Hey, it’s the second year in a row that I’m doing this! A brief recap of my perspective/biases:
I mostly played IF ‘back in the day’, which turned out to have two phases: when I was a kid with Infocom, and when I was in grad school in the late 90’s. I wrote ‘The Edifice’ back in '97, and had a blast, but haven’t written anything solo since. I got roped back into things more recently via ‘Cragne Manor’ and then again with Mike Russo’s Let’s play of it, and then I played and reviewed comp games! Overall, this has left me with a fairly old school/parser bias, but certainly not exclusively. Beyond that, I’m kind of biased against angst (which seems to come up a lot in these things) though it can be overcome if done well enough.
I’ll try to mention any other more specific-to-a-game biases in my review of that game. I’ll try to be kind and fair, and if I you feel I fail at either, I would appreciate you mentioning this.
The things I will be particularly watching for in my reviews are the two basic things I’m looking for in IF, namely:
- It’s nice when the author has something to say.
- It’s nice when I have something to do.
If either one is satisfied, I’m probably going to enjoy the game, and if both are satisfied, it’s likely to be one of my favorites. If neither is true, I’m going to be confused as to why the game exists, but generally don’t get upset about that; these things happen.
I’ll try to keep up with links to the particular reviews in this top post. Thanks to all the authors for the work you put into your games! It truly is appreciated.
(The order of reviews is as I played them, which is from the personal randomizer on the ifcomp site, with exceptions made here and there for what platform I had available at times.)
- The Long Kill
- Fix Your Mother’s Printer
- Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head
- Meritocracy
- For Eternity, Again and Again
- Death on the Stormrider
- Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest
- Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?
- The Vambrace of Destiny
- Eat the Eldritch
- One King to Loot Them All
- Please Sign Here
- Milliways
- Have Orb, Will Travel
- Barcarolle in Yellow
- All Hands
- The Ship
- The Witch
- We All Fall Together
- Hand Me Down
- GameCeption
- The Gift of What You Notice More
- Lunium
- To Sea in a Sieve
- My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition
- One Does Not Simply Fry
- A Thing Of Wretchedness
- Beat Witch
- Tricks of Light in the Forest