This game boldly takes timed text and makes it the focus of the piece, using a relatively brief poem as the text with the interaction being waiting for the timed lines and occasionally clicking to bring forth the next part of the poem. Parts are fast, parts are slow; at one point I was waiting for a line and glanced at my phone and got distracted for ten minutes then came back to the computer and realised I hadn’t finished (this shows I have a < 10 second attention span).
The poem itself is about a dungeon and escape. There were multiple lines where I thought, “Wow, I like this writing.” The twist at the end was amusing as well.
I think this is a great format for Ectocomp. Instead of going for broad scope, you narrowly focus on a piece of writing and work it to become as polished as possible. Nice.
That makes the fifth game I played by Dissolved, who has entered more games into a single comp than I’ve ever seen someone do. I especially liked Dual II: Cyclic, the collection of horror poems; and …Grind Exceedingly Small, the surreal bug parser game.
I remember Ghost Hunt I, it was a fun, compact Adventuron game tracking down a ghost (unless I’m remembering it wrong).
This game is one single puzzle with a lot of options. You have a large amount of clothing divided into type of clothing (socks, shirts, scarves, etc.) and colors, and you find three gravestones that gives you hints on the type of clothing and the color of the clothing. Putting the three correct items into the washing machine wins the game!
I was able to guess the items pretty quickly, so I spent less time on the game than almost any other game in the competition. But I thought the grave messages were cute and everything worked smoothly, and I felt a sense of accomplishment at beating it.
Thanks for the compliment to the writing! I’m also glad the twist worked—I was actually worried people would find it jarring with the rest of the piece.
It was also the result of conceiving of this and Cyclic as paired pieces—if one is a collection, the other must naturally be a single poem.
That surprises me, to be honest. I thought the rules of ECTOCOMP were practically made to encourage multiple entries.
But I’d set myself something of a personal challenge to push myself to write and code—write two Twine games (to learn the ropes of that) and three TADS games (to get myself back in the swing of writing parser games).
This game is by a Slovakian student as part of the One Boat Crew team.
It’s a branching Twine game, with very different paths depending on your choices. All of them deal with a kind of strange reality you find yourself in. I took what I thought was the ‘weird’ path first, but when I did the ‘main’ path later, it was a lot shorter.
There are semi-comforting/eery endings and horrifying endings, which is a nice mix, and I would be proud of my high school students if they created something like this.
Starting up this parser game, it didn’t have the usual banner text, so I wondered if it was Inform or something else. Typing VERSION didn’t bring anything up, but I figured that might have been overriden by a too-strict limited parser, so I opened up the Inspect Element feature and checked, and the javascript was different than anything I had seen. So I looked at the author’s itch page, which went to their personal webpage, where it describes a new framework for javascript parser games.
This game uses a limited set of verbs which can be found by typing HELP. The verbs that are here work generally well; I saw a couple of typos here and there and some objects weren’t implemented (you can’t X TREE, for instance) but that’s normal for parser speed-IF, and doing speed-IF in a custom language is especially impressive. So this looks like a tech demo for the new system. If I could put in any requests, I’d like to be able to change the VERBOSEness like Inform does. Currently, moving to a new location doesn’t give the room description, you have to separately LOOK; it would be nice to be able to set that property. Another thing I missed was the ability to manually RESTART.
The story is about wandering through a pumpkin patch alone, finding a variety of items while also dealing with oppressive fog. I enjoyed the ambient room descriptions and the messages when trying to go ‘off map’. There are also two endings, which is neat considering the game was written so swiftly.
This is the only Grand Guignol game that I tested.
This is a large and complex choice-based game with a strong emphasis on place and inventory. It has stylized text and background images, and uses a variety of fonts to indicate different character voices or special events. It has an inventory sidebar and uses graphics and animations to track your ‘panic’.
You play as someone visiting an old abandoned asylum in an attempt to recover treasure from within. Once you get there, you discover that things are much worse than you could have ever guessed: this aslyum is haunted!
The author mentions in a note that this story, which was started 25 years ago, evolved to be one where the patients are victims of mistreatment by a cruel facility.
The panic meter is the key factor in this story. Getting a scare can raise it by 1 or 2. But confronting a ghost can fill up almost half the meter, which can lead to instant death in some cases. Fortunately, you get one ‘free life’ to keep going if you do, but it can be useful to keep a lot of saves and only push past warnings when you’re sure your panic can handle it.
I found the panic meter engaging, keeping me more on my toes and more engaged in the gameplay, rather than just trying every option one by one. At times I found myself lost in the maze of links, but I eventually constructed a mental image of what the asylum looks like.
