Great Play Marathon: Runners' Reports

otistdog · May 1, 2026, 12:03am

Welcome, runners and casual participants!

This thread is the official location for runners’ reports of successful completion of games and logging activity that will count towards earning the awards that will be issued at the end of the marathon. (See the FAQ for more information.) Please feel free to use this thread for:

comments and observations about games that you’re playing
announcements of game completions (and optionally, of starts)
links to reviews posted or other discussion threads begun

I’ll be monitoring this thread and be using the information you post to update the big board showing runner positions. If it seems like I’ve missed something, feel free to ping me or send a PM.

The marathon will last until the end of July 31st, 2026 as determined by UTC time. Good luck, everyone!

Here’s the current state of the marathon:

key to games and runners

The Runners

The Field

ID	 Title															 Author(s) (may be partial list)			Year
--	 --------------------------------------------------------		 --------------------------------------		----
A1	 Cat Petting Simulator 2014                                   	 neongrey                                 	2014
A2	 Draculaland                                                	 Robin Johnson                          	2016
A3	 Raising the Flag on Mount Yo Momma                           	 Juhana Leinonen                          	2010
A4	 Miss Gosling's Last Case                                     	 Daniel M. Stelzer                        	2024
A5	 Social Democracy: Petrograd 1917                             	 Autumn Chen                              	2025
A6	 Swigian                                                      	 Mathbrush (as Rainbus North)             	2017
A7	 Tales of the Traveling Swordsman                             	 Mike Snyder                              	2006
A8	 Moon-Shaped                                                  	 Jason Ermer                              	2006
A9	 The Plant                                                    	 Michael J. Roberts                       	1998
B1	 Fingertips: Fingertips                                       	 Michael D. Hilborn                       	2012
B2	 His Majesty's Royal Space Navy Service Handbook              	 Austin Auclair                           	2023
B3	 Reflections                                                  	 Tristin Grizel Dean                      	2021
B4	 The Little Match Girl 5: The Hunter's Vow                    	 Ryan Veeder                              	2024
B5	 New Year's Eve, 2019                                         	 Autumn Chen                              	2022
B6	 Pageant                                                      	 Autumn Chen                              	2020
B7	 Turandot                                                     	 Victor Gijsbers                          	2019
B8	 A Murder in Fairyland                                        	 Abigail Corfman                          	2020
B9	 Moondrop Isle                                                	 Ryan Veeder, Nils Fagerburg, Joey Jones, 	2024
C1	 Save the Date                                                	 Chris Cornell                            	2013
C2	 A Witch's Word                                               	 RainbowStarbird                          	2017
C3	 Future Threads                                               	 Xavid                                    	2017
C4	 The Bones of Rosalinda                                       	 Agnieszka Trzaska                        	2022
C5	 First Draft of the Revolution                                	 Emily Short, Liza Daly and inkle         	2012
C6	 The Kuolema                                                  	 Ben Jackson                              	2023
C7	 Messages From the Universe Graveyard                         	 KADW                                     	2024
C8	 The Missing Ring                                             	 Felicity Drake                           	2019
C9	 You                                                          	 Carter X Gwertzman                       	2024
D1	 KING OF BEES IN FANTASY LAND                                 	 Brendan Patrick Hennessy                 	2013
D2	 Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom                              	 S. John Ross                             	2007
D3	 4x4 Archipelago                                              	 Agnieszka Trzaska                        	2021
D4	 The Mary Jane of Tomorrow                                    	 Emily Short                              	2016
D5	 Pytho's Mask                                                 	 Emily Short                              	2001
D6	 Starry Seeksorrow                                            	 Caleb Wilson (as Ayla Rose)              	2015
D7	 To Spring Open                                               	 Peter Berman and Yoon Ha Lee (as Two-Bit 	2015
D8	 CYBERQUEEN                                                   	 Porpentine                               	2012
D9	 The Axolotl Project                                          	 Samantha Vick                            	2013
E1	 The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer                     	 P.B. Parjeter                            	2025
E2	 Reference and Representation: An Approach to First-Order Sem 	 Ryan Veeder                              	2016
E3	 Xanthippe's Last Night with Socrates                         	 Victor Gijsbers                          	2023
E4	 The Anachronist                                              	 Peter Levine                             	2016
E5	 Worlds Apart                                                 	 Suzanne Britton                          	1999
E6	 Junior Arithmancer                                           	 Mike Spivey                              	2018
E7	 The Curse of the Scarab                                      	 Nils Fagerburg                           	2020
E8	 Ravine                                                       	 Joanna Berry                             	2018
E9	 Lore Distance Relationship                                   	 Naomi "Bez" Norbez                       	2020
F1	 Good Bones: A Haunted Housewarming                           	 Leon Lin                                 	2023
F2	 Dragon Fate                                                  	 Kris Schnee                              	2016
F3	 The Saltcast Adventure                                       	 Beth Carpenter                           	2024
F4	 Faute De Servo                                               	 Jack Welch                               	2018
F5	 Der Angstbaum                                                	 Jens Bojaryn                             	2002
F6	 The Owl Consults                                             	 Thomas Mack, Nick Mathewson, and Cidney  	2017
F7	 18 Rooms to Home                                             	 Carolyn VanEseltine                      	2015
F8	 Filaments                                                    	 FibreTigre                               	2003
F9	 Bill Belichick Offseason Simulator                           	 Jon Bois                                 	2015

