Meri's very casual IFComp 2026 reviews

Competitions IFComp
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I thought it might be fun to share my thoughts on some of the works this year, as I didn’t manage to finish my own entry in time, but I find this whole event to be pretty wholesome and full of talent. I have never done a review thread before and I can make no guarantees of completeness or even meaningful reviews. I should disclose that I will probably write most of these in between waiting for the code-generation-machine at work to finish using copious amounts of electricity on our quickly warming planet to give me code only slightly less mediocre than I could write by hand. What a time to be alive.

The Acquisition

Black Thumb

Deceit in the Guildhall of Virtue

Gambler’s Quest

Live and Let Pie

New Captain

On Repeat

Purgatory

The Quackpond

See You Around

The Very Last Night I Spent at Ethelred Estate

Wild Ride to Earth

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The Quackpond by Quackpond Admins

Ok, as someone who had an obsession with rubber ducks right around the time I discovered the internet in the early 2000s (age ~12), this one really tickled the tender nostalgia dendrites of my brain. Which is just another way of saying I found it delightful. I did indeed have a duck alter ego–Bub the duck–and I did indeed role play as Bub with strangers on various forums. There’s probably a box under the bed in my guest room with the special ID card my best friend printed as a gift for me with my duck name and duck picture.

I am slightly embarrassed to say that at first I thought maybe the work was going to be an actual open website where we were all invited to role play at mid-2000s web users on a duck enthusiast website. How experimental! I should have been tipped off by the fact that creating an account required no email or further verification, but it took me a few more turns to catch on (It was late, ok?) At that point I was sad to realize no one would read my duck role play post and further engage with me, but I could only accept reality.

Anyway, the rest of it was very cute and I especially appreciated the duck illustrations. It is a short story and the beats occur a bit abruptly, but I think it is solid at evoking the nostalgia and grief of losing a version of the internet that felt more personal and special. The game reminded me of another game called Secret Little Haven, which I recommend if you enjoyed this one.

14 Likes
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Live and Get Pie Tame Spond/ee

I must confess, my current work in progress that I failed to finish in time for this year’s event is also entirely in verse (well, mostly). So now I’m kind of relieved that I didn’t submit it, because that feels like the equivalent of showing up to school wearing the exact same outfit that someone else is wearing that day. Not that this necessarily spares me in the future…I imagine it is not that uncommon of a choice. But…phew for now. That being said, I have a built-in affinity for verse. Therefore, I enjoyed Live and Get Pie and the silly little poems it spat out at me. Does that mean I understood what was going on once I was thrust out of a plane and hurtling toward the ground? Not really. Don’t come at me, but I’m still a dunce with parser games, so take away most verbs, and I’m even more of a dunce. My first play through went probably exactly as designed: randomly scrabbling for things that flew past me until I inevitably splat on the ground and died. After that, I took the shortcut and looked at the walkthrough, which made me feel like even more of a dunce. At least I had a good chuckle.

8 Likes
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The Very Last Night I Spent at Ethelred Estate Kai DeJesus

This piece delivers spooky dread vibes and lots of mystery. I had to read it at least 3 times in order to really formulate a theory of what is going on here. My take is this:

I believe your family has either been unwillingly cursed or somehow agreed to a contract in which the women of the family must murder their firstborn child in order to keep their mansion. You’re in the middle of either your own wedding or your brother’s funeral, very pregnant, not really loving that, and dreading the task of killing your own child. After the event, you give birth. For some reason, you end up in the chapel where your brother’s dead body is. His death seems very significant to the story overall, though I don’t know why. Maybe his dying wish was for your child to live and you want to honor that? Or possibly, there’s some brother-husband-father of your child incest going on here given the duality of the different choices. For example, you see an angel on both the funeral and wedding path, and on one he resembles your brother, in another you realize it is your child, but also that he looks like his father. Could that imply that your brother is the father of your child? But there’s no content warning for incest so I’m maybe overreaching in my interpretation. Before you can really do anything with your child, the house starts collapsing on everyone in your family. In the end, everyone seemingly dies, indicating that you have failed to fulfill the contract of the curse. But also in the end, I think it is all just a recurring dream. I guess I interpret this as your remembering and being haunted by the choice you made in your past to escape the curse, at a great cost, given the title of the whole piece.

The drag and drop element of proceeding through the story branches was novel to me. It took me a few tries to get the hang of it, but the initial animation was very helpful in establishing how to use it. I did find a few bugs along the way. In particular, on the “listen close” choice, it seems like I was unable to proceed in at least 2 different play throughs. Anyways, I’ll probably continue contemplating my theories, I look forward to reading how others might interpret this one.

