Thanks for the kind words – though it’s amazing how far 8 weeks of parental leave and a questionable set of priorities will get you!
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Congrats on finishing everything! Hopefully I can follow your example.
And yes, I remember a Keno computer game when I won. I saw a big board of 80 numbers and thought there must be some grand brilliant strategy at play here. When I found out there wasn’t, I was disillusioned.
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Thanks for the review! I can’t believe you got so far only to encounter a glitch like that. I have no idea what happened, as I’ve never replicated anything like that! I guess something can’t be playtested enough no matter how much we try. Thanks for playing!
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Yeah, it seemed weird – I tried searching for the error phrase and didn’t find any other mentions of the specific one I ran into on the Quest forums. I think it had something to do with memory, and maybe it had the word “transcript” or “transcription” in there too? I was keeping a transcript, but it looks like it got cut off around the point it hit 1 MB, so dunno if that’s part of what was going on or just a coincidence. Sorry not to be more helpful, and thanks for the game!
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Just bumping the thread to note that I’ve added a longer, real review of Cygnet Committee, as well as short updates to my Kidney Kwest and Belinsky Conundrum reviews – so that’s all the games I didn’t beta test! I’ll probably wrap up this thread with some quick highlights of those, since I don’t have time to fully replay those and it’s unfair to write a review based on my months-old memories of beta code.
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Thanks for following up!
Lowlight winning the game gives you the option of unlocking a new “hard mode”, which I’m guessing fleshes out the plot a bit further…
I think I oversold hard mode. There is no special ending at the end of hard mode. Nobody should feel the need to play hard mode, as it doesn’t change the plot.
But depending on how much you enjoyed the mechanics, it will probably be interesting to see how quickly you can get a high score.
Note that, as you open up movement by spending the chips, you will also encounter more drones (and get more chips) because you’re moving more.
requiring two full playthroughs to open up the option to play a third time feels like inaccessible design.
You probably won’t want to play hard mode unless you’ve mastered it after two playthroughs or more—the death and capture system is much less forgiving. Drones also have more HP as the game progresses, which can really set you back if you lose a fight. It really is hard!
I turned up two, and am pretty sure I missed a bunch more – finding these was really rewarding.
Curious as to which two you found—one of them has a list of all the secrets, and some of them help you farm for chips more quickly.
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Ah, that sounds interesting! I got the dark alcove, and the crate of chips after the helicopter blew away some of the undergrowth at the mountain heliopad. Though I did feel like the drones were dropping more chips in the last half of the game so maybe I’d figured something else out without realizing it?
Though I did feel like the drones were dropping more chips in the last half of the game
Drones seem to show up in the forest more often; I think it is just because there is more outdoor space and backtracking to trigger their appearance.
There is also an issue with the way I triggered random numbers that I couldn’t entirely figure out, so sometimes you will get 2-3 drones in a row. This problem can happen anywhere, but happens a lot more in the forest because of the open space.
Re: increasing payouts, there is a special control panel at the “Airfield” room that increases payouts; it is a big, timed runaround challenge so you would know if you got it.
I got [spoilers]
Congrats. Did you figure out the alcove without hints? I can’t remember when the hint comes up exactly now that I think about it…
I just opened up the twine game to count the secrets and there are four others, only one of which is an actual room on the map…the rest are just chip payouts.
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As mentioned above, I beta tested the remaining games and I don’t feel able to do full reviews since I don’t have the bandwidth to replay them, much less the mental energy to try to compartmentalize away my experience of playing the initial beta versions, in some cases several months ago. But these are all great games so I don’t want to wrap up the Comp without saying at least something about them, so I’m just going to lift up a quick highlight for each.
AardVarK Versus the Hype, by Truthcraze
Highlight : I adore the period details in this high-school-set comedy – the bonkers school assembly, the house party – but it’s the attitude of the various bandmates towards their music, and the mainstream represented by the eponymous zombification-inducing soft drink. In our current later-capitalistic hellscape of paid influencers and multimedia content-leveraging strategies that operate mostly independently of the artists they’re notionally built around, the GenX energy of these kids, who believe, correctly, that their music can save the day (and maybe get one or two of them a date), brings some heartfelt sincerity that makes the game more than just a hilarious romp – though of course it’s that too.
