Looking For IF With Child Protagonist

One game I’ve found that no one here has mentioned is “Sunday Afternoon” by Christopher Huang (originally writing as Virgil Hilts), in which you are one Hector Percival Conrad, age 9, in Victorian England, yearning to escape opressive relatives and go outside and play! Very enjoyable, if a tad frustrating at times. :slightly_smiling_face:

5 Likes

Oh yes! Enthusiastically seconding Sunday Afternoon here. I had a lot of fun with that one.

2 Likes

Blackpool Tower is another one.

EDIT: I should have mentioned that the original game was written for the Oric in 1985 by Darren Reynolds. It was ported to the VIC-20 in 1986 by Jimmy Fang and unofficially ported to the Commodore 64 in 1991 by Dorothy Millard. Only the latter version is listed on IFDB.

1 Like

Aotearoa - Details (ifdb.org)

This is a great example.

It swept both IFComp and the XYZZY's in 2010:

1st Place overall; 1st Place, Miss Congeniality Awards - 16th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2010)

Winner, Best Game; Winner, Best Setting; Winner, Best Puzzles; Winner, Best NPCs; Winner, Best Individual Puzzle; Nominee, Best Individual NPC; Winner, Best Implementation; Winner, Best Use of Innovation - 2010 XYZZY Awards

It also a story about a child protagonist written for children. Seems very much like what you were looking for.

Thanks, @rovarsson !

ETA: Hrmmm… My brain misrembered all of your criteria. I forgot about the system specifics. My apologies if this makes the suggestion moot.

Huh. No idea if you’re looking for parsers or choice-based games (though by your systems criteria it seems you had intended to search for parsers), and also no idea if you were looking for IF with a child protagonist for a child to play (or not), but here’s a choice-based work appropriate for ages 5 and up about oranges (of all things), filled with lively illustrations. From what I remember of my own, long-time-ago playthrough, it reads like a picture book. Short and sweet.

Hope it’s of help.

Oh! And a comp entry for Spring Thing 2022: Sweetpea, by Sophia de Augustine. Decidedly not for little kids, but a good work of the light horror genre. It was actually pretty refreshing to read, as I recall.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, these choice-based games should be fine for your systems — they’re all online, after all.

1 Like
4 Likes