I’m hoping that I’m not too late to the party, but this is my review thread for IF Comp 2024!
A bit of context about me as a reviewer: I’ve been a casual player of IF over the last few years but would still consider myself a newbie in many areas (especially parser-based…) and have made a tiny game or two here or there.
What you can expect from this thread: mostly unstructured impressionistic feelings and vibes I got while playing through each of the games. There are so many thoughtful and considered reviews already out on the forum that I doubt I will be able to add much else of similar substance, so this will be a more relaxed and casual series of reviews. grab a sparkling water and kick back on the patio at sunset kind of thing.
List of games
198BREW
Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There, An
Apothecary’s Assistant, The
Awakened Deeply
Bad Beer
Bat, The
Big Fish
Birding in Pope Lick Park
Breakfast in the Dolomites
Bureau of Strange Happenings
Campfire
Civil Service
Curse, The
Death in Hyperspace, A
Deliquescence
Den, The
Deserter, The
Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain
Dragon of Silverton Mine, The
Dream Of Silence: Act 3, A
Dust
Eikas
Few hours later in the day of The Egocentric, A
Final Call
First Contact
Focal Shift
Forbidden Lore
Forsaken Denizen
Garbage of the Future, The
Hebe
Hildy
House of Wolves
Imprimatura
Killings in Wasacona, The
KING OF XANADU
LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST
Lost Artist: Prologue, The
Master’s Lair, The
Maze Gallery, The
Metallic Red
Miss Duckworthy’s School for Magic-Infested Young People
Miss Gosling’s Last Case
Quest for the Teacup of Minor Sentimental Value
Redjackets
Return to Claymorgue’s Castle
ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG
Saltcast Adventure, The
Shyler Project, The Sidekick
String Theory
Traffic
Triskelion Affair, The
Turn Right
Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe
Uninteractive Fiction
Unreal People
Verses
Very Strong Gland, A
Warm Reception, A
Welcome to the Universe
When the Millennium Made Marvelous Moves
Where Nothing Is Ever Named
Why Pout?
Winter-Over
Yancy At The End Of The World!
You
You Can’t Save Her
I’m a simple person. I see cowboys and a Western setting, and I put Ennio Morricone’s The Ecstasy of Gold (2004) on repeat. Also the WestWorld soundtrack.
This game felt like a dusty, sweaty, tired adventure, like riding your horse hard across a dusty plain while simultaneously trying to stop your toddler from eating sand and juggling 5 balls at the same time. Sincere kudos to the author for depicting the environment and interactable objects so succinctly. Also spent some time contemplating the difference between a sidekick and a lackey, which did eventually pay off in a delightful “aha” moment at the end!
As far as jaded cowboy stories go, this felt like a particularly true parable of our modern society of the jaded office worker just trying to get by. I felt like sitting on the edge of the train tracks and blowing away soulfully on my harmonica.
I was absolutely horrified by the ants sideplot. As a child I was so traumatised by that scene in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull where the bad guys are devoured alive by giant ants, so that was an unpleasant reminder of the treachery of nature. Post Black Bill, everything sort of goes down the route of classic James Bond, with showier and showier hijinks in a sort of Kingsmen vein. The thing that impressed me most about it was the length of the game – how long must this have taken to put together? How does one come up with something this in the first place?
Admittedly, after fiddling with the game for almost an hour and being killed by Black Bart twice in the pantry even on easy mode, I gave up and decided to go for the walkthrough, which didn’t really hinder my enjoyment of the game as a whole. One gameplay/quality of life aspect I really liked was having all the possible commands already available on the page, and while I think the tactility of typing in possible actions in a typical parser is great, I’m also the kind of person who has to type in “help” every single time to be reminded of the commands. Puzzle-wise, I was suitably impressed with the creativity of it all, and even the hints were really thoughtfully structured.
You know that genre of video where the artist has drawn a picture and then zooms in on a tiny detail that reveals another intricately drawn picture & so on so forth like a bunch of matryoshka pictures? This game was a bit like that. Floating on the surface of consciousness, dimly aware of the layers of multiple consciousnesses, aware that you are being steered by the hand of something other than yourself, the lack of agency is both alarming and yet freeing. The inevitability and futility of everything has been transformed into a performative tool for amusement, which in and of itself, as the player of such a game, is amusing.
