IFComprehensive

Ürs is a choice-based story about a rabbit who appeals to aliens (or some variety of advanced being) to save the warren from its imminent destruction. Comparisons to “Watership Down” are inevitable, but this work has an original tone and art style.

Gameplay: Although the game is choice-based, gameplay varies from puzzles to conversation trees to exploration. None of the puzzles are particularly elaborate, though, and the game is mostly about just wandering around the environment. It’s a very diverse environment with many compelling areas, though, so the exploration doesn’t feel like a chore. 7/10.

Mechanics: The different areas of the game are seamlessly put together, and exploration was smooth throughout. The world was smaller than I first expected, though, and more puzzles, conversations, or locations to visit would have made it a more memorable experience and improved its pacing. 6/10.

Presentation: The art in the game is excellent, and it complements the text rather than being a distraction or pointless embellishment. Both the illustrations and text remind me of a children’s book. Aside from a few minor mistakes in spelling and punctuation, the text was solid. The tone might have grated a bit in a longer work (e.g., “Without the Warrenherd rabbits might not do anything other than scuffle, dig and sleep the rest of their time away in the fluffle huddle.”), but it was fine for a game of this scope. 8/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like children’s books about rabbits.

Score: 7

Although traditional RPGs have been successful in other media, it’s not a common genre in interactive fiction. “A Final Grind” is a simple choice-based RPG dungeon crawl through a short dungeon.

Gameplay: The game is a choice-based dungeon exploration, interrupted by combat following the same choice-based system. There’s not much to do, though. There only a few simple options available in combat, and dungeon exploration out of combat is similarly limited. The high random encounter rate exacerbates these problems, especially given that combat is so unrewarding. 2/10.

Mechanics: In addition to a standard melee attack and a few combat spells, the player also has access to the Parry command. Despite the name, it hits all the monsters for 2/3 normal attack damage; the catch, though, is that the player first has to solve a small math problem (mostly arithmetic, though I did see a few problems from basic calculus during a boss battle) in order to pull off the attack. This mechanic isn’t any fun. I like math; I’m a mathematician in real life. These problems are too uninteresting and unmotivated to be anything more than a time-wasting mechanic, though.

The blurb on the IFComp website says that the character becomes weaker over time, though I must not have played long enough to notice any significant decline. I also didn’t notice anything relevant in the “self-loathing” stat, which the walkthrough mentions has some effects on the plot. These features might be apparent in later levels of the game, but I gave up after the first because of the high encounter rate and frustrating mechanics. 2/10.

Presentation: The game is purely textual, with the minor exception of pop-up dialog boxes during the Parry action quizzes. There were some minor issues with the text (e.g., “Parry succesful” and a non-fatal Twine error), but the bulk of the game is the formulaic combat. The game needs a much longer inventory of questions; I ran into two repeated questions in a single four-turn encounter. 3/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like old-school dungeon crawls and fondly remember the “Math Blaster” series of video games.

Score: 2

“Dead Man’s Fiesta” is a game about a man who rents a car after a funeral and deals with the ghosts who haunt it.

Gameplay: The game involves interacting with the three ghosts haunting the car through various scenes. It’s a longer work than I expected but managed to sustain my interest throughout. Although the narrator and the ghosts are well-described characters with definite goals, the game is more focused on the musings of its characters and their discussions together rather than any particular plots. Still, the game didn’t make a very strong impression on me. The overall impression was a positive one, but there were few specific, individual points that I found memorable. 5/10.

Mechanics: The game is choice-based, but it was unclear in place how exactly the choices made at decision points advanced the plot. Despite the game’s coming across as a somewhat philosophical road-trip adventure, I had the definite impression that there was an game or puzzle in trying to put the three ghosts to rest by making the right choices (informed by help from the fortune-teller). 5/10.

Presentation: The work kept up its wry and mildly absurdist tone throughout, and the artwork was a great complement to the text. The deliberate delays in text bothered me, though; I’m a fast reader (and one with a pile of games to play through on a deadline), and staring at text I’ve already read doesn’t create any effect beyond annoying me. I also don’t think anything was served by the removal of most punctuation and capitalization. The overall impression was that the game was simply opaque for the sake of being opaque in places. 4/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like the style of the author’s prose or art.

Score: 5

Because interactive fiction is such a flexible genre, works in it have a wide variety of interfaces. Some of the reviews here so far, for example, have covered games ranging from bare-bones parsers to an attempt to a recreate historical manuscript. “Railways of Love” is a choice-based game that uses a clever custom interface to present the different ways a chance encounter on a train in the future could play out.

Gameplay: The game takes place over a short meeting on a train, with the player choosing actions for the male or female charater to take, or simply events that occur on the train and in the setting outside it. There are only about a half-dozen choices over all, but the game is meant to be repeatedly replayed to find the different endings. 5/10.

Mechanics: The choices are essentially arbitrary, but that’s part of the point of the game (cf. the Latin tag that appears on finishing a run of it). The story is meant to be played through multiple times, with the choices mainly serving to divide up the paths of the branching plot rather than motivate them. The decision points are clear, although the characters will understandably refuse to take more aggressive advances if they haven’t reached that point in their relationship. 4/10.

Presentation: I particularly liked the interface for this game, which was cleanly laid out with appealing graphics reminiscent of games from the 8- and 16-bit era. Aside from contributing aesthetically to the game, it also clearly indicated its state of the game without overemphasizing it. 6/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like its art style.

Score: 5

Michael Kielstra’s “Pegasus” is an unusual attempt to present what feels like a choice-based game in a parser-based medium. It’s a story- and character-focused work involving an important choice to be made about the fate of an ally and friend, told through a series of flashbacks to their training together.

Gameplay: The game plays through a series of vignettes in the training of the protagonist and a fellow member of the military or paramilitary group they’re in. It’s parser-based and thus has that corresponding open-endedness, but the conversation trees and linearity and of each vignette make it feel more like a choice-based game. That setup makes it continue briskly along, and it’s well-paced. 5/10.

Mechanics: There’s a mild amount of state to the game, and the vignettes generally have some small puzzle or task to accomplish, rather than progressing along rails to the end. None of those puzzles involved much thought, though, and the conversation trees didn’t have much depth. The only real branch in the plot is in the final scene, and it only determines which ending the player immediately receives. 4/10.

Presentation: The militaristic near-future setting is convincingly shown rather than told. Ultimately, though, I didn’t care about the protagonist’s friend. The flashbacks showed the friend and the narrator’s interactions with her, but they didn’t illuminate much of her personality or the nature of their relationship. The moral choice driving the game therefore felt like an abstract philosophical problem rather than a personal choice affecting the life of a friend. 4/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like games about military camaraderie and making difficult decisions.

Score: 4

One of the interesting features of interactive fiction is that the medium is adaptable to a wide variety of genres. “Adventures with Fido” is an unusual attempt to make a single-player MUD or MMORPG in choice-based text adventure format.

Gameplay: The goal of the game is to collect bones available throughout the setting. The game world is much larger than I expected, containing several distinct subareas with puzzles and quests. New areas are opened up through randomly after repeatedly exploring areas, by boosting hidden stats through repeated interactions with certain items, or by solving puzzles. Although the scope of the game was impressive, I didn’t enjoy much of its exploration. The randomness of the game bothered me, and tasks like arithmetic or geology quizzes were completely uninteresting. Maybe fans of MUDs and that style of game would have a better time, but I didn’t enjoy the game. 3/10.

Mechanics: It’s impressive to see such a variety of game mechanics in a single work, and I didn’t encounter any serious bugs with them. It’s somewhat unusual to have puzzles in a purely choice-based format; most of the them are handled by interacting with an object in one location and then using the consequence of that interaction elsewhere (e.g., in entering the Cloud Kingdom). It’s hard to get excited about quizzes, especially when there are so few unique questions that I never finished a five-question set without getting a duplicate. There are other kinds of puzzles, though, as well as quests and other achievements. 7/10.

Presentation: The tone matched the cheerful hyperactivity of its Corgi protagonist, though the length of the game caused it to grate after a while. There weren’t many detailed interactions with NPCs, but the canine nature of the protagonist showed through in the scenes. 5/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like Corgis and combatless MMORPGs.

Score: 5

“Careless Talk” is a short, choice-based work about a soldier’s attempt to hide his homosexuality in a military that has prohibited it.

Gameplay: The game consists of a series of conversations and memories involving the narrator. The setting and characters aren’t developed enough to explain the stakes in the game or his relationship with the characters he meets. The game is about morality and trust, but there isn’t enough detail in the game to draw any conclusions about them. 3/10.

