Josh Grams's IFComp 2026

Competitions IFComp
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42

Ḫattušumna Laḫḫa

Another game with a map and inventory and a painful interface. Joy.

This one is really competent in a lot of ways: the language is introduced at a very careful pace, and it doesn’t make you type in a bunch of the extra bits of the language as long as the core grammar is identifiable. But while I’m pretty sure you can complete this game entirely through clicking, I’m also pretty confident that it’s completely impossible to complete it entirely through typing, so if you want to treat it like a parser game you’re going to be constantly going back and forth between keyboard and mouse, which sucks. And it’s constantly silently introducing more information in places off to the side or one corner where you’re NOT looking, and are you stuck because you missed something in the game part, or because the UI added a new verb to the list without telling you? I want to like the side-notes: that annotation is great, but then if you get more than one, often they overlap and you can’t read all of them.

It starts you off with a note on the side with pronunciation but if you think “oh good, let me just poke around and then I’ll come back to that” well good luck: short of going into the browser dev tools and deleting the stored data I don’t think there’s any way to get it back; you’re just supposed to memorize it before you do anything else. Although it’s probably in the help or accompanying documentation somewhere.

Dunno. I spent about 45 minutes getting through Tablet 1 and I felt like only about 15 minutes of that was the game puzzles and the language puzzles, and the other two-thirds was the interface sucking, so… I like the game part of the game a lot, but I think I’m done.

7 Likes
43

Meet the timesheet

This game has a 400 word blurb that is all about the theming but gives you almost nothing about what the game is going to be like; it then starts with a (completely different) 400 word intro passage that is similarly misdirecting.

…and then you move into a maze of cubcles where you’re playing a surreal (magic realist?) escalating game of hide and seek with your PM, trying to get past wacky computer screensaver obstacles to fill out your timesheet before the monster of beauracracy catches up to you.

It was all in nice Italian-tinted english; I like when these word choices and sentence structure choices aren’t sanitized out of existence. The moaning-about-beauracracy part was… fine; nothing you haven’t heard before. The horror/chase game was… also fine; but you can just undo. hide. when you get caught so I mostly ignored that part. I died a lot but the messages when you get caught are fun, so it’s fine. I do think the chase sequences have nice tension and pacing but …yeah. Once you get over the fun of that you can mostly just ignore them. Thankfully? Unfortunately? That’ll probably vary from player to player.

There are a bunch of puzzles about things making noise, about fantastical screensavers that refuse to go away until you give them what you want; they’re often somewhat “read the author’s mind” but if you’re in the right mindset these “what might you try in this situation” guessing games can be fun. For me these were the best parts of the piece.

Also you should definitely look at the “walkthrough” – I almost didn’t, but pulled it up out of curiosity after finishing and it’s not actually a straight walkthrough, it’s a BIG feelie that includes hints later on (and also includes maybe the entire source of the game at the end? heh). Actually, maybe this is the best part of the game.

7 Likes
44

Bob the Barbarian

Whoof. This one was rough. I don’t think I got a single puzzle without resorting to hints, and even FINDING the next hint I needed felt like an almost insurmountable puzzle in many places.

But it’s a very specific style of game and I’ll be curious what people think who actually like this style. It’s not exactly moon logic but it is very much adventure game logic. And it’s fairly creative with it, so it doesn’t lawnmower well, it’s more like you’re supposed to ask yourself “what would a stereotypical adventure game barbarian do with this object?”

It softlocks you or hardlocks you at the drop of a hat, so you’ll want to make multiple saves and save constantly. It’s pretty tightly designed so a LOT of the objects are single-use and you should NOT use them unless you’re making forward progress (score go up) with them – if you haven’t, you’ve probably softlocked yourself and you should go back.

It does have hints, but they’re often attached NOT to the obstacle but ONLY to the object that overcomes the obstacle, so if you haven’t found the item that solves the problem then you won’t be able to make progress. Which… if you KNOW that then you can go “OK, guess I’m not supposed to tackle this one yet, what should I do instead?” but the game doesn’t make that clear, and in a bunch of cases the hints ARE on the obstacle, so you have to try both.

Also the hint command gives you one step of a set of graduated hints without any real indication that you should be doing help with troll / g / g / g / g / g. And maybe that’s supposed to be obvious because the first hint is often pretty vague – but often even when you get to the end of the set of hints you’re like “OK, but what am I supposed to actually do?” Especially if the final hint is “come back when you’ve found the thread” and you think you’ve explored every location available to you and there’s no sign of any such object.

