I was using italics to represent the thoughts of the protagonist interrupting the narration, so I had to use bold to encode emphasis on the narrator’s part.
Yeah, I was assuming that the title mentioning verbs would be a hint this was a one-verb game (well, technically there’s also responses to about and x me, but these don’t change per room) and the reference in the title would hint at what the verb was—I suppose you could call it a case of needing to be a speculative fiction reader to understand hints.
I was trying to create a sort of surreal dreamlike feel—I had the ending in mind from the start, so I felt that making everything appears to be a nightmare from which the protagonist ‘wakes up’ was appropriate—but I also wanted it to feel like the protagonist was being put through trials by the narrator, hence the "out of the frying pan and into the fire” feel, the resemblance between one scene and the Zorkian white house, the road & car scenes recalling I-0, the general melange of tropes underlying most of the rest.
I wanted all of this to reinforce the ending, with the protagonist seemingly escaping the nightmare only to still be under the grip of the narrator and subject to an ultimate cruelty.
One of the authors of Warden here! It’s a bit of an oddball game, I think (I’m not sure if its coincidental proximity to Hollow Knight: Silksong’s release helps or hurts). As a player, I know I’d be wary of committing the time to a similar project (original world, atypical plot for a parser, newbie author), especially with so many other great games in the comp (and so little time). All to say, I just wanted to drop a quick but heartfelt thanks for playing!
Thanks for your explanations! I was just about to play another of your games and I feel like your guidance will help me coming into that.
It looks like, in addition to me missing some obvious clues, you accidentally ran afoul of some parser conventions: bolded text is often something that is meant to be typed in, and one or two people have released games with no verbs where you only type the name of nouns. So I wasn’t in the right headspace.
That makes sense about the dramatic ending! Poetic IF is a bit of a blind spot for me, but there are a solid group of poetic IF authors who I hope will see your games and come at them from an expert viewpoint!
I was aware of that convention, but I wasn’t thinking of it at the time and, if I had, I probably would have concluded that the context in which it occurs would have defused Blue Lacuna/Walker & Silhouette vibes.
This is another game by DissoluteSolute, and is the one I connected with the most so far. You play as a pet bug of a woman who was murdered by flies, using her last breath to curse them and ask her pet silkworms and tarantula to take revenge on the flies.
It is grotesque, short and focused on the story, with little implemented outside the main loop (including words mentioned in the room descriptions). In those regards, it reminds me of Baby Tree, a game that I frequently recommend to people who’ve never played IF as a way to immediately capture their attention.
I felt like the writing was solid and the main couple of puzzles were well-clued and simple but utilizing the classic parser gameplay loops.
I liked “Ivunche” also, and posted about my experiences on the Ectocomp25 page, where I got a helpful response from the author. There are actually three possible endings. You’ve already intuited the “best” ending, but need to do one more thing to reach it.
Subtle hint more than a direct spoiler:
Before you take that one final irreversible step to reach the bad ending, pay close attention to the other available option in the notes (N) section of your notebook.
This is a story-driven Twine game and is, I think, the first game I’ve seen by this author, although I’ve seem them around a lot recently.
It has nice styling and no bugs that I could find, and uses a variety of interaction forms like buttons for content warning, expanding ‘aside’ links and regular continue links.
The story is one of love and obsession, two people who meet and hit it off instantly, starting an intense relationship. Things devolve from there. It’s a story I’ve seen play out in real life, but there was an interesting twist here.
I enjoyed the time I spent reading this, which wasn’t too long, and I’d look forward to any future games by this author.
This is a Spanish-language parser game which is (thankfully, for this non-native speaker) well-implemented and fairly brief.
It has a framing device of being a text adventure generated by an AI (starting with a ‘sure! I can help you with that’ kind of message), and then starts you off in a jail cell as a captured soldier. It becomes a sort of escape room, but a fairly easy one; the hardest thing for me was remembering/looking up spanish parser verbs (at one point I had to use PULSAR instead of EMPUJAR and I’m not sure why).
After the main game, there is a little meta twist, which I thought was great, and enhanced my appreciation of the game. It made the game about twice as long. Then there was a fun message at the end, and it was over.
While AI is mentioned several times in a meta way, the writing didn’t have the negative aspects I associate with AI, and had many positive aspects I associate with the author, who has written several games I enjoy. So I suspect it’s handwritten, but if it’s not it’s well-done regardless.
This is, I think, the fourth game by Dissolute Solute that I’ve played during this competition. It is a Petite Mort game, which I didn’t intend on playing and reviewing yet (as I’m in that competition too) and misclicked on, but given the relatively low number of reviews this year I thought it couldn’t hurt to start reviewing a few of them.
This one is a one-room TADS3 game with a fun twist where you are a zombie whose home is being invaded by humans! There are a variety of items around you and you have the chance to set up a Heath Robinson machine to stop them (which, I discovered, is the same thing as an American Rube Goldberg machine. One post comparing the terms said that in the UK most people who remember pre-Usenet days say Heath Robinson and most people since then use Rube Goldberg).
There is a pretty strict time limit, and I found myself dying a lot. I had some ideas for items but they didn’t work out (putting pins on sofa, tying wire as my first action). I really couldn’t figure out what to do, and then I decompiled the game to find out what actions to try. The first one was one I simply hadn’t thought of (pushing the couch). After that, I tried out the other things listed, and got to the end. I liked the writing and the overall concept is fun.
