DemonApologist's IFComp 2024 Responses

[DemonApologist]

Context for Responses

With encouragement from a friend, I somewhat impulsively joined the Single Choice Jam, my first time ever writing interactive fiction or joining a game jam. It was the most intense creative process I’ve experienced in a while now. While I wouldn’t necessarily want to do a project so last-minute again, it did successfully get me interested in the IF genre. I feel like I have a reason to write again, and I’m really thankful for that.

Prior to the start of August, the only interactive fiction games I had played before were Anchorhead and one of the Unnkulia games (I think it was Unnkulia One-Half? There was something called a “cheezdom” involved. I don’t care to elaborate further.) Anyway, that was like 20 years ago… so I’m curious to see what contemporary interactive fiction authors are making. What great timing then, to be around to observe this big event.

I’m in (hopefully) an interesting position I think as someone with a lot of opinions about writing, narrative, etc., but not very familiar with interactive fiction’s specific genre trappings. Like, to me, perhaps even the mechanics of a very basic “parser game” (I only recently even learned what that means!) will be fresh and interesting as I’m not jaded by playing dozens of games in that genre already. Then again, my responses/analysis might be annoying or basic because of that same unfamiliarity. I’ll leave it to you to decide which side my commentary ended up on.

IF Comp 2024 Response Format

For each game that I play, I’m writing up responses with the following information:

Progress: How far did I get? How long did it take to play and what endings (if any) did I encounter? Did I have to stop due to reaching the 2-hour judging limit?

Things I Appreciated: Pretty self-explanatory, these are the elements of the game or narrative experience that I want to highlight as positive.

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions: This is a catch-all for anything that raised questions for me in terms of the experience. Is there a game mechanic or presentation element that I thought could be improved? Are there elements of the narrative or presentation that didn’t work for me? My intention is to be critical out of curiosity more than from a place of judgment, though I acknowledge it may not always come across that way when there’s a gap in perspective. I’ve told you what kind of person I am (very inexperienced with IF) so hopefully that helps with contextualizing my criticism when it arises. I bet I have made many silly mistakes while playing that don’t reflect on the quality of these games at all. So, look forward to that, I guess.

What I learned about IF writing/game design: I’m approaching this as someone who wants to learn more about the genre and writing, and I think any work has a lot to offer in terms of its structure/presentation. I want to acknowledge elements of games that give me tools or insight to better understand the craft.

Quote: An impactful or funny quote from the game.

Lasting Memorable Moment: The moment in my experience of the game that leaves the strongest impression, looking back at it.

By the way, I will be discussing plot/theme elements so if you are spoiler averse, I guess watch out for that? I’ll try to remember to spoiler tag anything especially juicy.

Okay I think that’s way too much information everything. I’ve been playing these in the “personal shuffle” order selected by the IF Comp website’s randomizer. Surely, it knows best for me. Right?

Alphabetical Index of Response Links

198BREW
An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There
The Apothecary’s Assistant
Awakened Deeply
Bad Beer
The Bat
Big Fish
Birding in Pope Lick Park
Breakfast in the Dolomites
Bureau of Strange Happenings
Campfire
Civil Service
The Curse
A Death in Hyperspace
Deliquescence
The Den
The Deserter
Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain
The Dragon of Silverton Mine
A Dream Of Silence: Act 3
Dust
Eikas
A Few hours later in the day of The Egocentric
Final Call
First Contact
Focal Shift
Forbidden Lore
Forsaken Denizen
The Garbage of the Future
Hebe
Hildy
House of Wolves
Imprimatura
The Killings in Wasacona
KING OF XANADU
LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST
The Lost Artist: Prologue
The Master’s Lair
The Maze Gallery
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
The Saltcast Adventure
The Shyler Project
Sidekick
String Theory
Traffic
The Triskelion Affair
Turn Right
Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe
Uninteractive Fiction
Unreal People
Verses
A Very Strong Gland
A Warm Reception
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

[DemonApologist]

1 | FINAL CALL

1 | FINAL CALL
by: doq, Emily S

Progress:

• I was able to complete this game pretty fast (I think I spent maybe 40-50 minutes on this total?), and went back to play a second time to get a different ending. I could’ve perhaps gone through again trying to brute force to get every ending, but I felt satisfied with what I saw.

Things I Appreciated:

• I was never lost and thought that the puzzles and navigation were communicated clearly.

• I liked the use of randomized flavor text in the casino (watching blackjack games and using the slot machines) to make the scene feel more dynamic.

• The shift from a thriller to more of a horror genre was engaging, as well as the protagonist’s past coming back to weigh upon their current mental state.

• I appreciate the effort toward including sound and visual/image elements to add to the atmosphere.

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:

• The thing that I think would really enhance this game would be a stronger standardization of the base game formatting. I noticed that there was inconsistent spacing between paragraphs (especially on screens where more text was being revealed). I think making the format internally consistent would make the times when the format is being broken intentionally for effect to have a stronger impact. On a similar note, there was a screen (red text on the mirror background) that was difficult to read due to the color not showing up well. I think these are the kind of details that could be adjusted to smooth out the player experience.

• I wonder what the purpose was of letting the player input a name for the protagonist? In this case, it seems like the character we are playing as is someone specific, as opposed to a blank/customized character. Maybe this is an IF norm I’m unaware of, but I feel like it would’ve strengthened the characterization to just pick a name for the character and call them that. Perhaps even a close third person instead of second person POV would have worked? On my second playthrough I entered the name “Roxy” in case there was an easter egg and it led it to be especially uncanny. (Uh, sorry for being a chaos goblin about that That one is on me for sure.)

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

• I thought this piece made effective use of the sidebar to store information that the player has gathered. I didn’t need to take my own notes because I was reminded as to what was there already. It felt like the game anticipated what I needed so I didn’t have to work awkwardly outside the game’s own UI.

• I liked the uses of timed text, such as when Roxy is giving an impassioned speech and the prompt to click through appears before her text is done. This helps immerse the reader/player into the feeling that your character has an impulse to dismiss what she has to say before you’ve even heard it all.

• I also like how the possibilities in some locations change when you visit them again, such as being able to reflect in the mirror more. I haven’t tried implementing something like that in Twine yet but I’m encouraged by seeing this game use that effectively.

Quote:

• “The fine customers of this ‘clean, safe, fun’ establishment.” (Made me laugh)

Lasting Memorable Moment:

• When I used the magnet on the slot machine and the protagonist is betrayed, punctuated with the bright red background. I wasn’t expecting that and thought it was impactful in pivoting the game from exploring the casino to the second half of the game.

[DemonApologist]

2 | UNDER THE COGNOMEN OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

2 | UNDER THE COGNOMEN OF EDGAR ALLAN POE
by: Jim Nelson

Progress:

• After two hours of gameplay (where I’m required to stop for judging) I have found only 7 out of 18 clues and I feel like I’m not that far in the story yet. It’s unfortunate—I’m not really accustomed to analyzing work without completing it. Were this not being judged for a competition, I definitely would have continued playing.

Things I Appreciated:

• The writing quality is very high. It has just enough description to create a scene without belaboring the point. There’s a very distinct tone and mood to it. I feel like I should say more about it since proportionately, my primary experience of playing this game was enjoying immersive, well crafted writing, but I meander on to a lot of other random topics in this response. So, I just want to emphasize that here.

• It has that referential quality where you feel like it is referring to existing works but still retains a distinct identity. As I played I was thinking of Anchorhead (admittedly one of the only two parser games I have ever played before this, but imagine if I compared it to Unnkulia instead…) as well as The Prestige (and maybe even Tenet a bit??) but not in a way where I felt like it was derivative.

• Mr. Belyle (who I am assuming is a demon, i.e., Belial). I have no doubt that I can change him, etc. I wish I made it far enough to become an authentic Mr. Belyle stan.

• The entire split/duplicate plot point is so intriguing, I wish I got to see all the creative ways it would eventually get used since it has a ton of potential.