Because the game is also probably trying to be helpful by locking you in a smallish area that gradually unfolds… but it felt like the areas were too big for that to work very well.

And the puzzles are largely unmotivated – you’re solving them because they’re there and for much of the game you have no idea how this is leading up to you saving the princess. Which some people will see as a series of humorously wacky detours but it didn’t really work for me.

And also you sometimes have to do seemingly-possibly-futile actions multiple times before they work. It starts you right off with this with combat, which is randomized, but you just attack troll until one of you wins – and my first time I wasted maybe two turns looking around at the troll or trying to talk to it and then I died. So I restarted and came back and ok, now I’m just going to attack troll / g / g / g / g / g …and I still died (got unlucky there).

And then the hints say “make sure to take the club” so you do, and then you encounter a thief and promptly lose to him – because it’s not enough to have the club, you have to attack thief with club until one of you wins or loses. And again, mostly you’re going to win if you have the advantage, but sometimes you’re going to win in two turns and sometimes it’s going to take six or eight and sometimes you’re just going to die because the dice weren’t on your side.

Yeah. This is the kind of thing that I’m absolutely terrible at because I’m going “wait, I just fought a troll, I’m seriously wounded, and now you want me to fight this thief?” but I’m pretty sure each fight completely resets when you walk out of the room. Or “what do you mean, ‘You dive into the haystack and kind of half-swim, half-crawl deep into it.’ – how was I supposed to know that you can go INSIDE a haystack in this wacko fantasy world?!! A haystack isn’t a fluffy pile of fall leaves, this is a couple thousand pounds of dried grass packed into an impenetrable mass that you can climb on!”

And that combination where you’re supposed to play along with the story and be creative and figure out what a barbarian would do in this situation but at the same time you’re supposed to just completely ignore major portions of reality to be working in cartoon stereotype reality… yeah, I suck at that. I can do one or the other but not both.

Anyway. There are a bunch of goofy things going on here and some of them did make me laugh. Feels like one that Rovarsson might love.

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45

Thank you for the review! (I will clarify for anyone else reading that it is possible to beat the game entirely through typing.)

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46

Wait, really? How do you find out word definitions without a mouse? I looked around for that but totally couldn’t find it.

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It should be possible to select them via tabbing around, but we tested mainly on desktop and mobile, so it’s very possible I broke something there. If so, I’ll make that a priority after the comp. It’s not a great game to play via screen reader, but I want it to at least be possible.

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No, the only things that are tab-selectable are the input field and the command submit button.

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Maximilien

I’m not enjoying this prose. It simultaneously leans toward idiom and cliché and toward never using a plain word when a glamorous one will do. I do have the vague impression that it is (or has been, at times) the fashion in France and other places to avoid repeating a word and instead finding synonyms. But this feels more like someone choosing the flashiest thing from a list of synonyms without understanding the connotations and baggage that it carries.

And I’m sure some of this is it being translated from French, which I like in moderation. Meet the timesheet sometimes rides the edge of too much for me, but for instance I like the use of “omen” in that game’s subtitle – in American English it doesn’t fit in that phrase (I’d probably say “spectre” or “threat” because you know your PM is coming for you, while “omen” is much more on the vague possibility side) but you can see the shape of a language where it would.

But in something as dense with description as Maximilien, it just feels clumsy and what-is-even-going-on-here to me. For instance, in maybe one of the least odd bits of the first passage of the story:

There, in the shadow cast by the austere wall of the Petty-Fitzmaurice fish warehouses […]

Austerity means to practice severe and unusual economy – a room that’s bare and unwelcoming because its occupants are dirt poor and can’t afford the softening touches they might prefer to have. It might get extended to a rich man’s house, but again with penny-pinching implications: he doesn’t believe in frills & furbelows and can’t be bothered to waste money on them, no matter how much money he has or what other people might think.

And you wouldn’t expect the wall of a fish warehouse facing a narrow alley to be cosy and welcoming. So… is this a translation artifact: is there a similarly-spelt French word with different connotations? Is this the protagonist’s local knowledge (maybe the Petty-Fitzmaurices are known to be particularly tight-fisted and somehow (?) their stinginess resulted in this wall being even more ominous than other warehouse walls)? Is this a joke; the author winking at us to lighten the mood after the overwhelming flood of description that is the preceeding part of this paragraph?

