Josh Grams's IFComp 2026

Competitions IFComp
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Usually I play whatever I feel like, but I’m going to try the randomizer for a bit this year. So far that’s:

  1. Ass in the Woods
  2. Deceit in the Guildhall of Virtue
  3. Wild Ride to Earth
  4. Tableaux Vivants
  5. Caribbean Nightmare
  6. Alana’s Dungeon
  7. The Acquisition
  8. Black Thumb
  9. (here I went off-randomizer b/c of the SF Bay IF meetup and also by Dolcett being next and do I even want to waste any time on that?) Uninteractive Fiction 3
  10. Quackpond
  11. Residual Income
  12. Escape the Wumpus
  13. Skeletrom Crew On The Loose!
  14. Out by Midnight
  15. Invasive Species
  16. Wait-Our-Way Tower
  17. IF Derby
  18. Demonstration
  19. The Count and the Communist
  20. Demon Game for Sophie

Right. I’m voting, as usual, mainly on vibes: how did I feel about this piece? The one exception to that is:

Don’t use timed text. Really. Just don’t. People’s comfortable reading speeds range from 100 WPM to 1500+ WPM, no matter what speed you choose, it’s going to be paaaainfully draaaagggggingly slow for some people, or uncomfortably or impossibly fast for others, and probably both. If you want to put timed text in your game, try making the timed text 3x slower and testing it. Then try making it 3x faster and testing it. Those are the experiences you’re inflicting on people. Is that what you want? Just don’t.

So timed text in a game is an automatic 1-point deduction for me, 2 points if it’s particularly egregious.

Hmm. I guess I should also say that I’m here for the text. I would like to see a little bit of attention paid to making it pleasant to read: good contrast, wrapping the text at 50-80 characters, not using kitschy fonts, maybe picking colors that aren’t fully-saturated color-wheel entries. A light/dark mode toggle is nice to see. But I’m not judging on that unless (like timed text) it gets in the way of experiencing the text. I’m not going to dock points for unstyled Twine games; I’m probably going to play parser games in an interpreter that doesn’t display graphics. You don’t get extra points for art; I’m not going to listen to your music or sound effects (and to those who try to “prove” that I have to listen to them I say LOL. LMAO). I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of graphical games where I’ve felt like the audio added anything to the experience. That’s probably partly because I grew up in smallish houses with a lot of people and game audio especially was probably disruptive to other people (and I think the computer was back down under the desk, so too far away for most headphone cords?). But yeah, I don’t like your audio and I’m not going to bother to try it just so I can confirm that I don’t like it.

There are a few exceptions, like I’m leaving the sound on for Uninteractive Fiction 3 as I play it in the background of whatever else, but I’m going into that knowing that it’s a troll game so the timer *ding* is useful.

Also, my internet is better than it used to be, but it still sucks that this number of supposedly text games adds up to a gig and a quarter of total downloads.

Right. On to the games. I played two last night (and a bit of Uninteractive Fiction 3 because what do you mean, it’s over two hours?! Oh. That’s what you mean.)

10 Likes
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Ass in the Woods

This is retelling a fragment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, centered around Bottom. A workmanlike 6/10 for me, minus one for timed text. It assumes you know the story. I think it’d be readable but a bit confusing if you didn’t? It has some nice bits of reactivity, calling back to other things that you’ve done first, while keeping the possibility space confidently under control. Despite (because of?) being only 10-15 minutes long it’s not afraid to let you miss things, which is nice to see.

On the other hand, it also has some transitions where it steamrollers on with no acknowledgement of your choice (or just making the following text fit any choice), and these stick out more for how nice some of the reactive bits are.

And it’s an exercise in trying out all of Harlowe’s text styling options, which is fine but not really my thing. It’s mostly used effectively, although it took me way too long to realize that the different colors indicated different speakers. And then there’s the timed text, of course. I almost docked this one two points as there is at least one point where the conversation will clear the screen and continue without you, so if you’re tabbing out to push the button on Uninteractive Fiction 3 while you wait for the timed text, you may miss a chunk of conversation and have to use Harlowe’s history buttons to back up and actually sit there and watch it. But the whole game is short enough, and that part (those parts?) are also exercises in real-time “if you click while the argument is playing out you can interrupt them” which… OK, that’s only going to work well for people in a specific range of reading speeds, but it’s a good exercise and I can see what you’re trying to do; I’ll give it a pass.

Nothing outstandingly remarkable, but I had fun going through it a couple times.

8 Likes
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Deceit in the Guildhall of Virtue

One hour and five minutes for me, mostly with hints.

