Influences
This year was dominated by returning authors.
- Of the top 10 games, all but one were written by repeat authors. Of the top 20, 16 were by repeat authors.
- This was only the second time in IFComp history that someone had won first place twice (Steph Cherrywell with the game Zozzled here and Brain Guzzlers from Beyond in 2015).
- 7 of the top ten had entered at least three times.
Even outside of the top 20, many games were by experienced authors coming back from hiatus or long-time enterers. Such authors include Robb Sherwin, Marshall Tenner Winter, Andrew Schultz, Ade McTavish (who entered the 4th game in a series), Katie Benson, Luke Jones, Bez, etc. Viktor Sobol, one of the most prolific players on IFDB with around 900 games rated, entered for the first time with a short, charming game.
This was a transitional year, with a lot of things either just having come out the year before (like the retro wave discussed in the previous article) or coming out the next year or after IFComp (like AI Dungeon). The intfiction forum switched over to Discourse from its previous software, and the very first Narrascope was held.
Some notable games outside of IFComp in 2019 included:
- Heavenâs Vault, an ambitious graphical game by Inkle where you translate an unknown language
- The Missing Ring, a twine mystery game in Spring Thing that has proven reliably popular over the years.
- Crème de la Crème by Hannah Powell-Smith, a large Choicescript game about an elite private school that proved extremely popular in the Choicescript community, and eventually tied for the Best Game XYZZY award.
- Ryan Veederâs Authentic Fly Fishing, a mystery game where all your saves are stored online and certain changes only occur when you havenât been playing for a while, making it impossible to speedrun. This required significant work on the backend of Inform/javascript and was part of a small trend of âfancy Inform effectsâ that extended into the first half of the 2020âs (so far).
Top Games
Zozzled
This game by Steph Cherrywell puts you in the role of an alcoholic flapper during prohibition whoâs trying to get a stiff drink at a hotel. Unfortunately, ghosts have gotten rid of all the good stuff, so you have to go around and drink them all up to get what you want.
Steph Cherrywell had previously won IFComp in 2015 with the hit game Brain Guzzlerâs from Beyond. Like that game (and their Parsercomp winner Chlorophyll), Zozzled is packed with vibrant and unusual characters with a consistent theme (in this case, prohibition/mobster era).
This game exemplifies the classic IFComp winner: around 2 hours of content, maybe more; easy to complete; funny; character-focused; unique narrator voice.
Turandot
Turandot is written by Victor Gijsbers, who had been influential in the early 2000âs IF community before taking a hiatus. His game the previous year, Terminal Interface for Models RCM301-303, had been fairly well received. But this new game was Choicescript, a departure from his previous parser modus operandi. It is currently the highest rated Choicescript game on IFDB.
This game is a spin on Pucciniâs incomplete and sometimes controversial opera Turandot. Just as in that story, a young man falls in love with the cold queen Turandot and has to pass challenges to win her love.
It has its own unique voice, though, very self-aware of both itself and genre conventions, such as a reference to Emily Shortâs Savoir-Faire. It is explicitly open and casual about sexual experiences, and uses choices mostly not to change the narrative but to express the main characterâs personality. More often than not, the choices serve to either contrast what can not be done (by greying out an option) or that all choices are equally meaningless in the face of infatuation by having them all be variations of one bad idea.
Chuk and the Arena
This was the most successful âpuzzle-focused Twineâ games up to this point. The author, Agnieszka Trzaska, had already released a couple big puzzly twine games, and went on to release many others.
This one features a small, weak alien who must enter a gladiatorial arena in order to win a chance to save his peopleâs moon. His greatest features are his wits and his ability to change colors on demand.
There are a wide cast of interesting characters and plenty of visual appeal in the multicolored links themselves. As has been common for high-placing Twine games, this is a visually appealing and interesting game. Itâs an interesting thing that visual appeal seems weighted so heavily in Twine games but not in parser games. It may be due to a hidden variable; maybe people who win tend to be people who work hard on their games, and Twine games have better tools to allow audio/visual variations than parser games do, so they end up tinkering with those. Itâs not a hard and fast rule; Animalia from the previous year had little styling.
Other Games
I should preface this by saying that this year has so many games that I absolutely love by authors whose work I admire. I could easily list 40 games here, so Iâm selecting games mostly based on how unusual they are, influential in some way, or even just random guessing about what people like might to read about.
Skybreak
This ADRIFT game won the Golden Banana of Discord award and placed very highly. Itâs an ambitious and entertaining game making use of menus and lists. Using procedural generation, it presents a large universe with distinct cultures where you can gather technology, allies, secrets, etc. and win in one of several different victory conditions.
ADRIFT games have often scored poorly in the past of IFComp, but this game attracted a lot of fans, contributing to the Golden Banana.
robotsexpartymurder
This game is interesting in that it has, well, sex and murder, and placed very highly. Now, Turandot has both of those things as well and placed even higher, but it was more subtle in its advertising. I believe one thing that strongly helped robotsexpartymurder place as highly as it did is the fact that it has multiple levels of explicitness that can be selected. Catering to multiple audiences this way is pretty clever, in my opinion.
Pas de Deux
This is a fascinating and unusual game. You are provided with an orchestra score (as a PDF âfeelieâ), and the parser game consists of getting the attention of the correct orchestra members at the correct moments. Just examining an orchestra member is enough to get them to act.
There is a bit of puzzle here, but otherwise this is almost more like a turn-based rhythm game than anything else. This is in stark contrast to the authorâs previous game, Tethered, which was a classic-style adventure game. The next year, he found the âGoldilocks zoneâ and wrote an IFComp-winning game: The Impossible Bottle.
Hard Puzzle 4 : The Ballad of Bob and Cheryl
This game series has an interesting history. Ade McTavish, the author, had had several successful games, from the 2nd-place IFComp game Map to the massive and highly-regarded audiovisual game Worldsmith.
Then he released a game called Hard Puzzle whose only point was to be really hard. Unfairly so, even. People were encouraged to not spoil the ending once they had solved it. I learned the ending from decompiling (using the program glulx-strings).
More Hard Puzzle games were released, specifically designed so that decompiling was not useful.
This particular game was much more complex than any of the others. âDecompilingâ is actually part of the gameplay! There are numerous âbugsâ that are actually features you have to take advantage of. The game extends beyond a single program onto a different website and a pdf, like an ARG.
Itâs pretty clever, but also obtuse; given that, and the â4â in the title potentially scaring off new players, this game suffered a bit in the ratings.
Legacy
Besides the many returning authors we had this year, a lot of future successful/prolific authors got their start in this comp.
This was Olaf Nowackiâs first IFComp, who has gone on to have many popular games in both English and German. Pace Smith, author of Limerick Heist, went on to write a few other well-received limerick games and to help with vetting IFComp games. Jac Colvin, who had several previous games not entered in comps, entered Each-uisge, and went on to do well in several other future comps. Damon Wakes made his first IFComp entry, and went on to make several comedic games, both in parser as well as choice, as well as some more serious games.
Throughout my writing of this essay, I felt like I missed some essential points. Please suggest any additions or corrections you would like for the year 2019!
Made with the support of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation
