This division is a big changeup from the last two. The highest-seeded game in the bunch is only #7 overall (Will Not Let Me Go) and 7 of the 8 matchups are parser vs choice! This means these matchups should give participants a wide range of interactive fiction to experience and should be plenty of fun.
Inside the Facility (#51) vs. Spy Intrigue (#25)
We start off with two games about big facilities filled with gadgets. The similarities stop there, though. Inside the Facility is perhaps the most popular of Arthur DiBianca’s long series of limited choice parser games. This one literally uses nothing but N/E/S/W movement and waiting! Despite that, the puzzles that are built up are rich and complex. The story and descriptions are minimal and sparse, letting the gameplay take the forefront.
On the other hand, Spy Intrigue is a lush and verbose Twine game that uses a lot of multimedia, including a node map of the whole game, a ‘radar’ that tells you which choices are deadly and not, numerous text animations, and more. It was one of the longest Twine games available when it came out, and has numerous branches, and alternates between off-the-wall, often grotesque (there are gory deaths and sexual/body fluid references) spy intrigue and flashbacks that feel almost like real-life confessionals but with futuristic tech.
Spider and Web (#27) vs. Violet (#24)
This is the only parser vs parser matchup and boy is it a big one.
Both of these games are XYZZY winners, one by Andrew Plotkin, who has produced a ton of award winning content over the last 30 years, and one by Jeremy Freese, who came on the scene to make an amazing game then dropped out, only to return to work on Cragne Manor years later.
Spider and Web is famous for one great puzzle. Andrew Plotkin has said in the past (I think, I can’t find the references) that part of his writing style is to imagine a ‘moment’ for the reader, and then to build the game so that that one moment can happen. This puzzle has often been called the best in parser history. The game itself is a spy drama, where you infiltrate an enemy base using cool technology. It’s told in the form of a flashback as you are tied to a chair in an interrogation, and features an unreliable narrator.
Violet is a tour-de-force, in a period where IFComp pressure was very high and people were putting out very polished, high-craftsmanship games year after year (including previous winners Lost Pig and Emily Short’s Floatpoint). It’s famous for its narrative voice. You, the player, are a grad student who hasn’t produced any PhD work at all after months, so the narrator, your girlfriend (or your imagined version of her) has threatened to leave you if you can’t write 1000 words by the end of the day. It’s a one-room game, and you have to fight through all the possible distractions in the world to survive. Together with Lost Pig, it defines the genre of ‘strong narrator voice’ IF.
Stay? (#18) vs. Toby’s Nose (#9)
This is a great matchup between experimental games, or at least games that don’t closely follow pre-existing standards.
Stay? by Jade Lomax is a sleeper hit, not entered in any competitions, just an Ink game found on itch and added to IFDB by Autumn Chen. Its presence in this competition is testament to its excellent qualities that let word of mouth spread it throughout the community. It’s a heavily branching time travel game with no well-defined stopping point. At the end of each run-through beside the first, you have the option to keep the life you have or to start all over. It’s a magic world, with many people to love, wars, spells, etc. It is by turns exciting, sad, and touching, and should be a treat for first-time players.
Toby’s Nose is, I think, the third Chandler Groover game we’ve seen this competition, after Midnight, Swordfight and Eat Me. This one turns the detective genre of IF on its head. It is inspired by the game Lime Ergot, which is purely based on examining more and more microscopic details. In this game, you play as Sherlock Holmes’ dog, and examination plays a key role, except that there is a twist on how you interact with the world. There are several suspects, each with their own vices, motives, and so on. Unlike most other detective games, you just play until you are convinced you’re right, then guess the murderer, and the game tells you if you’re correct. So both games in this matchup prominently feature the player continuing until they’re satisfied, and choosing when the ending happens for themselves.
The Weight of a Soul (#59) vs. With Those We Love Alive (#56)
The Weight of a Soul is a one-in-a-million game that survived a lot of hazards that many WIPs don’t. It was very ambitious, announced early on, and had an intro placed into a competition. Most games that fit that description never get finished; in fact, one of the Introcomp owners (not that this game was entered in introcomp) told the next not to worry about the prize money since no one had finished a game in years. So it was exciting to see this one pan out. It’s a goblin-filled alchemy-punk game, where different races mix in a big city fueled by steam and magic. You are a medical expert who is confronted with a bizarre disease. Investigating its origins will test your soul and take you throughout the city. Has lots of dialogue and is well-polished. This is one of the longest games this division, but the puzzles are beginner-friendly.
With Those We Love Alive is Porpentine’s highest rated work on IFDB (it also credits Brenda Neotenemie for music). Porpentine was the first Twine superstar in the IFComp community, although her work came out at the same time as Gamer Gate and encountered heavy controversy. This game features Porpentine’s famous worldbuilding with her favored elements of insects, slime, death, crystal, technology, etc. You are in the employ of an alien and un-understandable empress. You soon find that there is little to do but sleep, but sleeping brings unexpected changes, including returning a person you once thought lost to your life. This is a trans story; not even a trans allegory, the protagonist quite literally applies estrogen every week and your friend applies testosterone. The overall feeling is both beautiful and melancholy, and the music and styling are very appropriate for the game.