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:

• I want to start this by saying that this game does a great job offering help, hints, and prompting what types of things you should be interacting with. That being said, aspects of the parser gameplay are unnatural to me. For instance, I reached a point in the hotel suite where it turned out that the “solution” was to just leave and go do something else, which turned out to be to return to a different place I had already checked (the bar/polling place) that has someone new there due to the passage of time. I guess I find this unnatural because I don’t like to feel like I have to aimlessly re-check every location every so often just in case a new event is available. There’s a bit of immersion lost for me when I think, in-universe, this character would already know why they should go to this location next based on their internal drives and motivations and just do that, whereas the much more fallible out-of-universe player (my sorry ass) doesn’t always have a strong enough grasp of what’s going on to naturally make the choices that the character would. I suspect that this is a (prior to this, invisible to me) parser game norm that this is how players are expected to interact with locations (i.e., if you don’t know what to do, systematically backtrack through every location until you find something). To bring this long-ass tangent to a merciful end, I don’t think the author has done anything wrong here really and it boils down to my inexperience with the genre, but I figured I’d report my thoughts regardless.

• I found it disorienting that this was in 2nd person point of view, because the perspective character (I think?) is changing over the course of the scenes in different eras. Or maybe it’s the same person in all these times and I just didn’t fully grasp that? The reason I think it’s disorienting is because if written in 3rd person, you’d see “Theophilus does x thing” and be instantly anchored to whoever the point of view character is. But in 2nd person, it’s always “you” doing things regardless of who “you” are, so if the POV character changes it can be hard to track that. I suspect there is a tradeoff here where 3rd person is considered to be less immersive (since you are filtering thoughts and actions more by attributing them to Theophilus instead of just thinking them “yourself”) but I don’t know, I think for my personal tastes if the character is going to be someone extremely specific and distinct (as opposed to a blank protagonist) I would prefer 3rd person. Maybe I’ll change my mind on this if I ever go back to fully play the game after the event ends, having experienced (I assume) several more 2nd person parser games by that point.

• And just a minor point, I feel this game uses a lot of era-specific diction (e.g., “toper”, “gibus”). While I just looked these words up outside the game, I wonder if having an in-game glossary for setting-specific terms like this would be worthwhile?

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

• Well, in general, I learned a lot about the basic function of parser games. In particular, what I would highlight is how the writing works to direct you to the things that you should interact with. I think this is accomplished especially with the spacing of paragraphs, with each paragraph having a line or two pointing to a specific scene element. This is noticeably different than a more narrative writing style where the reader is a less active participant. This piece makes great use of shorter, punchier paragraphs making a single observation rather than trying to do too much at once. The writing is very efficient, without losing important tone/atmosphere/sensory detail.

• Mental mapping—one of the benefits of the “aimless wandering” gameplay style that I discussed above is that it helps you develop an internal mental map of which locations are connected to each other. This game (at least as far as I got) doesn’t have an overwhelming number of locations, so after traversing them a few times I felt like I intuitively knew which direction commands to enter to get where I needed to go. The “thing I learned” here is the economy of space—having fewer locations that are more densely used is better than having a sprawling map that is more static (and avoiding the feeling that you are just being guided along a hallway). Based on the progress I did make in the 2 hours, I felt like the scope of the map was appropriate to the scope of the game.

• I think based on this experience, it makes me more interested in playing parser games but far less interested in ever trying to write one. I’m just picturing the author spending god knows how long programming this, and then some random no-parser-knowledge-ass person like me types a command like “put gibus on poe’s head” to get the result “Edgar Allan Poe doesn’t appear to have any head,” a patently absurd statement which I laughed at and then felt bad about laughing at. The thought of having to preemptively imagine what kind of wacky ideas your players have so that you can program sensible responses feels like a brutally Sisyphean task. The alternative, being to just have to accept that even in your expertly written game, it’s an inevitability that a player might be told that Poe doesn’t have a head, is something that I would have a hard time coping with as an author.

Quote:

• “Without a doubt, it’s your double lying across the gurney—your duplicate, inert and inanimate.” (The moment I said, “Excuse me, WHAT?”)

Lasting Memorable Moment:

• Choosing between “fame” or “literary” and then walking down the split hallway to see your doppelgänger in the mirror, really punctuates the stakes of the contract and was a really cool moment.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@DemonApologist

I’m in (hopefully) an interesting position I think as someone with a lot of opinions about writing, narrative, etc., but not very familiar with interactive fiction’s specific genre trappings. Like, to me, perhaps even the mechanics of a very basic “parser game” (I only recently even learned what that means!) will be fresh and interesting as I’m not jaded by playing dozens of games in that genre already.

I just want to say, as someone who’s been in the IF scene for a decade, this is a perspective I would love to hear more from, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing reviews made through this lens!

[DemonApologist]

3 | THE DEN

3 | THE DEN
by: Ben Jackson

Progress:

• I was able to complete this game in around 1h45m, reaching an ending that I found satisfying.

Things I Appreciated:

• The game did a great job creating stakes where it felt like I was on the verge of failing (i.e., the recharge rate of Father ticking upwards, the main power time ticking downwards) when there was actually ample time for me to do everything I needed to. Even though I had read the game’s assurance that it was essentially impossible to create a no-win scenario, I still felt the tension building and felt pressure to be deliberate about the number of turns that I was using.

• The game’s interface felt very natural and unimposing. It was easy to navigate between rooms, different characters, and input information like in the decryption game.

• The puzzles all had very reasonable solutions. While I didn’t necessarily feel challenged by the puzzles, what I appreciated a lot is that sometimes when there was an “obvious” solution, something would go wrong, creating a bit of a twist where you had to do something else. (Retrieving the screwdriver comes to mind: you think you’re just going to solve it with a basic use of a magnet and get swerved by the magnet failing, requiring you to take another route). Similarly, the checkmarks indicate rooms that you don’t need to revisit as you’re done there, which reduces some of the tedium of re-checking locations.

• The plot/themes unfold in an elegant way. There are various interesting “reveals” that build on each other, and when you realize the overarching theme of what the game is doing, suddenly a lot of the details click into place. I imagine the game is enjoyable to replay as a result, because you would read it with the knowledge of what details to look for. Very cool!

• The decryption minigame—finally, all the time I’ve wasted playing Wordle has paid off.

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:

• It took me a bit to get used to the presentation style at the beginning—I didn’t like that when you clicked to a new scene, several paragraphs appeared at once. My attention was often drawn to the choices at the bottom first rather than the text. For my personal reading style, I would have loved if, on entering a new scene, the text appears one paragraph at a time (with a click through to reveal more until the choices at the end). You wouldn’t want this to happen when returning to a scene you’ve already seen as it would waste time, but I think this would’ve helped me feel immersed in the text at the beginning of the game, where my experience was a bit scattered. I think this is entirely a personal preference thing and to be clear, I locked in to the style pretty quickly as it is. This is just like, if I had to find anything structurally about this game to change, what I would suggest.

• One thing I didn’t like was that when switching characters, their name would appear and then disappear instantly when mousing over the name (replacing it with the text of the scene). This caught me off guard (mini jump-scare) the first time it happened because my mouse happened to be in a place that auto-triggered this event when I’d just started the game basically. I’d recommend instead a “click anywhere on the screen” type interface since that’s a more active choice by the player rather than easy to trigger accidentally as I did.

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

• Having experienced a few different types of games now, this feels a bit more “parser-like” than a more straightforward Twine narrative. Like obviously it doesn’t meet the definition of a parser game, but I think what I’m struggling to say is that the room-by-room navigation feels like a distinctly different genre that evokes some of the exploration style of a parser game. It reminds me of point-and-click mystery/puzzle games but text-focused. I thought this was an appealing way of structuring a game.

• This is another example of how important the user interface is. The side panel should not be undervalued as a space for easing the player experience, so I’ll try to remember that and think about how this game used that space so well.