And then the next paragraph goes for… is “idiom” the word I’m looking for here? None of these are individually common enough to draw comment, but all together …are you trying to see how many idioms you can cram into a single paragraph?

done nothing but […] to such a degree […] forced to flee […] seek refuge […] trying to reason with myself […] the nature of […] one more effort […] bring myself to […] in a sorry state […] draw several deep breaths.

Then later we get things like:

Even the most unbridled imagination could not have engendered such a syncretism of credibility, belief, dreams, and nightmares, in this vision my senses transcribe with a pernicious exactitude, as only madness can produce.

I don’t know if French has much grammatical inflection? This feels like it could work in a more heavily-inflected language, but in English we’re kind of floundering without signposts. I’m not even sure whether this makes sense or not. I assume it’s trying to say that even the wildest imagination couldn’t have created this mish-mash of a vision so he must be going mad? But I had to go back and forth through it several times and I’m still not sure the clauses really fit like that. And if that is what it’s saying, it seems pretty condescending and dismissive of people’s imaginagion, so phooey on that. Maybe your imagination is that impoverished. Or maybe it’s just a lazy metaphor.

It seems like the author has mostly done their historical homework? For instance, I wasn’t sure about the timeline of public transit so I looked it up and there does seem to have been a BERy line going out to West Roxbury in 1926 (though again, the language… calling it a “commuter train” sounds anachronistic to my ear. maybe I’m wrong about that. I didn’t look it up).

And hey, lots of people like this kind of thing. I once tried out a book recommendation subscription and they started off by sending me Lev Grossman The Magicians which is apparently very popular but I spent the whole time cringing and yelling at the book “that’s not what that word means. that’s not what that word means either. oh my god, please step away from the thesaurus.” And This Is How You Lose the Time War is very popular too – that one does the individual words OK but I found the poetic surface painfully empty and predictable/tropey underneath. So YMMV.

Anyway. Despite being Twine/SugarCube I don’t think this is going to be very accessible: some of the bits are conveyed by newspaper clippings that are images with no alt text and those felt pretty crucial? And there are a bunch of glitzy visual effects that feel like they would make the text hard to read for some people (there is a Visual Effects “density” setting but it’s not clear to me what it does? I turned it all the way down and kept playing and didn’t see any obvious difference).

The narrative design feels similarly vague and was-this-really-thought-out as the language. I started this once and then came back a few days later and started over, and it seems like the first night you have a variety of ways to experience what happens in the graveyard and then when you end up back there on subsequent nights you expect it to be the same. But it feels like then you’ve locked yourself into an interpretation and only get minor variations. But it didn’t feel like the choices signalled their outcomes. So while I could have liked the way this seemed like choosing a refrain to come back to, I didn’t know that’s what I was choosing and I didn’t know what options I was choosing among, so it just felt like “wait, how did I choose that?”

Similarly, it’s not at all clear whether it’s going to be a “copy out the text or take notes of specific details” game, or a game that remembers things for you and the important part is “have you encountered this clue in this run?” (more the former) but that was another source of confusion. There is at least one place where you type in a free-form search term but while I did find one thing that moved the story forward, I didn’t feel like I had any idea what the range of possibilities were, and a bunch of the things I tried didn’t work.

And that is probably intentional. But combined with the plot trying to be very mysterious while also dropping heavy-handed clues that seem to point to this being a very cliché situation… I don’t know that I trust it to do anything interesting with it.

My run came to an abrupt end at the end of day two (out of four, apparently?) when I accidentally committed suicide because I wasn’t sure how much the dreamscape actions affected reality. And I’m not sure I’m cool with this take on madness/possession/whatever. So… I should probably go back and play the whole thing, because the mystery parts seem like they might be interesting once you get a handle on them. But I don’t think I’m going to.

8 Likes
50

French does have the word austère which means severe/stark, but the English word can have that meaning too. Specifically, the dictionary lists a definition for “having a plain and unadorned appearance”, which seems to fit pretty well in that sentence. Using the word in that sense feels pretty natural to me, but admittedly Italian is pretty similar to French, so maybe it’s different for native speakers?

