IF 2025 Reviews Doug Egan

Competitions IFComp
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This morning I played “you are an ancient chinese poet at the neo-orchid pavilion” by KA Tan. I picked this one based upon my attraction to the title. It felt like a third person imperative, reminiscent of the memorably titled game “You will select a decision”. Strictly speaking “You are a poet” is third person indicative, but I read it as “You will be a poet, whether you want that or not”, and as I read into the story, there is some support for that interpretation. The PC, who has always been a secret poet in the past, has been discovered by the emperor and summoned to the palace for an annual poetry festival.

Incidentally, I was also drawn to the lower case letters in the title; perhaps I hoped I would be a poet in the style of ee cummings, the American writer known for his non-standard use of spacing and capitalization.

The story is hyper-link style, written in Twine. The graphic design is exceptional with thoughtful image placement and attractive screen color changes. On some pages clicking on the blank spaces below the text advances the narrative, a styling trick which isn’t very common, but which felt natural in this game.

The story is well written, and although I sometimes find myself getting bored or distracted with these long-form TWINE games, this one kept me engaged and I paused for a moment to consider each choice even in cases were the choice felt inconsequential. To this point “Do you want to walk clockwise or counter clockwise around a lake?” proves to be one of the most pivotal moments of the story.

After a long, and mostly linear introduction (which a player may choose to skip) the narrative becomes quite a bit more choice-based in the second half. During this part of the game, the PC can wander around the palace grounds, meeting other poets and gathering inspirations for their own composition. Aside from the PC (who works alone) the other poets have aligned themselves into groups which might be accurately described as poetry “cults” each with their own weird beliefs and fetishes. The story has a large amount of content which can not all be accessed on a single play through. I encountered a cult of sexuality, and a cult of numbers, and a cult obsessed with the purity of the natural order. In each case there are additional choices in how to react to the odd ideas of these other poets.

With 23 possible endings, the choices really do matter, although (as the lake example demonstrates) it is not clearly intuitive how the choices will impact the ending. I played to two endings (8 and 16, I think, if anyone is keeping track). That felt like a complete experience for me, for now.

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“Us Too” is a parser game, by Andrew Schultz. Schultz is the prolific and talented author of a style of word-games which would be hard to compare with other games, so I mostly limit my review to comparing this one to other Andrew Schultz games.

The central mechanic of this game is to recognize two word homonyms from descriptions in the text. These words will be solutions to puzzles which are used to advance the narrative, “Bar coat” might become “Bark oat”. I don’t think that particular example appears in this game, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Schultz has already thought of it. According to the in-game notes, this borrowed a lot of the code from “Why Pout” (Wipe out), along with some of the left over puzzle ideas he wasn’t able to fit into that earlier game.

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to find the homonym for the title “Us too” (you’ll need it near the end of the game) but oh boy, even as I write this I’m finding other hidden meanings in the blurb text “Aunt Ricky-Anne”

Tricky

One thing I thought this game excelled at was its highly polished in-game hint system, which I used a lot. There are no explicit hints given (for a walk through, you’ll need to refer to the available external walk-through file). However, there is a tool in the player’s inventory which can be used to identify word pairs of importance, and more powerfully the number of letters in each word of the solution. The player is gently hinted if they get even a single word correct of a solution, and if a solution is correct but will not be used until a later time. All very helpful, and very well coded into the game. Then if even the hints fail, there is another tool in inventory which can be used to skip puzzles, albeit only a limited number of times and with a penalty to the score. There are also a number of bonus points that can be earned along the way (I found only one of these).

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“Fascism- Off Topic” by Eavesdropper is a short parser game written in Glulx (Inform). My understanding, from reading another review, is that this game was inspired by a thread on the intfiction.org forum, which is a highly niche source of inspiration. The forum itself is highly niche, and I’m a regular but missed that thread. Still, I think it’s possible to appreciate the one joke in this game without any insider knowledge, so give it a try.

The tradition of insider joke-games goes way back to “Pick up the Phone Booth and Die” (Rob Noyes, 1996). As a game and coding exercise “Fascism- Off Topic” is more polished and sophisticated than its predecessor. There are plenty of things (including yourself) to examine and interact with within the train car setting, to put off typing the command which the game is signalling you to type.

As a message, this game is more provocative and interesting than “Phone Booth”. Even if we haven’t read the IF forum topic, most of us are familiar with Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” It is good to see that in thirty plus years of amateur parser game development, even the shortest entries are evolving in their form and substance.