• The game stores information that you’ve learned so that when you return to a location with new knowledge, you receive a new version of the scene. I’ve only used Twine in a very basic way for the one/first game that I made for the Single Choice Jam 2024, so I’m looking forward to better understanding the system and how it uses variables, I’m assuming, to create these kinds of effects.

• There was one interesting moment where I was about to leave with Vee having never visited the VCU room where the game prompted me to consider if I had time to visit it. I thought this was a fascinating choice because part of the interactive element is that the player could just choose not to reveal lore information when solving the puzzles. But the game wants you to see this room because of its significance. There’s a tradeoff where the game shows its hand a bit in prompting you to go here, vs. just allowing you to not learn the information at this location. I thought the way it was presented, while it did tip me off, at least does some legerdemain to frame it more about your choice (do you have enough time?) so that it still feels like you have the agency to ignore it even though, realistically, you won’t. I think this is a lesson in balancing real vs. illusive player agency and the tradeoffs that can happen.

Quote:

• “If you go now, you will never be able to return.”

Lasting Memorable Moment:

• Encountering the apple tree in the viral containment unit and suddenly realizing, you know… the implications! (And similarly, the very final screen where the lights go off on the title art.)

[DemonApologist]

4 | UNINTERACTIVE FICTION

4 | UNINTERACTIVE FICTION
by: Leah Thargic

Progress:

• I was able to complete this game in under 30 seconds (impressive, I know). I tried playing a few more times just in case something different would happen. I also tried waiting a bit before clicking through if that mattered. After that, I got bored of trying to figure out if there was anything else to it, went to the game’s thread to see if anyone else found anything, and then felt satisfied that I had experienced the game fully.

Things I Appreciated:

• The game delivers exactly what it promises and no more. Well that’s not true—the sound effect was unexpected. So it actually marginally overshot my expectations.

• I think the attempt to do some kind of troll/meta game has some merit to it. It is reminiscent of that John Cage composition 4’33’’ where the music is just the sounds of the audience waiting awkwardly for it to be over. Uninteractive Fiction performs similarly where the main value to be had is less from the work itself than the discussion it prompts. I suspect that “Leah Thargic” is enjoying seeing how people talk about this game, assuming the melatonin hasn’t kicked in already.

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:

• There’s one kind of sinister aspect to this game to me, which is the thought that because it is so successfully attention-grabbing and basic, more people will play and score this game than many of the entries whose creators spent hours/days/months/years pouring energy into their projects. Like, based on the structure of judging, I’d imagine this game will get a huge amount of ratings and reviews while other art languishes in the “I’ll get to that eventually” pile. This isn’t so much a critique of the game as just like, a reflection of the attention economy and the feeling of self-exploitation to produce creative work that no one engages with or cares about. I think that’s a feeling that a lot of writers, artists, etc., could empathize with. I certainly feel that way about almost everything I’ve ever made, no matter how much effort I put into it.

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

• If your goal is to make a meta joke, the author’s attentiveness to the audience and context is very important in shaping the impact of the joke. In this case, the creator of the game has successfully leveraged the context of a highly anticipated/prestigious event to get this IF community talking about their work.

Quote:

• “You lose.”

Lasting Memorable Moment:

• The sound effect that plays when you lose.

[Rob (Roberto Marcarini)]

It doesn’t matter how. The important thing is that people talk about it.
PS:
The game has been fixed!

[DemonApologist]

5 | MISS DUCKWORTHY’S SCHOOL FOR MAGIC-INFESTED YOUNG PEOPLE

5 | MISS DUCKWORTHY’S SCHOOL FOR MAGIC-INFESTED YOUNG PEOPLE
by: Felicity Banks

Progress:

• I played through the game and reached an ending after about 1h10m.

Things I Appreciated:

• The player character customization was great. I like that it was a compromise between a totally blank protagonist and a specifically defined character—there were different pre-existing backgrounds to choose from. My character was Lucas, an artsy Canadian car thief borrower with purple hair who was “as gay as a bucket of glitter.” Fittingly enough, he grew fairy wings shortly thereafter. I was delighted.

• Have you ever been as gay as a bucket of glitter, with purple hair, giant fairy wings, and a gun, headed on a roadtrip to Alaska? Well, now I have.

• I really enjoyed the prologue (prior to getting to the school). I was instantly engaged in the story and was excited to see where it was going.

• I liked the visual presentation of the choices at the bottom of each screen set apart from the main text in a table. This made it easier for me to focus on the narrative first before evaluating the choices.

• The magical school setting was well developed, I enjoyed the different scenes and descriptions of the food (which I normally don’t even like but because my character was so consistently hungry, I was invested in hearing about it).

• I connected the most with the character Amity. I was invested in helping her solve mysteries and try to activate her magic. I like the aspect of interactive fiction here that allows me to focus on the most interesting element of a world instead of feeling like I’m being pulled away from things I like as can happen in “static” fiction.

• I thought the magic development being based on story tropes was an interesting meta aspect of the narrative, with characters openly discussing if it was possible to essentially take control of their magical development and rig it to get what they want. That was a fun and unexpected approach.

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:

• The main issues I had with this game were in terms of the pacing of the narrative. I was caught completely off guard by the game ending. This isn’t such a bad thing; because I was invested in the narrative my mindset was that this was essentially the first act of the story (deciding who would be in charge of the school). So my expectations were wildly off in the scope of the game.

• The romance plotline felt underdeveloped. I was looking forward to that element but I didn’t feel much of a connection with Mulyadi. From my perspective, he just abruptly showed up and then we ended up dating without me really learning that much about him or spending a lot of time with him. The main trait of his that was developed was that he’s secretly rich, so good for Lucas, I guess . Maybe this reflects more on the choices that I made, but that’s how it went for me.

• The narrative does a good job simulating the experience of a character being dropped into a pre-existing political power struggle that they have to navigate. But I don’t know if I wanted it to be simulating that. I felt like I was being asked to decide things without grasping the significance of them. The scene of arriving at the school feels very busy because it’s full of a lot of interesting things happening, but as a player/reader I wish there was more uncluttered time to just learn about the school and develop relationships organically before the power struggle takes over the plot. I think a slower pace when arriving at the school is essential because I wanted to learn about the community, how things are run, etc., to develop an informed opinion of which side I wanted to support, before the conflict really takes off. As it stands, the actual power struggle/main plot felt less engaging to me than the setting and developing character relationships and my own character’s perspectives.

• I felt like the way characters popped in and out was a bit disorienting. For example, I spent some time meeting a person named Rohan and their winged baby, and then after that Rohan disappeared and I never found them again. Meanwhile, Amity just kind of shows up out of nowhere as a major character, which is great because I really liked her, but I didn’t have a lot of context as to why she was suddenly there. Similarly, at the end I looked at my “stats” and learned there was someone named Ravindra who didn’t appear in this playthrough at all that I encountered.

• Because I had fairy wings, I thought it made the most sense to take flying lessons to maximize that specialization. I was surprised during the final battle when instead of using the skill that I trained, my character abruptly used some kind of acid attack that I didn’t realize that I had the ability to do. In hindsight, I think as a player I should’ve picked the tasks that specifically signaled that flying was involved, rather than just assuming that I would use the flying skill in the situation I chose.

• Okay, I feel like this set of commentary gives the impression that I didn’t enjoy the game, so I just want to reaffirm that I did have fun and the long and short of it is that I just want things to be developed/fleshed out further. I would definitely want to play more games (or next chapters) in this game universe.

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

• This was the first game that I played that had a customizable player character, which I think is a great device. I appreciated how the game handles it which I discussed above. Something I want to highlight is how important it is to include periodic reminders that are specific to the background you chose as a reminder of your customization and to create the illusion that your personalization matters. I thought this game did a good job doing that, I took note of it hoping that if I ever want to write something with multiple character backgrounds/choices, I want to pepper in contextual details like that to improve the specificity of character and improve the feeling that the reader/player’s choices matter.

