3 on my own, getting all puppets, but needed to poke around the code to figure out how to get in and beat the 4th one. However, you can get a good ending even if you miss out on the final building.

While the premise is inherently amusing, the game is more about the march of time and the loss of childhood memories. There is a subplot that you only encounter in the very end parts of the game about the Black experience in America.

I found the ending to be a bit long, with page after page of fullscreen text. That part seemed like it was meant to be a tribute for Jim Henson (like the game mentions in the credits) or maybe an exercise in worldbuilding, but it was a little bit long for my liking. I may be a bit sensitive to that because I have something similar in my current game (a museum at the end describing everything you did or saw) and I’ve been trying to figure out what a good length of time to spend there is.

The ‘true ending’ I got with all 14 puppets worked out well, I think.

I found the random movement of the enemies a bit difficult to avoid at times, but with UNDO it wasn’t too bad. It provided a bit of flavor. The only place I found really rough was the final building, where there were usually only 2 exits at a time, so moving in and out was pretty risky.

I think fans of big parser-like twine adventures (like Agat’s games) will like this a lot. I enjoyed it!

I spent more time and attention on this game than just about any other game in this comp so far, using the full 2 hours and thinking a lot.

This game is about a person who is part Australian and part Indonesian going back to Bali to visit family. To their surprise, they discover they’re running a bed and breakfast for a week!

Like most Choicescript games, there’s a lot of customization here, but not too much. There are stats here, but they don’t seem to be used for pass/fail as much as just keeping track of your choices and giving you a consistent story.

I started out playing a boy, but over time and with the events of the game I started thinking of my character of a woman more, and ended up in a romance with the guy RO.

I think the game had a satisfying narrative arc for me. I read some other reviews before playing, which had expressed disappointment with a certain major arc not being fulfilled, but knowing that helped me be more satisfied with what I did see. The rewards and trials both build up over time in the game, with a satisfying action conclusion.

I enjoyed the cats, as others have mentioned. But most of all I enjoyed seeing a blend of cultures of which I have not previously been aware much of. The intersection of ‘what Australians are like on holiday’ with the intersection of Indonesian and Chinese people and the effects of local religions, as well as the kinds of food available and the transportation…there’s a lot going on here and it’s described lovingly. I don’t know how autobiographical it is, but it either seems that Felicity Banks is describing things from her own experience, and is part Indonesian, or that this was simply just written with a deep love for and interest in the region. It’s possible that, not being from the region, I may be mistaken as to authenticity or tone, but from an outside perspective it seems very nice. I enjoyed this overall.

I approached this game with a combination of excitement and hesitancy. To Hell in a Hamper, the previous game in the series, is one of my top 10 IF games of all time, out of around 2900 reviews. That puts To Hell in a Hamper in the top 0.4% of all games ever for me. So on the one hand, I’m sure I’d like more, while on the other the chance of any new game also being in my top 0.4% of all time would be pretty low.

Overall I liked it a lot, I can just say that. I found it more challenging than the first game and with more of a focus on adventure than comedy, though there is definitely a strong comedic slant. It was genuinely engaging and funny and, in my opinion, well written.

The idea is that the captain of your pirate vessel has fled his ship with his greatest treasures as well as you, a young cabin boy. Unfortunately, your row boat is sinking! You have to toss all of the captain’s treasures out to succeed. He’s not willing to help, though, and a dangerous Yateveo tree is out to get you, too!

I mentioned this game being harder than the other, and that’s true. I got kind of stuck 4 times.

I liked the ending puzzle, a nice contrast to the rest of the puzzle style. And the final scene had some quit nice poetry in it.

So overall, I’d rate this as pretty difficult, but at no point in the four scenarios above was I unhappy. It’s hard, but a fun hard. That’s good, and gives the game high points in my mind on the puzzle side.

On the writing and story side, well, like I said, this is different than the last game. That game’s humor depended heavily on the increasing absurdity of the objects you found. In this one, though, almost everything I found was reasonable. Instead, there was a lot more emphasis on the adventure of it all, like the helpful octopus, the dangerous tree, and above all the changing relationship of you and the captain. It was almost more like Violet than Lost Pig; each of your actions affects your relationship with the captain. So it was not as funny to me as To Hell in a Hamper, but I think it has a deeper story and a bit more substance.

Polish-wise, it was great. I found only a couple of bugs.

In conclusion, this game isn’t in my top 0.4% of all time, but it’s solidly in my top 4.0% of all time. Great work, and something I could recommend to people looking for humor, pirates, one-room games or great NPCs (maybe a nomination for Best NPC xyzzy?)

This was my favorite game of the competition!

I’m going to put on my ‘extra-critical’ goggles for this game, because it’s by a previous IFComp winner (who presumably can stand up to sterner scrutiny), and is in a genre (autobiographical emotional retrospective in game form) that has had several recent start-studded entries (Sting, Repeat the Ending, A Rope of Chalk, and of course the author’s own game two years ago). It also intentionally uses an older format and is mimicking ‘my crappy apartment/house’ games, which has to thread the needle between not being as bad as the source material and being accurate to source material.

So how does it succeed? Overall, the polish is evident. I rarely struggled with the parser, which (combined with the other AGT/AGX/MAGX game this year makes me respect the engine a lot). Teleportation and combat are handled well. Death and being reborn could theoretically have really messed up game state, but it doesn’t seem to have done so, which is really impressive to me.

The game itself relies heavily on the commentary to make it ‘good’, which makes sense, because it was built that way. At first I was critical of the base game as being too basic, given the rich and full games I’ve seen built by children and teens recently (for comparison, look at Milliways in this IFComp!). But then I remembered games like Coming Home 1 which are actually very similar in layout and descriptiveness level to this game (although not in polish), so I guess it is pretty authentic.

Exploration was fun. Sometimes commands and interaction felt just a bit ‘off’ from games I usually play, and this was good; it felt like seeing interactive fiction written by someone who had a different set of experiences than me.

I’m not sure whether the game is autobiographical or not; I suspect not, but I’m not sure that should factor into the overall evaluation of the game. The background story is emotional, and hearing only one side of the conversation really helps here as you can imagine the other side for yourself, with version painting the narrator in a deeply sympathetic light or as a barely-tolerated person stretching others’ patience. One thing though for me is that it was always very clear that I was interacting with a fictional narrative, one held at a distance, and that I wasn’t drawn into. This is a personal reaction and not necessarily one all would hold. That’s actually what made me wonder if this was autobiographical, as real life scenarios are often less believable than fictional (like the fact that Tiffany is a medieval name).

The map is nice, and I wish I had read it first. I solved one puzzle it solves on accident due to my normal direction-flailing I typically do when playing games. It has some messages like ‘Don’t Cheat’ and ‘Listnouns’ that make me wonder if there is some hidden content in the game.

Overall, it was clear from the beginning that this has high production values and includes a lot of elements I like. So the debate wasn’t whether to score high or low, but which high score to shoot for. I’m still thinking about it; in a way this game is more relatable to me than Best’s last game, but on the other hand it’s a slighter thing. The ending, for instance, felt anticlimactic, more of an opportunity to sit and ponder than a neat wrapping up.

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for other reviews on this; I feel like there are still some unresolved thoughts in my mind and maybe a fresh perspective can help. But I did enjoy this, and it was easy to play this on Gargoyle.

I deeply enjoyed this game. It’s a well-scoped, polished parser game with a lot of humor.

The idea is that you are a circus clown at a circus that is being sabotaged by a villainous Phantom! You have three friends whose acts get sabotaged and you have to find a way to defeat the enemy.

Most of the puzzles revolve around finding creative uses of items, although there are also some other puzzle types like math.

The characters are pretty distinct and memorable, like the grumpy animal trainer or your ‘dense’ muscle bound girlfriend. There are a lot of hidden details in the game, like a character being trans.

