IFComprehensive

“A Woman’s Choice” is a short choice-based game describing a woman’s decision about whether or not to have children, explored through vignettes in her life.

Gameplay: The major choice in the game is deciding which plotline about the narrator’s decision about having children to play thorugh; beyond that, the decision points simply move on to the next scene. Unfortunately, the important social issues raised in the game are undercut by the flatness of its characters and the ham-fistedness of its scenarios and dialogue (e.g., “[G]irls just aren’t made to be scientists, or mathematicians, or engineers. Our brains aren’t suited to it, you know?”) The game has little interactivity and no depth or subtlety, making it difficult to treat its message with the gravity it deserves. 3/10.

Mechanics: There are a few divergent paths in the game, but there’s little for the player to do in any of them, and they all effectively turn out the same way. 4/10.

Presentation: The prose and characters are deliberately focused narrowly on the game’s subject, but that ultimately makes them much less compelling and memorable. 3/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You identify with the protagonist and want to see how her story unfolds.

Score: 3

There are surpisingly few interactive fiction games based on wordplay, and the ones that do exist (“Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It, “Ad Verbum,” “Suveh Nux,” “Counterfeit Monkey,” etc.) are largely remarkable, memorable games. Adding to that list is “Ailihphilia,” which involves using palindromes to progress through a series of puzzles.

Gameplay: The game was simply fun to play. The puzzles were clever and used the palindrome shtick well. (It did seems like the puzzles were written to the palindromes rather than the other way around, but that’s probably inevitable for a game like this.) There are also enough standard set-piece puzzles in the game that playing it wasn’t a matter of just choosing the right palindrome to fit the words on screen. Even though the game is large, I didn’t feel overwhelmed with open puzzles at any time, and the puzzles weren’t difficult enough to be frustrating or simple enough to be uninteresting. 9/10.

Mechanics: The game perfectly takes advantage of its medium; it just wouldn’t be possible for a game like this to exist in a different medium. Its palindrome mechanic is strong, but it would be nice to have more variety in the puzzles. (“Ad Verbum,” for example, is a fraction of the size of this game but uses about a dozen different kinds of wordplay. “Suveh Nux” sticks to a single idea, but it’s a one-room game.) There are some use-key-on-door or give-item-to-NPC puzzles to avoid overusing the mechanic, but the game is quite large for an IFComp entry. I did encounter a fatal error in the game (trying to THINK at one point) after quite a bit of play time. 9/10.

Presentation: The author put considerable effort into the game, and it shows. It’s filled with anti-frustration features (e.g., hints and an in-game map), and the distribution includes a walkthrough. There are also several Last Lousy Point items in the game, which are explicitly noted as such and are fun bonus features rather than annoyances for completionists. Most unhelpful but reasonable palindromes are recognized; in fact, there’s a running tally of them. 10/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like games based on wordplay. You’re looking for a long parser-based game that has a lot of anti-frustration features.

Score: 9

This choice-based game describes a chance meeting between an android and a former acquaintance. The narrator is currently employed as a dealer at a casino; the acquiantance is from another line of work.

Gameplay: It’s an well-written short story, richly evoking a sci-fi future without describing all the specifics of the universe. In that regard, it’s similar to “+=x”; the main difference is that while that game is deliberately enigmatic, “I Should Have Been That I Am” relies on emphasizing very specific details and allows the player to sketch in the whole picture. It’s a strong effect, especially in the pensive flashbacks throughout the story. 5/10.

Mechanics: There’s very little interaction in the game itself; play consists of either simply advancing the text or reading a bit of background information, with little agency in the game. (The specific cards dealt varied in repeated plays, for example, but not significantly so.) 3/10.

Presentation: The writing is strong, and the overall effect is one of reading a good sci-fi story. There are a few bells and whistles, like hte cards and the format of the last decision point, but it’s mostly a bare-bones choice-based game. 6/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like sci-fi novels involving questions of identity.

Score: 5

Interactive fiction has a broader range of settings and themes than many other forms of fiction. In particular, the strange, esoteric, almost postmodern story is a recurring genre in interactive fiction; there aren’t a lot of other media in which those stories could be told. “+=x” is one of those stories, sketching out a future dystopia in which population control is handled by lot.

Gameplay: The game consists of several vignettes describing residents’ receiving their card for the lottery and its result. Tying the story together is a brief plot about a private investigator that resembles, even though he’s deliberately described only sparsely and enigmatically, the usual conflicted protagonist in a sci-fi dystopian work. The mysteriousness of the setting is compelling, and the author describes it well, leaving in just enough details to sketch out what’s going on. 6/10.

Mechanics: There’s very little for the player to do in the game; it’s more a randomized story than something with which the player can truly interact. Such interaction consists of dropping the lottery cards over certain keywords in the text, effectively starting the lottery and (blindly and at random) determining its result. From replaying the game, I don’t think there are any effects of the choices aside from picking which vignette to read. It’s a beautifully atmospheric work, but there’s little to do in it beyond just advancing to the next scene. 4/10.

Presentation: The text evokes the alien setting perfectly, and the card setup is a nice touch. 6/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like its cryptic, elliptical style.

Score: 5

One of the drawbacks of the Choose Your Own Adventure books I remember from when I was younger is that they rarely had any sort of state (though there were more complex gamebooks that did); they were simply mazes with a bit of narrative at each node. “Into the Lair” adds a bit of state and complexity to the usual hyperlink maze— not a lot, admittedly, but enough to make me think of the game as existing in a persistent world, rather than simply being a series of choices to click through.

Gameplay: The game is about adventuring through a dungeon, dealing with the occasional guards and traps as necessary. The choices made did affect the game, although they were all what one would expect in a dungeon crawl. 5/10.

Mechanics: I didn’t encounter any issues in the game, and playing it was a smooth process. I did get a bit lost at some points because of the generic location descriptions, but I was able to find my way back to the main plot just through brute force clicking. 4/10.

Presentation: The prose and setting were fairly generic, but they fit the dungeon-crawl design of the game. The descriptions were similarly a bit lackluster, but I noticed a few typos (e.g., “truely” in one of the last scenes). 4/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like old Choose Your Own Adventure adventures and games about vampires.

Score: 4

“smooch.click” is a simple choice-based game in which the player goes through a handful of scenarios leading up to a kiss. After that, the story describes the eventual kiss, and the player can go through the series of choices again to compare endings.

Gameplay: There are four short scenes in the game, each culminating in a single choice. The choices only affect the ending (as opposed to later scenes), and they do so only by increasing or decreasing a hidden anxiety stat. Aside from the small variations in the endings, interacting with the game is a matter of reading the static vignettes and finding the different endings, the one you receive being purely a function of that hidden stat. 3/10.

Mechanics: There’s not much to do in the game; there’s not even any branching in the scenes until the ending. Having the available choices rotate over time rather than presenting them as a static list is a bit interesting, but the delay between changing them makes replaying the game more tedious than it needs to be. The author provides a walkthrough, but it’s there mostly just to explain the mechanics of the game. 3/10.

Presentation: I didn’t find anything particularly remarkable, positively or negatively, about the text. The endings vary in their seriousness, which is fine for a short game like this. 3/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You’re looking for a short, five-minute diversion.

Score: 3

Last year’s competition included a game called “The Dragon Will Tell You Your Future Now,” the joke of which was that you can’t actually get to the dragon. “Re: Dragon” is the unofficial, unauthorized sequel to that game, in which you play a long-suffering competition organizer who’s being sued for defamation by the dragon.

Gameplay: The game has two intersecting parts: reading email from the dragon’s lawyer, and eventually ret-conning the events from the 2017 game. The latter is really just a hyperlink maze, but that’s totally reasonable for a game like this one; the goal of playing it is to read the funny jokes. 8/10.

Mechanics: I had no problems navigating the email interface, and the choice-based scrying portion of the game worked without issue. 7/10.

Presentation: The email account structure for the game is a clever touch, and the interface is clear and simple throughout. It’s truly a funny game; I literally laughed out loud at several points in it. 8/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You want a good laugh, especially if you played the 2017 game.

