Brave Bear is a child’s toy with a solemn duty to keep its owner safe. I liked the concept, I enjoyed playing with toys, and I liked the goal of bringing friends together to protect someone that they cared about. I just wish that some of the clues were easier to understand.
As a toy, the bear has a simple view of the world. As people who quote Steve Jobs will tell you, “simple” is difficult to implement. Brave Bear’s narrative voice describes an ordinary family home from a new perspective that felt unnecessarily limiting and confusing in a few places.
Some of this entry’s other design choices were unexpected — two toys have abilities that are hinted at but never used in the game, and a few of the locations have exhaustive lists of exits that are never used. They might have been red herrings, but that seems out of place in a story where the puzzles are so simple.
The experience reminded me of Samurai Lapin, which was an animated flash movie on the internet from (checks notes) more than 20 years ago.
…now I just feel old.
This choice-based adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a niche piece — almost a Medieval Boy Scout Simulator — and I love it. To quote one of the story’s options: “I’m all in on this. Let’s do it.”
The original story of Sir Gawain makes no goddamn sense. This work, written with choicescript, offers decisions that put Gawain’s thinking in a more relatable context.
The reader is expected to uphold the virtues of a knight, remaining pious, courteous, magnanimous, and chaste throughout the entire journey while also embodying the spirit of fellowship.
The expectations make Gawain’s predicament more understandable: How can good manners keep you safe from an immortal giant?
I appreciated how much extra writing was necessary to humanize Gawain’s adventure. And the story notes many of the reader’s choices, referencing them in future passages.
However, King Arthur's Christmas Feast doesn’t have a lot of branches, which means that people who stray from the correct path might find it less entertaining. I had fun pretending to be a rule-abiding poindexter, but I can see how that might not appeal to everyone.
The thing about The Corsham Witch Trial is that it contains no actual witches — and that’s fine, there weren’t any at the Salem Witch Trials, either. However, the blurb’s mention of a “worryingly urgent and irritatingly cryptic” request gets a bit confusing alongside other interactive fiction stories of magic and supernatural horror.
This work is a cleverly written courtroom drama. The author describes it as “a transparent attempt to enliven a disjointed and gimmick-laden manuscript with a few distracting interactive elements,” but I really enjoyed how its story was framed. Court transcripts and other documents are presented as .PDF files, and a workplace colleague asks questions about the evidence after it has been reviewed.
Every step of the Corsham Witch Trial works very hard to maintain an atmosphere of uncertainty. When the player analyzes the evidence to support a specific interpretation, their colleague explains how it can also support a different outcome.
Unfortunately, after a skillful buildup of tension and ambivalence, the entire exercise proves to be futile: It doesn’t really matter what the player thinks. The case is closed, the truth is discovered, and newspapers report the results.
After such rigorously enforced neutrality, I was expecting a twist that could suggest alternative sequences of events. Instead, I got moralizing about doing the right thing even when it’s pointless.
The Corsham Witch Trial is well-executed fiction, but doesn't end up being very interactive.
The conflict at the heart of this entry is gripping: You are the only person on board the International Space Station, and you must determine which of the two newest arrivals is human. Will you make the correct decision and save the human race, or will you be tricked by robotic agents of destruction?
It’s a delightfully tense sequence, but the problem is that you have to wade through a few thousand words of apocalypse fan fiction — my least favorite variety of fan fiction — before you get there.
I would have preferred to see fewer passages concluding with a single link. This author is clearly capable of creating meaningful story branches, but most of the time, they didn't.
In Twine, the story diagram looks like an enormous vertical column.
Many of the scenes in The TURING Test should be familiar for people who enjoyed With Folded Hands, Colossus: The Forbin Project, the Terminator franchise, and even The Mitchells vs. The Machines. If there was a larger message about intelligence, morality, or the ethics of interacting with sentient beings, I missed it.
Ultimately, your choice to determine who can access the space station will decide whether the story is disaster fiction or apocalypse fiction. It turns out that they’re separate genres.
Beneath Fenwick is the Lovecraft-adjacent story of a remote New England town full of sinister, malformed humans lurking just out of sight. The author's goal was to create an experience that is “primarily choice-based but plays like a parser game.”
On the one hand, I didn’t encounter the branching storylines that are seen in a choice-based game. There is only one “correct” sequence of links that brings an audience through to the end of the story. Readers are free to explore detours on their journey, and they're also encouraged to save often, because the wrong links will end things early.
On the other hand, I didn’t receive the clues that a parser might provide when players struggle with specific puzzles. Beneath Fenwick has a “combine” command that feels a bit vague — sometimes it involves using one object on another, and at other times it merges objects together, but the error message is always “That combination does not work!”
I respect the amount of effort that went into implementing and polishing Beneath Fenwick. It’s a smooth experience! I didn’t encounter any broken links or inescapable dead ends, and things functioned consistently.
My main issue was that the interface overshadowed the story, encouraging me to ignore the text and hunt for links. This problem has been discussed in Interactive Fiction communities before.
The writing in Beneath Fenwick is consistent, and fans of this genre might enjoy themselves. I recommend experiencing it for yourself to draw your own conclusions.