More information about all works listed may be found at IFDB, the Interative Fiction Database.

otistdog · May 1, 2026, 2:50am

First game on my course is The Owl Consults, authored in part by @tmack. I couldn’t resist the allure of a non-serious superhero (or in this case, supervillain) game that was nominated for four different XYZZY Awards in 2017, including Best Game, Best Puzzles, Best PC and Best NPCs.

As is typical for me, before starting the game I knew very little about it outside of the above (and that @mathbrush wrote an authorized sequel called The Origin of Madame Time), and I haven’t read any reviews.

First impressions:

I wasn’t expecting the 1930s.
Amelia Derringer seems like a distant cousin of Lady Thalia.
First laugh came from the first score notification: “[Your fee has just gone up by $1 million.]” – additional chuckles from the invoice-style presentation produced by >SCORE.
I was just starting to wonder whether there might ever be two conversations at once when the game did just that.
Jetpack!
There’s clearly something different going on than the game first leads you to expect.

A pretty solid opening!

Zed · May 1, 2026, 4:50am

[ Now I wish I’d just edited its contents away instead of really deleting the above, 'cause I could’ve recycled it for this. Oh well. ]

Here’s my review of Cat Petting Simulator 2014, my first game. Tomorrow, I march on my next game, one of:

Being a free-runner means not only that I don’t have to say, but that I don’t even have to know.

lpsmith · May 1, 2026, 7:25am

I don’t know what it is about going all-in on randomly playing games, but for ifComp, Spring Thing, and anything else, I am rabidly insistent on playing the games in a random order. For myself, that is. You all go have fun in your own way; I ain’t gonna stop you. But for me, I just know that I will be influenced to play one game over another, then feel bad about that, and then try to compensate, and then wonder what I would have done if left to my own devices, and then end up just not playing anything at all, and look, leaving this aspect of my life to a random number generator is just better for everyone involved, OK?

So I’m walking into this no-prep, and seeing where the whims of fate take me. When I signed up, Otis put me on ‘a random spot’, so I have studiously avoided looking at the marathon map all month. And today after the starting gun went off, I finally looked at where I was placed. And lo and behold, I find myself taking a break from Spring Thing games in order to play… another Spring Thing game from 2022! By an author whose Spring Thing game this year I have already played and enjoyed!

So things are staring off with a fun bit of synchronicity. "The Bones of Rosalinda’, here I come!

Crazyqix · May 1, 2026, 9:13am

“It’s 92 days to the end of the Great Play Marathon, we’ve got 54 games, 19 runners, it’s dark… and we’re wearing Peril-Sensitive™ sunglasses.”