Most of the puzzles made perfect sense, and hit the sweet spot between being non-obvious but not being too hard to figure out. I did get stuck on the rabbit puzzle, but once I got hints for it I realized that I just hadn’t experimented enough earlier. I enjoyed the payoff of the game name.

I like a circus setting for a parser game (Ballyhoo is one of my favorite Infocom works) and the pacing worked great here. Excellent work, deeply enjoyed it.

This game has a few different twists, but I’ll try to avoid spoilers the best I can.

This is a choice-based game, and it is quite extensive. It took me right around the two hour mark to complete. It’s reminiscent of Gruescript in a sense, with different locations you can click to and an inventory to use. However, the inventory only shows up every now and then in-game.

While it grows more complex, it feels fair to say that gameplay revolves around a ship captain walking around the ship, trying to understand a mysterious poem given by ancestors and talking to others on the ship.

Storywise, it’s all about navigation and pushing to the unknown. There are different books that give you lore about the world. The pirates in the game all curse, presumably for verisimilitude, but for some reason the swearing was written exactly the way the 14 yr old boys in my school swear so I kept picturing very young pirates.

Many of the characters have tragic backstories. There are several opportunities to show mercy or justice and to change your relationship with others.

The writing overall was adventurous and dramatic. Near the end, there were a few different narrative threads that came together, but I’m not sure how I felt about the resolution. I was left with more questions than answers.

There were graphical puzzles in the game as well. At first, they fit well into the flow of the story, providing simple distractions along the main journey. Near the end, though, there were so many puzzles of such quantity that by the time I returned to the story I had forgotten much of what had happened. While I do enjoy graphical puzzles from time to time, they lack many of the features I’ve come to enjoy in text based fiction and thus weren’t quite as enjoyable to me.

The level of craftsmanship in the UI and puzzles was very high; the author clearly has a good grasp of visual design and event-based programming.

I think the best descriptors for this game might be ‘incestbait’ and '‘unusual UI’.

Let’s talk about UI first. The idea is that you are ‘aiming’ at the screen, with a literal scope in the title page and elsewhere just dragging your aim around. While moving around the page you find text you can click on. So it’s choice based, but with work to discover the choices.

The controls are opposite from what I expected. It all clicked when I realized that instead of panning around the page I was moving the camera.

This is a very long game, and took me longer than 2 hours to complete. Parts of it were difficult; a couple of times I could have sworn the text needed to progress just wasn’t there, so I exited out completely and ‘Resume’ and it worked. But looking back, I likely just had trouble finding the right link. I got very stuck at one point looking for my father, due to the many places possible to look.

The story is one of was and love. You play as two siblings who have had a love/hate/LOVE relationship their whole life. While there is no history of romantic intimacy between you two, everything in the game drips with its possibility, so much that the entire theme of the game seems to be ‘what if two siblings were almost-lovers and sublimated that tension into hate’.

The backdrop is like a modern Gone With the Wind or War and Peace, where a violent war is raging and you are part of a privileged family, the children of an admiral. The countries involved seem to be fictional, but evoke modern tropes: an aggressor country feeding misinformation to others to justify invading a smaller country; corruption at the highest levels, etc.

The game opens with a violent conflict between the two protagonists, and I never really understood the justification for that. Even seeing the messages that spurred the conflict, I don’t understand why the fight happened.

In any case, this really does have the overall feel of the grand war novels I mentioned before, with similar musings on changes in life. The UI was an interesting concept but by the end it started to wear thin. It may be because I was using a trackpad and playing on desktop; I had to click and drag a lot.

There definitely is strong craftmanship in evidence; this is the kind of game where I personally didn’t love it but I’d definitely hire the creator for game work if I ran a studio. So the pros of this game are mostly in the areas of the author’s skill, and the cons are mostly in my personal taste.

There’s a tendency in interactive fiction for people to talk about ‘old fashioned adventures’ or ‘old school’ games , but it means different things to different people, usually ‘similar to games I played as a kid’.

I didn’t really get heavily into IF until I was in my thirties, so I don’t have a ton of feelings for older games. But I do have a couple experiences as a kid; one was trying Zork in my teens and failing to do much of anything (quit at the dam), and the other was playing some obscure text adventures with graphics in 6th grade (one called Hacker and another about rhymes in an Alice in Wonderland type world).

This game really evoked for me the nostalgia of those games, like Hacker. I know other Adventuron games are similar in appearance, but this also really got the feel of games of those time down well. It even reminded me of the feel of games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

Anyway, you’re a spy for a secret organization called TURTLE and you’re called in to rescue another spy who is in trouble. Your goal is to infiltrate the enemy’s secret villa and steal back his diamond while stopping his evil plan.

There are a lot of tropes here similar to the 80s and 90s and early bond movies. Some are a bit outdated, but it has a nice overall action vibe. It’s also very Italian (for me the most Italian moment was finding a monastery where the monks wouldn’t let you in without a crucifix). There’s a lot of Italian text in the game. While I’m not fluent, I could understand most of the Italian pretty easily, but it may be useful having google translate nearby (although you can’t copy and paste from Adventuron, last time I checked).

Puzzles were generally fair and well clued, and had fun features like a computer system and a money system. I had to check the walkthrough near the end about three different times.

Overall, I had a great time. Very fun.

I opened this game and I was poking around and thought, ‘Man, this really feels familiar. Where have I seen this before? Did I test this?’

Then I checked, and I realized that I had played it in the German Grand Prix as Fischstäbchen! I really enjoyed that game, so it was fun to see the translation here (something which has only happened recently since rule changes allowing translations of games).

This is a fairly hefty but manageable parser game about exploring a fishing boat in Point Nemo, the point on earth furthest from land. Things don’t seem quite normal; your crew won’t come out of their rooms and your cook spends a lot of time chanting out of ancient books and being surrounded by freezing mist…

I loved the German version of this game, especially since it had a built-in help menu to list all verbs that you need to finish, something that worked really well for me as a noob. This version seems like slightly different compared to the old one; it has some puzzles I don’t remember, and some features like highlighting of exits, which I like.

On the other hand, seeing it in my native tongue makes it easier to be judgmental. For instance, several times, there were ‘double directions’ like saying something is ‘down’ but you access it to the ‘west’. Even though both ‘down’ and ‘west’ are highlighted, going ‘down’ gives an error. I think it would have worked better to redirect ‘down’ and ‘west’ to work the same way.

The map is pretty intimidating at first. I’d recommend just exploring and mapping the whole thing before anything else as several of the puzzles just involve finding people or things.

I used the hints a couple of times, even for things I did in my last playthrough.

Overall the things I liked last time are still here: the Lovecraftian/dry humour mix and the active and engaging puzzles. I also like the guidance it gives you on some puzzles and the restart method for when you die.

Overall, I think I liked the German version slightly better only because playing in another language presents its own unique challenges and gameplay, but I still enjoyed this one.

This was one of the better experiences I’ve had with a custom parser game written for a retro format.

This game was written for the Commodore 64 platform and must be played in an emulator. I played with the Vice emulator.

It is a murder mystery. It comes with a great deal of background material. There are feelies with long, in-depth interviews with each of the suspects. There are also guides on what can be typed. I found it necessary to read every single feelie and command guide and manual to complete the game, as there are essential components you will likely not find without help (such as the important ANALYZE command).

The setting and game style is intentionally reminiscent of old Infocom mysteries such as Deadline and Suspect. There is a single house with multiple independent NPCs moving about and various clues.

I’ll talk a bit about things that were frustrating and things that worked well.

Frustrations came mostly from the engine and parser. The Commodore 64 emulator I had imitated its old clunkiness. Each room takes several seconds to load. If you go the wrong way and want to turn around, it’s 20 seconds just to correct your mistake. There was a ‘speed up’ button which I used, however, it caused the space bar to wig out, making only one-word commands possible in fast mode (great for navigation). At one point while messing with speed and trying to type ‘E’ I made the emulator hang up; I don’t believe it was the game’s fault.