7 Likes
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Deceit in the Guildhall of Virtue Doug Egan

Playing this game makes me feel affirmed in my choice to watch as many cartoons as possible as a child, including all the not very good retro Hanna-Barbara ones that Cartoon Network would play on slow mornings. I could have been reading or something to expand my squishy child brain, but no, I insisted on watching stiffly animated episodes of Super Friends even though at the fresh age of 7 I knew it was not very good. But playing Deceit in the Guildhall of Virtue was the big payoff, I guess. This is what people mean when they say everything happens for a reason, right?

Anyway, man, the Wonder Twins were pretty lame, weren’t they?

I loved how this plopped you right into that show, but on the mundane side of the curtain, which enriches the absurdity of the world. I found the goofiness and the jokes entertaining. The story itself was a fun enough mystery. It gave you the feeling of openness, but I think a lot of things were actually pretty strictly sequenced, and there is only one way to meaningfully proceed through the game. The need to try to figure out which topics to pair and the right character to bring them up with is where you get the meaningful puzzle aspect.

I played on a tablet and could not figure out how to drag and drop effectively, so I ended up using the clicking to pair interrogation topics, so I was glad for that option. I also had a bit of a hard time navigating. Another reviewer said they clicked on the map to navigate…I didn’t even realize that was an option! I would have preferred that, because the hyperlinks were not laid out in [what I thought to be] a spatially meaningful order and I was constantly moving to the wrong room. Fortunately, there were no consequences for my lack of link clicking skills, and by the end, I was getting better at it.

But the real “deceit” here was a late game bug that trapped me in the Prodigious’s bedroom when I was meant to go to the library. Of course I knew I was meant to go to the library, but my instinct is always to make sure I’ve looked all over before I proceed to a potential point of no return. So instead I went to the bedroom, Carmen said, “you gotta go to the library!” but there was…no way to do that. If I had been smart, I might have made use of the save feature earlier on. Or perhaps I would have realized there are built in “back” buttons. I was not smart. By the time I realized there was a back button, I had done enough clicks that I had filled whatever limit the back button supports, sooooo…I quit. I’d already sunk a few hours into the game, it seemed close to ending, I think I saw where it was going, and I had a fun enough time.

My last comment is that the music rocked. It didn’t last very far into the game, but I enjoyed it when it played. Hats off to the Tomato Nerd Garage Jams.

Edit: The author reached out with a patch, and I was able to complete the game! Of course, in this process I realized the answer was right in front of me in this review all along: I could have clicked the map. Oh dear. I should probably stop writing reviews for fear I will look foolish any further (I will keep writing reviews).

8 Likes
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Gambler’s Quest Chris

This is more of a demo than a complete game. It basically sets you up to begin a bigger adventure, but you never get to go on it. I’m not really sure what to make of the rest of it. I found myself frustrated at the very first quest: putting on clothes for work. At one point, I think I picked up clothes without explicitly doing so, but didn’t know how to refer to them to actually put them on (if I even could), and could not tell if I was wearing them or wearing something else? I had to start over multiple times to figure it out, and eventually, I just looked at the walkthrough. You collect points when you do the correct things, and obviously since the game isn’t finished, that doesn’t really mean anything. After having peeked at the walkthrough, I discovered a later action you can take that gains you a point, but is unrelated to any listed quest, has no reaction, and overall seems pretty meaningless. I encourage the author to finish the game if they enjoyed the process of building it, as I am sure there is potential, though I do recommend recruiting some playtesters to smooth over some of the less intuitive moments.

5 Likes
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The Acquisition by Jess Watsky

In choice based games like this one, it always seems like I find the darkest, most abruptly grim story paths before I find the ones that leave a real sense of closure. Is that just a reflection of my own impulses? Or a result of carefully crafted interactivity? Or a coincidence that I’m imbuing more meaning on than reality actually justifies? I guess now is a good time to say that the suicide content warning especially should be well heeded. It gets pretty graphic, and after playing through to a few endings, I started to wonder if I should stop, because I’m not in the best headspace for content like that at this time. My primary takeaway was “wanting things inevitably leads to pain.” Of course, to live is to want, so the logical implication there is that to live is to feel pain. Great.

But I don’t like leaving paths unexplored, and I had time to spend as Claude was still hammering away at refactoring some code for my day job, so I kept going. I’m glad I did, because the theme of wanting was more deeply explored in some of the fresh outcomes I encountered. I feel like this is a game about the nature of wanting itself, and considering how we engage with our own drive for satisfaction and joy left me with a little more to chew on than total despair.