“Hit it.”

otistdog · May 1, 2026, 5:58pm

Played some more of The Owl Consults. It’s now trending in a significantly different direction than the opening moves implied it might – lightweight puzzles for the scenarios of each of the two villains that the player indirectly controls, with an overarching mystery about what the PC is actually trying to accomplish (and possibly who the PC really is?).

Mechanically, I’m reminded of Infocom’s Suspended in the way that each of the two sub-PCs has a different take on rooms and objects. (It turns out they’re in the same place even though they don’t know it.) You’re not allowed to let them be in the same room at the same time, which is making me want to print out the map that came with the download and use little tokens to represent their positions, but I think the map is supposed to be considered a spoiler, so I won’t.

Voice and atmosphere are very well done, with characterization abundantly threaded through responses such as:

Line 1> X CHAIRS
The chairs are, much like Dashing himself, overstuffed and uncomfortably smooth.

(Rex Dashing is a superhero and despised by both of the villians the Owl is directing.)

Occasionally there are bits where the polish didn’t reach, e.g.:

I can see a terrarium (which contains a gecko) and a metal enclosure (which is closed) here.

I know that’s a product of the default room description machinery, but its output is kind of horrible sometimes. (If I recall correctly, in I6 the .describe() property of an object can be used to override this default treatment.)

I’ve also encountered some odd inconsistencies, e.g.

Aquarium
I’m standing at the edge of a vast tank, above which a cage is suspended. Fortunately, I’m no longer in the cage. I know 
you’re already aware of that fact; I just like repeating it. There is a prominent red button on the wall, and an exit leads 
south. There’s also a trapdoor high overhead.

I can see a steel cage here.

Line 1> X BUTTON
The blue button apparently opens and closes the tank.

(Apparently, the button is actually blue, based on >X RED BUTTON vs >X BLUE BUTTON.)

The >SCORE system continues to amuse, especially the changes to the equivalent of a “rank” as would typically be found in an old school game, which in this case is an indication of what the PC plans to do with the money being “earned.” I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a game that tried to use the command in this way, i.e. mainly for jokes.

At the moment, I’m at 13 out of 30 points (or $13M out of $30M), and stuck with the potentially workable puzzles being one about dealing with an alarm and one about getting a frozen container open.

Ordon · May 1, 2026, 6:44pm

Maybe they’re an unreliable narrator and also colour blind so they keep confusing the colours… I’m on to something, guys…

Zed · May 1, 2026, 7:37pm

A1. Cat Petting Simulator 2014. Exits: east southeast south
You can see a Twine game by Neon Grey here.

> e
A2. Draculaland. Exits: east southeast south southwest
You can see a Versificator game by Robin Johnson here.

> play draculaland

otistdog · May 1, 2026, 11:27pm

OK, I finished The Owl Consults. I liked it and would recommend it, but it seems like the game was rushed a little in production and would have benefited from a bit more development time. (This is almost certainly due to getting it in before the IFComp submission deadline; the authors clearly had the skills to even out the remaining bumps, which are small, though some have outsized impact.)

I needed to get half a hint from the built-in hint system in order to proceed – not the answer, exactly, but a definition of the puzzle regarding the alarm. (It turns out that the puzzle is not about disabling the alarm but instead about suppressing the response.) Once that was clear, the solution was straightforward enough. Every other puzzle seems to have more than enough hinting, but based on existing IFDB reviews that might not have been the case for the initial release. (The current release is 1.02, using a non-standard release numbering system.)

The plot wasn’t as complex as I had been imagining it to be; it resolves in a way that’s in line with what the blurb says. I admire the handling of the double climax and pacing of the denouement – there’s a countdown to provide a sense of urgency, but it’s not that difficult to figure out the final puzzles within the 30 turns or so that are allowed.

It’s a little surprising to me that there has never been another “Owl Consults” title; it certainly seems like a formula that would work again, with room for exploration in terms of puzzle design and new characters. There are some thoughts buzzing around in the back of my head about the way the game manages the PC/player relationship (which seemed out of step with the rest of the design to me). If I can refine them to anything that might be useful to someone else, I’ll post a review on IFDB.

If you try The Owl Consults and like it, other games suggested by the Magic 8-Ball are:

The ones with which I’m familiar (about half of them) seem like good matches, and I’m definitely looking forward to trying The Origin of Madame Time. I’d also suggest the original Earth and Sky, which isn’t on the list.

Next up for me is a steep uphill climb to Worlds Apart, which I’ve tried before but set aside after half an hour or so. It’s been a goal ever since Field Option C was selected for this event, and I’m expecting to take it at a pretty leisurely pace. At #19 on this week’s edition of the IFDB Top 100 list (where it has held the distinction of being the highest-ranked TADS game for a very long time), having won the XYZZY Award for Best Story in 1999 (plus been nominated for seven others), and having appeared in three out of four editions of the Interactive Top 50 of All Time, this seems like one of the classics that have endured.

lpsmith · May 2, 2026, 3:47am

Having been dropped off via helicopter at ‘The Bones of Rosalinda’ (C4), Lucian reviews the game then looks around. For the only time in the entire race, there are eight options for unplayed games on the pristine field around him. Assigning ‘1’ to mean ‘north’, 2 to ‘northeast’, etc., he rolls a die…

North it is! To “The Little Match Girl 5: The Hunter’s Vow”

And it’s a second bit of synchronicity: I just competed in Iron ChIF against Ryan Veeder, and hadn’t actually played many of his games before (I think the mouse/pirate/treasure-maxing game was the only one?) I’ve heard of and been amused by the premise of the ‘Little Match Girl’ games for years, so it’s a perfect time to jump in. In the, uh, fourth game in the series? Maybe? Assuming ‘1’ was not Ryan, but the original by good ol’ Hans? I guess I’ll find out!

lpsmith · May 2, 2026, 6:12am

So, a review of LMG5THV on IMDB reveals that it’s the tenth game in the series. I’ve now played a handful of moves in the opening and the whole thing is just bonkers. There’s an ‘Ebanezabeth Scrooge’ who… might be the Little Match Girl? I have no idea. Every time I see the name I laugh. Ebenezer himself shows up, with a talking crow, for some reason (presumably because Ebenezer Scrooge has long been associated with Odin in popular culture). After wandering around a newly-built house for a while, it is finally revealed that I’m in the ‘Scrooge Orphans’ and Widows’ Home, Manchester Extension’. So my guess is that this is post-reform Scrooge? Or possibly just a coincidentally-named Scrooge? Or the real-life Scrooge that inspired Dickens to write his famous story? The crow’s name is ‘Hrieman’ (another name that makes me giggle every time I see it) and not ‘Jacob’, so he’s… probably not one of the ghosts? Actually, Dickens never revealed the ghosts’ names; could easily be one of them.

The whole thing is bonkers and threatens to fall apart under its own weight for a novice initiate like myself, but it is 100% certain that had I just randomly tried the game, I would have set it aside again at this point, deciding I had to play all nine other games in the series first. And then probably never would have gotten around to even the first one. But no! The RNG has spoken!

And I’m utterly delighted. I think I can honestly say this is the first time I’ve picked up a story mid-series since I was in grade school and accidentally read ‘Second Foundation’, only realizing after finishing it, that it was the third book of a trilogy. I would Never Ever do this on my own initiative, and it’s marvelously subversive. Watch out, guys! <insert cartoon of Neil DeGrasse Tyson waving his hands>

lpsmith · May 2, 2026, 6:29am

Hey, I got to beta-test that game!

Here’s what I always tell people about Worlds Apart: You can ‘say’ (and ‘think’) whatever you want, and the game will reply “[whatever it was]” The game does not otherwise ‘actually’ know what you are saying; it’s just there to let you act in-character a bit. There were several times in that game (particularly towards the end) where I just needed to have the protagonist say something, and the game let me do that, and I have always been grateful for it.

Doug_Egan · May 2, 2026, 11:59am

It is my intention to run a short course starting from Robin Johnson’s “Draculaland” but due to my resistance against reading, understanding, or following directions I am signed up for a free-style run, so I can do what I want. My wife says I have ADD. I have chosen a salmon colored marker, which is eye catching without being too beautiful. I like the word “salmon” with its silent “L”. Salmon of Knowledge, Salmon of Doubt. My review of Draculaland can be found here.

