I’m going to play and review some of the IFComp games, focussing on new authors who identify themselves in this thread. I made a list of games from authors who introduced them there, and will play them in the order they come up on a randomized page.
If you’re a new author, let me know here or introduce yourself and your game in that thread, and I’ll try to play them all.
Naturally, I’ll take a break from these to play some games by established authors. You know I can’t pass up a DiBianca game.
1.) WATT by @profzhai
This was a highly enjoyable journey through a life, divided into 8 chapters or houses that take us through wildly different locations/storylines to showcase the joys and pains (particularly the pains) of life’s events. Some events simply befall us through accidents of birth or tragedies beyond our control, and some are the results of decision making when we are never truly prepared for those decisions and their ripple effects throughout our lives. We are plagued with guilt for things that are not our fault, plagued with regret for our irresponsible deeds, and at the end of our lives we often seek penance for the ways in which we have shaped other lives. The problem with youth is that you don’t have any perspective. The trouble with old age is that you have too much. I enjoyed reading through the chapters of Watt’s life, even if some of those chapters (Like The Chinese Opera House) seemed too metaphorical to be truly grounded in the journey. In each house of life, you collect a key, and they lead to literal and figurative enlightenment in the last chapter, of a suitably bittersweet nature.
This is more of a visual novel than a game, with few decisions to make, played mostly by simply clicking through the text. There is plenty of visual interest, with many text effects that often succeed in intensifying the prose. But unfortunately there is a LOT of jiggly text, which I find so unpleasant that I have to click through those pages quickly, causing me to speed through certain sections. And equally unfortunately, there is quite a bit of the universally loathed timed text, which didn’t seem to serve any real effect in the areas it was used. To the author: those things really hurt my enjoyment of the game, and you may find this sentiment a common one in Comp reviews.
There were also a few problems with knowing where to click to move the story forward. Sometimes there is colored/fancy text to guide you. Other times there were multiple colored words and you had to hover over each to find the right one. Sometimes there’ was nothing at all and you needed to simply click on the blank page. A few times there were tiny ellipses to click. I’ve never understood the popularity of ellipses as a thing to click. So moving forward could turn into a bit of a hunting expedition.
There are sound effects in the game, but as is usual for me I found them annoying and turned them off. The author shouldn’t take this poorly, as I turn off the sound in 99% of games I play of any variety.
All in all, I found the story engaging and occasionally quite moving, keeping me guessing as to where we were going next. For me, it was often dragged down by its effects and lack of consistency in how to move forward, but I found it well worth persevering to the end. A solid first game for Joan. I hope to see more from them, with less jiggly text.
2.) Under the Sea Winds by @dmarymac
You can’t imagine my excitement when, one minute into this game, I was told that I would be able to SQUEEZE EEL. This game is about eels! Squeezable ones! Joy! The setup is totally rad, with you as an eel researcher out to succeed where Sigmund Freud and Rachel Carson failed. You had me at eel, author!
I regret to say that following this awesomeness was a miserable failure at struggling with a parser that needed a great deal of testing it failed to get. I resorted to the walkthrough to discover that you must do an exact sequence of events in exactly the right order to get anywhere, with almost no verbs implemented. I tried for about half an hour to make a fishing rod, using every command I could think of, but you can’t. You have to SHOW GRASS to the boy and he does it for you, but only after you’ve gotten everything you need and filled the well. Showing him the grass before that yields nothing. Much is not implemented-- you cannot examine yourself, and there are many reasonable synonyms lacking, as well as the major lack of verbs. There also appears to be a difference of vocabulary-- to me a planter is a very large object, the kind you couldn’t easily take, let alone haul over a wall. Maybe the author hails from some part of the world where “planter” is synonymous with “pot.” This is the sort of thing that testing would have revealed and allowed the author to solve.
I then struggled for another half an hour with the next section in a hotel room, where you are told to PRESS BUTTON on a machine, but that doesn’t do anything until you TAKE the machine-- but I’m about to go to bed, so it doesn’t really make sense to take it at that point. Yes, I had to go to the walkthrough for that, too. After some more struggling to achieve everything before SLEEP, I was told that the game’s forgiveness rating was about to get nasty, and I quit, having already played for about an hour and a half, nearly all of that fighting with the parser to do things I knew I needed to do but couldn’t find the commands for.