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Well yes, that was my point: dictionary definitions generally do NOT capture major parts of how a word is used or what its meaning is. As I said in the bit you quoted, “austere” has strong connotations of being plain and unadorned for particular reasons, not just plain and unadorned in general.

And yes, I know I’m out of line with other people in how much this gets to me. Back in Spring Thing baezil’s review of Fantasy Opera included “An indulgent close reading” - but to me it didn’t feel like a close reading at all, it felt like things that the game was shouting at the top of its lungs and I was forcibly ignoring to avoid quitting the game in disgust at the idea of supporting that regime by playing a cop in that world, because I was pretty sure that the game didn’t intend you to feel that level of disgust.

But this is how it feels to me even when I’m reading it fairly casually. And there are genres where I have a lot of practice expecting to skip over this kind of thing and it’s easier. But in a game like Maximilen where it’s trying to be somewhat metaphorical and evocative, it’s a constant grinding burden of trying to sort through which half of the meanings the author intended and which half is them blithely discarding reams of language use that I’m just supposed to ignore because it wasn’t intended.

But yeah. It’s not going to feel like that to most people. This seems to be a niche opinion, even among people who are into words.

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Thirst for Blood

Short and… sweet? The way the room is sorta diamond shaped threw me a little at first. I don’t know why; that kind of ring structure is common enough in parser IF. I liked the twist(s) – the surreal human-like/very-much-not-mosquito-like narration there was fun. I was reading something recently where a guy was bragging about being able to shoot out the eye of a mosquito at 30 paces and the other person came right back with something like “ah, so that’s why there are so many mosquitos going around with eye patches in the West Indies” and this reminded me of that.

6 Likes
53

Enkii

This is as much a technical feat as anything else, using (it looks like) SugarCube’s save system to pass data back and forth between two games running under the same browser. I liked the story well enough. Nicely grounded in some ways, leaving a little too much out in others. The character stuck in the lab was less characterized than the other? It makes sense that she was more guarded, given the scenario, but it felt a little lopsided. And I didn’t think the turn into the more fantastical at the end earned its keep: it jumps out and yells “boo!” at you and then runs away and the story is over. And I don’t see that releasing it as two games and forcing you to go find the other rather than a single two-sided game really added anything…

I did find it interesting to think about how the writing is different in a game like this, intended to be played side-by-side by one person, than in some of the two-person IF out there (say, Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip).

4 Likes
54

Shadow and Ink

The blurb for this left me cold; I would have skipped it if I wasn’t going down the list. No indication of what the game is going to feel like, either tonally or mechanically. But it’s actually a fun choice-based scavenger hunt. Less corny than One Does Not Simply Fry but still has a constant drip feed of goofy “yeah, we’re definitely not in Kansas anymore” moments. And it has a more serious side: you’re helping these people recover from having their forms altered by the sorceror who stole their knowledge.

Collect the paper and ink, collect the items that you magically turn into the knowledge in a book; give them to the appropriate people; repeat. It’s fun picking up an item and going to see what humorous title it will turn into. Or wondering what unexpected object it might combine with before you can make a book from it.

Often these choice-based games are very clicky but this one is pretty snappy and brisk. The inventory items auto-combine so you just click “Make Book” or “Unmake Book” from your inventory, and otherwise it’s just a list of links at the bottom of the passage. Nice.

I’m surprised that it starts with such a long click-to-continue introduction, which I think of as a classic beginner mistake. I’d expect these two to be too experienced to fall into that pattern. But you’ll hear editors say that writers fall into two camps: the ones who need to be told to cut the first paragraph/scene/chapter and start where the story actually starts, and the ones who need to be told that the reader can’t read their minds and they have to actually write the first paragraph/scene/chapter that’s only in their heads and not on the page. So maybe it’s an ongoing tendency to fight against.

5 Likes
55

On Repeat

I like the way the pacing on this gives so much room for ambiguous interpretation. It takes “On Repeat” very seriously; each action cycles through a small set (usually three) of events in response. But they’re permutations of happy/sad/neutral or up/down/twist and they feel very strongly like consequences of each other. And there are a lot of things to do (relative to how many turns you have), and they don’t all appear every day. And you’re probably trying to balance the emoji meter of how much you’re listening to the album and putting a chunk of your time there. So unless you push for a particular action you might not realize that it cycles. It’s so easy to assume that the consequence is a response to something you-the-player did.