I am not familiar with Glen Baxter, and I had no idea what an Alessi juicer was. I looked it up. It’s an odd, alien-looking contraption that vaguely reminds me of renditions of the evil machines in War of the Worlds. I’m puzzled by the choice, but I like being able to contemplate the significance of it. If I had to come up with a surrealist illustration that could trigger a deep mental spiral within me, what would I choose? I’ll have to give it some thought. If I find some time, perhaps I’ll update this post with my own rendition.

6 Likes
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New Captain Joshua Kaden

In my first “real” full time job out of college, I became in charge of the women’s employee resource group for my office, mainly because no one else wanted to do it. My office was small, and proportionally women made up only 20% of the team, but we were within a large company, so HQ would give me lots of budget that I had no idea what to do with. I usually ended up just buying books for people. At one point I picked out Brave Not Perfect by Reshma Saujani and ordered half a dozen copies to give to anyone who wanted it. I read the book, and the premise was that women tend to be socialized to have high expectations for themselves, and this tends to paralyze them and prevent them from pursuing the same kind of careers as men. I do generally feel like I observe this phenomenon, but I remember not personally resonating with the stories in the book until the author shared an anecdote where she discovered the women who participated in sports were some of the only women she didn’t observe this behavior in. I felt very smug. I had taken up dance and circus arts in my early 20s, and it had boosted my self esteem immensely. I was comfortable with struggle, and literally putting myself on stage for judgement and potential failure. A career as a woman in tech? No sweat by comparison. I didn’t need this book at all!

Well, playing New Captain reminds me that I’m not impervious to the social conditioning of my environment. Because sit me down and tell me that it is my first day on the job and I have 11 reports who are all going to judge me and I can read the report on their judgement any time I want, and oh yea, you have to negotiate a political treaty between two fairly complex species, play into corporate politics, do some science mission on the side, and somehow you need to know how to correctly operate a spaceship, and every instinct in my body is to immediately close the window and stop playing. This is so much information! I don’t know how to do any of this! I will surely fail! I know it does not matter at all, literally no one can observe my failure, and sometimes the failure ending is more fun anyway, so yes, I pressed on, but it did not make the feeling go away while I played the game. I felt so desperate to do it “correctly”.

Come to find, I had definitely overthought everything and I passed the mission with flying colors with relative ease. I negotiated the treaty. I scanned the pulsar. My crew generally liked me. I did not make a lot of money, nor did I win corporate political capital. But I did my job. Shouldn’t I be proud? No. I’m just feeling annoyed at myself for having cared so much. I didn’t play through other potential outcomes, so I do not know how hard it is to fail. Don’t tell me. Let me have the illusion that I might actually be very smart and I have accomplished something difficult.

This is a long winded way to say that New Captain is not the type of game I would pick for myself. It felt like a real job, maybe worse because I couldn’t openly crack jokes with other employees to trick them into liking me, and that was a bit stressful. But it is solidly crafted, and very good at setting up a rich environment, a complicated problem, and leaving the answer open ended. If you like that, you might like this game.

10 Likes
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Wild Ride to Earth by Cavaris

If you won $150 million in the lottery and then were suddenly abducted by alien scientists and dumped on a faraway space port, what would you do? On one hand, you have an amazing life waiting for you back on Earth. On the other hand, you are one of the only humans to ever have the chance to explore a vast and diverse alien world. The good news is that in Wild Ride to Earth, you can’t get back home without working odd jobs across galaxies, so you at least get the best of both worlds for a little while.

This game is a good romp. It’s zany enough to keep you on your toes, but just structured enough around income, travel, and time management to keep you directed. During my journey home, I played a pet in an alien reality TV series (bucket list item tbh), was exhibited by the very scientist who abducted me to various crowds, posed as a model for artists and gained some prestige as a species, complimented guests in a spa, survived QAing a horror punk band “video game”, and managed not to rock the boat with the interstellar version of Amazon warehouse managers. All of this was enough to earn me a ride back to Earth with a month to spare to collect my lottery winnings, but I am left wondering what else was out there to explore? I didn’t buy a single thing in the shop, and I left at least 75% of the help wanted ads unanswered, and apparently there was an election going on but I was not involved past hearing about it, so probably a lot! What can I say? Time was passing quickly and $150 million sounds pretty great. Fortunately, this game is not terribly long, so replayability is definitely on the table. I’ll probably make my way back around to it in some work downtime, because I had a fun time.