• One of the most important lessons I think this game has to teach is about the economy of choice. In any given playthrough, by the game’s design, the player is missing a significant percentage of the possible encounters/content. This is a tough tradeoff; on one hand, this game is very replayable and encourages you to try different routes to get the full picture of the world. On the other hand, I am evaluating based on the specific playthrough I got resulting from my choices. In my case, the narrative doesn’t quite cohere and I feel like I was missing out. My question is, how do you balance replayability/choices mattering with the desire for the player to have a satisfying experience even if they only play once? That’s a question that I grappled with in developing my Single Choice Jam game, so it’s been on my mind. I don’t think I would have a fully satisfying experience here unless I play this game at least one more time.

Quote:

• “The troll grabs Jimmy, carrying him under one arm like a very surprised suitcase.”

Lasting Memorable Moment:

• The moment when Lucas jumps off the highway overpass trying to land in the snow, and sprouts glittery fairy wings to survive. It was (literally) a magical moment and got me so excited for what was going to happen next.

[DemonApologist]

6 | CAMPFIRE

6 | CAMPFIRE
by: loreKin

Progress:

• I played through the game and completed my camping trip in about 20 minutes. In this playthrough, the items I purchased were: corn, vegetables, magic fire, camping stool, newspaper, and juice.

Things I Appreciated:

• This was a relaxing slice-of-life style simulator, so as far as I can tell, there are really no “bad” choices you can make as a player. I thought the piece was successful in creating that feeling that you can just do what you want without ill effects, while still giving you a small push to be realistic about your choices.

• I liked the detail of tracking the amount of money you had left for camping supplies etc., even though it’s low stakes since you can’t really mess it up unless you are intentionally trying to (which I didn’t attempt but maybe someone else will), it did make me feel like I should be at least a little thoughtful about my purchases and actively consider what elements I’d want to include on my camping trip.

• I thought there was some interesting use of the click-link mechanics. For instance, during the fishing activity, you have to re-click the same link to wait multiple times, encouraging the player to experience a pace slowdown that matched the situation.

• There was something rather melancholy about returning to work at the end. I feel like that captures the sense of how fleeting a vacation/respite is, and how the time spent camping is almost made more valuable because of that fleeting nature. If you didn’t have to return, you’d value the experience less, yet, the act of returning triggers these mixed emotions.

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:

• I encountered a noticeable bug on the morning of Day 2. The counter for the number of activities I had time for increased, rather than decreased, when I did an activity. After doing three activities, my counter was at five, so I just chose to leave at that point. I hope this should be an easy fix since the counter works as intended for Day 1?

• Something odd that happened was that I encountered objects that I didn’t pack. This included smokies on Day 1, and the various breakfast items on Day 2. I don’t have any issues with these being included, but I think for immersion it would help to mention them in passing during the packing-the-car phase so the player knows that they have those things when they appear later on.

• In reverse of the above: I decided to buy and pack the magic fire (because who doesn’t want to change the fire to be zany colors, that sounds fun! Don’t warn me about burning toxic chemicals or whatever and ruin it!) but in my session I didn’t encounter an opportunity to use that item.

• In general, this piece needed more rounds of revision for typos and other minor formatting errors (for instance: during the “at work” scene, sometimes italics refer to the character’s internal thoughts, and sometimes the italics bleed over to actions. I think being more consistent about when italics are used or not used will smooth out the reading experience).

• Second visits: ignoring the issue I had above with the activity counter increasing, the game allots enough activity slots that you can do each activity once and one of them twice (or I guess you could just do the same activity all four times if you wanted to). In my playthrough I decided to go on the hike twice. The second time appeared to be exactly the same text. I think it would be cool if there were at least subtle differences (for instance, time of day differences between Day 1 afternoon vs. Day 2 morning) or something that acknowledged that you’d been on the trail before and noticed different details on a second pass.

• Finally, because of the nature of this game, I feel like it would benefit significantly from even simple environmental sound effects (the crackle of the fire, wind, water flowing, etc). Text only can be fine too, of course, in which case I’d appreciate more detailed descriptions taking me further on this journey. Just in general, I felt like the experience could’ve been made even richer with detail and I would’ve enjoyed having more scene painted for me.

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

• I really liked how this game tracked and displayed counters of the currency and how many activities you had left. These mechanics make visible to the player what resources they have available, when I feel like in other games you don’t necessarily know how many turns that you have remaining.

• I think this game helps illustrate for me how satisfying it is to see your choices pay off (I bought the corn in act one, and then I get to cook and eat the corn, all according to plan!) and similarly, how unsatisfying it is when your choices don’t seem to have an impact (I packed magic fire but didn’t get to see the zany colors, how very dare you!). In short, making sure you pay off what you’ve asked the player to actively set up, feels like an important lesson for me here.

• I enjoyed the cyclical structure of the game and how it lined up with what you’d expect a camping getaway weekend to feel like. Anticipation at Work → Planning → Arrival → Actual Camping → Melancholy of Departure → Returning to Work. The overall pacing of the game made sense for the scope of the simulation.

Quote:

• “Maybe I’m just stalling now.”

Lasting Memorable Moment:

• The recognition of how it feels to have to leave your camping trip at the end. I really connect with that kind of emotional twilight that occurs at the end of a period of escape or celebration, when you suddenly become conscious of how the mood has shifted now that the hour has grown late and the proverbial “twelfth night” is sinking towards its inexorable end.

[DemonApologist]

7 | YANCY AT THE END OF THE WORLD

7 | YANCY AT THE END OF THE WORLD
by: Naomi Norbez

Progress:

• I was able to just barely clear the game within the 2-hour limit and reached the end at around 1h55m. I was worried that I was off pace, so at a certain point (maybe 2/3rds of the way through) I started ignoring the voice acting since I can read faster than I can listen to the performances. If not for the artificial constraints of IF Comp judging, I would have been fine with listening at the pace set by the voice actors, but I had to make a decision in the moment to sacrifice voice acting for the sake of completing the game in time.

What I Appreciated:

• My favorite aspect of the game is the presentation of DMs when the characters are chatting in a Legally-Distinct-From-Discord server. It can be tricky to find the right balance of writing fictional messages and making sure that each character has enough of a distinct writing style without flattening them into a caricature. In this sense, the game does an excellent job. I liked moments where, for instance, characters would make typos in their DMs and then correct them. It was used just often enough to feel realistic without becoming a distraction for me.

• Another aspect I really appreciate is the multimedia ambition of the piece. As I’ll discuss later these elements were unfinished, but I’m listing this as something to appreciate because the multimedia elements make sense for the game and I can imagine a future version where all those elements are present, thereby enriching the experience even further.

• An aspect that I find more difficult to talk about but really want to highlight is… the way this work creates what at least feels like an authentic representation of online queer spaces in a way that straddles this line of being aspirational and realistic. To say more, there are times that playing this game made me feel washed up and out of touch due to my age/identity/life experiences, and other times that it felt uncannily similar to spaces that I have familiarity with (perhaps a generation removed? I’m not sure if it really is about age or about something else). Something I want to highlight especially about the depiction is how the game portrays characters who generally mean well (minus the mother character of course who makes no attempt to meet Yancy where they’re at) but make mistakes and create conflict that has to be acknowledged and hashed out. This is what I mean by it being both aspirational and realistic—it’s aspirational in the sense that the people in this space are approaching things generally in good faith, but realistic in the sense that their divergent identities and experiences result in interpersonal conflict that they must then choose how to resolve. And the presence of a character who will never truly accept Yancy no matter what they say (at least in my playthrough) is, unfortunately, also realistic.

