Welcome to the fourth round of the Free IF Playoffs! (See here for details and ground rules.)
With the first through third rounds complete, the pace of the tournament will seem a little slower this week, with only four matches. This post is for fourth round matchups in all four divisions – the Excellent Eight playing in the division finals. All matches are based on Round 3 results.
Vote in the matchups above, join the FIFP Fans group, and discuss your selections and impressions on this thread. Voting will close and Round 5 (tournament semi-finals) will begin in one week.
It will be interesting to see how Counterfeit Monkey fares against another top 5 seed game. Also, Superluminal Vagrant Twin has been having a closer result each round…
I love both Savoir-Faire and Anchorhead, but to me Savoir-Faire is a beautiful puzzlebox that also has nice worldbuilding and story, while Anchorhead has excellent writing and atmosphere but I don’t have anything great to say about the puzzles, so Savoir-Faire wins out.
I don’t really have a lot to say about these matchups. At this point these are all popular games. Outside of Repeat the Ending, which is new, and Worldsmith, which was temporarily commercial, these are all long term favorites that have topped award ceremonies and favorites lists since they came out. For people that have played enough games to be voting all along, I’d bet more than 3/4 of these are already familiar or recently played, and from here on out it’s going to be more about personal preferences and less about quality.
Wizard Sniffer and Superluminal Vagrant Twin are the two remaining limited parser games, one fantasy and one sci fi.
Counterfeit Monkey and Worldsmith are both maximalist games, with Counterfeit Monkey’s primary mechanic (there are many) about deconstructing through removing letters and Worldsmith about constructing through building worlds and customizing your own personal robot.
Spider and Web and Repeat the Ending both use framing devices for their stories. Spider and Web uses an interrogation room as a way for the PC to tell their own version of a break in at a research facility, trying to match the evidence the interrogator has already found, while Repeat the Ending frames itself as a remake of a years-old superhero (is that the best way to say it?) game with commentary. I feel like Spider and Web sees itself as genre fiction and that Repeat the Ending sees itself as literary fiction, but of course that’s up to author interpretation.
Savior-Faire is Emily Short’s pre-eminent puzzle box, which is saying a lot for one of the most prolific and popular authors in IF. Its systematic use of physical properties is engaging and fun. Anchorhead is one of the best fusions of gameplay and story, with a plethora of puzzles spread out over three days and almost all puzzles directly contributing to the plot.
For me, the hardest tossup is Superluminal Vagrant Twin vs Wizard Sniffer. Both are some of the best games ever made, but SVT has a lot more exploration and bonus content while Wizard Sniffer has a lot more laugh out loud jokes. Both have great world building. I think I’m leaning more towards SVT because I like sci Fi more but a vote for Wizard Sniffer makes perfect sense too.
I voted for Wizard Sniffer because of its story—it has memorable NPCs, several of whom have character arcs over the course of the game, and that made it really shine for me!
I also find it interesting that the last 30 months, Worldsmith (WS) only got one rating on IFDB, whereas Counterfeit Monkey (CM) got 34. I guess, that may be due to several things, including the popularity of CM, and that WS requires download (though it is an html-file with extra files) and perhaps the first puzzle of WS is more like a strategy game than standard IF.
Side note: There are two players currently leading the pack in the prediction game, each with 20 correctly-predicted wins. One of them made guesses using actual scores, so that person has the edge, even though the other has on the whole been closer to predicted scores in terms of relative percentages.
Those two players differ in their predicted winner for match 60 (Division 1 finals), so we’ll see who takes the lead after this week.
Round Avg Votes per Match Votes in Hottest Match Hottest Match(es)
============= =================== ====================== ===========================================
R1 D1 15.5 31 Lost Pig vs. Suveh Nux
R1 D2 14.0 18 Coloratura vs. The Shadow in the Cathedral
R1 D3 12.5 25 Spider and Web vs. Violet
R1 D4 14.9 20 Photopia vs. Digital: A Love Story
R2 D1+2 16.0 21 Lost Pig vs. Superluminal Vagrant Twin
R2 D3+4 17.3 23 Inside the Facility vs. Spider and Web
R3 ALL 16.4 20 The Wizard Sniffer vs. And Then You Come to a House... / Spider and Web vs. Toby's Nose
R4 ALL 21.0 24 Spider and Web vs. Repeat the Ending
EDIT: Also, FYI – The belated interview with J. J. Guest is has been posted here.
EDIT 2: I’ve updated the table and added a column to show the games involved in the hottest match(es) of each segment.
The clock has run out (after a little unexpected overtime). There are no ties and no significant upsets, so Round 5 will be going up very soon. Stay tuned…
EDIT: The new voting page is up. Remember: This will be a reduced duration round just 3 1/2 days long. The first votes are already in – don’t miss your chance!