Some commands were a bit difficult to phrase. One must type ‘interior garage door’; ‘interior door’ will not suffice. TALK TO someone and OPEN something almost always returned a blank line with no response at all.

The story and motives were lavishly described but stretched the imagination a bit. I’m not sure the motive found in the game would hold up in court, and some of the puzzles felt a bit arbitrary.

Those are the frustrating points. The good points are that outside of the above-mentioned difficulties, the parser was quite robust. I was frequently able to do what I wanted in an easy fashion. Puzzles were well-clued; I only turned to the walkthrough to speed up after I had the game crash. I do recommend playing on your own first without the walkthrough as it can help explain some of the more unusual action choices. I do think I would have had to turn to a walkthrough no matter what, though.

Other good things are the reasonable scope of the entry. With the slow emulation and the minimal parser, a long game could have stretched patience thin. This game seems well designed and compact, and is more fair (in my opinion) than the original infocom games. All interactable items are listed at the end of the paragraph, so you don’t have to worry about whether scenery contains an important clue.

In the past, I’ve had many bad experiences with custom parser and retro platforms. I’d say that this was genuinely refreshing and was, compared to those experiences, satisfying. For someone unaccustomed to such platforms I could imagine there would be much frustration. I also found the feelies to be very high quality (although there is a ‘images go here’ section that I believe will eventually be corrected). If I could change one thing, it’d be allowing ‘X’ as look at. I appreciate the game and was glad to play it!

This game combines a parser of its own with some AI-generated responses. The ai-generated text is fairly distinctive, with a very literalist interpretation of things (much like Drax the Destroyer in marvel movies). The plot itself and the 'human written' parts have a strong resemblance to the AI generated part, and I suspect that the plot was generated first by an AI and then pruned. There are riddles in the game that also seem like they were first thought of by an AI.

You play as a PhD student who can't get any postdocs, so they use AI to automatically fill out sweepstakes forms. This nets you some petty cash, but also a ticket to get onto a cruise ship.

The rest of the game involves getting on the ship, making friends, finding a couple of clues, entering some passwords, and grabbing some items, along with a thriller-type story.

The AI provides a lot of responses; interestingly, for me, the actual responses of the AI didn't matter, as it had no 'state' (the game told me a character was looking at his ring and thinking of his wife and kids; I asked him about his wife and he was unmarried). Every character is generic and defined with stereotypes that the AI found most logical (both black characters had grown up in poverty and become army vets; a white guy who went to jail had what looked like a deformed blunt in his hands in the AI image; etc.). But if you talk to them just right they'll reveal their prompt to you. So instead of AI replacing human ingenuity, it becomes a way to use AI to mask the true human ingenuity. What prompt created this? That prompt itself seemed AI generated. What was the original prompt for the game?

The game is slow. Those who long for the days of slow processors and chugging Apple-II's will be thrilled that this game also takes a lot of time to process actions. For me, if ai-powered games are to be common, speed will be an important factor.

I struggled with interacting with the game, and in the end looked up the author's github and found a test/walkthrough hidden in the code and used it (except for what seems to be a testing-only password for one room).

This game has convinced me that AI won't replace human ingenuity any time soon, especially for riddles. I wonder if the CSS and markdown and stuff was also AI, because there were several typos like too many ** symbols and such.

I usually strongly advocate for games to be archived long term and I hope the code for this is stored, but this game probably won't run 5 years from now, given its heavy reliance on an ever-shifting public resource.

I didn't play this game in the intended way (just opened two windows and played both).

I've played 3 or 4 two-player IF games in the last few years, and I think this one definitely benefits from being in the same room or able to talk to each other. The other two-player games I played had a major twist that was apparent from the start and sharing info would have ruined that. This one is different; even having complete knowledge of the other game doesn't really help you in the current game.

Instead, codes are used primarily to move objects from one game to another. When this occurs, you get a code you send to the other player, and they type that in to get an effect in game.

The puzzles are designed to be fairly light, but there were times when I got stuck in one of the games for ten or fifteen minutes, which is why I wonder if it would be better for the two players to talk to each other and bounce ideas off each other.

I loved the humor in the game; puzzles were oddball and events were shocking at times and cute at others. Despite this I never felt immersed in the game world; it definitely felt artificial and made as a kind of puzzlebox; but it was a very enjoyable puzzlebox, even as a single player.

This game has some pretty awesome worldbuilding. It's a French hypertext game with three main stories and a few incomplete ones.

It has very lovely art and some background music. The idea is that there is this ancient, ruined world filled with gigantic walls and large trees. There are no living creatures except for insects. It reminds me a bit of Nausicaa of the Winds, especially the trees that suck up poisonous metals and excrete them.

Overall, the worldbuilding was fun. You see this world of wild druids and ancient technology through the eyes of a young girl. There are horse-like insects, monstrous ones, insect gods, and insect food.

It's very big even as is. The one thing that I found a bit odd (besides it being released unfinished) is that the structure is kind of like a text maze. There is one main storyline you can usually just click through, with occasional side paths that can be very long before coming back to the original.

Overall, I love this world and art and think it's fun.

This is a long game in the 2023 French IF Comp, and one with an innovative take on interactivity and on the themes of 'treason' and 'archives'.

My opinion of the game changed around a lot because there are so many types of interactivity. Basically, you have access to a machine depicted as green-on-black, and you can dig through folders of files and applications.

I was in big trouble at first because my French is mediocre and there are parts of the game that are just reading page after page of fairly complex and technical French.

But then I realized that this is just a big game. Interspersed with the documents are images, codes, and minigames. They were well-done and all worked perfectly (except sudoku, which always quit when I put a 1 in).

The story really developed. At first I had no idea at all what was going on, some kind of obscure tale of political protest and treason, but then it became more of a work diary and finally unfolded into a pretty cool ending.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the outcome. It reminded me a bit of Kafka at parts, in a good way, but ended with its own style. Very fun, one of the better games I've played this year over all.

This game grew on me quite a bit over time.

It's a French Comp 23 game and written in a beautiful and evocative style. For instance, you start in a part of the city called the Luna Plaza that has a kind of mirror-like thing that reflects the stars so that you have two night skies.

You are in a medieval kind of town, and lore and secrets abound. I thought I had seen a lot of the game when I found a strange little house where a man talked about things like 'software' and 'photographs' that made no sense to me, a medieval person, but that was just very early on in the game. Later on, I found a lot of worldbuilding, some mythology, etc.

At first the game felt constrained, and then it had paths that branched so much I worried I was missing much of the game. But then it really opened up, and I truly began to understand the scale of the game. It was still manageable (a couple of hours), but quite large.

There are many people in this city, and as the time of day changes, what you can do with them changes.

In addition, the game has hover-over text, which lets you get additional info on things and occasionally provides extra interactions.

Overall, I found the writing very descriptive and had fun finding little secrets. I found one ending early on but stuck around for a final ending, which required a difficult choice. Great game.

I helped beta test this game.

The idea of this game is that you are part of an alchemical society that possesses the ability to travel back in time. It is your job to go to the very beginning and discover the truth about Cain and his Mark.

The alchemical system in this game is rich. It consists of the four humours (blood, phlegm, etc.), their 'poisons' (substances that counteract them), and a host of other substances. It is accompanied by a gargantuan book with many pages, dozens of them. It's too big to just read straight through, so I strongly recommend NOT taking the book as soon as you get it and looking up every topic you see; the game will guide you in using the book later on.

The main gameplay is unlocking memories of Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel through alchemical means, gathering more ingredients, and learning the mystery of this early world. Often you will told a formula you need, but for which you lack an ingredient or two and must find them.

