IF 2025 Reviews Doug Egan

Competitions IFComp
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“Fable” is a fantasy romance written in Twine. More precisely a queer themed romance involving an awkward rivalry between siblings, set in a fantasy landscape possibly inspired by Game of Thrones. This isn’t a genre I would normally choose to replay, but several things motivated me to do so. 1) The writing transcended the genre. I didn’t mind reading it again. 2) I wasn’t happy with the ending I got, and wanted to see if I could change it. 3) I felt like I missed some really important plot point in the first read. 4) I wanted to test a personal theory about the text.

My personal theory about the text, that the PC could be role-played as female, proved wrong. The PC is described as a “boy” (never a man, which I think is highly significant to the story) at least three times. And to play as female, one must interpret the line “you always hated apricots” much more literally than is intended.

Regarding the really important plot point, I had peeked at Victor G’s review after playing this the first time, and saw reference to some wild plot tangent about a shape-shifting body snatcher named Jamie. But I searched and searched, and could never find Jamie mentioned in any of the story lines. I searched a text dump of the html file, and the version Victor describes is certainly there in the text dump. I could just never find a path to it when I played.

There aren’t enough choice points in the entire game (which itself is a problem, limited interactivity) to hide a plot twist that large, so I don’t know what the heck is going on.

Lastly, regarding my disappointment with the ending: as a player, I really didn’t want my character to betray his sister by running off in the woods with her fiance. There were several choice points near the end which allowed me to delay that inevitability, but no matter what choices I made in the end game, I still ended up in that same position.

Addendum: it looks as if I ended the game prematurely, missing a tiny clickable blue period at the end of a passage, in spite of visiting it more than once.

The story does get weird after that, but ultimately reaches a more satisfying conclusion wherein the PC does not continue betraying his sister.

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I don’t think it’s possible to reach the end without encountering this character—could you have inadvertently stopped early? Did you get to the part where the POV switches to Ronan?

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Oooh, thanks for sharing that. I went back to the point I stopped at before and realized there was a tiny period off the end of the passage that could be used to advance the story. I missed that, even after multiple visits to the same passage. I hope others won’t.

That does change the story. Now I can feel satisfied that the character didn’t betray his sister, I guess. Something about it reminds me of Midsummer’s Night Dream, perhaps the criss-cross love affairs and body switching and frequent dream like jaunts into the woods. Oddly entertaining.

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“Backpackward” is a choice based game tagged “No emotional growth.” At last, the randomizer has served up a good old fashioned stoner comedy. Written by Zach Dodson for Interactive Tragedy, Limited.

Fired from his job at a Smoothie joint in the local strip mall, the PC goes home to his dysfunctional family to smoke a bong and sleep in his neighbors cellar. There, he discovers his backpack “Jansport” is actually a “Jansportal” to a D&D world where he has the potential to be a hero.

Oftentimes throughout the game the player is asked to choose his emotional response “push the anger down” or “let it out”. I toggled back and forth during play to see what differences these choices made in the short term. I don’t expect they make any difference in the long term, except that as a player I became increasingly likely to choose “let it out”, which I imagined as sort of a character arc.

The more significant mode of interactivity is graphical. Several times the player is invited to reorganize their backpack, adding new inventory or cleaning things out. The number of inventory slots is limited, so the player has to make choices about which items to equip. I’ve not seen this kind of graphical inventory management in the IF comp before, but it’s a common mechanism in the world of graphical role playing games.

The backpack inventory plays a big role in what happens in later scenes, determining what objects the PC might have available for defense, gifts, commerce, self-care or other uses. There must be a ton of Easter Eggs in this game, given how many different inventory objects are available over the course of play, and how frequently specific items are mentioned in the running text. In particular, the final outcome depends on the choice of inventory, So while I was able to reach a final “win” state, I suspect my outcome might have been even better if I’d carried an additional gift item.

The game has an extensive list of collaborators, with a highly polished and professional feel about it. I wish the dialogue styling had been done differently; the text felt fragmented and hard to read. But the graphical inventory management system was especially attractive and well designed. The text is amusing, even wildly funny in places (I loved that I could cure Seward’s fleas by gifting him a Rhinestone studded flea collar from the future world). The large cast of colorfully written NPCs also lend to the success of this work.