This is a big, polished game and was a pleasure to test and play. I think most people will enjoy this game. There are a few bugs here in there in the current version but the author has already described plans on fixing them after the competition.
This is another game by tzbits using a custom javascript framework. This one uses choice-based links rather than parser verbs.
You stand on rocky terrain near an angel and a woman named Rebecca. They are trying to tell you something, but it’s difficult for your character to get the message at first. There are some twists as the game goes on, but it’s fairly short, as makes sense for a speed-IF.
The choice-based links all resemble parser commands, like X ANGEL or just NORTH or SOUTH, which I thought was interesting given the other verb-based framework. Maybe they’re similar under the skin, like Robin Johnson’s versificator.
Like the protagonist, I had a little difficulty grasping what was going on; I could think of 2 or 3 scenarios that would fit what was going on, but I couldn’t tell which. But maybe the ambiguity is the point!
It’s a short Ink game that manages to pack in a lot of material. It heavily references news articles, forums, and forum posts, offering chunks of quoted text as well as off-page links to the source material, some of which I followed up on.
The writing is dream-like and both frantic and languid. The narrator is suffering from extreme social alienation mediated through use of the internet and AI (the game includes some quotes from an LLM, marked as such, as part of the game’s commentary on how AI affects us). It delves into topics such as guilt, religion, harmful thoughts and tendencies, and our connection to humanity.
I thought it was interesting and well-put together. It handles some rough topics but uses strategic censorship to hide much of it, like 3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS from the recent IFComp, as part of its meta-commentary. It gave me a lot to think about (especially since I was just watching someone who had a wedding ceremony with their AI-generated boyfriend).
And thank you very much for the testing If anyone is having trouble, you can set the difficulty to Gentle to get more second chances. And don’t forget to chew gum if you get nervous!
Also, as a small correction, while the original game was indeed made 25 years ago, it’s not been worked on in the intervening time … in fact I’d entirely forgotten it existed until this autumn!
I said in my review of Dusk, Airy, Does Carry, I said that I would welcome more games in the same vein. Glad I asked! This game has similar puzzles and structure, and similar pixel art, including animals.
It’s an Adventuron game with a central hub from which several other rooms branch, each room with 1-2 puzzles involving pairs word pairs that sound similar when spoken aloud.
This one shook things up a bit by focusing more on room connections that don’t appear until later. But like I said with Dusk, Airy, I just like the fundamental design so was glad to play more.
This is another ectocomp speed-IF game by a Slovakian student. This one feels like a take on the Saw franchise, waking up in a room with puzzles and traps.
This is a highly branching game, with almost every choice giving you a completely new branch instead of continuing along the same pathway. Many of these paths are deaths. Some of them were quite amusing, some were surprising.
It’s nice to see younger people learning IF tools and experimenting!
This was an interesting short game that could be open to several interpretations. It’s a short Chapbook game.
In it, you play as a young person in the heat of summer who is kind of bumming around. You live with a few friends but you spend a lot of time on your own. In particular, out in the woods, you come across an empty well. You have a habit of tossing things in, but for some reason, you never seem to hear it hit the bottom…
The game felt introspective and meaningful. I don’t want to say too much more, not because of any big twists, but because I think it would just make the experience stronger overall to play through without prior interpretation given by others.
This is a brief parser game that appears mundane before throwing a twist at the player.
You are in an apartment and can hear trick or treaters outside. But you’re not dressed! A pile of clothes lie on the floor, which you must assemble in the correct order.
The game felt well-implemented and the twist was quickly resolved. This was a delight to play, especially in a large competition with tons of long games: just a short burst of concentrated playtime with a big punch.
This is a short atmospheric game with great styling choices. You are in a house and you have some difficulty remembering how you got to where you are. You can turn around or keep going but everything you do has some problem.
The ending was, for me, unexpected, and I actually got two different endings when I replayed, which was also unexpected. I liked the creepy feeling that the beginning of the game had the most.
I don’t know of any other games by this author but I would play them if they released more.
This is the shortest of Andrew Schultz’s trilogy of Petite Mort games based on pairs of two-word pairs that sound alike.
This one has characters that follow you around and bonus points, which are nice, and the art remains frun and fresh, but there are less puzzles overall (which isn’t always bad, since I like these smaller games, but I think the 12-13 point games hit the sweet spot more), and I found a couple of minor typos.
I still, after playing all three games, think the pixel art really contributes a lot. They help ground the abstract gameplay really well, and show the effect the player has on changing the environment. For me, they provide nostalgia for 80’s and 90’s edutainment games, some of which had similar pixel art.
If anyone is having trouble, you can set the difficulty to Gentle to get more second chances. And don’t forget to chew gum if you get nervous!