Slouching Toward Bedlam (#52) vs. Will Not Let Me Go (#7)
I’ve often considered Slouching Towards Bedlam to be in some ways the essence of what parser Interactive Fiction is capable of as a medium. To explain it fully would require spoilers, but here is a general outline. This is a steampunk parser game set in London where you monitor the Bedlam pyschiatric hospital and panopticon. You have a robotic assistant with you that can scan things. Your goal is to understand and investigate the death of one of your patients. As you play and learn more about this world, you discover something beyond nature that infiltrates every aspect of your world, and even the game parser itself. This game was praised by Emily Short for having ‘real’ choices in a parser game, and has several very different endings.
Will Not Let Me Go is one of, if not ‘the’, highest rated example of a fairly popular genre. That genre is games that portray mental illness in a way that communicates to others what it might feel like for you or someone you love to have that illness, and to have sympathy. Other examples include Depression Quest (the game that Gamer Gate was centered on early on), Hana Feels, You Couldn’t Have Done That, and so on. This game is about dementia (like Of Their Shadows Deep), and the game communicates it to devastating effect. We play as an elderly man who is in the grips of severe dementia. We experience this as a player through techniques like jumping between scenes without warning, unreliable narration, and inability to select correct text options. The writing is excellent, and there is a subtle progress bar at the top, a feature I wish most choice-based games had.
The Spectators (#60) vs. The Axolotl Project (#45)
The Spectators is Amanda Walker’s second game in the competition. This is a larger work than Of Their Shadows Deep, featuring a large castle map seen from the point of view of multiple protagonists. In it, you (several of you!) are servants or visitors to a luxurious castle ruled by a strong-willed duke who has taken a frail young woman to bride. There are rumours of the Duke’s cruelty, but you are just the Spectators (I’m not sure if that’s where the name comes from, hopefully I’m not doing this meme by accident:
Meme
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In any case, this is a richly described world and the multiple viewpoints are pulled off with very polished gameplay. I experienced intense emotion while playing this game.
The Axolotl project was a standout of early Twine, drawing attention with its wry sci-fi humor, compelling characters, and interesting mystery. You play a research on a moon base studying axolotls/salamanders when one goes missing. As the game progresses through three acts, you explore the base, learning more about what the company that brought you here is really doing.
Both of these games have a nice understructure of physical locations and object interaction, but both are carried by their vivid cast of characters and strong plotlines.
Repeat the Ending (#28) vs. Magical Makeover (#57)
This is an interesting matchup. Both of these games take a critical look at genres and turn them on their heads while still playing into their tropes.
Repeat the Ending is one of the standout parser games of 2023, having won numerous awards (including Spring Thing’s top prize and the top prizes in the IFDB Awards, along with Dr Ludwig and the Devil). It is a recursive text that derives interest in unusual ways. IF is both an outdated and an experimental field at the same time, and Repeat the Ending is designed to appeal to both groups. To those who love IF as an archeological field and enjoy poring over Clubfloyd transcripts and past forum posts, this game invents its own history, framing it as a 25th edition of an old IFcomp game and creating reviews, forum posts and author commentary from thin air. It also uses fancy footnotes, nice graphics, feelies, etc. and includes modern conveniences like a ‘story mode’ that lets casual players see what’s going on. This is probably the longest game in this division. It is rich textually. The game itself is about a disabled man with psychic powers (that transfer entropy from one object to another) going to see his parent in the hospital. There is an emphasis on inability to act and on mental state. A very richly layered game overall.
Magical Makeover, while it may appear very different at first, has a lot in common with Repeat the Ending. This game is a twine game that was designed to mock a genre of misogynistic ‘girls games’ that were once prevalent where you are presented with an ugly girl with stubble, pimples, bad haircut, etc. and must apply the correct makeup or brush to each object to fix them. So, this game has multiple beauty products, of which you can apply any three you want (repeats allowed). A magical fairy and magic mirror provide commentary. The products are magical and not very safe. Once you make the choices, you are sorted into one of six or seven stories, each of which is quite long, making this a very verbose Twine game. The stories are generally modern takes on fairy tales that feature friendship over romance and magic and drama over bliss. Both games feature heavy reading and a self-critical look at self worth in a magical world.
Cannery Vale (#32) vs. Sub Rosa (#48)
These two games excel at worldbuilding.
Cannery Vale is perhaps Hanon Ondricek’s greatest work. It is written in AXMA, a system similar to Twine that allows for numerous features like quick time events. It features an author that is all alone in a creepy hotel, trying to write a book. Play alternates between writing the book and taking quick naps, where you dream of being in the book world. Changes you make in the book affect the dream, but soon things get weird. The game pushes AXMA to its limit, with nested popups and text entry and images and more. Much of the dream world involves exploring an island, the city of Cannery Vale, and the supernatural inhabitants thereof, in a story inspired by Dante. There are a lot of little easter eggs, too, like getting quotes when putting famous author’s names in as the player name. This is the longest Choice-based game in the competition (except maybe Spy Intrigue).
Sub Rosa, on the other hand, is a parser game built on incredible worldbuilding and intricate stealth-based puzzles. Not only do you have to conduct a heist (not of wealth, but of secrets), you also have to leave no trace whatsoever. The setting is bizarre and alien, like Porpentine’s game earlier in this division. Things like walls of leather, miniature suns, and curse stones. This is a tough game, one of the toughest in the whole playoffs, but it can be deeply rewarding to the methodical and diligent player. There are numerous endings, and a Club Floyd transcript is available.