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Next I played “A Rock’s Tale”, by Shane R, a Twine tale with very short passages, but a lot of different possible endings. You are a talking rock (which is a novel POV for an interactive fiction). You meet a variety of different people wandering down the forest past. Through interactions with these NPCs, or sometimes interactions between the NPCs and each other, the player can discover up to 20 different endings. The game keeps track of the endings you’ve already discovered, as well as offering hints about how to reach hidden endings. I stayed away from the hints, for the most part, except to see how they were formatted. I discovered fully half the endings, and more than nine different characters, which was enough of an experience for me. A light and pleasant diversion from the long form IF I’d been playing recently.

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“Violent Delight”, by Coral Nulla. I’m gonna hide the rest of this review, because nobody should be reading a review of this particular game without trying it first.

Summary

I made the mistake of reading a few reviews before playing it, so the unusual intro sequence wasn’t a surprise to me. I bid on a game. Then waited an hour for it to ship. A real hour. There was more to do while I waited than I thought there would be. Some other buttons on the screen to click. Meditation. Composing the intro of my review. Then at some point I gave up and said “I’m not playing this stupid game.”

Several years ago I read a review of one of my past games that said “when a game simulates a boring experience, it’s a boring game”. That advice is a truism. Every game developer knows it. But there are still reasons a developer might simulate a boring experience anyway; to prank the audience (Penn and Teller’s “Desert Bus Game”), or because the author is working through some personal issues by writing a game (which is not a boring experience) about an earlier experience, or because the author simply misunderstood that their topic was boring (how many times has he Towers of Hanoi puzzle been implemented? probably on more systems than the “Cloak of Darkness.”). I don’t presume to understand why Coral Nulla put a one hour delay on the start of this game, which is why I have hidden the details of this post. But seriously, I wasn’t going to play it.

Except that I inadvertently left the window open and when I came back it had actually loaded. That was when the real surprises began. This is genuinely a creepy game. It is proof enough that you don’t need high rez, five billion color graphics to create a mood. You don’t even need a plot. In fact I think the weirdness of it enhances its mood; the descent into deeper and deeper levels, with creepier messages and less time to read them, enforced by repeating cycles of hurry up and wait.

A couple things I noticed: the time allowed on each successive level gets shorter. the theme of each level correspond roughly to the anxieties and traumas of each age level, from the taunts of playground bullies, to the test anxiety of high school, and eventually into the workforce. Finally some of the messages on level 11 (which may or may not be the final level) call the player out of the computer world and into their own world; check your own basement, you hear?

For me, I saw some parallels (probably not deliberate) with “My Father’s Long long legs”, in terms of the “exploring downward” aspect, and also the change in screen color at the final level. But what this game did which set it apart from anything I’ve seen before was to perfect the use of the pacing timer, using it to both speed up and slow down the player’s heart rate. I just don’t understand why it needed such a long delay at the beginning?

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Violent Delight spoilers

I believe there are references to tariffs and the UK’s approach to censorship, including the so-called video nasties. It’s probably to replicate the way people become more invested into something creepy the more taboo and hard-to-reach it is.

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“The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens”, by Lamp Post Projects is a choice based game; a fantasy, romance, mystery, with perhaps even a little adventure thrown in. “Sylvan Gardens” hasn’t gotten many reviews, which I’m sure is due mostly to its length. The game is one of only two in the competition listed as “more than two hours”. I don’t watch the clock when I play, but I estimate this took me three to four hours, over two days time. The game is professional quality in terms of its scale, writing, original visual graphics, and lovely classical music. I REALLY liked the music (classical compositions, changing with each location) which the blurb says is original music written for this game.

Mild Spoilers

The PC, who lives in a little village called Sylvandale, has recently been troubled by sleepwalking. They find themselves waking up night after night in the local botanical gardens. To help cure the sleepwalking, the PC begins visiting the gardens during the day. The story is presented in six chapters, and lasts over several weeks of game world time. The character is highly customizable in terms of personal characteristics chosen in the early chapters: I role played a half-elf, Bard named “Alex”. But the character is also defined by choices the player makes throughout. I was someone interested in being polite and developing close friendships with the four NPCs who play a major role in the game, but I had no interest at all in devloping a “romance”. Thankfully this game allowed me to play aromantic, which not all romance simulators will. There is so much more driving this story than just the romance aspect.

All five characters (The four NPCs and the PC) have been cursed in some way; three have been cursed by magic, and one has been cursed by the selfish choices made by the garden’s wealthy founder (a wizard) many decades before. The PC is cursed by his sleep walking, which also turns out to have a magical origin. In the game I played, all five characters aligned to lift all of these curses. Other endings may be possible, but I got the feeling that many of the most significant choices are reserved for the last chapter.

