(Note: I have finished adding citations and cleaning up my old chapters in my book, so I’m working on finishing the rest. I will be publishing essays on 2022 and 2023, and the XYZZY winners from 2016 to 2023 this week, with little break in between).
Overview and Influences
This was a very strong year for choice-based games, with the top 4 games being choice-based, although a parser game would go on to win the XYZZY awards (almost a complete reversal from 2015, when Birdland won despite placing behind several parser games).
Amanda Walker had an outsized influence outside of IFComp, releasing blockbuster parser games in Spring Thing, Parsercomp, the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, and Ectocomp, all of which ended up rating higher on IFDB and in awards than most IFComp games.
Jim Nelson made his debut appearance in the Winter TADS Jam with Past Present. He went on to take 5th in IFComp and win the XYZZY and IFDB Awards.
The biggest new influence this year was, in my opinion, AI art, which was used by several games in their cover art, and would grow to be a contentious topic.
Top Games
The Grown-Up Detective Agency
by Brendan Patrick Hennessy
Brendan Hennessy is, by a wide margin, my favorite choice-based author, and is largely responsible for my interest in the format with his games Birdland and You Will Select a Decision.
So I was thrilled to see a new game by him in the competition. This is a sequel to Birdland. While it lacks the rhythmic structure and absurd birds of the first game, it gains more nonlinear structure and a lot more poignancy. The Grown-up Detective Agency sees our former child detective now grown up, pursuing more mundane crimes. Things take a surprising turn, though, when her younger self turns up and questions her about the path she’s taken in life.
While this game topped the IFComp charts, it had a bit weaker showing in the XYZZYs, only being nominated for two awards and winning one, for Best Individual PC.
The Absence of Miriam Lane
by Abigail Corfman
Abigail Corfman was another exciting name to see. She is the author of Open Sorcery, one of the most popular Twine games of all time on IFDB (and a commercial game at that), and her game 16 Ways to Kill A Vampire at McDonalds was the first choice-based game to ever win the Best Puzzles XYZZY award.
This game has gorgeous artwork, stylized but legible CSS, and pensive, beautiful music. Like The Grown Up Detective Agency, this is an investigation into a disappearance with a poignant twist. A man’s wife has disappeared, and you’ve been asked to find her. But she’s not just missing from the house; she’s missing from everyone’s mind as well.
This is a hard game; as you learn more about the missing woman, you are able to find ways to help her, but if you choose the wrong methods, you can end up hurting her, with no way to fix things.
A Long Way to the Nearest Star
by SV Linwood
This was SV Linwood’s first entry, and it’s a doozy. They later went on to win IFComp in 2023 with Dr Ludwig and the Devil. Right now, those two games top the charts of IFDB for the years 2022-2023, each with 41 ratings.
This is a twine game with a big world map and a parser-like inventory system. The game nudges you into using the system right away by requiring you to check your inventory and turn on your flashlight on the first turn.
You play as a thief on the run who’s crash landed onto a derelict ship. The main star of the game is the ship’s AI, SOLIS, who assists you as you wander around investigating datapads and robot parts. The game offers you a lot of freedom in how you interact with SOLIS and what the endgame is. It’s a great example of the parser-like choice games that have gained increasing prominence in recent years.
Other Games
The Archivist and the Revolution
Autumn Chen was no stranger to IFComp, having taken 10th place in the previous year. But the system used here was new to the comp: dendry, a system that Autumn Chen used to reconstruct Emily Short’s game Bee, which had originally used the Varytale system.
This game features a far-future protagonist who is part of a hidden minority. Out of work, you have to pinch pennies while picking up freelance jobs decoding multimedia that was embedded in the genomes of microbes years ago. It proved very popular, earning several XYZZY nominations, including one for Best Game.
According to Cain
by Jim Nelson
This serious and long TADS game contained a great deal of multimedia (which I unfortunately didn’t see when I first played). It features an alchemical future world where historians like you can travel through time to investigate the past. In this case, you seek to learn about Cain, the first murderer.
The game placed lower in IFComp (5th place) but won Best Game at both the XYZZYs and the first IFDB Awards. This is something that has happened many times in the past, where a more lighthearted, easy game has won IFComp (like Earth and Sky 2 and 3 or Alias the Magpie) while a more serious game has won the XYZZY awards (like Savoir-Faire, Blue Chairs, or Bogeyman).
It is the most popular game of the ongoing TADS Renaissance, a resurgence in the once-dying system in the last few years. It now ranks on IFDB as the third-most popular TADS game of all time, beating out heavy hitters like Gun Mute or Sunset Over Savannah.
January
by litrouke
The author litrouke lives in my head mostly as the creator of 10pm, a game that uses a lot of emojis to communicate.
This game is notable for its heavy use of graphics and animation. Navigation is done via a calendar, and text often morphs and changes as you read it. The story is a grim one of loss and disaster.
Thanatophobia
by Robert Goodwin
I just saw as I looked this game up that it is by the same Robert Goodwin who is listed on The PK Girl, one of the most popular Adrift games ever.
This game is noticeable for being a chatbot rather than a traditional parser, and even more noticeable, in the 2020s, for being a chatbot that doesn’t rely on AI. Everything here is hand-rolled. The author has used this system for a couple of games.
I was conviced it was AI after I asked it who made Starcraft (or something like that) and it said Blizzard, but I later looked at the code and found that the author had hand coded in several video games and their publishers (either this game or one of the author’s other games).
The Lottery Ticket
by Dorian Passer
This game was one of a series throughout 2022 by an author who had developed a new system for interactive fiction. Basically, each game took a classic short story and read it in chunks through a framing story of someone reading it. Every now and then (in one game, only once), the story would stop and ask you to fill in the blank with a word related to how you felt, then it would continue.
Under the hood, it used sentiment analysis. If you said a ‘good’ word, it would add a sentence about something positive to the next few paragraphs. If a ‘bad’ word, it would add something else.
This is one of the most unusual kinds of Interactive Fiction I’ve seen in many years, and was pretty neat.
Assorted Others
Some other games I’d like to mention in passing:
- Arthur DiBianca placed very highly with Trouble in Sector 471, continuing his string of limited parser games.
- Several authors associated to NYU entered Texture games as part of a workshop. This continued in 2023.
- Andrew Schultz continued his over-a-decade-long streak of entering IFComp games with two new entries.
- Jim Aikin released The Only Possible Prom Dress, a sequel to the game Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina, which is included in the Frotz iOS app and was one of my early favorites. This new game was one of the longest games ever entered into the comp.
Legacy
Several new authors continued to contribute to the IF world after this competition:
*SV Linwood went on to win the whole comp the next year.
*Jim Nelson has gone on to contribute numerous reviews and offering advice to other authors, especially with TADS.
*Jim MacBrayne, a new entrant this year, has gone on to release numerous games using the same BASIC engine.
*Manonamora entered The Thick Table Tavern. Manonamora would go on to write numerous games in both English and French (33, at latest count) and co-organized The Neo-Interactives, a group that runs non-stop game jams on a yearly schedule.
*William Dooling released Lost Coastlines, a game like his very popular Skybreak! but set in a fantasy world rather than sci-fi.
I started the IFDB awards the following year to be an earlier counterpart to the XYZZY Awards, and which included many of these games in its inaugural winners.
There are plenty of other great games from 2022’s IFComp. If you feel I missed one, let me know down below!
Made with the support of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation
