IFComprehensive

“Time Passed” is a short choice-based game about the narrator’s encounter as an adult with a boy he had a crush on when they were in school.

Gameplay: The story switches back and forth between the present and the narrator’s memories of school. The plot doesn’t branch; the choices merely advance the plot linearly or expand details of the author’s state of mind or recollections. There is one meaningful choice the player can make, but one of the two options ends the story immediately. 3/10.

Mechanics: There isn’t much to do in the story itself; the only interactivity is clicking on links to advance the plot. It might have worked better as an ordinary short story than in this format. 3/10.

Presentation: The author’s tone is consistent throughout. The two personalities of the two characters are developed over the course of the game (the crush’s through the narrator’s point of view, which reinforces his dilemma), both in the present and in flashbacks. The latter are shown with a different background color than the former, which is a nice touch.4/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You want to read a deliberately paced but short character study.

Score: 3

“Tower” is a choice-based game describing a person’s ascent up the titular tower, which serves as an allegory for his phobias and other aspect of his life.

Gameplay: I only played this game once, but it was unclear to me how my choices affect the story. There were definitely areas of the game that I missed (based on its concluding text), but I’m not sure even after finishing the game what I should have done to encounter them. The background and text colors change vary with the narrator’s mental state. Beyond that, though, I really don’t know what to make of this game. The post-game text goes into the allegorical significance of the areas of the tower, but I found it only more confusing. 3/10.

Mechanics: The game is choice-based, though it was unclear, both at the time and in retrospect, what significance the choices have or why I should make one choice over another. The game makes more sense to me a randomized series of rooms with some emotional imagery than as a single coherent story. There are also sections of the game in which one has to wait for the text to advance, which I found annoying, particularly when that mechanic was repeated at several points. 3/10.

Presentation: The author has a well-defined voice that stays consistent throughout the game. Completing it gives some information on events the player encountered or missed during the game, as well as opening up notes from the author accessible from the title screen. 4/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like the author’s style and games with ambiguous interpretations.

Score: 4

I’m a huge fan of word games, and text-based interactive fiction has unique advantages over other media in that genre. I was therefore excited to play “Dream Pieces 2,” a game about breaking up and reforming words like Lego blocks to escape from a series of rooms. Unfortunately, the puzzle design and interface glitches made it difficult to enjoy the game.

Gameplay: The central idea of the game is strongly compelling: Objects in the game can be broken down into their constituent letters, like Lego bricks, and then rearranged with other objects to form new ones. In short, it’s a game about anagramming. The goal in each room is to create a viable exit, often along with some special means of opening it. In many rooms, you don’t need to solve the puzzle; you can just move on to the next one, with no other reward that I noticed for solving it. Objects can be moved freely between rooms, although they seem to apply to the puzzle for the room in which they’re found. At one point, I went through a door and promptly had all the objects in the game, including my inventory, disappear. Some of the individual puzzles can be obtuse, like the one involving breaking a glass case. Some of the other puzzles are interesting, but there’s so little done with the mechanic that it’s hard to get excited about the game. 3/10.

Mechanics: While I was disappointed with its execution, the idea behind the game is brilliant. 7/10

Presentation: The text was very sparse; this game is an abstract, puzzle-centered one, and the focus is fixed on the anagramming mechanic. To avoid frustration, there’s an in-game map and hint system. 3/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like abstract word puzzles rather than set-piece puzzles.

Score: 4

“Stone of Wisdom” is a simple puzzle-based adventure reminiscent of early games from Infocom and its predecessors. Armed with some basic supplies and some useful items he finds along the way, an adventurer attempts to retrieve an artifact that’s been hidden away in a fantasy kingdom.

Gameplay: The setting is largely generic, with the game starting in a troll-infested cave and later expanding to towns of small furry creatures and dwarves. Still, the game makes an effort to avoid hack-and-slash fantasy gameplay, and some of the puzzles involve helping characters the player runs across. The game is well-paced; it’s larger than it initially appears, and the environment is open without making it unclear how to proceed in the game. 5/10.

Mechanics: The puzzles are easy throughout, except for a few guess-the-verb difficulties I had near the beginning (e.g., trying to APPROACH TROLL and dealing with the rope). Clues are provided both within the game and in an external walkthrough, although they probably won’t be necessary. Inventory management was unnnecessarily complicated when climbing the rope and accessing the dwarven section of the game. 4/10.