In the version I played, I reseeded the forest for the original inhabitants of the land, driving away the more recent immigrants in the process. I also betrayed one of my companions by determining to become a wizard myself, using the founder’s library as my training resource. I don’t know if these were the most noble choices I could have made, but they were mine and I was rewarded with a lengthy epilogue describing the results of my decisions. I might come back later to try one of the alternate paths, but right now I feel I’ve completed an epic adventure and need some time away to process it.

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Thank you so much for taking the time to play “Sylvan Gardens” and share your kind words! I’m just so delighted to hear that you enjoyed my music (I’m a classical composer “by trade”), and that the game felt like an ‘epic adventure’ for you!

I’m also really glad you found the aromantic, friendships-only route satisfying. While all my games on the IFComp ballot (including “The Path of Totality” and “Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade”) have romance (to varying degrees of depth or focus), it’s very important to me that they’re optional and that players can have a complete-feeling experience without engaging in romance storylines.

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"Fired”, by Olaf Nowacki, is a short workplace comedy with parser interface; a type of game which was a staple of the IF comp twenty years ago, but now seems exceedingly uncommon. The PC is a disgruntled ex-employee who has gone into the office on a Saturday to clean up, collect dirt on his former boss, and generally wreck havoc. The scoring system awards single point bursts of endorphin with such frequency that this surge could not be maintained if the game went on much longer. But pleasant while it lasts. The puzzles are straightforward (with one exception) and parser works well enough, as long as you don’t demand too much of it. (searching a box on the opening scene reveals “your belongings” but you won’t find out what’s actually in the box without “x belongings”). The one puzzle which I didn’t understand involved

spreading some goo on a velvet surface. I just didn’t understand the motivation.

My favorite puzzle involved

the hole puncher.

The former boss is described in such visceral terms, I can’t help wondering if this game was a sort of therapy for an author in recovery from a bad employment situation. Regardless, this game will provide fans of old-school parser comedies with a solid half hour of entertainment.

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Thank you for the kind review! :blush:

You nailed it! Fortunately, my anger is already gone. :sweat_smile:

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“The Breakup Game”, is an interactive experience written in Twine by Trying Truly. I had passed over this entry on an earlier iteration of the randomizer, but recently saw a review by dott. Piergiorgio @Piergiorgio_d_errico comparing it to “Eliza” and that piqued my interest. Eliza was a therapy simulator written in the 1960s which accepted natural language input; in other words, it had a primitive parser. I first saw an implementation of the software on my Uncle’s Osborne computer. The Osborne was incidental also the first home computer system I’d ever seen. My Uncle was a professional programmer who, among other projects, helped with the earliest digitization of the FBI’s fingerprint data.

“The Breakup Game” presents an odd mashup of achievements driven game and therapy tool. The use of “achievements” has been a driving motivator in several entries this competition cycle (“Sylvan Gardens”, “The Rock’s Tale”). In this entry, the impulse to steam roll through a series of mutually contradictory choice list options for the sake of earning achievements feels largely at odds with the use as a self-help tool for articulating one’s feelings after a breakup. Used that way, this game should be experienced mindfully, taking long moments between each passage to pick the one or two most sincere responses.

So should I judge this as a game, or as a self-help tool? As a game, it doesn’t work very well because of the content. As a self-help tool, its better than I would have expected. The passages are well written, and the advice is generally thoughtful and sound. The experience was also a bit longer than I expected, taking slightly longer than fifteen minutes if the reader will pause for a solemn moment between each passage. I’m not the target audience though. I’ve been in a stable romantic relationship for nearly half my life. I have to think back decades to roleplay my past self in the only relationship when I ever cried after I was dumped (I’d been with her for a year, my first serious relationship, and my emotional health was already on the rails for reasons unrelated to our relationship… in fact, in retrospect, I credit her for helping me get my emotional health back on the track)

Roleplaying as my past self, I wasn’t always able to find a sincere response from the menu list. Asked to describe my ex, three choice options recall her as the perfect soulmate who got away from me (I’m not a creepy stalker, just sad), one described her as “only human” and one described her as “terrible”. A more realistically scoped choice list would include “falsely idealized ex-”, three variants of “only human” and three different levels of “terrible”.

So again, I’m not the target audience, but I do sincerely hope this experience lands with someone else, and I think it might. It’s surely a healthier self-reflection and coping tool than an AI chatbot.

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Thank you for playing and for the kind review.

I was able to solve about half the mystery on my own, and then (because I could find no internal or external hints file) I plumbed the raw JavaScript for hints.

There is an internal hint system available - you can access it by clicking on “About” in the sidebar. Players are informed of this through a popup dialog box when they first view the case file. But, anyway, kudos for doing your own sleuthing at code-level!