It’s always fun to see experiments in choice games that have some kind of inventory and connected rooms to move around in (although I don’t think anyone has really cracked the interface problem yet) but Doug Egan’s taste and mine don’t line up well, so I think this is a 6/10 for me: solidly built but not really my thing. Kinda feels like it’s trying too hard to be for everyone rather than making strong design decisions, and undercutting itself in the process?

The goofy superhero mystery was good enough. The interface was more than a bit confusing; it took me a while to figure out where things were. Having your “inventory” be a part of “Interrogation” took me forever to find/remember, and the drag (and alternate non-drag) interface was non-obvious enough that it took a hint for me to realize to even try it.

Having a map was nice, but prefixing the graphical map with parser-style room descriptions meant that I was mostly just ignoring the text and scrolling down to click on the map. And then I didn’t know the shape of the space for the occasional chase sequences where you’re locked out of viewing the map and are expected to know which way to go.

And it seemed like the plot was entirely on rails, so it had the faux openness of a lot of parser games in spades. You can wander around the map and see several things that seem like interesting problems to solve, but there’s arbitrarily only one that you can solve next so the open map is just a pacing problem.

And the people moved around every time you took a turn, but time passing didn’t really matter otherwise so for me, that did less to make it feel alive and more to make it feel like I was sitting around waiting for a person. There was a “wait for people to show up” button in one room, but there wasn’t a “wait for person to leave” button in every room, and it wasn’t until after I finished the game that I realized I could have used the atrium to wait for people to leave other rooms. Useful, but not obvious.

And which problem was next and how to solve it was a bit of an adventure-game logic problem for me: I definitely wasn’t on this game’s wavelength so I just ended up following the hints through almost the entire game (even figuring out what the hints wanted me to do was sometimes puzzle enough for me). I did start to get the feel for it by the end but it felt like I was solving it more by author/programmer logic (“the plot needs these things to happen in this order, so of course this is the thing that goes next” or “oh, if I assume that these are six clues that uniformly pair off, then I can solve which pair is which”).

I also really didn’t want to start the “detective expounds” scene because I had no idea what was going on, but here instead of being the denoument that “scene” was… maybe halfway through the clue-finding? Two-thirds through? So you kept interrupting the scene to go look for more clues and AFAICT that’s required and baked into the design. Which technically was a nice series of reveals but it just felt anticlimactic to me. Might have been better if it was framed as “OK, let’s all meet up and get down to solving this together” to counteract the genre trope that I thought it was.

The interface shininess mostly didn’t get in the way, although I wondered if the reflective shimmer (?) shading on the new clue banners might have unreadably bad contrast in certain parts?

But yeah, solidly done as usual. I had fun despite mostly just following the hints.

7 Likes
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Caribbean Nightmare seems to be online only, so skipping that and moving on to

Wild Ride to Earth

What it says on the tin: goofy short ChoiceScript game where you’re an unimportant human from a backwater planet (Earth) who’s been abducted by aliens and dumped on an alien spaceport.

Take on various jobs, make money, earn prestige for your species, try to make your way home before your winning lottery ticket expires… or don’t. I did three playthroughs in about 45 minutes. The first time I got back to Earth, but too late for the lottery ticket; the second time I made a chunk of money and took a cab home in time to collect my $156.4 million; the third time I helped out a politician and ended up with my own reality TV show, apparently? There’s still a bunch more to explore.

Your basic silly fun.

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That’s true, but you only need an internet connection for starting the game.

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Hmm. How do I turn off this unplayably painful delay/animation after every command? There are a lot of settings here but I don’t see any text speed ones?

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Should be “Don’t animate between pages” in the change settings section of the menu, if you’re talking about the screen slide transition between choices?

(Unrelated but another tip to anyone who is playing choicescript games on mobile, the “disable touch slide” option can lessen the potential of flicking your fingers across the screen to accidentally choose something you didn’t mean to)

2 Likes
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Oh sorry, not ChoiceScript. Stefan’s game is Caribbean Nightmare which seems to have a custom choice/parser engine (with potential voice input as well?!), but it takes like three-quarters of a second between when you click a word or submit a typed command and when the output starts showing up.

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Josh is right, Caribbean Nightmare uses a custom framework. Yes, it allows voice input as well.
I’m not 100% sure what the exact problem is here, Josh, but I think I can offer a solution. I build a version with less delay and an option to switch off smooth scrolling (This option broke my heart :slight_smile: ). I’ll send you the link to a test version. It would be nice if you can confirm that your problem is solved. Then this version will go live soon (after some more testing).

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Oh yeah, that’s much better, thanks. Still noticeably sluggish compared to a game from one of the major engines, but playable enough.

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Just out of curiosity: Did you actually turn off soft scrolling?

Anyway, update of the regular version follows in a couple of hours.