• This game challenged me with the depiction of the mother character, which brought up a lot of difficult emotions. I had moments where I felt legitimately tense reading and/or choosing what to do. A phone ringing made me anxious. As an example of this, I avoided going to Yancy’s mother’s house for a very long time, and then when I finally was like, “Fine I guess I’ll go,” I went knowing it would go poorly and then it did go poorly. I feel like it’s a realistic scenario where you know making that choice will go poorly, but you still do it anyway and then have to feel not only the emotional exhaustion of the negative encounter, but also the added layer of feeling that you chose this encounter even though you “should” know better. It’s really quite diabolical. Another example is when she asks Yancy to bring the blue bag to the hospital and they are forced to choose between three different bags. In that moment, I knew that no matter which bag I chose, it would be deemed the “wrong” choice. (I don’t know if that’s mechanically true within the game. I selected the drawstring bag and it was incorrect, but what I’m getting at is that it felt emotionally true that I would pick the wrong bag no matter what and I would be legitimately surprised if it turned out that the game was programmed to allow there to be a correct answer here.) By the end of the game, I felt really wrung out and had to step aside for a bit before returning to write out this commentary. I’m including this in the “appreciate” category because I appreciate that the game packed such an unexpected and authentic emotional punch, even though I also have this vague sense of resentment for being invited to feel something so raw while playing this colorful arty queer game.

• Voice acting: this is the first game I’ve encountered so far that has used voice acting at all. Encountering Yancy’s voice acting at the beginning of the game was such a pleasant surprise; they have such a warm, inviting tone and it instantly humanizes the character and I felt very connected to that performance. I appreciate that the audio quality for both Yancy and Nekoni (the only two voices that I heard during this playthrough) make them feel like real people (I mean obviously the actors are real people, but like… the performances don’t feel overacted or overly smoothed out, it instead matches the indie-ness of the game just right).

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:

• Multimedia: Almost every image link that I encountered was broken (I believe I saw three that showed up as actual images: Beck’s papercraft quartet; Mack’s sketch of a bee; an art piece by Artemis). Similarly, with only two voice actors, it sometimes made encountering conversations strange when you are played audio clips of one person speaking in a group while still trying to read it. I think this was probably a dilemma for the submission; like perhaps for completion sake it would’ve been better to exclude those elements for the draft that’s being judged so the project is more cohesive, but I can also understand the appeal of wanting to show the possibility of what the game is yet to become when these elements are eventually added.

• Link locations within the page: I had a somewhat disjointed experience at the beginning of the game where the position of links to the next event did not behave as I expected. What I expected was that, if I encountered a hyperlink in the middle of a page, I should click on it when I get to it to reveal more text, because I had encountered game mechanics like that in prior submissions. However, the result of this was sending me through to the next scene before I had finished reading. Fortunately the sidebar allows you to navigate back to the previous scene manually, being able to finish reading. Still, I experienced the discomfort of feeling like I had to actively train myself to not click on the hyperlinks in the middle of the page until I got to the end, which was distracting until I got used to it. My recommendation is to consistently put the clickable links at the end of a passage to create more stability for the interface.

• Zombie Apocalypse theme/allegory: I had a journey with this. At the beginning of the game, I was frustrated that the zombie aspect of the game was treated in such a cavalier way. This is an earth-shattering breaking news event and should be treated as such, what the heck! When the characters did talk about the zombie apocalypse, it felt more appropriate to the situation, but it seemed very under-discussed at the beginning. I expected it to absolutely dominate the first period of the game and be even more impactful. I was really surprised, for example, that Yancy had unrestricted movement to just kind of go do whatever despite the active threat. As the game went on, I began to shift my perspective to think about the zombie element as an allegory for COVID19 responses (not that it’s exactly 1:1 given the parallels with racism/human rights that are developed later, but that feels like the direct inspiration) and when viewed through that lens, I realized that the kind of ambiguous crisis-that-we-both-talk-about-and-ignore-in-equal-measure felt like it made sense. What I’m getting at here, ultimately, is that I think what would’ve felt more natural for me is to have the game frontloaded with the news/government action/shock of the zombie apocalypse dominating the conversation and then leveling off as it becomes the “new normal” and eventually over the course of the plot morphs into a distinctly non-apocalyptic situation. In the current plot structure, it feels like everyone is already at the “new normal” stage at the inception of the event rather than after an appropriate amount of time has passed.

• There was a minor technical error (in my view) based on the path that I chose (editor’s note: which I will now proceed to discuss in excruciating detail, I am so, so sorry this entire response is an overwritten MESS). For context, there is a scene on the first day where you take a photograph of Yancy’s pet, Babbit, as your first photo, then there’s an open ended prompt where you pick a location to take your second photo for that day. In the route I chose, I went to the Latte Shop of Horrors (I mean how could that not be the highest priority with that name??) where Yancy encounters a character named Caleb who conditions the photo on privacy (you are not to post this photo online as you promise to do). At the end of the day, in the server, Yancy is prompted to share their photo, but it doesn’t specify whether this is the pet photo or the photo of Caleb. This is important because I was suddenly stuck, not knowing what path to choose. If it was the pet photo, I would post it, but if it was the Caleb photo, I would not post it due to the privacy situation. I think that a choice should be carved out to specify which photo it is if you took this exact path where posting or not posting is based on the privacy concern that for me, superseded Yancy’s comfort level with being vulnerable and sharing their photography as the determining factor in whether or not to post.

• Finally I want to comment briefly (editor’s note: it was not brief ) about an aspect of the game that I have mixed feelings about so it’s more of a discussion than a criticism. Basically, I think this game plays very differently based on your identity/knowledge of the experiences involved. The challenge for me is that, in my day-to-day personality, my hard-wired impulse for any situation of social conflict is to be self-effacing and concede in order to be agreeable and avoid people being mad at me. So given that the game is kind of… about ethically navigating social conflict, which often calls for an active rejection of avoidance, the types of choices that I would naturally pick were generally forgiving people as fast as possible to get out of the conversation. But, as the game goes on, I start to feel this uncanny separation between myself and Yancy. Yancy is agender and aroace, neither of which are my personal identities, and I was suddenly feeling very strange about being put in a situation to decide for Yancy how Yancy feels about the things happening to them. Who am I, the player, to say how Yancy gets to react to those experiences? I may have had experiences that echo aspects of what Yancy is going through, but I haven’t lived their life. As a result, I started to become self-conscious about making the choices that I personally would make from my own social position and whether I was unfairly imposing my own coping strategies onto Yancy. Fortunately, the game works with this to some extent by making it clear at times when Yancy needs more time to process/heal and forced my hand in terms of letting the process of forgiveness/reconciliation take place over a longer span of time. I put this discussion here because I think the discomfort was perhaps part of the goal of the game in challenging the player to develop a different layer of empathy if they don’t have an identity that is neatly congruent with Yancy’s. But at the same time, it made me think, from a mechanical perspective, that maybe there are conversations where it would be better if the game didn’t let me choose what was best for Yancy and instead had Yancy assert their feelings for themselves more.

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

• A simple thing that I appreciated was the day-by-day reminder to save files. These were pretty unobtrusive. I never ended up needing to load a save during this playthrough, but it did make me feel more secure while playing that I wasn’t at risk of losing significant progress. I think a touch like that helps, and putting them at natural stopping points is a good design decision. Perhaps better would be some kind of autosave function, negating the need for manual saves, but what this game has is working.

• I’m most used to writing narrative text and dialogue, with different stylistic concerns for each situation. However, this game reminds me that dialogue is not the only kind of communication where you can apply a different style—the DMs feel like somewhere in between dialogue and epistolary writing. I don’t really write in modern settings where something like a DM or text message would come up, but if I ever did write in that genre, I would want to return to this game to study how it curates authentic-feeling DM-style communication.

• An aspect that I am thinking about here is the challenge of pruning branches efficiently without getting “caught” by the reader. I discussed the situation above with the photo sharing that made me think I was on a branching path that didn’t account for the choice that I made. As a result, when I did share the photo, it made me actively aware that the comments on the photo would be the same regardless of what the photo was due to the vagueness of the compliments. In other words, that single moment made me consciously aware that branches were being pruned, where if my slight variant path was accounted for in the previous page, I would not have become conscious in the same way. The lesson I take from this is that pruning is trickier than it appears on the surface level, and if your goal as a writer/creator is to maintain the illusion for the player that they are on a truly unique path shaped by their choices, you have to spend a lot of energy either writing a lot of branching paths, or prune discreetly enough to avoid the reader becoming overly conscious of it.