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Next I went searching for a very specific type of game, a light, traditional parser game. After filtering for parser games, skimming past games that had extensive content warnings or promised extensive reliance on AI, or games I’d already played, there wasn’t much left. “The Semantagician’s Assistant” by Lance Nathan made the cut.

Semantagician is a wordplay game, in the style of Emily Short’s “Counterfeit Monkey”, but much more constrained. In fact, this is essentially a one room escape game that could be completed in about an hour. Nothing wrong with that. It will be many years (if ever) before we see another game as ambitious, massive, and polished as Counterfeit Monkey. As a one room game, Semantagician certainly holds its own.

After a short opening scene, the PC finds themselves in the Semantagician’s Dressing Room, surrounded by all sorts of magical props and a talking rabbit who occaisionally gives hints. The introduction of so many magical items, all at once, was a bit overwhelming, and after giving everything a once-over with “examine”, I found myself a little lost. Once I learned the “use” verb, my path forward became a little more clear. The “use” verb gives additional details about the magical equipment (most helpfully, the verbs that can be used with each item) which is not always evident from “examine” alone. But there were still a lot of things to try.

Like the devices in “Counterfeit Monkey”, each magical tool operates on a word, not on an object. A two syllable word like “railroad” could be split into a “rail” and a “road”. Letters can be cut off, added, switched in sequence, or operated upon in other ways to generate the particular objects which are needed to escape the room.

Compensating for the fact that there are so many new operations introduced all at once, is the feature that there are just a few takable objects in the game world to operate on (initially) and also that most of the transmutations that are allowed, are necessary to advance the story.. If a transmutation works at all, the player can feel pretty confident they are moving in the right direction. I’m sure there are some hidden Easter Eggs here, but for the most part the game falls short of fully creating the illusion that the player could create absolutely anything with their semantamagic powers.

I can’t help to keep comparing this to “Counterfeit Monkey”, but also it is unfair for me to do so. It would be like comparing a short moment of close up street magic to a two hour Las Vegas show. “The Semantagician’s Assistant” stands on it’s own. It has an entertainingly light tone, a working parser, a series of thoughtfully designed word puzzles, and an NPC rabbit imbued with a real personality. Moreover, this game was just what I was looking for when I found it.

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Next I played “The Olive Tree” by Francesco Giovannangelo, a story told from the perspective of a Palestinian olive tree, a tree variety known for its incredible longevity. Olive trees can live for hundreds if not thousands of years. This one lasts only just short of a century, but that is still longer than any one of the family members who take care of it, and that family is who the story is really about.

The “game” aspect of this piece is a resource management simulation, although the game in this case exists entirely to support the story, a beautiful heartbreaking story about this Palestinian family: their lives, their loves, their struggles, and losses over several decades of expanding Israeli occupation. The optimization game serves this story well, highlighting the fragility of life itself, and the struggle (of a tree, or of a people) to just survive, let alone produce flowers and fruit. In years of drought, it is almost impossible to give the tree the water it needs. Toward the end it is possible to produce a crop of olives. But by its nature and setting, this story is a tragedy.

Regarding now on the story’s use of Vorple. I haven’t experienced very many games written with Vorple, which is a tool to incorporate JavaScript and CSS styling into a parser game. Vorple is applied to good effect in this game, incorporating graphics, sound, and customized fonts to uniquely style all aspects of the player’s experience in support of the story.

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Thanks for the review! Better hinting/quality of life features were a big push for Us Too. And yes, it was a nice place for things that didn’t fit into Why Pout.

If you remember any of the places where hints went off the rails, let me know. It’s the sort of thing I want to fix up post-comp. But don’t sweat going back – I’m looking forward to your reviews of other entries.

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You might want to tag this post with the ‘IFComp’ category, instead of just the ‘Competitions’ category: I’ve been scanning only the former, so I almost missed your reviews!

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Also add your name to the title, to differentiate it from all of the other review posts.

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Thank you so much for playing The Olive Tree and for taking the time to write such a kind review! I greatly appreciated the clarity and accuracy of your analysis.

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Next on the randomizer is “Lady Thalia and the Case of Clephan”, by Emery Joyce and N. Cormier. This is one of the longer games I’ve played in this competition, a Twine entry in four acts. Lady Thalia has appeared as a character in several previous IF comp entries. I’m not sure I’ve played any before this one, but I kept mixing Lady Thalia in my mind with Enola Holmes, Sherlock’s forgotten sister from a YA mystery series. Who knew there were so many lady detectives in Victorian London?