I think this is an Adventuron game? Adventuron has quirks that cause problems-- like the “You see nothing special” stock reply if you type something in wrong. So when I tried X STAND in the hotel room, I thought there was nothing there. You must type in “NIGHTSTAND” to find something important. So the platform certainly doesn’t do you any favors here, and is a problem I’ve encountered before in Adventuron games.
So sadly, I found the game largely unplayable. The good news is that with some rigorous testing to iron all this out, this could be an excellent game. The writing is zippy and fun, the story is divine, and did I mention the eels? That you can squeeze?
I’ll finish my last half hour of play time (for those who don’t know, IFComp requires judging on no more than 2 hours of play time) by watching the rest of the walkthrough. The author should not be discouraged by this review-- there are 2 major hurdles for an IF game: an engaging story and smooth playability. Writing a good story is HARD. Making it playable just takes testing and the gruntwork of fixing what the testers find. The author has cleared the “story” hurdle by a wide margin. I recommend putting in the time for the second hurdle and this game will be enormously fun.
3.) Mooncrash! by @Silverthorn
Normally I start reviews by saying something good about a game and then move into criticism. I’m going to reverse that tendency for this one. This is an Inform game, which is my wheelhouse both as an author and as a player. I’m sympathetic to the difficulties of writing an Inform game, especially the first one. But I like Inform games to be well-made. There are many of the standard new-author problems with Mooncrash. You are as good-looking as ever. Almost nothing in the descriptions is implemented. There are some hiccups. There’s a laundry list of things new Inform authors do wonkily, and this game checks a lot of items on that list.
But.
None of that really mattered here, because the game was so. Much. Fun. It was really just delightful. A fantasy game with dramatic writing that needs to be purple and is suitably lilac, Mooncrash touches on all the fantasy tropes: dragons, battles with HP, mage-god-type guys with names like “The Fateweaver”, etc. It’s the end of the world! What are you going to do? Make fantasy machines, fight grinning imps, navigate mazes, and find out whether or not you can reach Mount Doom and throw the ring in the fire! Well, not that last part.
There are 4 different sections to this. You’ll start out taking a little personality quiz that tells you where to start. I ended up starting at what I think is the easiest section: The Watcher. I’d hate to think of ending up with The Shroud first. After your first win or lose, you can choose your path and rack up some expertise with weapons.
I didn’t finish in 2 hours-- I didn’t beat To Cheat Destiny with that mfing Shroud. But I’m gonna get that done.
I do recommend that the author smooth this game out to be in line with the standard IF player’s expectations once the Comp is over. Get some testers here and it will be pretty easy to get it sparkling. But even with its newbie flaws, this game is just a rollicking way to spend some time. Great job, Laura.
Thanks - I’m glad you had a good time in spite of the issues! You’re right that I’m new at this, and I fell into lots of pitfalls on this one. I’ll definitely run my games by some more experienced IF folks (and more specifically people who will know what to look for in newbie inform7 games) next time. Most of my playtesters had very little IF experience, as I didn’t know how open people here are to helping with playtesting. Now I know! 
The examine text was something that I really wish I’d had more time for, and I wish I’d known the conventions before the competition. Thank you for pointing out that it needed some more work - I’ll focus on that more next time around. I mainly added it in The Watcher’s section, and even then, I kept it mostly to ‘useful’ information (like letting you know when you’ve crafted a part of the machine correctly). Most of the fun flavor got shunted to room descriptions, which, looking back, was probably a mistake.
Have fun with the rest of the comp, and let me know what you think if/when you run through the final chapter! Also, no shame in checking the walkthrough for To Cheat Destiny if desired - there are a few ways to beat it, but imo none of them are totally reasonable. ^^
You’re welcome! It was a pleasure to play it.