Very cool.

I’m more of a “tell everybody about the thing I’m excited about” person than a “hide in a cave and obsess over the thing” one (and also I think I play music more than listen to it?), so this is going to resonate more personally with other people. But it worked for me. It’s clear what kind of person the protagonist is here.

Hmm. It was also cool poking through other reviews and see someone describe the protagonist as “a tech worker” or some such phrase: I had the impression the game was going out of its way not to describe your work too specifically? Which leaves room to interpret it as different kinds of work… yeah. I like the shape this one is and the space it leaves.

6 Likes
56

Necromanceers

Another terse blurb. This one grabs me a little better than Shadow and Ink, especially with the cover with paper-era black-and-white clip art of two women and some fabric-draped skeletons floating over a saturated yellow and purple 90s CGI kind of background. But I was mostly curious what Pacian was up to.

The blurb is closer here: you are dropped behind enemy lines, and when things go south for the rest of your regiment, you decide who to resurrect to keep things moving forward. I liked this! The writing is fun and mysterious, leaning toward a little too mysterious.

But I think that’s partly because of the structural thing that I’m not sure of: you’re meant to play it multiple times. I’m really really torn about the compendium. Because this feels a lot less consequentially different between paths than something like 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds: when you summon someone the game does move forwards, and the consequence of that choice is mostly in the following passage of how it moves forwards, plus some silently-changed bits in other parts of the game. And some of those silently-changed bits are “you learn the name of a new dead person to summon” so they’re important! But you don’t know why they changed. At all. And on your first playthrough you don’t even know if they changed.

So you’re playing hide-and-seek blindfolded. And much of the text is the same each time through: it’s mostly the (fairly long) interstitial action scenes that are different.

Which feels like it’d be a much better match for a game that expects you to play it once and get one particular story and then compare notes with other players to see how different yours were. But the compendium is pushing you to try and find them all. And I… well, I got a little lucky and found all but two of the names on my first run. But you only get… is it four summons? One per chapter? I feel like it might be five. So you have to take several runs through (and sometimes you have to ensure that the person dies before you can summon them back) to get all 16. And some of the names (I think) you can’t find without knowing a name ahead of time and using it early.

So I played for 47 minutes, until I found all the names, but only my first playthrough was i reading carefully. The rest of the time I was mostly just zipping through trying to strategize about which people I could summon this run. And while the individual revenants’ (? is there a better word?) interventions are great, they don’t have the same punch without the main story (which you’re not reading because you’ve already read it twice).

And there’s a bunch of little branchy stuff in the main skeleton of the story. But again, you don’t know why anything has changed or whether anything has changed, so checking every location and item each time for something that might be different feels like it robs the text of its charm.

So I wonder if “hey, there are 16 names; here are the ones you’ve found so far; can you go back and find the rest?” is doing this justice. But on the other hand, there’s a LOT you won’t see if you only play it once (or even if you play it a bunch of times) so do you really want people to only play it once and miss all that? Dunno.

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Also, I started by summoning Captain Eustace and the resulting “Oh no! What have you done!! …oh wait, it’s fine” was a great way to begin a career in necromancy.

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Ryan Veeder’s Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express

HEY RYAN DON'T READ THIS YOU SAID YOU WOULDN'T READ THIS
SERIOUSLY YOU SAID YOU WOULDN'T READ THIS
ARE YOU FOR REAL RIGHT NOW

Look, it’s a Ryan Veeder game, it’s fine. I like them a lot more than I have any right to given how few tastes in puzzles and humor that we share, and this one is no exception.

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Hi Josh,

Thank you for your feedback and for the energy you put into it, especially since the reading clearly wasn’t easy for you, and I’m sincerely sorry about that. My writing isn’t to everyone’s taste, and the many playtests carried out in French had already shown me that its density and its clumsiness could create a certain resistance. It isn’t an easy art, but when you’re passionate, you have to take that first step at some point, despite the risks it involves.

What gave me the courage and the strength to see it through was the many positive responses to my writing. Other readers and testers, including two French literature academics, shared my sensibility and appreciated this prose that takes its time, despite its clumsiness. This density is a choice. I wanted to reach toward a period narrative, with Lovecraft and Balzac in mind, and toward an expansive style like the one Dan Simmons handles with such virtuosity, without ever claiming to come close to them. But my execution sometimes slips into a lumbering generosity, instilled by a lack of confidence and a desire to do too well at the risk of sabotaging oneself, that of a beginner. I decided to keep the text as it is and watch it gradually loosen up. More than a hundred thousand words is no small thing, it takes work, and it evolves.

