EJ's IFComp 2026 Reviews

Competitions IFComp
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Wow, I’m getting this thread in on the early side! That never happens! (Last year I went looking for my first IFComp review thread; I didn’t find it, but the way I knew the earliest one that was still here wasn’t my first is that it was like “here’s my IFComp review thread, late as usual!”)

My general IFComp strategy is to play things mostly in the order my personal randomizer hands me, with some skipping around based on what I have time for at any given moment, and then in the last week or so of the voting period I will throw that out the window and race to try to get in any games further down the list that I’ve been itching to play. (Inevitably I will miss some great games and then they will be added to my ever-growing backlog and I will spend the next few years feeling vaguely guilty about not getting around to them. But I may still review them someday!)

This year I playtested Deceit in the Guildhall of Virtue, Necromanceers, Meet the timesheet, and, uh, what was probably some version of WITHOUT corporation, so I will not be rating them for the comp and will not prioritize reviewing them. I will also skip games if they have flashing effects that can’t be turned off or if they give me eye strain.

Reviews

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Everyone’s Invited

Everyone’s Invited is a surreal, choice-based game in which the player character is trapped in a looping nightmare of a party where everyone around them is some sort of non-person making content-free conversation. You can go different places within the party, and maybe get some hints dropped about a shattered sense of self and a broken friendship, but hard facts and resolution are elusive.

The content warning about psychosis suggests that the game represents an experience of mental illness, and I can see that, but without that I might have taken it for a game about the kind of person who sees themself as the only “real” individual in a world of “NPCs”. The PC is disdainful of the other people at the party and how they “look like exact copies” of each other and their inane conversation—“It’s like… The world is exactly the same before they spoke as it is now.” The only person they feel drawn to and sense is “real” seems to be some other version of themself. Not to say the PC seems content with their sense of superiority, though; they repeat “It’s better to be alone” with the fervor and frequency of someone trying, not quite successfully, to convince themself.

This has what one might consider a visual-novel-style screen setup with images at the top and text at the bottom. The graphics are sketchy, pixelated, distorted; there is a constant warping or shimmering effect and human figures are cutouts full of moving, brightly-colored moiré patterns. (I don’t have a problem with this, but I know some migraineurs do, and perhaps some people with motion sickness? So be forewarned.) Leaving aside the potential accessibility issues, it does seem like the creator was going for images that are uncomfortable and off-putting to look at, and they certainly accomplished that.

Now for the part where I admit to not really being a proper reviewer of the game: The text has a typewriter effect, and it says you can use the C key to speed it up but I found the increase in speed barely discernible. I’m a fast reader who is frustrated by timed text I can’t either turn off or speed up a lot, so I really struggled with this. As such, I did not reach an ending, if there is one to be reached. After going down a branch of the party scenario, the game loops back to the beginning of that sequence; I don’t know if there’s some kind of final scene once you’ve seen everything (or made the correct set of choices?) or if it just loops indefinitely. Because of the timed text, I only had the patience to run through the game twice. (I do appreciate it skipping the non-branching intro, at least, but there’s still some repetitive stuff to get through at the beginning of the loop.) If there is an ending to be reached, I’m pretty sure the text speed prevents reaching it in under 15 minutes, so even the not-quite-exhaustive amount of it I played was a little more of a time commitment than I was expecting.

Surreal games about mental illness are certainly not new territory in IF and there are plenty of examples that are more polished than this one (such as perhaps having fewer comma splices), but Everyone’s Invited does do a good job of evoking a tense, oppressive atmosphere, and if it were possible to disable the typewriter effect I would consider going back to fully explore what it has to offer.

(Edit: I initially styled the title in all lowercase because it appears that way in the game proper, but then I noticed it appeared in title case on the IFComp game listing, so I’ve edited this review to match.)

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High School Reunion

High School Reunion is a short Texture game about a man attending his 10th high school reunion. While standing outside feeling anxious about facing his peers, he encounters an old classmate who made it big in cryptocurrency, and events take a wild turn.