Glad you enjoyed the game! Will take your feedback into consideration for future works.

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Hey Doug!!! Thank you so much for your review and honest attempt to engage! Made my day!

I’m interested in what you’ll say: I did my best to clarify in the game itself and its description that the game is NOT about unlocking all achievements (“This is not about seeing all there is to see”) - I’m guessing I worded it too cryptically. I absolutely DON’T want people to try and gain all the achievements, just to get whatever is relevant to themselves and their personhood.

What do you think I could have done differently to hammer in the point better?

Also I completely agree with your point about the lack of variation in responses sometimes (btw: if you would have chosen “Perfect Soul Mate” the game WOULD have chided you that they ARE a falsely idealized ex in response).

I’d love to expand options in the future to cover a wider breadth of mental spaces though.

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At the top of my personal list of favorites from the 2024 IF comp was “Mrs Gosling’s Last Case”, by Daniel Stelzer. It is with some chagrin, therefore, that I had overlooked Mr Stelzer’s entry in this year’s comp, until just last Tuesday. This can happen when there are over eighty games in the comp, and I’m mostly only paying attention to the ones near the top of my randomized list.

“The Wise Woman’s Dog”, set 3300 years before “Mrs Gosling’s Last Case”, is in no sense a prequel, but the two works do share some striking parallels: Games written in Dialog, featuring a choice of hyper-text or full parser input, told from the POV of a dog helping its incapacitated human companion.

“Wise Woman’s Dog” includes just about every player convenience you can imagine; choice of parser or hypertext, onscreen interactive map, exits listing, path finding, in game hints, reminders of acquired knowledge, an original soundtrack, and comprehensive footnotes. The footnotes provide historical authenticity to this simulated Bronze Age world by documenting the research and evidence supporting this historical fiction, as well as authorial choices made for the sake of the story-telling.

Before I describe the very best feature of the game in the last paragraph, forgive me for this {criticism sandwich} I played on my laptop, and my screen view compressed the content to the middle third of the screen, as if I was playing on a handheld device. I had trouble seeing the text. There was an option for enlarged text, but I didn’t find that viewing very satisfying either, because of limitations on the amount of text visible between the command prompt and the top of the screen.{/criticism sandwich}

The quality of the puzzle design in “Wise Woman’s Dog” sets it apart not only from “Mrs Gosling”, but really from nearly anything I’ve played since Hadean Lands. Honestly, “Wise Woman’s Dog” should be analyzed as a case study by future puzzle designers. The magic system is initially simple (there are only six spells) but grows exponentially in complexity as the PC acquires techniques to modify and/or extend those spells to new situations. The game has a large open map, with multiple puzzles available to solve at any one time (never a gauntlet situation). There are multiple ways to solve some of the individual obstacles, and a variety of paths to achieve the same ends. I played for at least three hours before reaching a win state, and estimated (based on unexplored areas or unresolved situations) that I’ve only experienced about 70% of the game.

Thanks for writing this game.

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Thank you so much for the review, and I’m so glad you enjoyed the game!

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“Errand Run (Sad Girl Summer)” is a short story written in Twine by Sophia Zhao. Ought to be played before reading my analysis.

Spoilers

For the first thirty seconds I took this at face value, a single woman grocery shopping in a pretty crappy grocery store. I like food stories, so I played on. The twist became apparent fairly quickly, that I was shopping in some post apocalyptic nightmare world. The vividly written text and creative CSS styling work together to create that mood. For the next thirty seconds, I thought it was set after a war. Then in the last thirty seconds I realized that it was more literally post apocalyptic, in the religious sense, set after the Rapture. This is timely, since the rapture happened last week, I’ve been told. Nobody I know was taken up. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just didn’t happen to any of my friends. “It’s the end of the world every day, for someone” Margaret Atwood tells us in the end quote, leaving me with a fourth possible interpretation of Sophia Zhao’s provocative art piece.

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I honestly think “Hobbiton Recall” is a good title choice. A mashup between dissimilar genres. It’s the sort of title which might have been imagined during a fever dream, much like the one the PC has woken from in the opening scene. Saner minds would have scrapped the title the next morning, but JD Bardi followed through and developed a lengthy game around it.

The title drew me in. But when I began playing, I was put off by the relentless characterization of the PC as a misogynist jerk. Other reviewers have chronicled examples from every chapter reinforcing this characterization. As much as I enjoy GrueScript games (due to my affections for Robin Johnson’s early work) “Hobbiton Recall” is not a Robin Johnson game.