There are some tricky puzzles I struggled with as a tester, including mechanical puzzles and flashes of intuition.

The game has a darker tone to it; this is an unhappy and grim retelling of Cain and Abel's already grim story. It doesn't conform to my personal beliefs, but it's clear this is a work of fiction and a well-written one at that.

I beta-tested this game, so I won't post a score until after IF Comp.

This is one of the longest games in the competition. It's a Twine game with 7 chapters, and it has quite a few choices that have a major effect on the game.

I beta tested it a year ago, when it was unfinished, and it has been substantially improved and extended since then.

You play as the young princess of the kingdom of Vestria. Your brother has taken ill. You have to go on a quest to find how to save him while also dealing with the political fallout of a failed marriage and disastrous rebellion many years prior.

The pacing, writing, and interactivity are all imperfect, but come together in the way that really good games do (for my taste; everyone has different styles they like). The genre might theoretically be described as young adult (a young protagonist, no profanity and little sexuality or gore), but the game does allow you to be frequently ruthless in ways typically reserved for adult games. There is a family-friendly version for people who want to play with kids.

This game is noticeable for having several choices that affect big chunks of the game. When I beta tested, I killed someone early on; in this run through, that person ended up as my companion for much of the game.

There is a timed section in this game which can be rough; it gives you 10 minutes, though, for a single puzzle, and you can save and reload if needed.

This is a fun medium game. The author has a long-running series of games that feature a limited parser, where only a select few commands are recognized. In fact, you could say he's a pioneer of the field.

I've come to learn how to play these games, although they're still pretty hard for me. So I was looking forward to playing this game.

You play as a robot that has to go around zapping bugs who have infiltrated a robot factory. It kind of reminds me of the MO factory in adventure time, if it was working well (the only similarities are single minded robots, but still...).

It's kind of a metroidvania situation, as you gain new abilities and items as the game progresses. There are also codes, waiting games, patterns, etc. However, there's no sequence skipping possible like in a lot of Metroidvanias.

I did better than I usually do, completing all the optional tasks and getting all but 1 of the bugs. But man, that last bug was nasty; I looked at every hint and then had trouble. It was the (Spoiler - click to show)sculpture bug. It was fairly clued, I just forgot some capabilities, which shows how complex can get.

I liked the characters in this game a lot; they were simple and often dumb but it makes sense for a collection of bots.

This is quite a large and complex Twine game that has a lot of humor. It's about a mysterious male protagonist who wakes up and seeks the help of two magical detectives named Cannelé and Nomnom. They are a duo who act like siblings (maybe are?) and express intense dislike for each other while also acting pretty dumb.

The game has excellent styling with colors used for text, animations, and some minigames that are quite well done. One is a card game; another is a complex 'detective board' with red string and post-it notes that unfortunately doesn't always work well with saving and loading, but is fun while it lasts.

The game is very long already, lasting over two hours for me, and is actually incomplete. The player is invited to post their hypotheses and guesses for the finale online, with the author taking these hypotheses into account for their later writing of the big finale.

I loved the images, the interaction between the protagonist and the two detectives, the minigames, all of it. Except...

I don't like the dynamic between the two main NPCs. It's just pure negative all the time, completely unrelenting. It can be a funny bit, but I wished for just an occasional gleam of fondness, or loyalty, etc. There may have been some, but it was few and far between. This is 100% just personal taste; I think there could be many people that like this so it doesn't have to be changed. But I like 'jerk with a heart of gold' more than 'jerk with a heart of jerk'.

I also found more than a few small typos and had some trouble with saving and loading and keeping the 'memory board' the same.

Overall, this is one of my favorite games of this comp, and the criticism above is just a small detail in a great work. I'm looking forward to the finish, and can recommend this.

As someone who's never tried alcohol, mixed drinks always seem intriguing; I always imagine they'd be like milkshakes or punch or other sweet things. From what people say, it's not really like that. But I like the way the bottles look and the idea of trying to combine ingredients in a neat way.

This game heavily features a minigame where you have a stock of drinks (represented visually with nice graphics) and have to mix specific cocktails from it. All real-world drinks have been re-named, and some are pretty funny (especially ones that are just nicknames for a single drink).

The main storyline is about you, a young individual, trying to save up enough money to buy out the tavern owner. Simultaneously, you are contacted by a 'watcher', an extradimensional being, who discusses the nature of agency with you.

The dialogue in the game is written with an accent, which is always a risky choice, as it can come off pretty goofy or hard to read. This one was fairly simple, though, so that's good.

There is some strong profanity in the game (I have a filter that turns it off, because why not?), and some mild references to sexual situations.

Overall:
-Polish: I had a couple of times where a major event repeated itself (making a buffet, passing out, etc.) and there was some fiddliness with things like the tip box, where you made a choice whether to put it out or not, then when doing the 'getting ready for the day' menu, you had the choice again, repeated word-for-word. Just things like that I feel could be fixed up a bit.
+Descriptiveness: The game is very descriptive, especially with the imaginative cocktail names.
-Interactivity: Like several other reviewers have pointed out, the main minigame can get monotonous. I got to flinching when I'd get another round of 9 orders. But I think the core idea is good, maybe it just needs a few tweaks. I wish there was a sense of progression in skill, or something to learn, but after the first few it's mainly repeating identical actions.
+Emotional impact: I found it heartwarming the way the group could hassle each other but also bond in positive ways.
+Would I play again? With a few changes, like those mentioned above, I think it would be fun.

This is a Twine game with a significant world model. In it, you explore a ship you've crashlanded on which is empty except for an AI named SOLIS.

There are a lot of areas to explore, and you have both an inventory and notes of all important information.

It has puzzles that are honestly complex and can be fairly difficult. The inventory allows for quadratic complexity: you have to be in the right room, and use the right item.

I enjoyed the AI, and felt an attachment to them. The nice thing about IF containing AIs is that the AIs exist in reality, in a sense; the organic characters are just described in words, nothing like their 'true' selves, but the AIs are supposed to be code masquerading as a person and that's what they actually are: code in Twine or Ink or Inform that takes your inputs and reacts to you. It's weird to think about.

Anyway, the game is fairly non-linear and has multiple endings and paths to victory. I think a large chunk of content is the same in each walkthrough, especially conversation, but you can replay those parts with different attitudes.

Navigating back and forth got a bit tedious by the end, but fortunately a new mechanic gets introduced that lets you 'warp' around ((Spoiler - click to show)following the robot).

Overall, I really enjoyed this polished game.

There's a long tradition of games about completing a magical education, including early games like Enchanter and more recent games like Winter at Hogwarts and Junior Arithmancer.

This game is a pretty standard example of the genre, where you have 5 tasks to perform and must search for spell books and ingredients to complete the 5 tasks.

This game uses a custom web parser. It's actually not too bad, being able to handle things like hitting the up arrow to repeat earlier commands and getting a lot of commands I typed right. It does have weaknesses, though, like not understanding pronouns like 'it'.

The nice things about this game include multiple paths to solutions for many puzzles. It has a built-in hint system, but I often found the hints were only available for things I already knew about. I had to check the walkthrough for about 30-40% of the game, and finished at 2 hrs 7 minutes (according to the game's handy timer).

I found several typos in the game, and it wasn't very descriptive. But I had fun with this game, and appreciate how the engine seems to be coming along nicely.

This game is a fairly hefty parser game where a spaceship is sent spiraling off into space with only one person, you, in it.

You have a to-do list that expands and contracts as the game demands. There are a lot of little devices: cabinets, panels, fuses, etc. and a very intricate-seeming fuel injection system.

