Fun fact: the author of this game is who taught me IF! 
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AardVarK Versus the Hype by Truthcraze
Spoilery Review
AardvarK Versus the Hype almost lost me very early on. Let me post a partial transcript:
The Driveway of Lewis's House
Lewis's house is dark, but there is a crack of light coming from under the garage door. This is both good and bad. Good, because someone is apparently home. Bad, because if you can see the light, so can... they. Your car idles, half on the street and half on the lawn.
>x me
[Jenni's description isn't the point.]
>i
You're carrying car keys and a walkman. You're wearing a truly dumb hat in addition to your normal clothes .
You get the feeling you should get off the street. Before they catch up to you.
>get out of car
I only understood you as far as wanting to get outside.
[I guess I assumed she was in the car, on account of the impliction that I just showed up.]
>lock car
What do you want to lock car with?
>keys
I didn't understand that sentence.
>lock car with keys
(car with car keys)
That doesn't seem to be something you can lock.
The street is not safe. You should get inside.
>enter house
That's not something you can enter.
Why is the garage door down? You need to get in!
>open door
You try to lift the garage door, but it won't budge. Lewis's parents have a motorized lifter for their garage door. No expense was spared. Someone inside will have to open the garage door - but you'll have to alert them to your presence!
Is the band there? Could they let you in?
>knock
(car)
Violence isn't the answer to this one.
Maybe if the band heard you, they would let you in, and off this street. Before THEY find you.
That was rough, and the roughness was surprising. I recall the author’s previous work, Tex Bonaventure as being good, and it’s been beta-tested by well-regarded members of the IF community, several of whom have their own more polished works in this very Comp. So I’m not sure how the above happened? I was considering, at this point, bowing out so as not to spoil the high note left by You Come To A House.
But I carried on, and the level of polish improved noticably after that, although there were still patchy spots. (I note belatedly that the game has been updated several times during the Comp. I didn’t realise this when I started playing. This review is based on the October 1 release.) It was worth continuing with the game, as it is quite a strong game under the hood.
AardVarK Versus the Hype experiments with non-linear chronology and multiple protagonists. The non-linear chronology is rather fun, especially as it’s used to let ‘later’ segments provide clues for ‘earlier’ segments. The ‘multiple protagonists’ angle is introduced with aplomb, as the presumptive protagonist - who, alarmingly, is also probably the smartest person in the band - turns into a zombie. The implementation is such that one can switch between PCs even in the middle of a conversation, which must have taken a lot of work to implement, and which goes some way to making up for the roughnesses in other areas.
The characters themselves are only loosely differentiated from each other, but they have enough definition to get a few good jokes out. Much of the humor derives from the teenage characters’ basic naivete about the world. Or not just even naivete, but a sense that the descriptive priorities are just a little skewed. The description of two guys getting high as engaged in a “combined botany/fluid dynamics/pyrodynamic experiment?” That’s funny, as is the same guy deciding that things owned by a pretty girl become pretty by the transitive property.
The game’s about a punk band - well, an alt band, but one which aspires to punkness - so obviously the threat is corporate in nature. The specific approach is to whip up a (tongue-in-cheek) anti-consumerist parable. Anti-consumerism is rather a banal take (“it’s bad that people buy things they like”) which tends to obscure the actually evil things that big corporations do, but it makes perfect sense for a game about adolescents to have an adolescent worldview. And situating this as not just a generic product, but a very obvious parody of the Surge rollout in 1997, feels daring and amusing.
The ending felt rather anti-climactic: AardVarK just suddenly win because it’s time for them to. It doesn’t feel like a BIG moment, if you get my meaning. Even so, the journey was fun. I’ll close this review with a couple of extra points:
- I did look at the walkthrough a couple of times, and I didn’t appreciate its tone.
- Really, the students are all dupes for drinking Hype as late in the day as they did. Never take caffeine after 2 pm! It will wreck your night. The optimal time for taking caffeine, by the way, is between 12 and 2 pm, to forestall the afternoon slump. But never after two.
Rankings
A Paradox Between Worlds
And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
At King Arthur’s Christmas Feast
The Song of the Mockingbird
How it was then and how it is now
The Last Doctor
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Closure
Hercules!
Finding Light
AardVark Versus the Hype, which has almost exactly the same quality as the similar
Codex Sadistica
Silicon and Cells
Brave Bear
Dr Horror’s House of Terror
D’ARKUN
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
The daughter
Unfortunate
Smart Theory
And that’s that: almost every eligible game from Z to A, with three skips. Iiii’m tired! But I’m happy to have gotten this far. Now all I have to do is put numbers to these rankings and fill out the actual ballot.