Opinions differ on this, and there are pitfalls to doing it both ways. Have huge room descriptions and important things can get lost in them. Have a ton of information in the descriptions of items-- especially if there are many items-- and players may think they have to read through all of it, or may get overwhelmed by scenery. World-building is tough to get right in parser IF, because you can’t do it like you would in a novel. It’s one of the beautiful challenges of the art form, and I’m always happy to see a new artist join the scene.
Hi @AmandaB! Thanks for taking the time to play through our game and share your thoughts; we really appreciate your generous and detailed review.
On timed texts– I hadn’t realized how strongly the community feels about those, and that’s very helpful to know moving forward. I’m just now reflecting on how we’ve used those effects more for mood than mechanics and I see how they can sometimes get in the way of the experience.
I also hear you on the clickable text and navigation, you’re definitely not the only one who felt that some of the link placements turned into a bit of a scavenger hunt. We were experimenting with subtlety and symbolism but I can see how that came at the cost of clarity in places. We’ll do our best to patch or improve this post-comp or even within the comp timeframe if possible.
It means a lot that you still found the story engaging despite these bumps. We’re learning a lot from feedback like yours, and we’re excited to keep improving. 
You’re very welcome-- I really liked the game! In particular I liked the fragmented structure and I did think many of the text effects were quite effective. If you’re interested in a game that uses timed text to good effect, check out Dysfluent by @Ally. It’s a great example of a game that makes full use of the annoyances of timed text.
I’m excited to see what y’all do next!
4.) Eight Last Signs in the Desert by @laughingpineapple
I’ve been sitting here trying to think of what to say about this game visual novel poem
experience.
This is something to surrender to. You cannot wring sense from it. You cannot construct a narrative from it. You simply let go and let your eyes follow the words and the images, try to make choices that ripple or clash. Its surreal lyric prose and its flowing jumbled art will take you somewhere else if you let them, if you let go of the idea of a game or a story. If you just look at old junk in the sand, the tattered snakeskins of a dying culture.
I turned off the music, which interfered with my contemplation of the strangely familiar.
The timed text is also an unwelcome distraction (beating beating that drum).
I loved this and will replay it several times. Thanks for the rift in space, Eva.
5.) Clickbait by @rolson28
Clearly a first parser game, Clickbait would be pretty fun if there were some synonyms to work with. You go down into some icky train tunnels to get a picture for an online photography contest, meet some creepy people, solve some puzzles, and escape with a winning photograph, hopefully.
There is only one very specific action you can take to do anything, with no other options. You cannot GET WATER or PUT WATER IN CUP or PUT CUP UNDER LEAK or anything except FILL CUP WITH WATER. You cannot PUT KEYCARD ON PAD or UNLOCK DOOR or SWIPE CARD or anything except exactly UNLOCK STEEL DOOR WITH BLUE ACCESS CARD. You cannot FIX CHAIR WITH WRENCH or anything like it. The only thing that works is USE WRENCH ON CHAIR. The list goes on and on and on. Eventually, I stopped wrestling with the picky parser and just went to the walkthrough after my first couple of command attempts failed.
I did not finish because no command for the final door, not even copying and pasting the exact command from the walkthrough (UNLOCK EMERGENCY HATCH WITH GREEN KEY CARD), worked-- I got this reply: “I only understood you as far as wanting to unlock the emergency egress hatch with the glowing green access pad.” Because the disambiguation problems with colors are legion here.
This would be a serviceable game if it got some serious testing. I realize that many people entering the comp just didn’t know that this community existed, so I can’t fault folks for not polishing their games when they, like me, probably don’t know any other parser players IRL. But please, folks, 2 things:
1.) Get some testers. Even non parser players will try things like GET WATER.
2.) Even without testers, keep in mind that the order of events/ exact command you want players to do will never happen. Like, never. Players will NEVER do the thing you think they are going to do in the order you think they’ll do it in. So ponder that while writing your game. Think of all the verbs people might try, or all the reasonable ways they might try to achieve something. You can’t have only one way.
Anyway, I enjoyed the game once I just surrendered to the walkthrough, although it’s a bummer I couldn’t finish it due to a disambiguation bug.