The puzzles are generally clever. Some of them are moon-logic type puzzles.
As a case in point, very near the end of the game (heavy endgame spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)you find the captain's journal and need to unlock it. The captain has two pictures: one of a dog named Pluto and one of the moon. The idea is that the password is Pluto's moon, Charon. But why would someone, in their own room, make their only personal objects just happen to be an obscure hint for their own password?. But most of the puzzles are fair.

Implementation is sometimes missing but when it's not it's very solid. So a lot of cool objects are implemented (including a large rope) but a lot of scenery objects are just not there or are missing reasonable actions. (For instance, (mild lategame spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)if you unlock the starboard chest, it has wires, but you can't refer to them or interact with them in any way. Similarly, there is an operations console on the bridge which isn't implemented.

I think this is already a good game, but I think with a few tweaks it could become a great game. Maybe there could be a post-comp release with a bit more things written in? Either way, I enjoyed playing this. It was a little unpolished, but had nice puzzles, pretty descriptive, and was enjoyable, and I would replay it if it was tweaked.

This is the third game by Eric Zinda with the Perplexity engine. The first two games were intended to be played with voice, I believe, while this game didn't seem to have the voice option.

The Perplexity engine is still really rough, but each game has been better than the last one. I imagine there's a ton of backend work going on between games, but I think the front-facing part could use a tune-up.

In this game, you explore a bunch of surreal areas, usually involving nature, a deer, and traffic-related imagery.

While the game is a significant improvement over previous entries, it's still pretty rough.

Polish-wise, the game tends to form uncapitalized sentences when using automated descriptions. It is smart enough to answer the question WHERE IS THE _____? but not smart enough to make the output easily understandable. This version seems to understand most traditional IF commands and abbreviations (like X for LOOK AT and I for INVENTORY, which is a big relief.

Descriptiveness-wise, the game has many rooms with a cursory description followed by a list of visual objects, sometimes kind of confusing (like 'A bush, a bush, and a tree').

When it comes to interactivity, the game is mostly fair, but at least one point in the walkthrough asks you to interact with an object that is not visible and doesn't show up in the description of other objects (specifically the (Spoiler - click to show)branch in the mossy log area).

Emotionally, I liked the surreal theme and thought it was cool. The little clues were nice. The other issues made it harder to stay invested but I like the concept.

There's not a ton of replayability, but overall I wasn't sad I played.

This seems exactly like the kind of game that would be made by a talented and energetic individual who had never played a text adventure made in the last three decades if they woke up one day and said "I'm going to make the coolest text adventure on earth" but didn't have many people test it.

It's a python game with a bunch of actually really good ascii art. It has a maze, randomized combat, some tricky puzzles, art that sometimes changes according to your actions. Seems like everything a text adventure would need.

Except it has very few of the quality-of-life expectations most parser games have, and many of the solutions are poorly hinted.

For instance, on the very first screen, you are around some trees. Commands like N, NORTH, I, INVENTORY, X ME, LOOK ME don't work at all, but that's okay, this is a custom parser so it has no need to follow conventions from other games. Rereading the help text shows that STATUS gives inventory (although I didn't notice this till later). X TREE and EXAMINE TREE don't work, but LOOK TREE does. It turns out you're supposed to (Spoiler - click to show)CLIMB TREE. Once you make it to the next screen, it's not a big jump to (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK PLANE, but now what? After several fruitless minutes, I turn to the guide to discover I should (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK IN POCKET. But why? If the author had had several people try this game out, they would have found quickly that few people would guess this. You can access a HINT that generally helps you, but most people seem to like games to be solvable without HINTS, using them only when stuck.

The randomized maze combat was hard. I was determined to finish this game, although I kept randomly dying (and there is no UNDO and typing the wrong command after dying exits out of the game entirely, and the command for loading a game during the game is different than the command for loading the game after dying and typing the wrong one will also exit the game as will hitting enter just one too many time). Combat is just pressing enter over and over after picking your weapon, and looking at the code the strongest-looking weapons are incredibly weak while the weakest-sounding weapon is the strongest. There are several insta-deaths in the labyrinth as well.

Overall, it looks like it was magnificently fun to code and make the art, but it doesn't seem like a game that was created with a lot of player-side input, and I ended up frustrated. My 1-star rating is not indicative of the effort put into the game or the total amount of fun that can be derived from it, but merely results from the fact that my usual grading rubric (polish, descriptiveness, interactivity, emotional impact, and replayability) evolved from a different style of text adventure than this one.

(Note: for a much more positive review by a different reviewer, see this link: https://intfiction.org/t/b-j-bests-ifcomp-2022-reviews/57995/3?u=mathbrush)

This game is self-described as more an interactive novel than a game, and that's fairly accurate. Gameplay consists of clicking different days on a calendar and reading vignettes that happen that day. Multimedia images and animations are displayed on different days, and often the text will rearrange and morph, especially when revisiting days.

The storyline is purposely obtuse, slowly revealing more of itself, with some major shifts. I don't know if even now I'd be able to paint the broad strokes out; (major spoilers for what I think happened) (Spoiler - click to show)I feel like at the beginning some of his family turned to zombies and some didn't, so he left the ones who were still alive and tried to die? Then wandered around, found the cat, met some people, then came back to his living family? Also maybe lost an eyeball as a kid before the change?

This is a grim and unhappy world. This game contains descriptions of violent, painful and gory deaths for animals, lots of zombie-related human gore, disrespect for courses, strong profanity, and suicide references, with multiple gory images. It also features a cat companion for whom things don't always go so well, as well as several positive interactions with that cat.

Overall, the craft in this game is remarkable, and the storytelling is vivid and descriptive. The calendar was a clever innovation, and though I didn't feel a strong sense of agency, I did the best I could by reading dates out of order. The biggest drawback to me personally is the grim and unhappy nature of the game, which is a matter of personal taste.

The author of this game entered the first two-player IFComp game a year ago (The Last Night of Alexisgrad) which inspired at least one other multiplayer IF game (Ma Tiger's Terrible Trip) by another author.

Those games featured a few pages or so of text interspersed by choices which were then communicated to the 'other player' via passing of codes (in the first game) or a server (in the second game mentioned).

This game is different in several ways. In the first place, it is a substantial chunk of text. Each of the two stories takes well over an hour to read through. There are only a few choices to make that get transmitted; the bulk are not.

I'll spoiler much of the rest of the discussion below to various levels of detail. Before that, I'd say that this game has a lot of disturbing content of various sorts: (Spoiler - click to show)occasional extreme profanity, slurs spoken by people presented as villains, torture, execution, and affairs. Overall, it had a gritty/depressing vibe to me.

I'm putting the story descriptions in spoilers, even though they're mostly spoiler-free, because knowledge of one story can be seen as a major spoiler for the other. Reading just one should be fine, with Caroline's suggested as first story.

Short description of Caroline's story:
(Spoiler - click to show)This is a well-written story of a woman balanced between duty and excitement. A young housewife of an arrogant politician is offered a job showing around a handsome and exciting foreign diplomat. Said diplomat has an entourage that keeps him safe and occasionally asks Caroline to carry out an essentially pointless task that seems to be about agency.

Short description of Leon's story:
(Spoiler - click to show)Leon is a military soldier specializing in interrogation. His job is to interrogate suspected war criminals and sentence them to death, torture, release, or return to their cell. However, he can only provide suggestions, which are then sent out to an ordinary civilian who then decides whether to follow the suggestions or not, allowing some plausible deniability.

Bigger spoilers for overall combination:
(Spoiler - click to show)Playing Leon's game was very surreal, at the beginning, as he was none of the characters in the first story and he seemed so disconnected. I was shocked to find that the mechanism of communication between them wasn't the words or choices of the first story but simply the trivial color choices (this would have been more apparent had I played multiplayer first).