Presentation: The game didn’t strike me as particularly original or memorable, but it was solidly crafted. The more prominent PCs encountered had distinct personalities; I didn’t notice in typos in the text; and I didn’t encounter any errors while playing. 6/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like old-school adventures with easy puzzles.

Score: 5

“Dreamland” is a short choice-based game in which the player explores his dreams and the odd characters inhabiting it. Unusually for choice-based games, it mixes together a couple of different genres: puzzle-based IF, personal narratives, and dream-logic scenarios.

Gameplay: The game comprises three main parts: preparing to go to sleep, a dream about a library, and a second dream about a market. The individual parts are interesting enough, but the game as a whole wasn’t particularly compelling to me; the dream scenarios were neither bizarre enough to be interesting as narratives nor logically consistent enough to be interesting as puzzles. Similarly, I didn’t find the characters to have much depth or evoke the dream-logic of the underlying plot itself. 3/10.

Mechanics: Even though the game is choice-based, it has state; there’s a bit of freedom in preparing for bed and wandering through the dreams, and actions (e.g., picking up books or speaking to certain characters) are noted by the system and change descriptions accordingly. The most interesting choice is that how the player prepares for bed affects the solution to the book puzzle. Still, that effect is not readily apparent in the game (I found the details of it by reading the HTML code), and not even perfectly clear in retrospect. I expect many players to discover the solution only by brute force, at least in the first playthrough. Aside from a bug in one of the opening scenes (“missing ] after element list”), I had no difficulty navigating through the game. 3/10.

Presentation: The text in the game was largely solid and consistent, although I did notice one typo (“noone around here”) that would have been caught with a spell checker or more testers. 4/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You’d like to a play a dream-based game that’s more grounded than most.

Score: 3

My own games have involved multiple protagonists and points of view, so it’s great to see another work in that style. “Basilica de Sangre” is a fun, puzzle-based game in which you play a demon trying to break its mother out of a convent by possessing its residents.

Gameplay: The game involves solving puzzles to steadily open up more of the convent and find the items necessary to save your mother, but they mostly rely on the central mechanic of the game: the demon’s ability to possess other characters. Despite the number of them and the size of the game, the various characters have distinct abilities and interactions with each other. Several of the puzzles involve relationships among the characters, not just finding the nun to possess who’s good in a fight or has the keys you need to continue onward. 9/10.

Mechanics: The game uses the Quest system, which is parser-based but has an auto-mapping feature and a GUI for common commands. Aside from a few minor annoyances (e.g., the game waffles on the spelling of “Madgelena” or “Magdalena,” and “exit” is not recognized as a synonym for “out”), the game played smoothly throughout. The demon’s possession mechanic is easy to use, and I enjoyed using it creatively to solve the fair and logical puzzles throughout the game. 9/10.

Presentation: There are some genuinely funny parts in the game, such as the scene of speaking to the Sexton as a demon at the beginning. For the most part, though, the tone is a Zork-like one of mild amusement, without being wacky or farcical, to focus attention on the puzzles. Changing the fonts depending on whom the demon is currently possessing is a nice touch, particularly for the blind character. Descriptions change a bit depending on whom the demon is currently possessing (again, particularly strongly for the blind character) but not radically so. (It would be unreasonable to expect otherwise for a game this size and with this many different characters; the combinatorial explosion is massive.) There were some significant typos in the text (e.g., “We giong to make a break…”), but overall the text was solid. 8/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You want to play a puzzle-based game with a more creative set of puzzles than the usual inventory and set-piece ones.

Score: 9

Anyone who’s worked in any sort of technological field has anthropomorphized his or her hardware and idly wondered what it gets up to when the humans leave. In this game, we get to see it: The protagonist is a futuristic cleaning robot who has to fend for itself after the world changes.

Gameplay: The game is choice-based, with the decisions mostly involving directing the robot to perform its tasks. It’s an open world, and the tasks can be performed in any order, but playing the first half of the game is simply a matter of running through the available options until there aren’t any left. Still, the game is a narrative along the lines of “A Mind Forever Voyaging,” where the story is about wandering through and observing the world as it changes, rather than directly influencing it yourself. 5/10.

Mechanics: For most of the game, you simply explore the estate, cleaning up rooms as necessary; there’s not much to do beyond performing your tasks (which makes sense for a game fundamentally about robots and agency). Toward the end, you have a bit more freedom. It seemed like the choices at that point were indeed meaningful and opened up multiple endings, but I didn’t want to replay the substantial less-interactive part of the game again to verify that. There are a couple of what could be considered inventory puzzles at the end of the game, but they’re simply a matter of finding the proper items. 4/10.

