Report of the second spelunking expedition! (I’ll put links to initial lists & final reports in the opening post. If anyone else uses the topic for their expeditions, I’ll add links to their initial and final posts too.) It was quite a different experience from the first expedition. There were two games I could only play on my phone. There were two games I had already played. There was a game that was no longer available, but I contacted the author and was able to play it anyway. There was a game that the author had tried to hide on the IFDB and which has now been entirely removed (though it’s still in the Archive). There were only three parser games. There was a Spectrum game (which wasn’t good, unlike the previous two Spectrum adventures I played), an MS-DOS game, a BASIC game and an Atari game. And there were THREE terrible instant-death CYOA-style games. Anyway, it was an adventure!
I find it hard to rank these games from worst to best, since many are at more or less the same level, and some are hard to compare to each other. Nevertheless, here’s my attempt.
- Escape from S.S.A.D.B. There’s a lot of competition for the bottom spot of this list, but I’ve chosen this ultra-primitive parser game written in BASIC because it is such a pain to interact with. The parser is terrible, guess-the-verb issues abound, the prose is extremely terse, the puzzles are at the same time clichéd and illogical.
- Assignment 46. Kind of James Bond in space, but playing this Atari game mostly consists of replaying it in order to find out which of the choices do not lead to instant death. Actually, this is also true for the next two games on the list, which are not substantially better or worse.
- Hippy’s Quest. Become a hippie! The choices make slightly more sense than in Assignment 46, but it’s still a terrible instant-death CYOA… and this one has the added insult of shareware protection that you can only circumvent by sending $10 to the author. Not being able to continue felt like a blessing.
- The anonymous game . It’s not actually called that, of course, but I’ll leave its identity a mystery here. I probably wouldn’t have done that if it were any good, but I’m pretty sure nobody will want to check out a timed-text instant-death CYOA where all the choices consist in choosing between several coloured doors. This did have nice writing and graphical effects, though, which puts it ever-so-slightly above the previous two games.
- Shore Leave. A Quill adventure with a lot of parser issues and a heavy reliance on desperate and immature humour. Still, I think some people might enjoy it for the zaniness and the puzzles, so it’s clearly better than the previous four offerings.
- 9/21: My Story. Perhaps not exactly good, but I found it an intense and moving document of a terrible time at middle school. I understand why the author has taken it offline, but I also feel they don’t have to be ashamed of it.
- Choices: And the Sun Went Out. This is a huge commercial choice-based game for mobile platforms that I bought and played sometime last year. I didn’t play all of it, because it never gripped me. The story is a breathless tale of adventure and intrigue, but it never really goes anywhere – it’s breezy pulp without depth or meaning. It’s very competent and rich in content, and some people have enjoyed it greatly.
- Basilica de Sangre. I prefer the emotional intensity of Poppet and the humour and polish of Lovely Assistant: Magical Girl, but Basilica de Sangre is a worthy game in the Bitter Karella oeuvre. Fun puzzle mechanic, but some parser issues. (I had played it in the 2018 competition season.)
- Hyper Rift. A free mobile game available for Android and iOS. It’s a choice-based game with navigation on a graphical map, and it will take you all over a large alien-infested space ship where you have to rescue and lead a ragtag band of survivors, solve some mathematical puzzles, and find your way to the many, many endings. Polished and fun.
- Three Mile. Putting this at the top spot is certainly controversial, and if someone prefers Basilica de Sangre or Hyper Rift or even C:ATSWO to Three Mile, I can’t really argue with them. But I was blown away by this small multi-media horror Twine, which went to places that I certainly didn’t foresee at the beginning, and managed to be both subtle and extreme.