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Congratulations on getting to the end of your reviewing marathon! I enjoyed reading them all.
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I hope (I belive that) you had enjoyed playing and writing these reviews as much as I have enjoyed reading you.
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Congrats on making it through and also on having the topic eclipse 3000 views!
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First, thanks to the people who’ve posted kind words. Despite the confident tone I sometimes adopt, really, I never know if my reviews make sense to anybody but myself. So I’m pleased to hear some people enjoyed them!
My final ballot is below, but before I post it, a few points:
-
I’ve tried to use the entire range of scores. This means, for example, that some games I had a perfectly good time with got 6s, because they weren’t quite as good as the games that got 7s. If I gave your game a sunny review and then turned and gave it a 6, don’t take it personally! (My reviews are never a complete description of how I see a game in relation to all the other games, at any rate.)
-
People who’ve been keeping track of the rankings may note that they haven’t stayed entirely consistent: I’ve reconsidered placement on occasion. That has also happened here, on the final ballot. Perhaps the most noticable change is that Smart Theory is no longer condemned to the bottom spot. I got a righteous thrill out of keeping it down there. But I couldn’t defend rating it worse than The daughter and Unfortunate, which in my opinion showed disrespect to everyone else in the Comp (authors and judges) by not making a good-faith effort to avoid wasting the judges’ time. All the other authors put in that effort, and I can’t act like Smart Theory’s reactionary ideas are equivalent to that in an artistic context.
Even at a 2, I’m penalizing it harshly for its ideas. But it really gave me nothing else to judge it on.
- There is one 10. The 10 is the game I want to win the Comp. I wouldn’t be disappointed if any of the 9s win instead. But I’m rooting for one game which I think is better than any other game I played in this Comp. I think this is fair. In fact, I think if everybody took this approach to 10s and 9s we might get some more interesting winners (not that the comp winner really matters, but I care a little.)
Without further ado, the ballot:
Ballot!
A Paradox Between Worlds: 10
And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One: 9
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg: 9
At King Arthur’s Christmas Feast: 9The Song of the Mockingbird: 8
How it was then and how it is now: 8
The Last Doctor: 8
Off-Season at the Dream Factory: 8
Walking Into It: 8Fine Felines: 7
Sting: 7
The Golden Heist: 7
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed: 7
The Libonotus Cup: 7
Closure: 7Hercules!: 6
Finding Light: 6
AardVark Versus the Hype: 6
Codex Sadistica: 6
Silicon and Cells: 6
Dr Horror’s House of Terror: 6Brave Bear: 5
D’ARKUN: 5
Mermaids of Ganymede: 5
Ghosts Within: 5
I Contain Multitudes: 5
Wabewalker: 5The Library: 4
The Spirit Within Us: 4
Plane Walker: 4Kidney Kwest: 3
Second Wind: 3The Vaults: 2
What remains of me: 2
Smart Theory: 2Unfortunate: 1
The daughter: 1Infinite Adventure was played but not rated.
This was a really satisfying excercise. I’ve never played this many games during the Comp season before, let alone written reviews for them.
The marathon is over, but my Comp '21 writing isn’t. First, I owe @cchennnn an actual review of A Paradox Between Worlds. I’ll take a week or so to decompress first, but I am going to write that. Second, I also want to write a retrospective about what I learned from writing these reviews. That might wait until after the results are out. (EDIT: Well after the results are out; I thought they were coming out sometime in December.) Those will probably each be in seperate topics.
Thanks for following this adventure, guys!
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I read this as: For as long as other people make art within your defined parameters, your output of reviews will continue to flow.
I am going to be cheeky now. I wonder how you would deconstruct an exchange like this:
A: I give your game a 6.
B: Invalid. I do not accept scores of that kind.
I mean, sure. It’s any artist’s perogative to consider criticism in any sort of way they like. In fact, it’s probably healthier for artists to ignore numerical scores, which are always a little arbitrary.
If the idea is that the artist is trying to control the conversation around their game: they don’t get to do that, I’m afraid! Once art’s out there it’s open for people to talk about through whatever lenses they see fit.
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You’re right of course. I just logged in to delete my previous comment, which was one of my more clumsy, late at night efforts. 
I was trying to make a point about conformity vs innovation, but I didn’t express myself very well. Apologies.