Gigantomania

Gigantomania is a fascinating piece written by an inexperienced but inventive IF designer. The 5.24 average rating it got in the IF Competition is completely undeserved: this game is worth playing and also worth thinking about. I cannot understand why anyone would give it a 4 or lower, which is apparently what almost 30% of the judges have done.

Gigantomania was entered in the same competition as The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game, with which it shares the theme of communism. Apart from that, the two games are polar opposites. Glorious is a highly polished light-hearted puzzle game that does not take its theme seriously and brings us nothing in the way of innovative design; Gigantomania lacks polish and smoothness, but it takes its theme very seriously indeed and experiments with the medium in quite unexpected ways. If the former is a slick Hollywood production, the latter is an experimental art house movie that sometimes works and sometimes does not.

This characterisation should give you a good idea of whether you want to play the game or not, which is the only thing I want to do in this review. Everything else I have to say about the game would be so full of spoilers that the IFDB is not the place to post it.