It seems clear then that this is the connection to the philosophical experiment in the title of the game, 'The Chinese Room'. In this thought experiment, a person is placed in a room and receives instructions with no understanding of what they are, processes them according to prescribed rules, and then outputs another message which they don't understand. Theoretically, with sophisticated enough rules, the output could seem truly intelligent, the work of a genius (such as chess moves or even conversation), but the person running the room actually has no clue what is going on.

So in this game, you make many many choices that are deeply meaningful and clearly informed by knowledge, but your communication between players is limited to laughably ineffectual systems. An especially amusing/sad point is when the Leon player, after having innocents murdered or hardened criminals released by the opposing player, can send feedback on their performance; however, this feedback only shows up as the color of a handkerchief in a pocket in an incidental sentence I hadn't even noticed in single player mode.

Overall, the two stories together are much stronger than either individually. In a very specific way, this game is a comment on multiplayer systems and communication itself, and is an interesting experiment.

This is a wordplay game by Andrew Schultz, the third in a series involving double rhymes (like the name of the game itself).

I found it more appealing than the other two. Like the other games, this is a surreal setting, with names and locations picked more for their rhyme possibilities than anything else. But somehow it felt more coherent than the others. Also, the map is more manageable in this game.

Gameplay mostly consists of taking locations or items and typing two words that rhyme with two words in the location or item. There is a help system that is carefully explained, except for its main feature consisting of two dials. I got about halfway through before I realized that it (Spoiler - click to show)was telling you how many letters to add or subtract to your first and last words, although I'm still not sure what the last two decimal places mean.

I had to go to the hints increasingly more as time went on, and there was one word that I honestly had no clue ever existed (heavy spoiler for later game) (Spoiler - click to show)FLAIN.

The main boss had what felt like consistent character development, and the storyline felt taut and trimmed of fat. Overall, I found this to be above average for a wordplay game.

I remember playing the Frenetic Five games a few years ago. They date back a few decades, and were a funny take on superheroes with characters that had pretty under-powered powers, always taking on villains with similarly silly ideas.

I never beat any of those games without hints, but I appreciated the vibes and felt they were internally consistent.

Although I've forgotten a lot about those games, I was happy to see a sequel/prequel released. This is a pretty fun game about trying to open up a vault.

It's a game that requires leaps of intuition for almost every step, which is a style that is both frustrating and rewarding. Given enough time, I probably would have wanted to play this off and on for a week or more, but instead I played an hour or so before using some hints that Dan Fabulich wrote on Intfiction.

I think the author succeeded in their goal, if their goal was to please fans of the former games and create a difficult one-room game centered on exploration and experimentation. I do like easier games myself, or ones centered on learning complex systems with easy individual parts, but I appreciate the vision of this game and hope the author keeps their intention to make more.

When this first came out in Parsercomp, I heard people talking about bugs, but the author seems to have patched them.

To be up front, this is probably the VtM Choicescript game I’d be least likely to recommend to the general public.

This game is very high quality, but it doesn’t focus on the mechanical aspects of the VtM nearly as much as the others. For me, and I expect many people, the draw of these games is to try out the systems.

Furthermore, choicescript games in general are often easiest to enjoy when the effects of your choices are clear and obvious. This game has a lot of branching text, but much of the variation is in the emotional aspects of your character’s thoughts rather than major events (compared to similar games; there is still major event branching in this game, just not as much). Also, there’s some more strong profanity on this game than I prefer.

With those caveats aside, this is an excellent psychological introspection game. More than the other vampire games, this dives into the inner mind of a vampire. I think the game was describing itself in this quote (only available in certain paths):

“Alex had a knack for putting together campaigns that would test your morality more than your STR and DEX, and they would frictionlessly lead you to dilemmas that forced your group to ask: So, who are we? What do we stand for? What do we play for?”

Another, later quote takes a rare wink in the fourth wall:

“ For a moment, the idea that you might be a made-up character yourself takes root in your mind and seduces you with the possibility. What would it be like to be a fictional character—just another collection of ink and paper in a book with its own backstory and motivations? You're full of so much mundane detail that when the plot needs you to do something, they can pull you out and have you do it without any messy internal conflicts dragging you down—that's the fantasy, anyway.”

The game is about you as a vampire who was abandoned by your vampire-sire, and later taken in by a man named Markos. You live in Athens, which is gripped by a conflict between those who want vampires to continue the Masquerade, hiding from humanity, while others, radicals, want to tear it down and reveal all.

This author is a previous Nebula nomineee, and it shows. The story is tight and excellent. However, it is somewhat dark and can be depressing; failure at the end is not only possible but likely.

Some have described the game as rushed, and I think that’s because of the focus on the inner mind. The typical events of a game, like fights, betrayals, etc. are given less focus while your own doubts and hopes are played out over a longer time.

I had thought of giving this 4 stars, but I honestly enjoyed the storyline quite a bit, especially some parts about sunrises.

This is an Exceptional Story, a part of Fallen London that is available to subscribers or purchasable separately at a higher price.

In this story, you are robbed by two unusual thieves: a pair of sisters of advanced age. You are quickly drawn into their shenanigans, and plot a heist with them.

The main focus of this story is the relationship between the two sisters, and their individual meditations on mortality and age, as well as the loss of ones dear to them.

The heist itself, and your group, is relatively straightforward, leaving more focus to go into immortality. The groups you encounter here are the urchins and the Gracious Widow, with this story giving some chunks of info regarding her that are otherwise difficult to obtain. I'd primarily recommend this story to people interested in the Gracious Widow specifically, or who have considered what it would be like to get a new lease on life in their old age.

This is an Exceptional Story, an additional piece of content for Fallen London that is available to subscribers, or for purchase for an additional amount.

This story centers around a revolutionary (called the Growling Radical) who was essentially exiled from London for a time. He wants to come back and put on a performance that will shock the powers-that-be.

And that's all that really happens. There aren't too many twists in this story; he asks you to help his song, he puts on the performance, and you can influence a bit how things go.

In a recent survey, out of the 100 stories that require money, this story ranked 90th, one of the least popular. But the author has also written a story in 6th place, The Brass Grail, so it seems less like a skill issue and more like just an idea that didn't work out as well as hoped.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, an extra piece of content that subscribers receive and which can also be purchased separately for additional costs.

In this story, you, a detective (as most characters in Fallen London become early on), are asked to track down a missing Dachshund. Your client is a newspaper reporter that covers the Bazaar (a Bazaarine Correspondent).

But soon you discover that you are entangled in a web of espionage. A lot of the story revolves around decrypting messages with seeds you find (this decryption is carried out automatically, rather than solving a cryptogram by hand). You find several people out to get you, and you soon get embroiled into a massive conspiracy with supernatural terrorism and several Masters.

I'm a fan of mysteries, and this game does a great job of setting up several curious and mysterious things that later get pulled back in satisfyingly and surprisingly by the story; kind of like Checkhov's machine gun instead of Chekhov's gun.

Descriptions are vivid, especially of people. The masters are painted vividly, the clay men are humorous, the new assailants and missing people are unusual and diverse, and the locations are creative (especially the sugar factory).

I think one thing that I enjoy about this story (and Chandler's others) is that the player is at the center. Many of the other stories, including recent ones, have you at the edges of some great conflict, where you observe for a while and then make some monumental choice at the end. It's like you're in someone else's novel, but you play the side character who gives good advice at the end and changes the tide.

But in this and other Groover stories, you yourself are the main story. You are the problem for other people, the main driving force of the plot, the center around which other things resolve. Your actions feel weighty. Some other stories by other authors do this, too, like the Icaran Cup or Flint.

Overall, I enjoyed this one.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London. Exceptional stories are chunks of additional content for subscribers which can also be purchased separately.

This story takes a lot of strange terms, some of them very dark. One warning for a kind of content that might trouble a lot of people (even people who usually don't need warnings): (Spoiler - click to show)possible animal abuse. More specifically: (Spoiler - click to show)you can voluntarily choose to murder a sentient elephant and watch it die and get harvested for ivory. This is only a small side part of the story and not the main thrust.