It took me time to save up, then to choose the translator who could carry this project beyond my borders while respecting my style. And I’m glad to put it before an English-speaking audience for the first time through IFComp, even full of doubts. Reading you, I’m actually somewhat reassured, because I can see that she did a good job, not free of flaws, but faithful to my tone and my standards. For English-speaking readers, I want to stress that this translation is the work of a professional, who managed to render fluid and natural English while preserving the period register and the distinct voice of each character.
Thank you as well for your feedback on the story and the gameplay. I fully understand the frustration you felt. Some points will help me improve the game. Others will stay as they are, simply because you aren’t the reader this text is meant for, and that’s entirely legitimate.

I won’t hide that I sensed a certain violence in your words, and that it affected me. Everyone has the right not to like something, but some of your phrasing seemed to me to go beyond criticism. Still, I’m keeping the substance of your feedback in mind. I’m grateful you took all this time to share your experience of Maximilien, which is also a part of me, and to shed light for those who won’t connect with it.

Here’s hoping the AI translation tool I’m using can carry my words just as well.

Yohan

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Yeah, sorry, I should have given this one more space. That scene where Max starts showing his abusive creep side to the landlady’s teenage daughter had me feeling pretty violent.

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Without Corporation

Hmm. Indirect control is tricky to pull off and this game’s coding feels like it’s extremely brittle. I kept triggering things in ways that felt out of order and then the game didn’t quite know what to do? Sometimes it felt like it was following a script and events were happening in order without reference to whether you’d already done the thing it was telling you to do, so you’d get redundant information. Sometimes it would instantly clear the screen without you pressing a key, or it’d get you used to always having to press a key so you cleared the screen by mistake and then well, I hope you have a transcript going or you might not ever get the information you need to continue. And sometimes it felt like it was triggering events based on the world state (but maybe not quite the bit of world state that I’d expect the event to be attached to?) so if you’d already experimented and done the thing then again, you might not get important information.

And then the game-in-the-game is intentionally glitchy, making it even harder to tell if anything is functioning as intended. I did get through this, and I think I have a picture of how it’s supposed to go, but it’s hard to tell.

sequence?

So I think:

No, wait, maybe I should delete the external files and run through it again to see if I’m right. Eh. I’m not sure I feel like it. So some of this may be wrong.

