Detective City

This hilarious piece is loaded with comedy, both in contextualized situations and laugh-out-loud lines. After tracking down a particular crime to a group of babies, for instance, and relentlessly bullying them into helping my gumshoe earn back her previously good reputation, I was treated to the line, "I can see into your soul, sucky baby. I see into it, and I find it wanting."

The entire work is infused with this sort of silliness, taking place over a variety of declaratively-named locations: ArtistCity is a city of artists, and your home location, DetectiveCity, is a sprawling metropolis of detectives and gumshoe tropes.

The protagonist needs to collect enough Detecto-Points over the next 10 days to keep her job after an embarrassing blunder, hinted at but never explicitly detailed, known as "The Noodletown Incident". Each day is a chapter, initiated by choosing where you'll spend it: you can work a case or take an oddball detour into criminal enterprises, anarchy, or other weird segues.

Each day involves some type of event, ranging from cases (classic logic problems re-styled as mysteries and solved through multiple choices) to embarrassing interactions with your co-workers. After a day, you'll be awarded detecto-points, either stolen, earned for your work, or gifted by a colleague or NPC.

After the ten chapters, the work concludes in a courthouse battle where you can take actions based off of your earlier successes, before you receive a score and the credits appear.

The game mechanics are incredibly satisfying, and the randomization and wide number of paths makes this a very replayable work.

I highly recommend this for anyone who enjoys quirky, silly writing and fun Interactive Fiction.