Joey · May 2, 2026, 2:22pm

I’ve been off to the races with Swigian, (for which I’ve given a few reflections). Turandot is next!

Harren · May 2, 2026, 3:57pm

I’ve finished the first game in my long run: Tales of the Traveling Swordman! I’ll soon add my own thread with reflections and insights about the games I played, and will then add a link here.
Edit: my reviews can be found here: Harren's 'Great Play Marathon' reviews

Next up is Turandot!

rovarsson · May 3, 2026, 3:59pm

I just finished Faute de Servo. And it was great! Nice pun in the title too…

Now continuing on to The Anachronist.

Hellzon · May 3, 2026, 10:25pm

Just finished Miss Gosling’s Last Case. Might put up a proper review later but for now:

At first blush, this looks like an entry in the “dead people solving crimes” category. And it is that, but in practice it’s the “animals solving puzzles” category since who you’re really controlling is Miss Gosling’s dog Watson.
It is overall not a terribly hard game, but I got stumped at some points by underestimating the manual dexterity of our protagonist dog.
I’m casually doing a thing based on Enigmarch 2026, and I find it quite amusing that myself and Daniel M Stelzer had similar ideas for at least two puzzles - changing the colour of things by looking through coloured glass, and using a noisy thing to guide you through a maze - COLOR and SOUND being two of the prompts. Though, of course, Miss Gosling’s Last Case from 2024 isn’t based on Enigmarch 2026.
Speaking of the author, I have a few more games on my wishlist after checking through his IFDB credits. Death on the Stormrider in particular was already on there.
Meetings so far: @otistdog is doing my planned run in reverse, we’ll see if we diverge later on. I and @Crazyqix share our start square and I look forward to their report.
Next up: Well, my early game is a bit flexible as long as I reach D4. We’ll see.

Melisande · May 4, 2026, 2:04am

I finished The Owl Consults. It’s fun, but it could have used some more polish.

The writing is very well done. Since both main characters are exploring the same locations, the authors put in the work to have two descriptions of everything aboard the Mephistopheles, which paid off; it does a lot to characterize the two protagonists, and provides splashes of humor. I got stuck once or twice and I had to replay the ending sequence several times, but overall the puzzles and pacing were good. My favorite of the two clients was Amelia Derringer. I thought her plan to use the slug to achieve world peace was amusing, especially since she actually tries to do so. It makes her much less of a stock supervillain. I also enjoyed the 1930s retrofuturistic setting.

As @otistdog notes, it seems like the game was finished in a hurry. I thought the characters should have reacted a bit to finding new things in places they’d already been, given the amount of attention paid to how they perceive their surroundings. The ending was darker than I expected; I didn’t think the reveal that The Owl had actually killed Rex Dashing fit very well with the overall tone, as even supervillains rarely actually murder people.

I also encountered a few bugs. Dirk Radon could move around the ship while in the middle of a monologue, and it’s possible to bypass the sequence of puzzles to get the flask entirely. In my playthrough, as Amelia Derringer, I turned off the power, then tried entering the cold storage room without having reprogrammed the robots, which worked. It just said “(first opening the heavy metal door).” In the one turn before Amelia had to leave, I examined the flask, but I could have pushed it west that turn and bypassed two puzzles. I instead later found the real solution to getting into the room, and, again as Amelia, got another turn, during which time I did push the flask out. It was only after that that I discovered you could eat the scarf.

Despite my somewhat unconventional playthrough, I still enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to returning to its unique setting in The Origins of Madam Time.

Now, onto Junior Arithmancer!

iaraya · May 4, 2026, 5:26am

I’ve just finished Save the Date, 5/5 excellent experience. It’s one where it’s best to go in with no spoilers, so I’ll just say it’s absolutely not a typical dating sim, clever and meta in a thought-provoking way.

Next stop shall be C2: A Witch’s Word

Ordon · May 4, 2026, 6:22am

Wait what?! I say the “L”, though?!