Calliope

This is a relatively short game. You play a programmer in an apartment who is trying to get IFComp inspiration.

As you continually attempt to write your game, you begin to get trippy dreams...or are they dreams?

The game is over relatively quickly, but its enjoyable while it lasts. Has a couple of puzzles.

A neat little meta-fictional game about the trials and tribulations of IF writer's block, featuring a guest appearance from the muse of epic poetry (hence the tortured pun in my review title). It's nicely packaged for a short game, and relatively well-paced, but suffers from a crucial guess-the-verb problem at the last moment.

(Spoiler - click to show)I tried 'writing' the game, I tried 'typing' the game, I even tried 'playing' the game, but didn't think to 'make' it or 'put' it until I'd banged my head against the wall too many times. A fault of my own imagination, perhaps, but a more modern version should certainly have circumvented this difficulty.