Lady Thalia is a former thief, who now applies her B&E skills to fight crime. In this caper she is chasing an art thief who has appropriated her criminal identity. Thalia is motivated as much by jealous desire to protect her own criminal legacy as she is by more noble pursuits. Thalia is assisted by various others: an old friend from the theater who scores her thievery, an employer (Mel) for whom she feels a sapphic attraction, and a husband (in the legal sense only) who spends most of his time at the club with his own special friend. Along the way she gets involved with ghosts, mediums, secret societies, and other tropes of Victorian society. One of my favorite styling tricks in this game is a split dialogue screen for Lady Thalia and Mel, allowing the player to role-play both of them simultaneously during critical interrogations of others.

There is a score-keeping mechanism in this game and I ended with a ranking of “skillful” thief. After finishing this elaborate game, I loaded the HTML back into Twine to view the passage structure, not something I usually do. There are a lot of different choices along the way, and it is possible to earn much lower scores than I did (or even somewhat higher; I fell short of the “mastery” level). But the score doesn’t appear to otherwise affect the final outcome, and I don’t think it is possible to lose. It would be interesting to go back and play as a total bumbler.

Just before the start of this year’s competition (in late August) I played “Winter-Over”, by the same authors. The setting, characters, and mood are so different, it is impressive to see a pair of collaborators with such wide ranging literary talents. For my own tastes, I liked “Winter-Over” more. I liked the stark arctic setting, and sense of creeping doom in that game. Others will like the comedy and romance of “Lady Thalia” a little better, so it’s really all a matter of personal taste. Both games are remarkable in the ambitiousness of their design.

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Thanks for the review! I’m glad you appreciated the game in some respects, even if it’s not so much to your taste.

(It is a bit later than Victorian, though; I added the line about Thalia’s mother’s Victorian sensibilities because playtesters were tending to read the setting as mid-20th century at the beginning and that’s too late, but maybe the line confuses more than it clarifies.)

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Thanks for this clarification! Thinking back now, I recall a comment by Yorkie, that his occult society was founded thirty years earlier “during the last century”, which puts this in the decade you intended to represent. I was pre-disposed to think of it as somewhat earlier, because I kept making comparisons to Enola Holmes (a fictional female detective set in the 1880s who also climbs walls, breaks into houses, engages in cos-play, and defies social conventions). The Spiritualism movement lasted several decades, but faced public scrutiny by the late 1920s, so Yorkie’s comment places this story at just the right moment in history.

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Next up, “The Burger Meme Personality Test”, a point click parody by Carlos Hernandez. This game purports to be a personality test given in the final stage of a job interview. My first time through I thought this game was hilarious. Second time through, I saw some repeated material, but there was also plenty of new content to keep it fresh The first time through I role played as myself, and got prematurely ejected from the job interview. The second time I role played as a total boot-licker, and I got the job! So there is actually some thought put into the endings, and this goofy personality test is probably at least as legit as the purportedly real corporate personality test it is meant to parody (cited in the end notes). There are several other endings listed which I haven’t reached.

I love that the author includes clowns in the game’s content warning. “Fear of a clowns” was an example I gave in an essay I wrote several years ago, related to some issues I have with the ubiquity of content warnings.

The game has an aesthetic which can make it feel like it was written by some brainy high school students while they were waiting for their acceptance letters to the Harvard Lampoon. But I began to suspect it was written by someone older and more professionally experienced even before I went and found the author’s website and bio. The list of credits is extensive. The subject matter is that of someone who has been in the workforce for several years. It takes a very intelligent writer to parody foolishness this well.

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Thanks so much for this review! Finding an audience for humor can be tough; it’s a great feeling to know the game is landing for some folks out there. And I might have to get an inspirational poster made that reads, “Live your life like you’re a bunch of brainy high school students waiting for their acceptance letters to the Harvard Lampoon.”

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“A murder of Crows” is a Twine game by Design Youkai. I chose this because it came near the top of the randomized list, and the blurb looked inviting. The game delivers what it promises; a day in the life of a crow. We (my crow friends and I) had a series of adventures involving dogs and humans and the flock (collectively, “the murder”). The crows speak in a rhyming cant, a speech pattern which effectively imitates the repetitive “caw caw” sounds of a real flock, but regrettably detracts from the representation of the birds high intelligence, something I think the author also meant to show.