Score: 8

Interactive fiction, both choice- and parser-based games, is primarily a plaintext-based medium. It’s therefore good to see a game to takes a more visual approach to the genre, still providing an interactive narrative but using illustrations to drive rather than merely support the prose. “Abbess Otilia’s Life and Death” presents itself as a historical medieval chronicle of the titular nun and the administration of her abbey.

Gameplay: The work’s charming central conceit of being a medieval document is emphasized throughout, with period-appropriate illustrations, font choices, vocabulary, and even a song included in the game. Playing the game really does feel like reading a recovering medieval document, complete with snide commentary in the marginalia. It’s a choice-based game with about ten decision points, and the choices I made did feel like they mattered. The conclusion of the game, for example, summarizes the choices you made and both how they influenced the world and how they affected other characters’ impressions of the abbess. It’s a nice touch that brings together the story as a coherent narrative rather than an indepedent series of choices. 8/10.

Mechanics: The choices are clearly laid out in the text, and (from replying the game) the different paths are genuinely distinct. Aside from the choices themselves, the player can click to translate the marginalia and Latin quotations in the main text. Still, I would have liked more variety and deeper effects from the various decisions; the game was primarily a series vignettes to sketch out Otilia’s character, and it didn’t feel to me as a player that I had much ability to influence the larger the setting and plot. 7/10.

Presentation: The art for this game is amazing. In fact, it feels more like a work of visual art than fiction simply because of all of the rewarding effort that has clearly gone into the illustrations. Even the font and text layout suggest a medieval manuscript. The game is not just a work of fiction, but a beautiful work of visual art as well. There are a couple of typos (“whos bird was whos”, “Peregrins are really to big”), but nothing that detracted from my enjoyment of the game.

It may not be clear if you’re reading through these posts chronologically that I’m stingy about giving out scores at the high ends of the scales. If this work doesn’t deserve a perfect score for presentation, though, nothing does. 10/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You have an interest in medievalism, especially visual art in that style.

Score: 8

I’m a fan of heist movies, and I’m always happy to see interaction fiction works that avoid the most heavily-trodden genres and settings of the field. “Let’s Rob a Bank” offers the player the chance to do exactly what the title describes, primarily through choosing the diversion, the driver, and the muscle on your team. After briefly playing through the encounter at the bank, the player gets to see the results of the attempted heist and try again with a different team. It’s a quick, fun diversion that can be played in a few minutes.

Gameplay: Aside from a few nontrivial choices that arise during the heist itself, the main means by which the player interacts with the game is in choosing among three candidates for each of the three positions on the team. They aren’t heavily described, but that’s perfectly fine for a work of this length, and they feel different during the heist itself. 5/10.

Mechanics: The game is a simple, choice-based one without anything to slow down the process of playing it. It’s short enough to allow the player to retry with several different team compositions, and it’s an entertaining puzzle to try to find the optimal one. 5/10.

Presentation: The text is well-suited to a light game about robbing a bank. The Lucy Honeysuckle scenario is odd, but the game doesn’t take itself seriously. 5/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like heist movies and have secretly always wanted to be a criminal mastermind.

Score: 5

In “Campfire Tales,” the player contributes a couple of names and salient points to a brief ghost story, with some of the Mad-Libs-like specific details changing with each replay. The style of input, the fact that the game is hosted on a separate website, and the reference at the end to the “previous visitor” suggest that names from one user are used in other users’ stories. (The exact details might be more evident if my randomizer hadn’t placed this game near the beginning of the month.) Beyond that, I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

Gameplay: There’s not much interaction here; the player simply adds a few minor descriptive details. The narration is fittingly in the style you’d expect from children telling ghost stories around a campfire. 2/10.

Mechanics: Since there’s little interaction in the game, there are few mechanics to discuss. The website is slow to load but otherwise works without issue, and the ability to display the entirety of the story after it’s played is convenient. 3/10.

Presentation: The layout is simple and clear, with a background graphic of a campfire and crackling sound effects. The prose in the story is plain but appropriate for the genre. 4/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You’re interested in randomly-generated elements in stories, or you have fond memories of telling ghost stories around a campfire as a kid.

Score: 3