  • You get a bunch of commentary at the beginning.
  • You begin the game-within-a-game
  • You get a lot of stuff dumped on you, you’re supposed to figure out that you’re messing with the game while the protagonist goes around doing sometimes-random-sometimes-scripted stuff, and you need to get her (or him? I think this is randomly chosen and then saved?) to do the things to advance the game.
  • Your first goal is wake-up. You can do other stuff until the time runs out, or you can run it directly. If you run it directly but don’t dequeue wake-up then you’ll get yelled at for running it twice when it fires again.
  • You’ll get some new goals: child (there’s a male and a female version; again, I think gender chosen randomly but a bunch of the messages only match one gender; I’m almost certain this is intentional), gown, torch.
  • So you can move gown to dresser before the PC gets out of bed and looks in there, then they’ll find it. There’s also (sometimes?) a run wear-gown possible.
  • Once the PC gets the gown they’ll leave the room. The child is supposed to follow but they don’t. You might think you could run the [child]-follow routine but no, you have to move them manually: move [child-name] to entrance-hall.
  • Then the PC might (?) move to child’s bedroom? The child had the torch hidden under their blankets, or the game is buggy and doesn’t mention it; I’m not sure how you’re supposed to trigger the PC to put the kid to bed. I think I just did move [kid] to [kid]-bed and move torch to player to get those goals to happen?
  • After that the PC will go outside. You can move them around (there’s also a kitchen, for instance, but there doesn’t seem to be anything there?) but they’ll just head back out. Eventually (maybe after a very long time) they will dig a hole and fall back in to the scene where you started (I think?).
  • While all this is going on, the narrator will occasionally throw passwords and filenames at you (I think in a particular order)? And occasionally throw a little temper tantrum and restart the game on you. I assume you’re supposed to see “app” to “ncc” and “diA” to “qvN” and “Poe” to “Cbr” and realize that it’s a consistent letter substitution and in fact rot13. Then you can go open (most of) the other files. But the narrator may yell you to read at least one of them later even though you already have and you just have to do it again.
  • PC is in the hole, stuff happens, eventually a sturdy root shows up, but the PC seems to ignore it. I think the thing I did that triggered it to move on was move root to deep-underground (the game prints capitalization but it doesn’t seem to care about it in the input at all).
  • But you get the player to grab the root and Rudolf helps them out.
  • Also at some point in here the narrator wants you to do an “update” and gives you the “zilf” command. I think if you type in the thing that you’re supposed to you’ll completely miss a cue that you need later, so try zilf by itself and zilf file by itself to find out about the command-line options and then maybe zilf not-the-update-file -X with all the options to find out what they do.
  • Now you’re back in the Front-Yard: the PC will randomly try to go back down but the game won’t let them. There’s supposed to be a chase sequence here and the narrator strongly implies that you shouldn’t trigger it but I never figured out how to get the game to do it. So I died/looped the game a few times.
  • Eventually I think what did it was putting Rudolf in the front yard and then running chase? But I’m not sure when chase showed up: I don’t think it was there initially.
  • Rudolf moved around a bit and eventually I triggered advance. The PC tried to UNDO which the narrator didn’t like (actually I had typed UNDO way early on so I’d already seen this message).
  • I wasn’t sure what to try so I started CUtW again and tried the same thing (rudolf, chase, advance?) and this time the PC quit, which seemed to be the game moving on.
  • Now the Narrator said that someone “is coming for you” and has plugged in an external drive so if you’ve played enough with zilf you suspect will allow the -C (copy) command to work. And if you’ve seen the error message when you try to open MFog.zip in the FILES list then you know what that file is, so you’ll try copying it.
  • Which triggers the end of the game. I’m not sure why jumping from a running computer to a random drive that some unknown person (who may be the one coming to stop you?) is better, but there you go.

Hmm, actually, that was pretty long. Let’s see if I can manage a tl;dr.

tl;dr

There are kind of two separate threads; advancing the inner game (CUtW) and advancing the narrator’s story. I’m not sure how tightly they’re tied together. I think pretty closely but I don’t remember the exact order of interweaving so here they are separately.

CUtW

There’s space in between: list or routines or goals would make time pass: it seems sorta arbitrary whether z works or whether it makes the narrator throw a temper tantrum and restart the game or whether it doesn’t work at all, so I didn’t use it much.

  • dequeue wake-up
  • move gown to dresser
  • move [child] to entrance-hall
  • I don’t know how to trigger the PC to achieve the torch and child goals, so
  • move [child] to [child]-bed
  • move torch to player
  • player goes to yard, eventually goes in hole. Can you just move player to deep-underground? dunno.
  • sturdy root shows up, move root to deep-underground makes player notice it?
  • player is back in front yard.
  • move rudolf to front-yard; run chase ?? not sure about these last steps; I was flailing around forever.
  • Then run advance
  • Do these last three steps repeatedly (I think?) until you trigger the player to quit

Narrator:

  • files (open files the narrator tells you to, find out that MFog.zip is a model file)
  • maybe rot13 first-three letters + day/month from log as password to check out the other files
  • “update” the terminal, but play around with the zilf command with different arguments before running the actual update command.
  • (you want to find that zilf filename -C is copy, but it needs an external drive and there’s none right now)
  • Once the PC quits you’ll get the narrator triggering an end-game, zilf MFog.zip -C

Anyway. I don’t know. I’m also not the audience for this game at all; I usually find this kind of meta-storytelling pretentious and boring, I’m so done with AI stories, and glitchiness is not my thing either unless it’s really strongly tied to a believable fictional author like Lake Adventure or whatever.

I ended up thinking this game was attempting something interesting, but getting in its own way a lot (the endless key-presses between typing a command and typing another command were super frustrating and distracting and “hey, do you remember what you were trying to do now that we’ve interrupted you once or twice?” – would it have been better if it did the PC action first and just didn’t bother with the press-any-key-to-continue? I think so) and advancing the story was too brittle and it was hard to tell if you were running into intentional glitchiness or actual bugginess.

4 Likes
WITHOUT corporation hints