Playing a little further, I’m pretty confident that the dysfunctional relationship between the PC and his wife Mavis is a direct parody of some specific book or short story. Just not sure which one. The game has many direct or implied references to last century British literature. The space under the stairs and the breakfast scene felt distinctly like Harry Potter. The Toothpaste factory and later the little children working at the Rekall institute for “99.9999% less than adults” recalled specific scenes from Willy Wonka (Roald Dahl). The late chapters of “Hobbiton Recall” reference scenes from “The Hobbit” (Tolkein) and “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale” (Phillip K Dick story which inspired Total Recall).

If you haven’t yet started the game, but you’ve read this far in the review, our protagonist dreams of becoming a Hobbit having adventures like those in Tolkeins books. He learns about an institute “Rekall” which can make dreams come true in the Virtual Reality world. But first he must solve an unrelated puzzle by delivering his wife’s urinalysis sample to the lab.

About half hour in I started following the walk-through very closely. The main puzzles prior to entry into Rekall are gauntlet-like, one item needed to get another, without much natural motivation about why you would do something like….

Playing bagpipes for a cat… filling your wife’s urinalysis bottle with pond water.

The most satisfying part of the story comes near the midgame where the asshole protagonist is

tied naked to a chair in a doctor’s office and injected with a hypodermic needle through his forehead.

The scene leading up to that is also one of the funniest dialogue sequences of the game.

Then suddenly, at the end of Act 1, the walk through file suddenly ends. I could see in the raw HTML text that I wasn’t even half way through the game, but there were no more walk through notes. I continued to play, consulting the raw HTML code for hints. The code is well organized and easy to read. Some reviewers have reported the hospital scene was impassable prior to a Sept 8 comp version update. I’m here to report that I went beyond the hospital scene, played for another two hours, and STILL haven’t reached the winning ending (but I think I’m close, and I’ve already spoiled it for myself by reading the code). The writing and characterization are a little less cringy in the second half (Mavis reappears briefly. I doubt very much this marriage can be saved). Some of the scenes, especially those parodying the Hobbit are quite funny. The puzzles beyond the first act are generally more intuitive and less tedious.

Well, there is one puzzle where you have to broker a romance between two elves by running messages back and forth between the two. But that was tedious in a fun way

I predict this game will have a high standard deviation, and may even be a contender for the Banana award.

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“The Transformations of Dr. Watson”, is short mystery with supernatural elements, written in Twine by Konstantin Taro. The story incorporates music and graphics, Twine features I have praised in other games, but knowing (or frankly even suspecting) that AI has been used to generate assets leaves a sour taste for me. There are graphic artists in this community who might be willing collaborators for your work.

No matter, the text is human written (I presume), an entertaining contribution to the cannon of Sherlock Holmes fan fiction. Doctor Holmes is violently attacked while performing an autopsy at the estate of a wealthy client. His soul transfers into a series of other bodies, animal and human, through which he is able to collect evidence but less able to communicate his observations in an effective way to Sherlock Holmes.

The game offers several choice points: what details to focus on in a given scene. Time advances quickly, so there often isn’t an opportunity to go back and try the other option later. But this seems like the type of game where it will all work out in the end… for Doc Watson, at least. Maybe not for the various other bodies his soul has transferred through.

The game is short, and will be an entertaining read as long as the reader is not sensitive to violent content.

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“Willy’s Manor”, by Joshua Hetzel is a parser game set in a familiar location: a large house full of magical puzzles left there by the playfully eccentric owner. (Remember Hollywood Hijinx, Savoir Faire, Finding Martin?). “Willy’s Manor” isn’t nearly as ambitious as those titles; the central puzzle mechanism is a box which dispenses printed riddles, and won’t dispense the next one until the player has inserted something in the box which matches the answer to the riddle. Some of these riddles are tricky, involving clever word play, while others are more concrete: “bring me a sticky treat that bears enjoy.”

There are sometimes obstacles to fetching the required objects. There is also an interesting collection of rooms which change seasons each time the player enters; this section reminded me of “Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons” which I played recently. But really most of the required puzzle items were hidden in plain sight. This is a good puzzle design for a developer who may be relatively new to Inform; the puzzles are forgiving to inadequacies in world model implementation and parsing. Among the world model issues I observed

Notes to author

“Examine Me” gives the default response.
“Shoot termites at tree” in the seasons area skips the reporting step-gives no output at all.
The lizards are not recognized as animate, so commands like “kiss lizards” or “feed roast to lizards” return unsatisfying responses.

I hope the author will continue honing their craft, and I look forward to future games.

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