Presentation: The best feature of the game is that it consistently shows rather than tells its story. The characters in the game are fleshed out by small background details observed by the protagonist, who itself is a somewhat unreliable narrator and whose personality is developed by the details it observes but interprets differently from the player. 6/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like robots and have wondered about what it means to have free will.

Score: 5

This game is presented as a classroom exercise in shipping and trading, analogous in mechanics to economics games like “Iron Dragon” and analogous in tone to old 80s games like “Oregon Trail” (without the minigames or random dysentery). You travel around Canada buying and selling various goods for a profit, and that seems to be it.

Gameplay: The game is choice-based, with your choices boiling down to deciding which city to visit next and which goods to buy and sell there. Of course, there are different goods available and different in each city. Maybe I didn’t play long enough in the game to get to the punchline or surprise reveal, but the game does seem to be a straight simulation: buy goods cheaply in one city, then sell them for a profit elsewhere. It’s not very interesting, despite the author’s efforts to improve the presentation. 2/10.

Mechanics: In addition to maintaining your inventory, you also have to manage time and fuel for your truck. Beyond that, though, playing the game is just a matter of navigating menus to find the best possible trades. The game is slow-moving due to its interface, which itself has problems; even though it uses a simple a choice-based system, the game often has spurious options on the menu that have a toggle to click on but no text. 3/10.

Presentation: The conceit that the game is a classroom exercise is well-executed. There are creative touches throughout the game, like the random dreams each night and the different tourist destinations in each town. Still, the game is ultimately a trading simulation with a clunky interface. 4/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You played this sort of simulation in school as a kid, or you have a particular interest in Canada.

Score: 3

I have fond memories from my childhood of playing “The 7th Guest,” a game that combined abstract set-piece puzzles (e.g., swapping white and black pieces on a chessboard while only making chess-legal moves) with an ongoing frame story. “Instruction Set” is like a mostly-text adapation of it, using a sci-fi narrative but still keeping the central gameplay idea of alternating between solving a classic puzzle and then watching a cutscene. Unfortunately, technical problems and uninspired puzzles make it difficult to enjoy the game.

Gameplay: The first real puzzle of the game is the classic 3-gallon and 5-bucket problem. It’s hard to have any positive reaction to that, especially when it’s followed by another bucket puzzle and a 3×3 number slider puzzle. The other puzzles are variants on mazes that are more creative but tedious to solve, and there’s also a third bucket puzzle. The frame story might have made the game more compelling, but my browser froze up while playing through them. 2/10.

Mechanics: The game lags significantly throughout, both in the puzzles and during the cutscenes; my browser froze up for about 15 seconds while playing each of the latter. The author mentions that the game is written in the visual programming language Scratch, which doesn’t offer much support for keyboard input and text. While it’s an impressive technical feat to get the game working in that kind of system, it’s clearly not a good tool for the job, and the game suffers as a result. The cutscenes lag so much that they’re almost unplayable, and the uninteresting puzzles are there simply as roadblocks dividing up the narrative. 2/10.

Presentation: The layout of the game is well-designed, and I like the simple aesthetics of the cutscenes. Adding some narrative content in the background while starting the puzzles is a nice touch. Still, the narrative is not enough to support the game by itself, and the lag throughout the game makes it hard to sustain interest in playing it. 3/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like visual or otherwise unusual programming languages, and you want to see a project that takes them far beyond what’s normally done with them.

Score: 2

This game is a short- or medium-length choice-based game in which the narrator describes their mother’s struggles with mental illness during their childhood and their own anxiety isuses. It’s an odd work, and I’m not quite sure how I’d characterize it, especially while avoiding overt spoilers.

Gameplay: I would consider the game to be a well-deserved parody of a certain genre of interactive fiction, and it’s a more restrained and muted treatment than most parodies are. It does its job too well, though; the more unusual content takes a while to show up in full, and the part leading up to it gets a bit tedious. 6/10.

Mechanics: Due to the genre being parodied, there’s not much interactivity in the game; almost all of the choices simply advance the static text. There’s a slightly more open segment toward the end, but it still doesn’t offer much variety for the player. 3/10.

Presentation: There are some typos in the text (a few commas and an apostrophe missing, “It’s surface is dusty,” etc.), but nothing very distracting. The tone of the text is strong throughout, and the sounds and other effects toward the end of the game reinforce the atmosphere. On the other hand, I found the occasional forced delays in the text to be annoying roadblocks that break up the story’s building momentum. 5/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like choice-based personal narratives.

Score: 5