Mechanics: There’s little interactivity in the game; the alternatives at each decision point are similar, and none of them have any significant influence on the plot. This story might have worked better as a piece of conventional, non-interactive fantasy or science fiction. The one departure from the standard choice-based format is the cliché of a decision point with four ostensible alternatives, all but one of which the narrator refuses to act on when selected. 3/10.

Presentation: The protagonist is two-dimensional, although there are a few NPCs who have stronger characterization. The setting appears to be a version of Britain, possibly in the future, with magic. Few details are given; it’s never indicated how magic works, how commonplace it is, how commonplace magicians are, etc. It’s not necessary to describe the details of the setting for a story that’s based more on characters and morality than plot, but those details are given here; they’re just not explained, and the overall effect is just confusing. The theme of the story would have worked just as well if it were set in historical Britain. 2/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You’d like to see what the British navy would look like in a universe with magic.

Score: 3

Like “Haywire,” Sly Merc’s “Shackles of Control” is more of a genuine Choose-Your-Own-Adventure work that most short choice-based games, with a variety of branching paths and choices that redirect rather than merely embellish the plot. The main difference between the two games is that while “Haywire” stayed within the same setting and genre, “Shackles” is more meta, with the endings dipping into a variety of genres and offering comments about the game itself.

Gameplay: The choices certainly have a significant effect on gameplay, but gameplay is matter of choice a branch of the decision tree to explore. There’s little state, and it’s often completely unclear what effects the decisions will later have or why the player should choose one over another. That isn’t necessarily a drawback; the goal of the game is to see the variety of endings and meta-commentary on the game itself. Furthermore, the brevity of the game and the high degree of branching makes it easy to replay it. 5/10.

Mechanics: Playing the game is straightfoward, and I didn’t encounter any bugs in it. There aren’t any real mechanics to the game; the choices are there simply to move along the plot tree. 4/10.

Presentation: The text was concise enough to avoid bogging down gameplay but also description enough to make the scenarios truly distinct, and there are a variety of endings available. 5/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like quick, somewhat meta games.

Score: 5

I have a soft spot for interactive fiction works about crime in fantasy settings. “Dungeon Detective” is a great addition to that genre, describing a gnoll’s investigation of a case of dungeon looting that a dragon has hired him to solve.

Gameplay: This work is choice-based, but the choices are meaningful. Ultimately, this is a detective game: Your goal is to gather clues, question any witnesses you can find, and piece together the solution to the puzzle. You can miss clues and go down wrong paths, though there are convenient save points to eliminate any frustration. The game is medium-length, and its writing is strong enough that canvassing the dungeon for clues doesn’t get tedious. 8/10.

Mechanics: Gameplay consists of wandering the dragon’s dungeon for clues, then the equivalent of taking a short quiz to test whether you found the correct solution. The investigation makes sense, and it requires remembering prior clues in places rather than just exploring every possible link. Nevertheless, I found the mystery itself a bit disappointing; I was expecting a more coherent and satisfying puzzle than just a series of details. 7/10.

Presentation: The game is charming throughout. The cover artwork is great, there are some genuinely funny lines in the story (much of the initial conversation between Sniff and the dragon), and the game is perfectly paced for its length. The protagonist is compelling and fun to read about, particularly in his interaction with other characters, and he has a distinct personality. 9/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like light, funny fantasy games with strong characterization.

Score: 8

I fondly remember reading the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books in elementary school. It’s surprisingly rare to find a modern text-adventure that recreates their open-endedness, rather than railroading the player through a series of inconsequential choices. “Haywire” succeeds in having genuine branching in its plot, making playing it a much more rewarding experience than most games in that genre.

Gameplay: The game is a straightforward choice-based one, presenting a series of interactions with the main character and various people she encounters. She has psychic abilities; exactly how these abilities manifest and the extent of her powers vary in different branches of the plot. 5/10.

Mechanics: “Haywire” succeeds in making the choices it offers the player matter. There really is branching here; the choices have more ramifications then adding a bit of flavortext to the next predestined decision point. Furthermore, rather than just leading up to a single ending (or a single good ending and a single bad ending) with minor variations, the choices have a wide variety of resolutions. It isn’t just a matter of how close the player comes to the optimal route; different choices result in completely different character arcs and endings 6/10.

Presentation: The tone of the text was unserious but not goofy, which suited the story. I didn’t notice any significant typos while playing, nor did I encounter any bugs. 5/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You also fondly remember the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” series.

Score: 5