Quote:

• “Heteronormativity can be a real bitch.”

Lasting Memorable Moment:

• The sinking feeling—really, the banal listless horror—I had while picking between three blue bags, knowing that I have been set up to fail and still hoping beyond hope that I somehow picked the correct one.

[Norbez (Naomi Norbez, call me Bez (e/he))]

Thanks for the super thoughtful review! I appreciate the lengthy response. To touch on the multimedia elements super quick: the game’s audio files unfortunately do not play correctly in Chrome or Edge, but do play correctly in Firefox. I put that in the game’s description, but maybe I should put it in the game itself. I’m working on a fix to this, but it’s gonna take quite a bit of time. Also, I did upload a build today that should fix the picture issue.
It’s very late where I am and I want to type a more detailed response in the morning; I just wanted to say that for now though!

[DemonApologist]

8 | THE LOST ARTIST: PROLOGUE

8 | THE LOST ARTIST: PROLOGUE
by: Alejandro Ruiz del Sol
co-written by: Martina Oyhenard

Progress:

• The first playthrough of this game took me around 10 minutes. However, I found that it was important to re-read multiple times to make more attempts to make sense of what I was reading, so I estimate that I did spend around 40 minutes off and on, cycling through different options and revisiting the same scenes.

What I Appreciated:

• Even though I had a difficult time cohering what I was reading into something that I felt enough of a grasp of to meaningfully comment on, what I appreciated was that there were a lot of cleverly written and engaging individual sentences with a satisfying turn of phrase. Because of the interesting and unexpected writing, it made me feel like it was worth my time to keep re-engaging with it as opposed to just letting the work slide off of me.

• The work has a somewhat surrealist quality to it. Admittedly I haven’t read much work like this, but I think there’s merit to work that is challenging in this way—readable, yet reticent to be neatly consumed. I suspect that if someone reads it with a significant lit/poetry background, they would have an enjoyable time piecing together the narrative.

• The strongest theme that I pulled from this is a kind of commentary on the (self-)exploitation of artists trying to cope with the emotional baggage of limiting their work in economic conditions where a truer version of their work would be unprofitable. The central image of the text is the raven and how it transits shattered/opened windows. For instance, in Leben’s scenes, she has been writing soulless business documents. She seems to have made an attempt to partition and isolate her artistic self away from the version of herself that is capable of pretending that it is satisfying to write business documents. By using company time to design a non-standard logo, Leben opens the window and unknowingly lets the raven (representing a kind of unfettered or at least, less-fettered muse) in. This is an “unmanageable” raven that tramples over Leben’s business work, spilling the mate for a second time the moment she tries to “manage” it with the RMG software after experiencing the impulse to add drama to her bureaucratic writing. After reading these scenes, returning to the beginning (the prologue of the prologue) suggests that maybe the bank heist occurred after Leben’s scenes chronologically, and that opening the window to her artistic desire, even unintentionally, led to the containment shattering. That’s what I think this piece is getting at, at least how I read it: artists and their art cannot be neatly contained and managed forever, as this is an unnatural state of things imposed onto them. Even self-denying attempts to maintain the terms of that containment yourself will ultimately fail and lead to a chain reaction of artist-chaos defying the oppressively ordinary.

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:

• The biggest question I have about this piece is a question of audience, I guess? Like I wonder if I would have had a more successful time analyzing this piece with deeper familiarity with works being referenced (such as: “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, which is specifically called upon here). If there were other literary references being directly made, they evaded my notice. The feelings this piece leaves me with are mainly curiosity about what I read, but also an unsettling sense that I was inadequate to the task of reading it. The tension of a piece that invites an audience but also holds them at a distance is interesting to me, I’m not sure how to resolve it. Perhaps I shouldn’t resolve it?

• I wonder what the significance of the interactivity of the piece is? Having gone through it a few times, the main choices that the player can make are: (1) requesting more information during the heist, or not; (2) deciding which of the three logos Leben draws; (3) choosing which of the three unsolved cases Balding looks at; (4) choosing to clarify that the “you” in the letter is Detective Balding, or not. How would this piece be different with either less, or more interactivity? Is it truly an essential element of the piece’s construction? Each choice that the player makes reveals a bit of unique text, so it’s worthwhile in the sense that you have more tiles to consider in the mosaic that you are piecing together if you choose to search for the meaning. Moreover, the interactivity I think helps encourage the reader to take a more active role in the piece.

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

• Something that intrigued me about the construction of the game is how the links to the next scene are written to have their own voice. By that I mean, for instance, at the beginning of the piece, the main text is one of the people involved in the heist telling you what happened, and the hyperlink to the next scene is you responding by asking a question. I thought the call-and-response format of the hyperlink is worth taking note of because of how it shifts the tone of the work to make the reader more involved in what they are seeing.

• I also want to highlight an aspect of the narrative structure that has come up in previous pieces that feels more apparent here; you are sometimes choosing between different competing alternative scenes, and you are sometimes choosing whether or not to learn new information. The placement and meaning embedded in these different types of choices is something that a writer should consider. How does it impact your reader/player to forego the opportunity to learn certain information?

Quote:

• “The raven was shocked at this response, but bowed out gracefully, somersaulting out the window, flipping the bird with their exit.”

Lasting Memorable Moment:

• When Leben, in the midst of trying to return to routine, gets spooked by the raven and spills a second mate on her documents.

[DemonApologist]

9 | FOCAL SHIFT

9 | FOCAL SHIFT
by: Fred Snyder

Progress:

• I made it about 2/3rds of the way through the game, until at around 55 minutes, I completely bricked my playthrough. A command I entered caused the game itself to crash during the “hack stratego” minigame, and the crash removed my ability to enter any more commands. After this event, I paused the timer and took a break so that I would be able to focus and quickly get back to where I trainwrecked myself. I caught back up pretty fast and was able to complete the game in a very satisfying feeling by around 1h25m total across both attempts.

Things I Appreciated:

• I really enjoyed the commitment to the cyberpunk/hacking theme. There wasn’t a ton of description overall, but the description that was there was very clear and effective in invoking the mood of the setting. The use of computer terminology was at an appropriate level for me where I felt slightly challenged by it but not completely lost. I also thought that the main character was unobtrusive but still had a clear sense of personality in some of their responses to situations.

• I liked the logical layout of the map and the limited scope. There were just enough rooms that it felt like there was a building to explore, without overwhelming me with too many places I had to navigate to and keep track of. The navigation was very intuitive and easy to engage with.

• While the next section is going to detail my struggles with parser gameplay, I just want to emphasize that I thought the minigames themselves were pretty fun once I got them to work. My favorite minigame was the last one, which involves placing the tokens while evading a sentry. I don’t think I mastered the minigame, rather I think I just got amazing RNG on the winning attempt. The reason this minigame was satisfying for me is that it felt like a higher-stakes escalation of the games before it. This game aligned the mechanical element of a challenging minigame with the climax of the plot, so it felt like you really had to persevere and earn that good ending (even though I was allowed to try over and over again, it still felt exciting and high stakes to me).

• Because I had such a struggle with elements of this game, I felt very satisfied to actually complete it. It made me feel good that I didn’t give up and that having learned from my mistakes, I got through to the end.

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:

• During my first playthrough, I hit essentially three snag points, so I thought I would detail each one in order as the most efficient way to communicate how cursed my parser gameplay ended up being.

• Snag Point #1: At the beginning of the game I was exploring the rooms and talking to people to gather information. After doing this for a while I realized that I needed to find a key fob somewhere. However, I never organically found this because in the appropriate room, I didn’t think to “examine workstation”. I examined the employee, drone, and the “deck”, and after being told the deck was normal I concluded that there was nothing else I could do here. I do think this one was my fault for not picking up on the cue that “workstation” was the noun I needed to interact with. But this resulted in me wandering around the entire building a bunch more times not being able to make progress because this was such a critical step.