On a tangent, this quote from Balamer was especially intriguing – “We shouldn’t be resistant to labels. Labels allow us to talk about what things are and create building blocks of understanding.” This, when combined with the main conceit of the game, where you have to pick which statements you (or the character you are playing) identify with, reminded me so so strongly of (1) those personality quizzes (a long history spanning from Buzzfeed to more recent Uquizzes) which essentially give you a label to stick on yourself at the end, and (2) the whole YA craze of sorting people into houses or factions? Give the people what they want! Labels!
The further we go into the game, the more it’s like walking into the brain of the universe, like going into the real control room behind the control room and just watching something play out behind the scenes. There is such a strong sense of detachment, of distance. Still, in a relatively humorous way, and at the end of it all, the certainty that life is worth living, that it is worth hanging on for, that meaning is something you have to make for yourself. While your choices shape who you are as a person, that person is ever-shifting, fluid, through a physical shell that can barely contain the multitudes that you are.
As an end note - loved the design, the game’s retro vibes juxtaposed with the papers’ more formal layout.
A perfect game for a grey, rainy afternoon when you are sick and feel like all is not right in the world. The pace in which you explore the world is leisurely, unhurried, told in the minute building blocks of the world that you painstakingly move through. Examining the world around you only heightens the gloom, the plodding tone of life, the feeling that you need to constantly look over your shoulder.
What’s most successful about this game is how well it conveys its essence: “there are still problems here, but the problems want to be solved; you can feel their desire to unravel.” It’s impossible to get more than fleeting impressions because everything is lost in translation in an attempt to describe the thing, between languages, but also in the translation from physical object to our own experience of the thing, as mediated through machine. Nothing is fixed, everything is mutable, our experience of the thing completely incomprehensible.
The game actually really reminded me of Autumn Chen’s The Archivist & The Revolution and Eliza Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho, a little bit of The Employees by Olga Ravn – all loosely stories about trying to get by, of the grunt work of hyper specialised fields, of trying to understand something bigger than yourself and ultimately utterly failing, of mediating difficult relationships between people and superiors, between being dragged along by a force greater than yourself.
There were so many very excellent lines here - a few of my personal favourites below:
The work happens in a wooden box. The product of the labor is removed, and the work continues. Where it goes is none of our concern; maybe it would hurt us to know. But it’s impossible not to wonder."
There is no one keeping you here, but then again, to escape a place is to abandon it.
What have I done? I have not collated the memories she brought to me. I have not kept eating and eating and eating what she has given me. I have not been her dutiful oblate.
I honestly had such a good time reading the different versions of the poems, watching the act of translation happening in real time, and the descent into the mystery is beautifully opaque and wonderfully rendered.
Is there anything more vibes-based than playing a game based on another game you’ve heard a lot about and have only a very loose idea of the characters and plotline?
Playing this was sort of like being in Plato’s Cave and looking at the shadows of the wall, both confirming some aspects of the characters that I sort of picked up on from popular media and being chronically online but also learning new things about others. Much like the ghostly shroud that you play in the game, it was a delight to drift through this beautifully realised world, steered by a steady hand which sketches action and character study with a deft pen. There is such a sense of considered and deeply thought fanlore behind it – I even had a browse through the AO3 collection accompanying it and was really impressed by the sprawling universe. Time to get a machine that can actually play Baldur’s Gate 3.
A largely cheerful experience, like reading a familiar fantasy novel where you know that all will be well in the end. Uncomplicated and hearty, not too unlike eating a solid hunk of bread and comfortingly warm cheese by the fireplace, despite the descriptions of waterlogged mines.
“This game is unlikely to change your life in any meaningful way, but I hope you enjoy it.” – the blurb intrigued me, and playing this was not too unlike a slice of life story, and even more like eating a soft and pillowy piece of milk bread, a regular staple that you can rely on. The game’s narrative reminded me really strongly of No One Writes Back by Jang Eun-Jin, where the stories of others are fleeting, but leave you feeling like you’re not really alone in this world, that everyone is human and we all face variations of the same struggles.