Hey thanks for the review! Sorry you couldn’t finish that is such a bummer. I’m honestly not sure why it didn’t work. You’re absolutely right this is my first try at this so was expecting some bugs but that’s a weird one. I did have some play testers but they’d never played this type of game before so probably weren’t as keen on trying a bunch of different things. Everyone else told me they were able to finish though so I’m not sure what happened with your play through. Definitely will refine my work more for the next one!
EDIT: Just tested it myself again. Looks like
unlock emergency egress hatch with green key card
works, although the given command
unlock emergency hatch with green key card
also worked for me. So I’m still stumped, haha.
Thank you so much for choosing my game as one of the first games to give attention to (and a lot more time than I estimated the game to be. that wasn’t collected from my playtesters), and also taking the time to write a review!! When I set out, I tried to make my only goal be to find someone else who either loved the mysteries around this creature, or would come to by all the dropped nuggets of crazy info about these creatures. In the first sentence of your review I received that more than I hoped! But I also felt what others have described at their first entry which was disappointment in the experience of gameplay you described even though I thought I wouldn’t. I don’t want to defend the amount of play testing I did, I applied all the recommended changes but I definitely could have done more (and got more transcripts instead of just feedback). This is to say that your entire review is very helpful, as others have also shared about the gift of this kind of feedback.
It’s a common problem. You’re way ahead of me-- I can’t get anyone I know to even LOOK at one of my parser games. They won’t even try it. So I’m jealous that you have people who will engage at all.
The curse of the IF author is that we all have a fairly linear progression in our minds-- we know how the game is meant to be played and it’s hard to get away from that. After writing some 10 games I’m still plagued by it, although I’ve improved somewhat. Your game had a lot going for it-- it just needs a lot of alternate reasonable commands implemented. It’s a lot of work to code all those, but it will be worth it.
Don’t be discouraged. You have the hard part beaten. You should have seen the state of the first game I wrote when I sent it to testers. It was bloody awful. A dozen testers and countless hours later it was playable but rickety (as it remains to this day because I’ve never gone back to recode it). To write IF is to be in a constant state of learning how to make a story accessible.
6.) Lady Thalia and the Case of Clephan by @Encorm and @EJoyce
After 5 games by new authors, I wanted to play something by established authors, and I was really in the mood for a Thalia game. This is the fourth in the series, and you can absolutely play it without having played the others-- it does an admirable job of cluing you into the background without being boring for old fans. But I recommend you play them in order because they’re so great and everything’s been building up to this game.
Briefly, Thalia is an Edwardian era master thief who excels at fashionable crime, sparkling repartee, and hiding her sexual identity from narrow-minded and repressive English high society. She has a longstanding sexually charged battle of wits with Margaret “Melpomene” Williams, a police detective turned private eye. In this episode, Thalia has left her life of crime to work with Mel, not so much because most criminal enterprises eventually try to become legit, but to pursue her romantically.
The mechanics are the same, requiring you to read people’s characters accurately to decide how to approach them in conversation (occasionally as both Thalia and Mel at once!), and with action sequences that feel decidedly more interactive than most choice-based IF. You aren’t just clicking through this story-- your choices matter and there’s far more player agency than you get in most Twine games.
[some spoilers in the next paragraph!]
And this installment made my heart hurt a little. Thalia at a typewriter? Like every other woman of the era who wanted to be more? Reduced to picking the locks on file cabinets in her own office? I confess I resented Mel a bit for this. Although Thalia does get to exercise her criminal skills in a twisty story involving a fraudulent Thalia, seances, secret orders, and priceless treasures, it’s not the same and Thalia knows it. There’s a vein of sadness and uncertainty about identity running through this story, making it more serious than usual. The authors lean into this, making it clear that Thalia’s old life is gone for good, including her long-term involvement with Gwen, a former romantic partner who grades Thalia on her success/failure at navigating the puzzles she encounters (a neat trick to score the player without seeming too “gamy”). Will we keep Gwen around in the next game? If not, how will the player be scored?
This is an excellent outing for Thalia & company, with all your favorite characters returning (Yay, Yorkie!), and with the will-they-or-won’t-they romance finally seeing some real movement, but it signals a definite shift in the storyline, one that saddened me. After all, by the end of the game, Thalia is actually getting to be OK with that typewriter.