Yeah, I could probably have clued pushing the sofa better—I was writing full speed ahead to keep within the LPM time and presumably thought barricades + traditional zombie movie tropes would be enough of a hint.
ETA:
Fun implementation fact
Which ending you get is solely decided by the score.
ETA2: I also think that the usage of the knives may have been kind of derivative of 10 Second Defence which I think used a knife in a similar manner. I wasn’t actively thinking about that until after I finished writing the game, though.
This is, I think, written by one of the Slovakian students that participate in Seneca Thing (a yearly anthology entered into Spring Thing). As far as I can tell, the number 88 was just chosen for aesthetic purposes and wasn’t an intentional Nazi reference.
It’s a fun little branching/gauntlet game where you travel to a hotel with your family but get caught in a deadly game. You have to do your best to escape. The best parts to me are the little bits of humor when you go off the beaten path and/or die, like the would-be kidnapper getting mad if you go home and calling you to come back and let yourselves get kidnapped.
There are some typos and things and it could be longer (both of which are completely normal for Petite Mort games), but it was fun to play and made me laugh.
I was glad to get this game in my randomized list, as Ruber is someone who’s consistently produced good games for a decade.
This game taught me a lot. I thought at first it was a fictional story about a pro-Amazon forest activist who is murdered by activists, but apparently her life and death were real.
After your death, you have the option of your spirit spreading out and inhabiting various life-forms. I thought that would result in a short branching game, but instead you occupy all of them in turn: a river, a wolf, a tree.
The writing was poetic and pretty. The themes reminded me of Captain Planet, which I watched enthusiastically as a kid, and Ferngully. But knowing it was real made it way more sad. It’s definitely a topic I’ll research more in the future and talk about with my students (some of which are very into environmental conservation).
I got into the story of Berta Cáceres because the song by Christina Rosenvinge, as I said in the game. And yes, it is a story very fascinating to investigate, if it weren’t for the deep sadness of it and the cruel reality of the world were we live. For example, one statistic that shocked me deeply is that since 2012 to 2025, 150 activists were murderer in Honduras.
Also, recently I saw the typical film about a white american man pursing revengue and killing the bad guys; Ice Road: Vengeance, starred by Liam Neeson. And after learning more about the case of Berta Cáceres and the fight of the Lenca people, the film resonated with the reality of the dangers of environmental activism worldwide. So, maybe it is a good recommendation for the class.
This game by the Stelzers follows in the footsteps of A Familiar Problem last year (maybe it’s in the same universe?). You play as a homonculus with a strictly limited set of available actions (just 1!). That 1 action, though, has the effect of gaining more actions, including navigation and interfering with others.
Story-wise, is kind of a pastiche of mainly Phantom of the Opera along with Shakespeare, other plays, and fantasy elements.
Gameplay-wise, it feels like a growing power-fantasy. You start out with so many limitations that it feels like the world will just always be mostly inaccessible, but it ends up growing until you can do quite a few amazing feats.
I had a great time with this fun game. My only regret is that one part near the end is written in iambic meter, but some lines have 8 syllables and some have 10 and I couldn’t see any pattern or reason why. Even still, that part was fun, it was just something minor that stuck out to me.
I think most people will like this, and the intro flows well; I think it was the best intro for my tastes out of all Stelzer-made games.
Thanks so much for the review @mathbrush ! Glad you enjoyed it overall It’s nice to know what worked and didn’t. (More scenes that are mermaid specific, less ones like the splinter.)
I like that summary . Not sure it is a genre as such, more a product of my weird imagination that kind of went, hey given the military use marine mammals for everything from scouting to defense, what if they had access to a mermaid?
I looked it up, and the name has reference to a legend kind of like the Bermuda triangle where ships bearing rice (i.e. humanitarian ships with food) would disappear during the mid-1900s.
This is a Bitsy game, where you have minimalist graphics (only two colors per palette, for instance) and can move around the screen, with text happening when you run into something.
You’re a miserable kind of person who doesn’t get along with anyone, but the only person who can put up with you has invited you onto a boat. Once there, things are normal, for a party, until Ricardo messes everything up.
There are, I believe, multiple endings in the game. I reached one that had me exploring a river and doing a kind of trading quest. I thought it was creative and a lot of fun. Overall, it was short, so replaying shouldn’t be too bad, but I only played once as reading in Spanish takes some effort. Fun game.
This was a short, well-written game about a horrifying experience being trapped in the darkness.
Most of the game is about your reaction to the things happening to you. The hardest part is the fact that everything is in complete darkness, making you have to react to everything without knowledge of what you’re truly experiencing.
It stays mysterious to the end. I did make a silly translation mistake in my head; when the game says you are surrounded by miles de patas, I accidentally thought it said miles de patos, and picture the lights going on, revealing that your enemy was thousands of ducks. I laughed and thought that was fun, then later realized my mistake. The actual story was quite grim, and had a fitting ending.
It’s nice to know what worked and didn’t. (More scenes that are mermaid specific, less ones like the splinter.)
. Not sure it is a genre as such, more a product of my weird imagination that kind of went, hey given the military use