There are a lot of circular paths through the text, which might be true of a crow’s life (repeating the same series of actions again and again) but this made the game feel like a menu maze, as I struggled to find a path to the end game. There were a couple small spelling mistakes, and a Twine syntax warning message on one passage. Overall, this was an interesting and ambitious project for someone who may be relatively new to the Twine medium. I hope to see more from this author.

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Next played “Anne of Green Cables” by Brett Witty. I had been looking forward to this title with some trepidation. I enjoyed the original children’s story upon which this is based, and I am a fan of Canadian Maritime culture more generally; the music, the history, the landscape, etc, etc. I once considered buying a vacation property in Nova Scotia, but then Covid changed our financial situations and that did not work out. On the other hand, I’m lukewarm about cyberpunk, or steampunk, or whatever this particular adaptation should be called.

“Anne of Green Cables” follows the original story somewhat faithfully for at least the first three chapters, which is about as much as I remember from as long ago as I read the book. But the cyber-punk conventions and setting almost completely displace the pastoral maritime setting which attracted me so much to the original.

This re-telling is text dense, with few branch points. I read as carefully as I was able for a few chapters, then found myself skimming, stopping at the branch points. The “undo” button is enabled, so I could toggle back and forth to see how much difference the choices really made. Sometimes they did (in the short term, at least). In one scene (which I think was adapted from the original) Mrs Rachel insults Anne by calling her ugly. Anne has a choice between calming down, or blowing up, but this is a false choice. If the player directs her to “calm down” we are reminded this is not in her nature, and the scene plays out exactly the same. Afterwards, however, given a choice between apologizing to Mrs Rachel or not apologizing, the scenes play out quite differently through to the end of the chapter.

The CSS styling is attractive throughout. There is a cool visual puzzle near the end, which determines the ultimate conclusion. The default ending (if the visual puzzle is not manipulated) includes a number of Twine Syntax warnings. The more desirable endings work fine.

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As of just now I’ve fixed this. Thanks everyone for pointing out this issue.

And thanks for the review!

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Back in August two authors were kind enough to allow me to preview and beta test their comp entries. I’ll keep these reviews short, as I don’t want to accidentally reveal anything I saw in the pre-comp versions. Interactive fiction is like sausage; they can be very tasty, but nobody wants to read a long essay from anyone but the author themselves about how sausage is made.

“Frankenfingers” by Charles Moore. This is a parser game produced in Z-code/Inform. The “Frankenstein’s Monster” legend is retold from the perspective of a dismembered hand, which begins trapped in the parts room of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. What makes the game unique is that it is written in rhyming verse. The writing is nicely atmospheric, especially due to the poetry. There is a clever puzzle involving a trampoline, and other clever puzzles as well which the player must reckon with in order to escape Frankenstein’s compound and reunite with his family in the village. This reminded me somewhat of “The Bones of Rosalinda” (and its sequel). All of these games fall into a genre I choose to call “comic horror”.

“Where is Mr Beaver” by Stefan Hoffmann. This is a web-based parser-point click hybrid game. The player is a mail carrier who stops into Mr Beaver’s curiosities shop, and becomes worried that the owner isn’t around. A curiosities shop (or antique shop, as it is described in the game), is a great starting location for a text game; so many weird and unusual objects to examine and use. I really like games that feature options for parser and point click play styles. In fact, this particular engine has a long list of system options which make it highly customizable: to highlight words, add in multichoice options, to provide hints large and small, or even to revert back to a robust traditional parser.

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Thanks Doug. :slight_smile: “Where is Mr. Beaver” is also bilingual and can be switched to German at any time (for whatever reason one should do this :slight_smile: )

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“The Island Of Rhynin”, by Ilias Seferiadis is a short Twine game, written in an adventure game-book style. The character attributes defined in this game book are health, competence, confidence, and trust. For each choice the player makes, a bonus or penalty may be applied to the displayed values of each attribute. My first game I role-played as a courageous but humble explorer. This strategy had a mixed impact on my confidence score: courageous actions increased my confidence but humility decreased it. In most situations it is easy to predict which choices will result in good outcomes and which ones will not. In the late game, some choice options become unavailable if the scores have fallen too low, something I observed only on a second play-through where I deliberately made the worst choices I could at every turn. The game is short and it was worth it to play more than once to see these different outcomes.

Thematically, this felt a lot like an RA Montgomery or E Packard “Choose your own adventure” book: foreign explorers arrive on an already inhabited “primitive” island with the implied purpose of taking what treasures they can. Even the ending resonated with what I remember about Packard’s books (spoiler)

in the end game, at least one of the protagonists must perish.

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