I enjoyed the writing in Kidney Kwest. It has the unavoidable “after-school special” tone that you would expect from the subject matter involved, but there’s a clear challenge with some basic puzzles and multiple outcomes. I was also entertained by the Kidney Fairy's sense of humor.
I don’t normally quote the bible, but Kidney Kwest makes me think of the one about trying to serve two masters. This work is trying to do a bit more than that when you consider that it’s:
-reinforcing key messages about taking medications and avoiding specific foods,
-giving people something to do during their weekly dialysis treatments,
-engaging an audience that is 8–18 years old,
-showcasing the “Perplexity” Natural Language Prototype that was designed by Eric Zinda, and
-being judged in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.
Clearly, some tradeoffs have been made.
The overall experience reminded me of AI dungeon — specifically, the part where I endured a noticeable lag between submitting a command and receiving a report from that command. This added extra stress to my personal Kidney Kwest, because a substantial part of the gameplay involves finding food and taking medication before bad things happen.
(I knew that the delay in sending and receiving responses wouldn’t really affect my character’s health, but it was rough having to wait through a sequence of commands before I could take care of immediate needs. And then it was only a matter of time before hunger became an issue again.)
I’d call this entry a functional proof of concept, but the real question is how Kidney Kwest is received by its target audience. If it encourages people to lead healthier lives, then my opinions (and its final score in IFcomp) are irrelevant.
This fantasy adventure is light on details -- the protagonist's brother feels like less of a family member and more of a placeholder to provide motivation for the journey.
I did appreciate the number of choices that Enveloping Darkness offers. The passages are short, and the reader is presented with something to do at the end of each one.
However, it would have been helpful if choices hinted at possible outcomes. I got killed early while trying to rescue an innocent victim, and at one point I spent two inexplicable months in a boat on the lake. It was a complete surprise when the story ended and I was praised for saving the realm.
Enveloping Darkness also includes several fantasy creatures that don’t feel connected to the narrative. Like the orcs used as generic outsiders: some are helpful, some are violent, and some are infested with parasitic brain worms. You could replace them with Canadians, and the narrative would be completely unchanged.
Overall, it could have used some developmental edits.
The blurb for this title encapsulates its entire story: the player is at a retro gaming convention in Las Vegas. Although the convention lasts for 2 “days,” you have as much time as you want to explore everything.
The author has pulled off some feats of programming that are far beyond my own Twine capabilities. You can play 3 different games at the convention and gamble on 4 different activities in the casino. Each of the 7 options presents a mini-game in its own right, including one that is a functional parser experience.
But just because you can do something, that doesn't mean doing it is a good idea.
RetroCon 2021 works as a proof of concept, but I would have enjoyed a narrative arc that offered more than arriving at a location and leaving when I got bored.
(To be fair, engaging narratives are difficult to implement! Especially when you’re making a game about playing other games. It took a lot of work to build RetroCon2021, and that deserves to be recognized.)
I really enjoyed the way that this combined strong writing with strong coding. You might think that you want to pick things up, move to different locations, or interact with a bigger world through the parser, but the story provides elegant distractions to explain why you won’t be doing any of those things.
Grandma Bethlinda's Remarkable Egg discarded a lot of familiar parser actions in favor of custom commands. There’s supposed to be a manual that explains how everything works, but… you find out for yourself in short order. Meanwhile, new commands introduce persistent changes into the environment that interact with each other in unexpected ways.
Other entries have fallen flat when authors focus on technical challenges for themselves instead of design choices that support a better story for the players, but Grandma Bethlinda's Remarkable Egg seamlessly integrates its story and its mechanics with playful explanations.
It was a lot of fun.
This might be the depressing story of a person who gives up in the face of an unstoppable disaster. It could also be an encouraging connection between two people at the end of the world. (And it might have been an attempt to create a meta-narrative about persistence in the face of adversity? I thought there was no way to avoid bleak destruction, but I kept trying options until I found something positive.)
Chase the Sun puts a lot of effort into establishing a specific atmosphere with its early passages:
“Pennsylvania is known for its winding, aimless back roads like it was known for its abandoned coal mines and its flirtatious relationship with religion. That is to say, only the locals know the grimy, dirty truths.”
It says exactly where you are and how the protagonist feels about it, presenting a consistent, richly described world that holds up across several readings. I appreciated how statements that seemed odd or out of place in the early passages were explained elsewhere in the story.
On the other hand, it would have been helpful if the story mechanics had received a similar level of attention. This work was created in Texture, and it asks readers to drag words from the bottom of a passage to connect them with highlighted points in the text above.
In theory, Texture enables new types of interactivity. In practice, a lot of that potential went unused in Chase the Sun.
From a game design standpoint, there’s almost no difference between passages that end with “click to continue” and passages that end with a single verb to be moved onto a single highlighted noun. Chase the Sun had both types of passages and some other design compromises that felt more like awkward attempts to deliver additional backstory and less like a valid method of reader participation.
My overall impression was that stronger editorial choices or conscious design changes could have improved this story’s focus — there were a few satisfying combinations of words that moved the story forward, but it made the other sections feel under-developed.
It’s a solid work of fiction that would benefit from some improvements to the user experience.