I get the impression that the author of High School Reunion is quite young; most people who are themselves out of high school wouldn’t consider the 28-year-old PC an “old man”. With expectations calibrated accordingly, High School Reunion is a reasonably amusing jaunt, showing a writer with a promising eye for a comic situation. I can definitely imagine a protagonist stealing the identity of his douchey crypto millionaire ex-classmate, going to his reunion as that classmate, charming the girl of his dreams and taking her on a date to Wendy’s of all places, and then getting beat up by the guy whose identity he stole in a Wendy’s parking lot as an episode plot for a certain kind of sitcom.

But the difference between High School Reunion and an episode of something like Arrested Development or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, other than at least ten years of writing experience, is that High School Reunion is just a smidge too sympathetic to its protagonist; this guy is taking some pretty outrageous actions and ultimately getting hoist by his own petard, but the game doesn’t quite shake the feeling that he’s an underdog you should be rooting for and you should cheer when/if he gets the girl (even if he does also gets beat up in a Wendy’s parking lot after winning her over). And I feel that undercuts this style of comedy. (Though there’s perhaps a discussion to be had about how well “watch unlikeable guy get hoist by his own petard” comedy works to begin with in an interactive medium that tends to identify the audience more closely with the main character, also!)

So I would not say High School Reunion is an especially successful piece, but I do hope the writer keeps at it and continues honing their skills!

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Devils of Terminology

Devils of Terminology is a visual novel about a detective in an alternate Victorian England plagued by supernatural phenomena. The detective has a special bond with a “devil of terminology” named Renua that allows them to investigate these phenomena—but more than that, the strange happenings might have a particular connection to their identity, past, and future.

I suspect that a lot of people are going to play Devils of Terminology, come away feeling like they don’t get it, and chalk that up to either not being into VNs or this particular VN having been translated from the Korean. But I’m a big VN fan—I understand this medium and how this genre appears in it, I think I can even recognize some of this game’s inspirations, and I’ve sifted through far worse translations to puzzle out far more convoluted plots. So I should be perfectly positioned to make sense of Devils of Terminology, and… to be honest with you, I still don’t think I get it. Playing it, I never quite felt like I had a grasp on the PC’s personality or goals or past, or on how the setting worked, or on how metaphorical/allegorical any given thing was supposed to be.

The whole thing has the feeling of one of those dreams that feels like it has a coherent plot while you’re having it, but then you wake up and realize that there are all sorts of things that don’t add up. For instance, there’s a scene in which another character refers to Renua as “Dante”, which I at first took as that character making a literary reference, but then it was treated as a big reveal about Renua’s identity, except that I’m not really sure what it was supposed to reveal about her identity (I’m pretty sure she’s not supposed to be the actual Dante Alighieri?). And then it doesn’t come up again until the final scene, in which it’s also not explained because the emphasis is on Renua being revealed to have yet a third name, but I’m not really clear what the significance of that one is supposed to be either.

This is all a shame, because I want to love Devils of Terminology. I love supernatural mysteries, I love historical fantasy, I love surreal metaphorical dreamlike narratives. The choice selections mostly don’t feel too consequential, but there’s a section where the choice-based gameplay gets meta in a way I thought was really interesting and could have appreciated even more if I had a stronger sense of the game’s themes and how that section connects to them. The relationship between the detective and Renua has a love/hate element that could be very compelling to me (and then the ending implies that it’s some kind of time loop future-self-on-past-self toxic yuri situation, which is the kind of bonkers decision I have to respect and could under the right circumstances be delighted by).

But I never quite managed to get my bearings in the narrative enough for any of these things to hit for me in the way I wanted them to. I was in a constant state of wondering: What is happening? Why is it happening? Why does it matter? And honestly, being left wondering about the first two things can be fun sometimes! With the third, though, you start to lose me, and Devils of Terminology never really overcame that.

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Out by Midnight

Over the past ten years or so of IFComps, Art DiBianca has firmly established a niche of puzzle-box-style limited parser games. No frills, minimal story, just a small set of well-honed puzzle mechanics and maybe a map to explore. Out by Midnight sees DiBianca applying his signature style to an optimization-based treasure hunt in the vein of Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder or Sugarlawn.