In this story, there is a mysterious band of thieves that seems to be making enormous amounts of money, but without any apparent victims. Your job is to figure out who their victims are.

This ends up being tied to some of the deeper lore of Fallen London, specifically (names of factions it ties into): (Spoiler - click to show)Parabola, the chessboard, and the Red Handed Queen. It has some significant choices that gave me pause, and features a lot of duality, which is a favorite topic of mine to play in IF.

Overall, I would give this 4 stars, except it features a couple of concepts I personally enjoy quite a bit.

This is an Exceptional Story from Fallen London, a piece of additional content for subscribers that can also be purchased separately.

In this story, a group of the Tomb Colonists (older people who have pushed Fallen London's immortality too far) desire to experience true death through the ancient Totentanz, a mystical dance that releases the dead into a dream world.

The dance is connected with the Third City, a predecessor to Fallen London from pre-Columbian America that ended in a horrible tragedy. It's also connected to moonlight, which in Fallen London shows things how they would be, not how they are.

Most of the story revolves around assembling the various parts of the dance. This includes visiting a mad scientist, hunting down a mysterious woman all across London, and attending a high stakes auction.

The concepts are interesting, but some of the interactions feel a little like filler. Definitely a good one for fans of the tomb colonists, though, or Mr Wines.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, a kind of additional content that subscribers get.

This story features a prison with three inmates. The prison, a fixture in many Fallen London stories, is a giant stalagmite that has been hollowed out. There is an infestation of sorts in a higher level, so prisoners are getting moved lower down where there is, unfortunately, less room.

So you are sent in undercover to determine who should be released. The characters are a notorious pirate captain who may actually be a decoy, a retired spy, and a sentient tiger (a not uncommon kind of character in Fallen London).

The writing is excellent overall, but the storyline, I feel, tries to be too many things at once. It's a character study, it's a mystery, it's survival horror, it's political drama, it's romance, and I feel that there's just not enough room in the story for all these threads to be pulled together, especially since the interactivity means that some plotlines won't be followed up on.

This is a Fallen London exceptional story, a chunk of additional story-focused content available to subscribers (or on its own, for a heftier sum).

This story focuses on a new brand of makeup being sold door-to-door in an MLM format, with people recruiting others and getting bonuses for it. The makeup is based on the Neathbow, colors in Fallen London that have magical effects (like forgetfulness, remembrance, dreams, emptiness, etc.).

The collective is trying to disrupt Victorian London society by giving greater power to the lower classes. The establishment is not happy about this.

You become one of the recruits, but you become embroiled in a dispute from the far past. Features cats, royalty, Egypt, a striking main NPC, and the other side of mirrors.

This is an excellent character piece, but that is its only distinguishing quality, unless you are especially interested in social reform.

This is an Exceptional Story, a bonus piece of content for subscribers which can also be purchased by itself at a premium.

This story centers on spiders. There are a variety of spiders in Fallen London, from the sorrow-spiders that hatch in eyeballs to their larger cousins like spider councils or senates, huge beings formed from conglomerates of smaller ones.

This features the spiders of Vesture, a kingdom on the Elder Continent. Fallen London takes place in a giant cavern called the Neath, which has a variety of locales (such as Hell). The Elder Continent often seems to intentionally evoke North Africa as well as Eden, and is connected with immortality and life.

Vesture is a kingdom made of an alliance between spiders and humans. This story examines that connection, entangling you in a royal family's dispute about how to handle the death of a great, vast spider and the fallout that will bring. Family loyalty and tradition vs progress are the main themes.

I enjoyed the story, but felt a little constrained. There are some very meaningful choices (including a permanent companion and very different endings), but I didn't feel like I really shaped the story, mostly witnessing someone else's story and stepping in at the last moment. I prefer the exceptional stories where you take a more prominent role, even if it's all still scripted.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, a kind of content that comes out once a month to people with a subscription, or can be purchased later for a significantly heavier cost.

This story has a quite charming premise. The city of Fallen London is ruled by Masters, hooded, alien figures that each have a different 'domain'. Much of the progress in Fallen London's main storylines centers on the Masters and how much you know about them, so info on them is generally considered rare and precious.

This story focuses on Mr Stones, whose domain is all things beautiful, especially diamonds.

A smuggler needs help with a diamond and Mr Stones. But instead of robbing him of a diamond, he wants you to 'plant' a diamond from the surface. Why? Because (Spoiler - click to show)it's a cursed diamond, one that brought empires to downfall. Specifically, it's the Hope Diamond. Things go wrong, though, and you end up trapped with the smuggler, a furious Mr Stones, and a clay golem-turned-Quaker, kind of like a bottle episode of a sitcom.

You can end up learning quite a bit about Mr Stones himself, probably the biggest backstory reveal we've ever had on him and just about the deepest possible level of lore.

Mechanically, there were options to try to save certain people and whether to trust or betray. It was generally satisfying, and I think this one is worth playing, but overall it didn't exceptionally stick out. This may be due to the overall high quality recently.

This is really a very inspiring game, but I haven't been able to complete it yet due to some weird issues.

You are sent back in time to your grandmother's life, who was Cinderella but able to make potions. You explore a large city, discovering various potion recipes and hidden secrets and memories while making money to buy things for the ball.

The puzzles are engaging. I used a lot of hints, but only because the game is so large; it's generally fair as long as you examine everything.

There are a couple of weird bugs though which the author is aware of but are really hard to fix. These bugs include items sometimes stopping working, making progress impossible. By restarting several times, I've managed to get through each individual stopping point, but never all at once.

This game is, I believe, written in a custom parser that the author has used in other games. It works well here, with elegant javascript integration.

You play as an adventurer/junior magician gathering spell ingredients for you boss. The spell ingredients are all food items.

The map is laid out visually, making navigation simple. Areas vary in complexity from mostly-empty to containing multi-level structures with puzzles in each level.

The primary puzzle-solving technique is inspired by The Wand by Arthur DiBianca. You say a magic spell in your grimoire, and point your wand at something for that spell to take effect. The spell language follows patterns that you have to discover.

I haven't completely finished the game, finding only a little more than half of the ingredients on my own and 4 more with hints, but the game lets you stop at any point, and I've gotten up to an E for Exceeds Expectations.

The puzzles are rich and interesting and systematic, and vary from trivial to complex. I didn't connect on an emotional level, more just skimming the surface, but that's more due to personal taste. Overall, well-done and enjoyable.

This is a game that's essentially a demo for a longer visual novel. It takes pieces of stories of that game and mixes them into one.

This game has quite a lot of visuals, with the snow animations and wintery background being especially gorgeous, and the overall portraits being fairly high quality.

You play as a bartender who gains a mysterious ability: when someone talks to you, you gain the ability to 'replay' their story and make different choices, which can have an effect in the real world afterwards.

These stories involve dark and frightening creatures in the woods, which have become more dangerous ever since the sun disappeared.

Overall, the dark vibe here is good, the stories are detailed, there's more interactivity than most VN-type games. I did have trouble getting a feel for the 'flow' of the game, as there wasn't so much an overarching story arc with rise and fall of action. Since the full game will have an entirely different storyline, that problem may fix itself.

Bitter Karella has been making games for many years now, but I think this is the best one I've played so far, for my tastes.

You play as a cowgirl whose beloved horse has been stolen by a lying, murderous judge, and you have to get it back.

It's set in a wide town with quite a few locations, and even more that get unlocked over time. I say the humor is 'grotesque', but by that I mean that a lot of solutions are amusingly gross.