A question for the players of this round: Is someone who voted for it willing to give a breakdown of what they love about Repeat the Ending? There has been very little commentary about it, considering its run all the way to the division finals (and fairly close loss).
For me, Repeat the Ending is a clever game, appearing as a critical edition of a 1996 version of itself. The puzzles and storyline flow hand-in-hand, seamlessly. The writing is great and the whole thing feels written deeply from the heart. It’s a powerful game, with good characters, solid implementation, and a lot of thought and effort put into it. A top game for me.
Can you (or anyone else) elaborate on any of that? I’m looking for as many specifics as anyone can provide… Which puzzles stand out? What passages are great? What are the most powerful parts of the game?
To me, there isn’t really any particular point that stands out, because the whole thing works so well it couldn’t be done without the other, but I will say I especially loved the ending. I don’t have it downloaded, unfortunately, so I couldn’t get a specific passage from it. That final bit where you find your ending, the true ending, and then you go through and read the other endings that you could have achieved, depending on your score: it’s a bittersweet moment.
But, like, unless nobody else says anything, I’m not a good person to quote things on. I have terrible memory.
I’m asking someone in the Spanish section of the forums if I can translate their review. FWIW I played it specifically for the playoffs and it’s really hard to describe precisely how much it impacted me without revealing too much about myself to a degree that feels uncomfortable. I really think the metatextual elements being integrated parts of the actual work was fascinating. The art and prose were beautiful and heartwrenching. I screenshotted a specific moment and described it as a gut punch to my friends.
> give toy to child
The boy regards you with hostile suspicion. Upon sighting the Badman figure, he appears to write us off as one of those parents who give their kids presents and are usually sober during the day.
If we’re going to compare it to Spider and Web, which it was up against, I’d say that it is rather interesting that both games require you to repeat deaths over and over. Unlike Spider and Web which makes death a mandatory failure state on the way to solving a puzzle, Repeat the Ending makes death optional paths that are needed to reach the best ending. While with Spider and Web I felt like the game was smirking sardonically at me every time I died, Repeat the Ending stood by me and shouted “Yes, yes! Die more!!” in a celebratory and excited way.
I appreciate your response, pieartsy. In particular, thank you for citing a specific passage that you found to be powerful. (I would love to see more citations about specific details, if anyone cares to provide some.)
Repeat the Ending won against Magical Makeover (Round 1), Cannery Vale (Round 2) and Slouching Toward Bedlam (Round 3) on the way to the division finals. In another bit of coincidence, both Cannery Vale and Slouching Toward Bedlam arguably feature repeated death, as well.
Outside of the ending sequence (i.e. post-interrogation), which features “cruelty” typical for the era, I wonder if you’re interpreting the interrogator’s maliciousness as being from the game itself. He’s certainly a well-written character that encourages dislike! Which deaths felt like they were “smirking sardonically” at you? (As I recall, for the bulk of the game any protagonist deaths are played for comedy since they would be factually impossible within the fiction, but it has been a while since I last played it.)
All of them (for how far I got in, anyway), but especially the first one, felt like gotchas to me. I didn’t really like the game and don’t want to replay it to cite more specific ones. Voting for RtE was an easy choice.
I wish I had the words to write something more in-depth about this game and explain why I love it so much. I’ve mentioned several different aspects at various times here on the forum, and I hope to write something longer someday. But for now, I’ll just quote one of my favorite passages, which captures the contrast of magic and mundane, power and powerlessness, that pervades the game:
Every second, the traffic on the bypass either rushes, lurches, or creeps by. The distant sound of engines, occasionally punctuated by horns, is nearly enough to drown out the music of nearby insects and frogs.
>diagnose traffic
The traffic in total—a continuous flow of large, motorized objects—is shedding a massive amount of kinetic energy. I’m not sure that we are capable of controlling it, but it may well be time for a bit of productive recklessness. I think we should try to *SIPHON THE INFINITE MOVEMENT*.
The music of the many cars traversing the bypass is a single, held note.
>siphon infinite movement
As much as we love bad ideas, I feel a little anxious about this. The traffic is squandering a massive amount of kinetic energy every minute. I’ve never before attempted to control such an incredible amount of wasted power. Reaching out with my mind, I feel the cast-off momentum of every stop and start, every acceleration, every depress of every brake pedal. This power is almost… it’s almost like drinking—absolutely thrilling—and I feel the hairs on my neck vibrating, singing. My teeth hum in my mouth. It’s as if the world told me a secret so massive that I can’t push it into my ear. Can’t you feel it?
What should I do with this power? Something impossible. Something amazing.