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I left soft scrolling on for a while but eventually it got annoying enough that I turned it off.

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OK. Yesterday I also played

Tableaux Vivants

Easily my favorite of Lamp Post’s games. I like the… gothic? melancholy, surreal? much better than the settings of their other games. And the history feels much more integrated into the story here than the “this is me infodumping at you” of their other games. Almost felt like it could have been an Amanda Walker game.

The parser implementation and the game design felt very smooth and solid to me. I’m sure it won’t work as well for absolutely everyone but I almost always felt like (despite the surreal uncertainty of “what’s going on here?”) I always had some idea of something I could try next. And a couple times I was agreeably surprised by the game having a response to something I only typed on a whim.

I did forget to check the library a couple times – my brain kept slipping off the “maybe you can search the library and turn up a random book that can be transformed into the physical object you need” part. And I recognized the Rossetti poem so I wasted some time trying to say the next word, or recite the next line, or say one of them at the exact right time, before finally realizing I needed a physical object.

Yeah. 65 minutes, somehow happened to get all of the achievements except that I didn’t think to try the thing before dealing with the chimera. Tried all the endings. The depth of how much you don’t trust anyone, not even yourself, in the “forget everything again” ending was especially tragic. Nice.

6 Likes
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I also tried saying the missing word to the woman as well. also I went and did a web search for the poem, completely forgetting it’d be in the library.

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I felt very silly when I realized what I was missing. Also I really really wanted there to be something cool to do with the fascinating portal in the vanity.

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Caribbean Nightmare

This is a chunky two-plus-hour parser puzzler that frequently revels in moon logic, built around a twisty little three-room maze of a hub, implemented in a buggy unpolished custom engine.

I liked large parts of this but it’s extremely inconsistent. You begin with amnesia on a beach, with no goal and a large number of useless scenery items to look at; if you wander along the beach you discover four or five locations similarly dense with useless scenery items. It feels very sparse. If you wander north through the dunes to the jungle you land in a twisty little maze of passages, almost all alike, connected in ways that I’m still not sure I entirely understand, but going northeast is often the same as going east, while going west may not be the opposite of going east – once I found a few items I dropped them in the rooms to let me tell them apart until I got the general sense of the shape but never fully mapped it out.

You start finding a few items, which you don’t know where to use, and the error messages suggest that maybe you can’t use them for the thing that you might think they’re for at all. Or you find a place to use them and think “ah, now I’ll make some progress” but no, there’s some complication and you’re sent on another quest to find something that you have no idea where to look for. And then it turns out you can use the other item for the thing you expected, it just only works in one specific location and only works on the third or fourth way of wording the command that you try. And the engine does something really wonky that not only disallows key repeat in the input box (so you can’t hold backspace to clear your command) but also randomly eats keypresses so about every fourth or fifth command doesn’t go through because it’s missing letters that you definitely typed. Or it eats the enter key and you’re like “hello? did you crash? oh.”

And if you accidentally type something that needs disambiguation, or start talking to an NPC, or anything else that involves choices, it doesn’t put that in the transcript panel that you’re looking at, it zaps the input box and puts some choices way off in another corner of the screen and you’re like “oh no, it crashed.” And disambiguation seems to be broken? Every time I tried to do it instead of cancelling out and typing the command again just gave me no output.

And then you start making progress, and it’s a fun goofy setting. And oddly non-violent; it’s an island of zombie pirates and occasionally they’re described ominously but they never make any real move to attack you, and the game doesn’t even understand the words “hit” or “attack” or “kick” (“Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the input”) and hey, that’s a refreshing take! So you feel pretty safe exploring aimlessly, and gradually you accumulate goals (Oh hey! Here’s the top of the waterfall and we need to open this gate and we can go back – oh nevermind, it’s stuck and we need a tool. No, you can’t use the lever-like object that you already have. OK, new quest). And then you have several quests and you start seeing how they fit together and it’s all good fun. Why do you need a trumpet vine? No, you can’t play it, it’s a plant, not a musical instrument. Can you plant something in the hole left behind? Who knows? But they feel like interesting questions.

But then it starts cranking up the moon logic. And also hey, it turns out that maybe you do need to dig in the ever-present sand and you don’t always find “neither treasure nor your lost childhood.” I tried going back to solving puzzles for a while but after about the third “how on earth was I supposed to guess that? And even if I did guess that, how would I know it worked when the first three ways I tried to type it weren’t accepted?” So I ended up mostly following the walkthrough for at least the last half. And there are a bunch of objects which don’t respond to the NAME THAT’S HIGHLIGHTED IN THE ROOM DESCRIPTION. No variant of “tow hook” works, for instance, it’s a “tow eye.” But until you happen to trigger an error message that mentions the actual name, or happen to look up at the room/object/inventory tree panel, good luck figuring that out. You have to turn on the brightly colored skull but its (very brief) description only mentions the charging port; nothing about a switch. Stuff like that keeps happening.

