Josh Grams's's 2022 IFComp ramblings

Competitions IFComp
4

Tried three in a row that…weren’t my thing right now: time to call it a weekend.

  • Lost at the Market: tried largely because it was Gruescript. It’s intentionally surreal but also the text is just off enough that I couldn’t tell if some of it was accidental or intentional rejection of traditional punctuation etc. Didn’t grab me enough to try to push through and form an opinion, personally. And the nouns and verbs keep switching around which, again, is it underimplementation? Or intentional surrealism? If surrealism is even the right term. I think it’s supposed to be an interactive poetry/dream sequence kind of thing, so if that’s your jam…

  • The Thick Table Tavern: Had a looong opening sequence with a disembodied voice being generally ominous and mysterious while also demanding your name etc., which was entertaining to argue with but a LOT of clicking (you could probably short-circuit this by being cooperative, but who does that?), then a full-screen close-up animation of beer sloshing which almost made me dizzy, so watch out if you get motion sickness, and then an introduction which badly needed copyediting/line edits and was also verging on purple prose, so I quit before I got to the bartending part. But I am curious about that, so I’ll probably go back to this when I have more energy for it.

  • Arborea: this dumps a lot of disconnected info on you up front but with no real hook? And it’s weirdly cued, or not cued? Unless you type help you don’t know what you’re even supposed to do to get untrapped from the first room (I guess if you just try all the directions you’d find it, but…). Then there are eight directions all with tree themes but no clear reason to choose one over the others. I came to a blind monk who’s giving me tea with sugar and the game is giving me unsubtle “hints” that I want to trick him into giving me a (rock-hard?) sugar cube without dissolving it in the tea, but I have no idea why, or who I am, or what I’m doing here, or why I should care about any of this? So I stopped. The individual elements did seem intriguing, so I’ll likely come back to this one as well.

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