• Snag Point #2: The next area that created an issue for me was the first hacking minigame. I was attempting to hack the surveillance drone, and was presented with what I thought was a Wordle/Mastermind-ish puzzle, and I had 24 attempts, so I was like okay, I just need to systematically solve this. The first time my guess was “HOVERS” which resulted in ++++++ as the feedback. I was like, ok, wow, that must be really bad luck that none of the letters are in the word. I decided to just fish for letters by guessing “ABCDFG” next. I got ++++++ again. Then I realized, oh, I just assumed it was a word puzzle, how silly, so I tried “123456” and got ++++++. I tried “7890QX” and got ++++++. At this point I thought, okay, no matter what I type in, it’s giving the exact same result, so maybe the lesson here is that brute forcing the solution is wrongheaded. Maybe the game is training me to think like a cyberattacker, and I thought back to cybersecurity training modules I did IRL and was like, oh yeah, those videos emphasize that social engineering attacks can be effective. I should be talking to people trying to trick them into accidentally revealing passwords or granting access to me. I did more rounds of the building but didn’t have any luck talking to people more. I tried hacking a car and continued to get ++++++ for “MONEYS” (lol) “123456” and “#$%^&*” (I decided to check symbols just in case). At this point, I decided I was stuck and looked at the walkthrough, which explained the rules of the minigame and how you could get + or - depending on which direction up or down the alphabet. I was like, that makes sense, I guess I just had somehow cosmically horrible RNG and just happened to get only + signs making the puzzle seem impossible. Confident that I knew how to do the puzzle, I tried again, only to get ++++++ no matter what I put in. I was truly stumped by this, thinking I had missed some crucial step in the game to enable the hacking minigame to show minus signs, so I wandered around talking to people again. Finally, I looked at the walkthrough yet again and had the aha moment—the minigame only accepts lowercase letters. Somehow, that was the only type of symbol that never occurred to me to enter. I attribute this to being used to Wordle, where the letters in the puzzle are always uppercase, so I’m used to solving word puzzles in uppercase only. So anyway, my recommendation would be to either code the game to accept uppercase letters in this minigame, or indicate to the player to use only lowercase letters.

• Snag Point #3: The stratego server minigame! So the minigame itself is fine once I figured out how to solve it, I enjoyed it. The issue came after my initial attempt didn’t work. So the first thing I did was guess that I should put Token #1 in the slot labeled #1, and so on. When I finished putting in the five tokens, the puzzle wasn’t solved. I realized oh, the tokens represent the position of the numbers, so if the first number is 7, I need to put “token 1” in “slot 7”. I decided it would be most efficient to just reset the minigame by typing “exit,” figuring I would try again and breeze through it. After exiting, I attempted to “hack stratego” and was told, “I recognize ‘hack’ as a verb but don’t know what you mean by ‘stratego.’” I continued typing commands but the game seemed to have forgotten nouns entirely. I tried “exit” and it said, “You don’t see any obvious exits.” What the heck? Where am I? After trying more commands in this surreal void I finally thought ok, let’s just try to leave the room and picked “south,” which resulted in the message “An error occurred in the game driver: undefined method `children’ for nil” along with a massive list of hyperlinks and then the ability to enter commands had been removed. This was the most cursed moment in the playthrough, when I learned that I am so bad at parser games that I somehow bricked the entire playthrough with my incompetence. Weirdly, this didn’t actually ruin my experience because while this was obviously not the intended way to play, since it’s a game about hacking, getting trapped in a hyperspace void that you can’t escape from is actually a plausible event that could’ve happened in-universe. The moral of the story is: I am not cut out for this. I literally could not hack it.

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

• The main lesson I think I learned here is that it must be incredibly challenging to anticipate all the ways that players might mess up your game even when they are trying in good faith to engage with it. Uppercase-letter-gate is a situation where perhaps it would just be assumed that no one would ever default to uppercase for one place in the game when lowercase is used everywhere else, yet, that is what I naturally did. Even more embarrassingly for me, after learning the issue, I still entered uppercase letters a few times automatically and had to actively suppress that impulse. So I think this is a good reminder for me, when creating something, that I need to occasionally check in and make sure I am not so close to my work that I make too many assumptions about how someone new encountering it might misinterpret what the game is telling them.

• Another important lesson I take from this game is how elegant the escalation of game mechanics can be. The minigames progress naturally, building upon what came before and having trained the player how to engage with it. By the time I was in the final minigame, I was typing commands almost automatically, making it feel like I was actually getting better at “hacking”.

Quote

• “If there’s any color in the spectrum that could accurately be called nondescript, it’s the shade of beige that decorates these walls.” (Made me laugh)

Lasting Memorable Moment:

• The strong feeling of satisfaction when I broke through the final minigame to reach the end, it was a great punctuation to the experience.

[Gamefic]

Thanks for the great comments! I’ll work on an update to fix the two bugs you found.

1. The word puzzle: I think the word guesses should be case-insensitive, since most everything else in the game is. This should be an easy fix.
2. The token puzzle: While it would be an interesting story element to get trapped in virtual reality, that was definitely not my intent with the exit command. I have a feeling this should also be an easy fix. Exiting the puzzle should just return you to whatever room you started it in.

Edit: The fixes are uploaded.

[DemonApologist]

10 | TURN RIGHT

10 | TURN RIGHT
by: Dee Cooke

Progress:

• I completed this game in about 15 minutes.

Things I Appreciated:

• A compelling aspect of the game is the way it builds tension for the player. As the game progressed, I was caught in a struggle between continuing to try to turn right, or trying to come up with some kind of lateral solution to the game. With how it unfolds, it gives the impression that you might be in an infinite loop; this is especially threatening when successive traffic events are so cruel in their mundane repetition that I wondered whether I’d already encountered that scenario already and should be trying to actively resist the game’s insistence that I turn right. I would rather try doing something else to avoid turning right, but ultimately, that is where you need to go. So I thought it was an interesting aspect of the game that it fostered that kind of response in me given that the game has “innocently” told me that all I need to do is turn right.

• Similarly, one of the strengths of the game is how it potentially draws creative self-expression out of the player. I could not resist the temptation to do things other than turn right. After a while I started entering more surreal commands like, “dematerialize obstacles,” “heat death of the universe” (well at first I typo’d it as “het death of the universe,” so I guess, straight people might take care to avoid causing that particular unmaking of spacetime), and “abolish cars”. I didn’t expect any of these commands to work, but it helped to vent the emotions I was feeling to just say that.

• I liked the dry comedy of having a diagram of the intersection as if that would somehow help me demystify the task of turning right. I would look at the diagram and think, okay, is there some kind of clue here of how to break out of this? There isn’t. It’s just context for your misery.

• In other parser games I have played so far, it is sometimes annoying to have the game tell you that it doesn’t recognize a verb you are trying to use. However, in this exact use-case, it really adds to the passive-aggressive tone of the game. For instance, being informed, “You don’t need to ‘dematerialize’ in this game.” It’s hard not to read that as a bemused roast of my pitiful escape attempt. Rather deserved, I think.

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:

• Overall, I think the game does exactly what it needs to do visually. One very minor thing that I didn’t like was that upon opening the game, it immediately forced me into fullscreen. It was trivial to undo that, but I’d rather get to decide for myself whether I get to look at anything other than this game while trying to turn right.

• I encountered no bugs or technical issues; this was a small-in-scope, but ultimately well-crafted experience.

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

• Using parser error messages to influence the tone of the game. As I discussed above, receiving (what in context became) passive-aggressive error messages from the game when I used forbidden verbs enhanced my experience of playing. It made me realize how, in the context of a parser game, even if you can’t anticipate every bit of nonsense your player might input, putting thought into how those error messages are presented could be a great way to influence the tone of the game. Here, it was passive-aggressive, but perhaps other phrasings could evoke different moods. So the lesson is: there is no space of a game that you can’t imagine as being influential for the experience, and a snarky error message is an example of that.