After playing a few games that felt like their reach was exceeding their grasp in various ways, it was nice to sit back, relax, and go on a ride with a veteran author doing something that is firmly in his wheelhouse. I think this could be an instant new favorite for some people. Unfortunately, I don’t quite have the kind of brain that loves to latch on to this kind of thing. I enjoy the exploration phase, but once the new discoveries slow to a trickle (or dry up completely), I start to lose interest in the optimization part. (I’ve enjoyed replay-based optimization mechanics in games with a little more story/flavor, like Forsaken Denizen; when there’s a narrative I’m invested in, little tidbits of new stuff can keep me going for quite a while. But that’s not what Out by Midnight is about, and I respect that but it does make the game not the best fit for me personally.)

So although, as is common for DiBianca’s games, meeting the basic win condition turns out to be just the tip of the puzzle iceberg, I called it quits after getting there. Out by Midnight is a tightly constructed, nicely polished experience, a game that knows what it wants to do and does it without a hitch. It’s not my new obsession, but it might be yours.

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I did the same; winning once without any extra challenges was hard enough!

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Yeah, it was a challenge just to get that far for sure! To complete the additional achievements I think I would’ve had to start making spreadsheets.

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Well, I called it quits after exploring the house (and making my own map), since I didn’t feel like trying to find an optimal-ish path – too many things for me to keep track of in my poor old brain, especially having duplicate target items in the mix.

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Yeah, I do think some amount of note-taking is useful to succeed at the treasure hunt even non-optimally, but I didn’t mind that so much.

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Plot twist: she’s Dante from the Devil May Cry game franchise.

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After making a better-than-usual head start on reviewing, I got a nasty migraine 2/3 of the way through playing The Rat, and then it updated while I was incapacitated so my save file didn’t work and I had to start over, but here it finally is:

The Rat

In The Rat, you play as Fox, a sort of project manager for a group of criminals carrying out a heist at the home of a bat-themed billionaire currently holding a soiree for his wealthy and unscrupulous friends. To get the goods, you have to direct one of your compatriots, the titular rat, to create chaos around the mansion to distract the staff. Lucky there’s only one elderly butler on duty…

If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because The Rat is a spinoff of 2024 IFComp winner The Bat, by Chandler Groover. In deference to the original, it focuses on a different bat-themed billionaire, Count Vespertilion, and what I assume to be a different elderly butler. But it shares a setting and some secondary characters, such as the nefarious Dr. Malatesta, plus of course a focus on the way the rich mistreat those they perceive as beneath them.

I understand this game was written as a prize for The Bat’s IFComp success, but it’s still a bold move to riff on a previous Comp winner like this, or at least to submit the results to IFComp as well. It sets expectations rather high. Fortunately, The Rat is very good. I would even say it’s more fun to play than its predecessor, although partly this is because its setup doesn’t require it to create a sense of overwhelm for thematic purposes.

It is a little less substantial than The Bat, which is to say that it’s shorter and also that it gave me less to chew on literarily. It’s not doing anything on the order of The Bat’s themes of who gets to be perceived as “human” and who doesn’t (which I discussed in my review of that game), or trying for the kind of intertwining of gameplay and themes that The Bat did (ambitiously if not always in a way that was successful for me personally). The Rat basically just says, “Here’s a group of unpleasant rich people, don’t you want to ruin their day?” But you know what, there’s really nothing wrong with that (I say, perhaps self-servingly). The rich people are suitably hateable and ruining their day was a mechanically well-designed process that I enjoyed a lot.

I also enjoyed the chatter between the different members of the team of thieves, who are suitably colorful eccentrics themselves and often very funny. I would also like to shout out the joke about Vespertilion acquiring an illustrious ancestry literally by acquiring the chapel in which those ancestors are interred—a Pirates of Penzance reference, if I’m not mistaken, but crucially not one of the Pirates references that people usually make—and the fact that when choosing the PC’s pronouns, your options are “they”, “it”, or “other”.

And hey, I’ve talked a lot about The Bat in this review, but I don’t think you need to know it, or to compare the two. There are things, especially in Act 3, that you may appreciate a little bit more if you’ve played The Bat, but The Rat is a fun and polished heist game that easily stands on its own, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

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Thank you so much for the review! I’m glad you were able to enjoy it even with the poorly-timed update.

(And it is indeed a Pirates of Penzance reference!)