A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric by Ola Hansson
Reading this was like being a young kid dropped off near the magazines section while your parents go shopping - you pick up the first thing you see that is a comic and not some gossip rag, the kind of thing which more often than not drops you into the middle of the story without much context about what came before or after, but it absorbs you for the delightful length of 30 minutes. Inevitably, your parent comes to pick you up before you manage to finish it, or else you are finished but are now trying to surreptitiously look for another issue under the watchful eye of the nearby clerk… but before you can do that, it’s time to go home. Oh well, maybe you’ll be back when the next issue is out.
LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST by THE BODY & THE BLOOD
How to come up with a vibe when this entire game is just a series of incredible vibes back to back? One of those games where you’re like ?? this is just a novel ?? But also - why aren’t more novels actually formatted like this?? After starting this yesterday evening I literally spent every spare moment (including on this dreary cold morning) devouring the story, going through the epic highs (that kink club scene lives in my brain rent-free now) and lows (the dry-eyed anxiety of trying to get through to the NHS when you think you’re dying but no you’re not special everyone who calls the NHS thinks that and the operator on the other end has heard it all) and also the five stages of grief until you reach acceptance (the experience of being trans today being wrapped in such a specific cultural milieu of Tumblr and Discord and that there is life within and beyond that and you deserve all of it).
Nothing much else to say except wow I’m so glad that this was written and I wish there was more!
Loneliness is the thing sitting in the corner, making its presence known no matter how much you try to ignore it. It spills out from within you, entrails trailing behind as you try to stuff them back in, to fill a gap. You don’t even remember when the gap appeared, but it is there now. You are in the absence of space but there is also the absence within you. Even among others, you are alone.
A delightful, quietly sad game about being alone in space. Thoroughly enjoyed the world-building and esotericism scattered throughout.
I can’t remember why The Remains of the Day was at the top of my mind when I was playing this, but this was 100% a sort of mirror-image version of the butler in that book. The image of the butler is such a quintessential stereotype of the sprawling manor and it was just so fun to see this subverted. Vibe-wise, this was like trying to wrangle a bunch of wet cats into a bath when all the cats want to do is escape the bathtub, and I loved every moment of it.
As far as Batman adaptations go, this one was actually good. I also have to give the author a huge round of applause for managing to capture my attention with a parser for so long and making it fairly easy to figure out the puzzles - they seriously didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the narrative at all, and at no point did I feel like I was taken out of the story.
An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There by Mandy Benanav
La Traviata is one of my favourite operas, and it was a delightful soundtrack to this cosy mystery. The perfect thing to play accompanied by a mug of hot chocolate while underneath a warm blanket, in the half-twilight with candles flickering up against the walls. Was this timed for October and the spooky season? My favourite bit was the bookshelf depiction, which I felt was particularly adorable and I had fun talking to all the house’s inhabitants and mediating their squabbles.
This was a really absorbing tale of adventure, tinged with desperation. Like clinging to an exposed bit of rock face and regretting every choice that has led you here but it’s impossible for you to let go because you’ll drop to your death, the only thing you can do is choose to go on. When asked about how she did x or y, my mother often says that these things just somehow don’t seem difficult when you’re a mother - faced with the life of your child or when the time comes to protect your family, you will find boundless reserves of strength to complete your task. I wouldn’t know about all that myself, but I think that Carpenter has tapped into a little bit of that magic here, and it was so refreshing to see a protagonist as someone who is a little bit older, who has something to fight for.
I wonder if Pentiment was in any small way an inspiration for the author? The third act strongly resembles what happens between the second and third acts for that game but with a lovely and much more personal twist…
ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG by Hubert Janus
The self-fulfilling prophecy! Just when you escape one dong punch, another inevitably finds its way to you. Rod is a true Prometheus of our age. Hats off to the author for squeezing as many synonyms and alliterative phrases for dinging the dong.