• This is a minor UI thing, but I liked the use of the blinking yellow cursor as a minor aid in telling me when I needed to hit return to reveal more text as opposed to focus on my next command. It’s just a small thing that helps unobtrusively get the player focused on what they need to do to get the experience to unfold in an organic way. It feels important to make UI elements that are present and helpful, but unobtrusive, as this game does.

Quote:

• “You should be focusing on turning right.”

Lasting Memorable Moment:

• When I was allowed, mercifully, to turn right.

[Norbez (Naomi Norbez, call me Bez (e/he))]

I’m back with more thoughts, as promised!
–Everything you said about the mom & her scenes is the reaction I was hoping for, so I was happy to read that.
–The link location critique is very interesting to me! I usually put my links around notable sentences/words, to highlight part of the text that is significant. I didn’t realize some associate links in the middle of the page with a link that will show more text on the page.
–That’s my favorite quote too! X)

[aschultz]

My thoughts on the graphics in Turn Right as a tester

@DemonApologist

I liked the dry comedy of having a diagram of the intersection as if that would somehow help me demystify the task of turning right.

As someone who lives in the US, where turning right is a lot easier, it was legitimately non-ironically useful for me to keep my bearings. When I first read the title I Thought “man! It’d have to be REALLY crowded to turn right!” So I sort of imagined having to turn left instead across a busy street.

[DemonApologist]

11 | A DREAM OF SILENCE: ACT 3

11 | A DREAM OF SILENCE: ACT 3
by: Abigail Corfman

Progress:

• I completed a first playthrough in about 40 minutes (using the settings: story mode and summarize Acts 1 and 2). After finishing the game, while the first experience was very thought provoking, I felt like I hadn’t experienced enough of the game to fully wrap my head around the mechanics so I decided to play a second time on the same settings. In total, I played for around 1h10m.

Things I Appreciated:

• Well, the first thing I appreciated about the game is the amazing cover art by cymk8. Every time I scrolled past this looking over my personal shuffle order, I was looking forward to becoming trash (affectionately) for this vampire man who looked like Astarion. I was surprised when it turned out to literally just be Astarion since I don’t think I fully grasped that fan works would be submitted to this competition (not knowing much about IF Comp). Anyway, the reason that this is in the “appreciate” category is that luckily for me, I am in the target audience for an Astarion fan work. (Even so I was expecting to get to meet a different vampire guy for the first time so I feel just the slightest bit robbed of that potential experience. I think mentioning BG3 in the front matter/blurb would’ve avoided that feeling. Sorry for putting a mixed comment about this in the positive category, it turns out the categories all blur together because of how messy my responses are, it’s actually getting worse the more of them I do somehow )

• The UI and presentation of this game is fantastic. The screens feel polished and provide a lot of useful information without feeling cluttered. I especially want to observe here how the backdrops have subtle low-contrast patterns to them that are related to the scene, so it’s extra textural detail if you want to pay attention to it, but ultimately doesn’t sacrifice readability by busying the background of text.

• Something that I thought was well done even in the “easy mode” version of the game that I played was how every choice you make is a true compromise due to limited resources. My first playthrough went so poorly that I thought by choosing different stat distributions, I would breeze through the second time, but it turned out that losing the things that I had originally put points in was consequential. I feel like this game has a lot of potential depth as a result; you are held to account for what you choose to prioritize, so it encourages several playthroughs to reach the extremities of what is possible in the game.

• I thought some of the writing captured Astarion’s voice super well. There was a line after giving Astarion a knife, “Oh. Oh, this is lovely,” where I felt like I actually heard Astarion’s voice actor from BG3 speaking the line in my head. That was a wild experience.

• The “something shimmers” text effect was really cool, it was kind of like a visual frisson. Similarly, I loved the text in the final scene where you could click to cycle through words on the page, it really was effective in underscoring the exuberant triumph of waking Astarion up.

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:

• The number one question this game instantly raises is one of audience, on multiple levels. The first level is, this is explicitly a sequel work (Act 3), where people judging it have not necessarily played Acts 1 and 2. The second level is that as a fan work, the piece is radically different to experience based on the reader’s familiarity with Baldur’s Gate 3. One of the first questions this game presents is a choice between, “Play through a summarized version of the first two Acts,” which is labeled as being for the IF community, and “Go play the first two Acts in their entirety, then come back,” which is labeled as being for the BG3 community. This choice perplexed me because I have both played BG3 (I’m still on my first playthrough in Act 3 and haven’t finished yet) but I am also playing this specifically to judge for IF Comp. I selected the first option because I was perplexed by the idea of accounting of play time for the first 2 acts and how that might collide with the 2-hour time limit. Anyway, I would be curious to hear about how accessible people completely unfamiliar with BG3 found this story.

• My first playthrough was fascinating in kind of a cursed way. Essentially what happened for me was, I had no sense of how valuable the “energy” economy was, so I ran out of energy completely during the Godey scene. Additionally, the stats I had prioritized were speech > touch > sight. At this point, being completely out of energy, I started to believe that I was completely out of agency to affect the narrative. On every page it felt like there was a scene with a line “Something exists beyond your perception” because I couldn’t see anything, and all my options to say or touch something were grayed out because I was completely out of energy. I hadn’t discovered the shimmer mechanic yet, so I would just select “wait” on every page for the vast majority of the game, watching Astarion try to solve his problems on his own and dragging me along with him. What I find fascinating about this is that, there actually were things I could’ve clicked to affect the story (essentially, clicking through to find a shimmer to regain energy), but so many options had been grayed out and blocked that the game had taught me to play it as a helplessness simulator. Toward the end, I found my first energy refill during the fight with Leon and it felt amazing to finally get to intervene and help Astarion. While one could view my experience of the game as something negative (a simulation of disempowerment that was at times frustrating), I personally find it interesting when games allow me to have that kind of wacky personalized experience when I make questionable choices due to my idiosyncratic (or less politely: stubborn and misguided) way of approaching games. In my second playthrough, I had a stronger sense of what to do and felt like I was much more in control of my options.

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

• A feature that I want to foreground here is the emergent trackers for “His Attention” and “Escape” that got added to the UI and had distinctive visual appearances. Because of the nature of my “helplessness playthrough” I was watching the two trackers battle with each other as Astarion struggled through the scenes and I felt tense not knowing whether “Escape” would reach 10 before “His Attention” got to 20. The lesson here is how the mere threat of the “His Attention” counter and the ominous way that it would tick up was enough to create an emotional response for me. Even if I knew on some level that realistically, because I played in the story mode, Cazador was not going to be stopping us, I still felt the heat of it. So I think making variables like this visible to the player to set tone/stakes is a good thing to keep in mind. I think it would’ve been less effective if I was told in a non-numerical way through text, even if a non-numerical way on the surface would seem more organic/natural.

• Another writing trick I liked was the semi-script-like presentation. I felt that this was written somewhere in between a script format and a narrative style, and that it felt natural. I’m more accustomed to writing with dialogue tags personally, but I feel encouraged by this game’s presentation to try being more experimental with writing interactive fiction that breaks out of “static fiction” formatting norms, if I ever do end up choosing to try writing another IF piece.

Quote:

• “You’re just floating. You intangible freeloader.” (This was such an accurate depiction of my first playthrough it stopped me in my tracks. I was like, how does the game know that’s exactly how I’ve been playing this whole time )

Lasting Memorable Moment:

• There was a single moment where the game dunked on me so hard by calling my bluff on my first playthrough. There’s an option you can select during the Leon scene where you use your ghost power to whisper his daughter’s name. I clicked on it and the game said, “That would be clever. Do you know his daughter’s name?” And I gasped because of course I didn’t know his daughter’s name, I’m just a poor helpless ghost who hasn’t been allowed to see anything for the last three scenes! Leave me alone, I’ve been through enough! I was too chagrined to even submit a guess, and backtracked in shame thereafter. It was a legitimately entertaining moment for me to have the game sass me like that.

[jnelson (Jim Nelson)]

Thank you for your great review!

[dee_cooke]

Thank you so much for your lovely review!