Dunno. It has some nice moments. I like how it’s divided into four chapters. Some of the specific error messages are funny the first time. But a lot of the generic error messages end up being misleading at some point in the game. And the pacing is pretty rough, and some of what could be the funniest puzzles are “just read the author’s mind” in a lot of places.

7 Likes
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Alana’s Dungeon

At under 10 minutes, you can just go play this one. This has less of the wild twists of childhood imagination that are often my favorite parts of the Senica Thing games. It’s more “small person doing a serious job of making a game,” perhaps? But it managed some excellent moments of its own: donning the armor and wielding the sword, for instance. And it was a tense few moments of being convinced that something was going to come out of the dark and eat me before I finished rifling the desk drawers or managed to find a way out. And an “oh no, how bad is this going to be?” when I realized that I actually was going to have to release the orc to get at the key. Well done.

8 Likes
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Caribbean Nightmare

Thanks a lot for your review, Josh!

only works on the third or fourth way of wording the command that you try…

That would be of high interest for me to get more information. It would be really great if you can send me the transcript of your game. Type “transcript” in the inputline or click in the menu, then the transcript downloads automatically. Thanks in advance for this!

If you wander north through the dunes to the jungle you land in a twisty little maze of passages, almost all alike, connected in ways that I’m still not sure I entirely understand…

I reduced the “complexity” of this maze already 2 times, but I learn: Ok, still hard to navigate. Ok, I will reduce it even more. Or place a sign right there “Smallest maze in the world.”

… but also randomly eats keypresses …

Ok, this is really weird and I need to fix that quite fast. I don’t see that here. if I have a possible fix, but it doesn’t make a difference for me because the problem doesn’t occur. Maybe you can confirm that the problem is gone once I have prepared a test version for you? Can take moment. I’ll send you a private message!

Every time I tried to do it instead of cancelling out and typing the command again just gave me no output.

Very special thanks for mentioning this. I think I broke it right before the start of the IFComp.:confused:Shame on me. Fix is on the way.

oh nevermind, it’s stuck and we need a tool. No, you can’t use the lever-like object that you already have.

I really would assume that a thin bamboo stick would break in that situation, so that’s not moon logic for me, if you can’t lift the sluice gate with it.

And also hey, it turns out that maybe you do need to dig in the ever-present sand and you don’t always find “neither treasure nor your lost childhood.”

The following happened: “the monkey yanked off his smartwatch and hurled it high into the air, somewhere in the direction of the beach.” Well, yes, after this you have to conclude, that the watch may stuck in the sand. That’s neither rocket science nor moon logic.

But a lot of the generic error messages end up being misleading at some point in the game.

If you have some examples for me that would be helpful. The generic answers shouldn’t definitely be misleading.

BTW: There’s a questbook/ hint area (type “Help” or “Hint” for it) which not only gives spoilers and solutions, it also lists - free of spoilers - current tasks and issues. It’s specially helpful in the beginning.

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The Acquisition

Am I missing the point of this? I spent about 12 minutes clicking through repeatedly to see all the text and there are glimmers here and there that make me wonder if maybe it’s trying to say something? But mostly it came across as misogynist and poking fun at mental health and therapy and so on? Dunno. I think it’s quite difficult to do this kind of thing in an irreverent way without just ending up being creepy and this one uhhh… very much didn’t clear that bar for me.

Mind the content warnings.

3 Likes
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Black Thumb

OK, that was charming. I kind of love the play on a common beginner parser-author problem of being able to take things that you shouldn’t and turning that into an intentional part of the game.

But also I got hopelessly stuck at that part and spent about half of my 30 minutes with the game trying to figure out what to do next, and had to ask for help. It’s a little under-clued and even once I thought I knew what to do next I got stuck on a parser response that’s kind of for the next step (put sun in jar gives “That doesn’t seem heat-proof”) so I went looking for anything and everything else that I might be able to use (can’t take the chest; can’t take the plants out of the pot and put them in the box or the chest or the jar so I can use the pot; what else even is in this room?) and then once I finally tried simply take sun while holding the jar and got the better error message I was really really uncertain what to do and only tried the papers out of desperation because adding something highly flammable to the situation didn’t seem likely to help the non-heat-proof problem).

But I think if you didn’t trip over that (or if you accidentally put the papers in the jar earlier)… I thought the writing was charming and the ending was enjoyably strange and I’m glad I played this.

8 Likes