Welcome to the fifth round of the Free IF Playoffs! (See here for details and ground rules.)
With the first through fourth rounds complete, the pace of the tournament will pick up again this week – both Round 5 and Round 6 (tournament final match) will be completed. This post is for fifth round matchups for remaining games – the Final Four which have each just become the champion of their respective divisions. All matches are based on Round 4 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 6 (the tournament’s final match) will begin in three and one-half days (midnight at the start of Wednesday August 07 UTC).
Very funny that as of my vote both games are tied 4-4.
It’s really anyone’s game now as all remaining games have dominated their own matches most of the time.
Counterfeit Monkey and Superluminal Vagrant Twin both have strong world building and a lot of depth of exploration coupled with solid mechanics and a need to pay close attention to words (in SVT’s case due to picking up clues in character conversation and descriptions).
Spider and Web vs Anchorhead is a different kind of matchup since the games are pretty different in length and difficulty. Anchorhead, while still hard, is the easier of the two and is quite longer, and represents perhaps an idealized form of classic parser IF (long, puzzly, with integrated story), while Spider and Web has much more unique framing and mechanics. Both came out in the same year, which makes it pretty funny that they’ve ended up together here.
Regarding the prediction game: A definite frontrunner has emerged, with 24 correctly-predicted winners among completed matches after Round 1. Close behind is another player with 23 correctly-predicted winners. Differing predictions in this round make it possible for the two leaders to tie again on this metric going into the final match, so we’ll see what happens…
I will note that the current first place player exactly nailed the final score of Superluminal Vagrant Twin vs. Worldsmith… but with a different expected challenger! The current second-place player continues to show eerie prescience about relative vote ratios, having made the closest prediction more often than not.
I love Superluminal Vagrant Twin, but I’ve gotta go with Counterfeit Monkey. It’s probably the best parser game that’s ever been written, and one of the best games period that has ever been made.
Whether I’m playing a game or designing one myself, I always ask: “Does this story need these mechanics?” In many cases, the answer is no. You could strip the narrative or the mechanics apart, reconfigure everything, even change the medium, and the core concept could still survive. But you can’t do that with Counterfeit Monkey. It’s married completely to the text-game format. Fused. Welded. The core concept would not survive if it were transplanted to another medium. That’s my ideal.
And it’s executed almost perfectly. Some of the puzzles were too bumpy for me, certain stretches a little uneven, but the system itself is astonishing. The gameplay also has narrative weight: the puzzles are the story. And it’s a story with a lot to say–with the depth of a classic novel. I played it years ago, and I’m still thinking about it. I’ll probably think about it until the day I die.
It’s interesting to see Spider and Web going so far when Hadean Lands is not in the competition due to being commercial.
For me personally I have an effect where when authors have multiple games in the playoffs I think “oh, this isn’t their best one, so I’ll vote for their best one in its competition and not for this weaker one”. Like Savoir Faire and Counterfeit Monkey. It’s not always conscious and sometimes I voted for the same author in multiple competitions.
But if Hadean Lands were in the completion, I wonder if there would be two Plotkin games in the final 4 or if a similar effect as above would have happened and Spider and Web would have dropped out early while Hadean Lands held on.
Or maybe Hadean Lands would have dropped out early and Spider and Web stayed in! There have been a lot of surprises on this competition.
HL is my favorite Plotkin game, so I’d certainly hope to see it here, although that’s the thing about the Shorts and Plotkins of the world. They just have so much good stuff. I definitely voted for Spider and Web several times, though, so I don’t have the effect you’re talking about. I was irritated at the Short vs Short matchup, because I wanted to vote for both of them.