8 Likes
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Black Thumb by Bridget Hoang

This is a [more or less] single room puzzle game with a few sub-tasks that reminds me a bit of the game Superliminal. As a very novice parser game player, I was able to get through it with a few hints. Surprisingly, I knew immediately I had to take the sun (thanks to a well set up piece of text), but I had a very hard time realizing I should go out the window instead of the door first. Funny how our assumptions can get the best of us.

I’m not sure if there is more than one ending, but the ending I experienced left me feeling conflicted. It seemed both beautiful and terrible all at once. I really can’t think of what it could be a metaphor for, it seems more designed to dredge forth some ineffable feeling than anything else, a bit like watching an abstract short film. Thematically, perhaps it is about taking chances and filling up your life. Though there is no direct mention, I am reminded of Icarus.

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Purgatory by Lorenzo Cellier

This was quite a read immediately after a day of difficult news at work. It was not so difficult that I wanted to enact violence, but frankly speaking, the fantasy of just walking off and never returning is a recurrent one for me. I’m struck by the fact that I wrote a surprisingly similar short story nearly 15 years ago. It included a spontaneous murder of someone I resented and culminated in driving across the Mexico border to walk into the sea with the intention to never come out. I never shared it with anyone and I’m not really sure why I wrote it. I think it was a therapeutic exercise more than anything else, and Purgatory feels in good company. To me, there’s some frustration that is being worked through here. The story is light on character details and motivation, and heavy on gore. I’m not sure if I am meant to continue looping and discover some other outcome. I played through it 3 times to be sure, but just kept ending back up in the beginning. I suppose that is meant to be poetic and speak to the game’s title, though I don’t understand where the “redemption” from the subtitle comes in. It seems like bad news just all the way through.

6 Likes
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On Repeat by Sarah Willson

Yikes, yet another story about losing your job? I thought this might be a light and fun palette cleanser right after Purgatory. And it was, stylistically speaking. But we’re evolved to see patterns, and the patterns are not always my friends.

This was a story of looping through pedestrian days with little intention, thought, or feeling…”on repeat”, if you will. Even when things did seem to happen, everything was described at an emotional distance. Your friend going through a typical dating cycle, your mom struggling to quit smoking, listening to music you really like…These things are meant to make us react, and yet, it was all plainly described. Even being laid off from your job comes completely emotion-free. All the while, the world carries on. I have to say, it kind of resulted in a feeling of nothingness from within. My completion of the game was a “that’s it?” moment. I guess that in itself is a feeling? Do I like that? I can’t decide.

8 Likes
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See You Around by Lacey Louwagie

I feel cautious letting my brain do its thing when I read fiction about sex workers. I hold myself back from full immersion by wondering “How realistic is this actually? Am I building a harmful misrepresentation of prostitution in my head?” I am not sure if that is always fair of me necessarily. Authors are allowed to write about experiences that are not their own (literature would be pretty boring otherwise), but I can’t help myself from being sensitive to this subject matter. That being said, I still felt the character of Jasmira was a rich one, and I could easily imagine her entirety in my mind. We get only a few glimpses into her backstory, but it says more than enough about what kind of life she has lived and why that motivates her actions now. Alim, on the other hand, felt under explored and, to me, served more as a wall for Jasmira to bounce off of. So when the point of view of the story switched to Alim, I was left a little wanting, especially because his point of view becomes the emotional climax of the story. Yes, Jasmira seems beautiful and cool, but I am not fully clued into why she has such an impact on him in the end.

I don’t think it helps that two elements of the writing were hard for me to engage with. The first were the song lyrics, which I think were supposed to give us a deeper insight into the characters. I have many creative skills, but music is not one of them, so whenever I read fictional lyrics, my brain comes up with the most banal tune possible. I’m suddenly reading these lyrics like they’re immature stylings of my 13 year old self (when I had a short lived interest in being a pop song writer). I realize I would probably have this problem reading even really great song lyrics. The music just does not download to my head. I think actual music here could be really powerful in elevating the emotional resonance, and IF is great medium for that choice. The second one is small, and I’m probably nitpicking, but descriptions that methodically list clothing choices–especially when they contain things such as lacy lingerie, fishnets, and big black boots–really reminds me of the infamous My Immortal fanfic, and that link removed me a bit from the otherwise serious tone of the piece.

The interactivity of the work is limited to letting you dip into flashbacks at your own discretion, but otherwise the story is pretty linear and straight forward, and I feel like it could have been written just as a story. Overall I liked reading it, and I am intrigued by the larger space of Zimmerman Studios that these characters fit into.

6 Likes