The characters are vivid and based on tropes and stereotypes, like a snake-oil salesman, a crazy miner/inventor, a brothel owner, etc. A few of them lean heavily into racial and cultural tropes, like an opium-smoking asian man named Lucky Strike or a hispanic saloon owner named La Muerte with a face painted like a sugar skull. I'm not really fond of relying on racial stereotypes, but all those characters are portrayed in a positive light as independent business people respected in their community.

The puzzles were pretty hard, and I had to get help on a couple, especially on finding a bezoar. I played the game over about a week on and off. Most puzzles are 'find an item in one area and use it in a creative way in another'. A lot of the humor is in finding out what item actually solves to problem.

The implementation of the game is a big improvement over all past Karella games, but still has a couple of rough edges here and there. I had trouble finding the right words to use the dynamite, or to use a rope. Fortunately, the game itself will also include the right wording to use as a hint, and has other features designed to help with implementation.

We played part of this in the Seattle IF Meetup, where it seemed well-received, and I finished it on my own later.

This is a very large Twine game. I think of all structures Sam Kabo Ashwell mentioned in his 'Standard patterns in choice-based games', it most resembles the sorting hat, as there are ten or so different paths that, once you pick, is generally linear to an ending.

You play as a person whose identity is stolen, leaving you as a gaping hole in an alternate world.

That world is one where anything can happen. A shop that has a closet can take you to another world, and so can biting a sucker.

Each path allows you the choice to become a 'man', like the Drake Man or the Darin' Man, giving you an awesome and alternate life.

I found the prose to be overall well done, and there were interesting ideas. But after 3 or so paths, I began to feel like there were, if it's even possible, too many good ideas!

Brandon Sanderson has said before that good magic systems are more interesting the more restrictions they have. This isn't a high fantasy novel about complex magic, but I think something similar applies here: if anything is possible, it's almost the same as if nothing is possible. After a while, it all kind of blended together.

I opened up the game in Twinery to see how much I missed, and realized that after an hour or so I had only seen about 20-30% of the game. I used the code to read the 'ultimate' ending, which I thought was roughly as fulfilling as the other endings, but had some cool descriptions of things.

Taste is subjective, but for me personally, I think I would have enjoyed it more if there were more structure in terms of themes or some other kind of rhythm to the game. Outside of that, the game is coded in a smooth and complex fashion and the writing is vivid and descriptive.

This author has a history of making highly-polished twine games with complex and robust systems.

This game is no exception. You play as a recently-reanimated skeleton in pieces, and have the capability of moving each piece independently.

The map is constrained at first but then slowly opens up in manageable pieces.

The complexity is quite high; you can play as your self, detach your parts and play as them, and command another character as well. There is an inventory which allows you to both use items on things in the room and to combine items together.

The story is light comedic fantasy with dramatic elements (maybe Polonius would call it tragical-comical-fantastical-dramatic). The light-heartedness is connected to gameplay as well, which lets you face certain scenes over and over if needed to give you time to think of a solution.

The complex nature of the inventory and pc-changing system proved pretty hard for me. A couple of times, I had the right idea for the solution, but didn't know how to implement it. As an example (major spoilers for kitchen puzzle), I knew that (Spoiler - click to show)the peppers were bad for the dog, so I tried to pick up my arm and the peppers and combine them to rub them on it. Then I tried dropping the arm while holding the peppers. I tried talking to the cook, but didn't realize I could switch characters while talking, and there is a later similar puzzle which doesn't allow character switching during a short scripted scene. These kinds of issues with playing are normal for me with parser games, but Twine games rarely reach such a level of complexity. Overall, I found it challenging in a good way, and can heartily recommend it (and need to remember to nominate it for some XYZZY awards next year).

This is a long Twine game about a young woman who's had a very difficult life finding her younger brother being sucked into a mysterious portal by a dark creature.

Following her brother, she enters a mysterious world filled with destruction and many malevolent entities. Her brother's life is at stake, and there's not much time left.

As the author puts it, this is a narrative-focused game and eschews large-scale branching, but manages to find numerous ways to test the player.

Puzzles come in two varieties: riddles, which are either type-in or choice-based from a huge list of options; and using a color-based system where some colors in the game always signify the same thing (kind of like (Spoiler - click to show)circles in Sorcery 2).

Overall, the writing is earnest and deals with a lot of childhood trauma. Emotions are plainly spelled out, and overall it reminds me a bit of Steven Universe (crying breakfast friends) or She-ra in terms of the emotional notes it reaches for. The emotions didn't land quite as effectively for me as in those two examples, though.

There were some unusual word choices in the game that were jarring, like using the phrase 'he was made into a room' instead of 'he went into a room'. It could be cleaned up a little bit grammar-wise; I would give it 4 stars if that happened.

Overall, I felt like it was a worthwhile investment of time, and I was glad to play it. I've enjoyed the author's other games and hope that they continue the trend of releasing fun and meaningful games.

This is the third game by this duo, the other two in the past having been very long, surreal games, one of which reflected a psychotic break and really felt like what such a thing would be to experience.

This game starts with the first author confessing that he/she (both pronouns are used) made sexual advances to their trans step son whom they've lived with for 9 years, and that it has ruined the partnership of the two authors, after most of this game had been written, and that the author is trying to make up for it.

Much of this game isn't real, so it's hard to know if this is, but it certainly seems so, which is sobering and disturbing.

The rest of the game focuses mostly on a few recurring themes:
-The idea of very large cardinal sets and non-principal ultrafilters on them. This is an area of math that is extremely abstract, especially since (as mentioned by the author) most of these things are non-constructible and cannot be proven to exist in any meaningful way under normal mathematical assumptions.
-The author's life at the Lothlorien coop in Berkeley, which still exists and houses people today.
-The idea of using psychic energy to communicate with Hong Kong singer Deng Ziqi telepathically.
-The author's relationship with Staci (who I believe is also Maev?)

The game is laid out on a six-dimensional hypercube, corresponding to 6 binary digits, corresponding to the 6 cardinal directions N,E,S,W,U, and D. Unlike most games and real life, N and S are not opposites and have no relation to each other. Instead, going North cancels itself out, so going N twice will bring you back to where you started.

Not all 64 options are filled; about 20 or so are empty 'unfinished' rooms. One room had its connections backwards (so that going U and D changed the N and S bits), which may or may not be intentional. The room names are based on the binary numbers.

In the rooms are found items, one at a time or zero. There are lots of scenery objects described in the text but none are implemented.

I received around 432 points (I think) out of 530 or so. There is no overarching goal outside of 'binding' some items together in a chain, which just gives more points. One room contains a complete walkthrough for the bindings.

Overall, as a game it continues the glimpse into a surreal world offered by the previous games, but the confession at the beginning overshadows everything else and renders it all heartbreaking.

I had some trepidation approaching this game, as, based on the last Lady Thalia game, I assumed it would be:
-long,
-complex,
-requiring a great deal of thought,
-engaging,

and thus require some special time set aside. And I was right! If anything, this game exceeds the last one in all those categories.

You play two different women this time: one, the infamous lady thief Lady Thalia; the other, a policewoman named Margaret Williams, somewhat stodgy but dependable. Together, you are teaming up to stop a rival art thief who is obsessed with royal privilege and the trappings of aristocracy.

Play alternates between playing as Margaret, who investigates and prepares, and Lady Thalia, who follows up on Margaret's leads. There's a point system (which is humorously lampshaded in-game), and sub-systems including a relationship tracker between the two leads.

There are a variety of puzzles, with the most consistent one being a conversational system where you can choose between being flattering, direct, and leading someone one; most conversations give you 3 chances to find the 'right one', with a bonus if you get all 3 right.

The other puzzles for the most part involve retaining information from earlier and using contextual clues. There is a complex save system which allows for easy restoration (I did this quite a bit), but some choices have significant delays, so a perfect playthrough is quite difficult.

The characters are bold and well-written, and I'd consider this among the best crime/heist Twine games.