Thanks so much for your review! And don’t worry – we’re not planning on sticking Thalia with the paperwork long term. 
We did initially intend the secretary stuff to be as much a “respectable” cover for why she’s actually working there (i.e. thief stuff) as much as a starting point for her character arc this game but I think the first part got lost a bit in all the melodrama, so that’s something we can try to emphasize better in the post-comp release.
As for future games without Gwen, if you look closely we’ve already set up someone to take over the scoring!
No, that was clear. It just bugged me to see her doing it. But it was the kind of bugging that’s necessary in a long-term story. Things can’t stay the same forever. Sometimes a character has to change, even if it hurts to see it happen. I would have enjoyed another typical Thalia installment, but this one made me have deep feels instead of just entertaining me.
Aww, thank you! Sorry for misunderstanding. We’re touched people feel so much for the characters (including Gwen, who I promise isn’t gone for good)!
7.) A Rock’s Tale by @FlamingPickle
This is a nice little game where you play, you guessed it, a rock. Not just any rock, but a talking busybody rock who likes to help bring people together. A social glue kind of rock. You meet people, talk to them, and hook them up with other folks you meet to help them. Although you have snarky unhelpful options at your disposal, which can lead (of course) to your downfall, your goal is to find out who needs what service and who can provide it, who is in love with whom and how to get them to talk about it, etc. There’s nothing here that’s amazing, but it’s a pleasant way to spend some time. The writing is solid and can be funny. The cast of characters is zany.
The best part is when you meet the Dog God! But somehow the game ended without an option to go back when I went through the door of the Dog God. I had only gotten to about half the endings. I don’t particularly want to restart and play through again, which is a common feeling for me. I very, very rarely will restart a game. I appreciated the “go back to the last decision point” options throughout much of the game and was sorry when that disappeared.
There was a formatting bug which I’ll hide a picture of below in case the author is interested in fixing it. It didn’t affect gameplay, but it was quite noticeable.
I enjoyed my time with this game.
8.) Rain Check-In by @Zeno
I gave this a good-faith effort 3 times. I like the setup a lot! But I kept losing without good reason and I’m just not into games that are constantly ending when I’m trying to learn the rules. I ran into a bug that was exasperating-- while trying to turn the wheels on the lockbox, the third wheel kept sticking and not letting me turn it, with a typed choice number just erasing on pressing return. And I lost due to being wet when the dials have to be turned many times to hit the right combination.
I don’t know why the game didn’t tell me about the footnotes at the start. I kept seeing numbers, but it doesn’t tell you what they are or that the correct command for viewing them is FOOTNOTE NUMBER until you lose. This just really bothers me as a game design decision. So I have to lose once to get important information? This tells me that the game is working against me, not with me.
There were multiple oddities which are too small to mention. Well- I’ll mention one as an example: USE TORCH disambiguated to “Use torch (to pry phone).” I’ve had these same kind of problems in Inform and so I sympathize, but there were many hitches like this. Tons of things are not implemented, so you find a wheel with a gear but you can’t examine the gear. The syntax is a little off-- I understand that English is not the author’s first language, and that AI was used to help. But when it’s a little difficult to understand what something is (and I wonder if that’s the AI making things strange), you think perhaps examining its parts could help, and when its parts aren’t implemented (“you can’t see any such thing”), that’s a problem. Inform is hard because players expect that everything you mention will be implemented. It’s hard, boring work to code all that, but it’s necessary. I love puzzly parser games, and this had the makings of a good one. But it’s a cruel game, too cruel for its somewhat clunky gameplay. When you’re struggling with the parser and you’re using up turns because of that and then losing, it’s just not fair to the player. And I really just don’t want to play cruel games in this day and age. I put in my time with that in the 80s and 90s and now I want games that aren’t out to get me.
I’ve harped on the problems with a game I didn’t get very far into, but I do think there’s a lot here that’s valuable-- I was intrigued by the ambience and the story and my first explorations. The author can iron out all these problems and make it a smooth playing experience, and then I will certainly try it again.
