Goat Game

This is in my opinion the best-looking and most cleanly designed game from IF Comp this year.

The illustrations give the game a storybook feel, and the author's professional history in art and design comes across clearly. This really pays off in IF, a medium where custom-designed multimedia is reasonably rare. A good point of comparison is probably 2008's Everybody Dies, though those illustrations feel more at home in a YA graphic novel, whereas Goat Game's illustrations are a little more inviting generally.

The author has tweaked the Twine theme and general CSS to provide a responsive design that works on different screen and window sizes. Only a few other web-based game in the comp (notably Mermaids of Ganymede and Beneath Fenwick ) really took this factor into account, and those games have fewer images so this factor is less noticeable there.

Goat Game's structure is also effective. It uses a mixture of accordion sections and page-to-page navigation. On top of that, the game is broken up into "endings" that can only be accessed through multiple playthroughs. The end result is a lengthy two-hour game that can be played in bite-sized pieces.

The progress indicator at the bottom, which shows how many endings you have achieved, is a nice touch, though it might be better if each one was labelled with a tooltip that displays the title.

I won't comment on the story as I have not played through all of the endings and I am not sure how neatly everything comes together. It isn't clear how choices impact the story beyond stats, and I am not sure if stats determine which ending you get.

Even without taking the story into account, the production value of the design is enough to warrant four stars.