And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One, by B.J. Best
Highlight : There’s loads of cleverness on display here, including a game-characters-as-gigging-actors conceit that’s honestly maybe a little too clever for me but leads to a lot of really fun conversation options that flesh out the game’s cast as well as providing a bit of a lens on the main character’s feelings as he navigates recent grief and puberty (not necessarily in that order). That’s of a piece with many aspects of the game, which has gameplay resembling many an IFComp puzzlefest of years past, but stands out by making sure all the puzzle-solving, location-navigation, and NPC-interaction help drive the character’s arc.
At King Arthur’s Christmas Feast, by Travis Moy
Highlight : Adaptations are famously difficult to manage in IF, because there’s an unavoidable tension between fidelity to the static source text, and offering the kinds of interactivity that tend to provide strong engagement. AKACF is one of the best at managing this tension, I think for two reasons: the first, straightforward one, is that the source text does revolve around an extended dilemma, and it’s one where the protagonist does kind of fudge his way through – meaning that I felt freedom to fudge things in a slightly different way. Second, even just inhabiting the tension of the dilemma, regardless of how it’s resolved, felt rewarding to me, because it offers an opportunity for some historical tourism. The past, as they say, is a foreign country – they do things differently there – and while it’s possible to intellectually understand the way Sir Gawain is torn between the duties of chivalry and the duties of hospitality, these duties can feel pretty abstract to modern sensibilities. So the way AKACF expertly communicates his internal conflict wound up working really well for me, since it made me appreciate the alien values of a past era in a way a straightforward history, or static fiction, couldn’t do.
The House on Highfield Lane, by Andy Joel
Highlight : As befits its top billing in the title, I found the eponymous house one of the best pieces of this old-school puzzlefest. This isn’t to slight the puzzles, which are pitched just right in terms of difficulty (OK, except for the final one, which I floundered on at least as it was presented in the beta) – but in a mansion-crawl like this, it’s easy for the setting to feel incoherent, with a mish-mash of different environments and thinly-justified puzzle elements pushing the player out of the game. The house in HHL does have its obscure touches, from a steampunk elevator to a creepy arboretum (not to mention the mad-scientist’s laboratory in the basement), but a few canny touches create a real sense of place: you can catch glimpses of your own house through the window, you can see blocked-off locations before you get to them, and the map of the house changes over time, keeping the player on their toes but also forcing you to think about how to navigate the space. Even though it’s been a couple of months since I’ve played it, I can still close my eyes and remember how the map fits together, which isn’t something I can do for half the games I just played in the Comp over the last month.
The Libonotus Cup, by Nils Fagerburg
Highlight : I feel churlish picking this given the embarrassment of riches this game offers, from the Monkey-Island-ish humor to the surprisingly open-ended race that caps things off, but Libonotus Cup has the best Easter Egg of the Comp. Spoilers, obv: it’s tied to what’s also I’d say the best feelie of the Comp, the included crossword puzzle that at first looks like a neat little add-on. But once it’s solved, the solution cleverly provides a key to some mysterious text on a couple items in the game, which in turn opens up a cool hidden interaction that also provides a boost to your winnings in the race. Like the game as a whole, it’s fun, smart, and tightly-designed!
Walking Into It, by Andrew Schultz
Highlight : Given that it’s an Andrew Schultz game, it’s unsurprising that the implementation here is smooth and robust (not to mention a story and characters that are way more emotionally impactful than they needed to be for such a puzzle-focused design), but it’s the premise that’s a stroke of genius. Flipping the goal of Tic-Tac-Toe from winning to losing in a plausible-enough fashion transforms the world’s most boring game into a surprisingly-engaging intellectual challenge that had me smiling as I worked through all the cases. I gained a new appreciation for this humble pastime – and now I’m wondering if there’s hidden fun if you somehow manage to reverse Monopoly!
What Heart Heard of, Ghost Guessed, by Amanda Walker
Highlight : WHHGG (look, I’d give the author a hard time for the title, but my entry last year was called “The Eleusinian Miseries” so I have no leg to stand on) has probably the most sheer pathos of any Comp game I can easily recall. It’s a bold choice for a first-time author to go downbeat, but one that pays off: the puzzle-solving mechanic, which revolves around manipulating the player-character’s emotions, could easily have come off gimmicky if it was embedded in the Comp-traditional light-comedy vibe, but here it lends surprising thematic weight to the lonely house-exploration that makes up the gameplay.
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Half and half – I was actually messing around with the menu options to see how the hints worked, and as soon as I saw that it added extra text to the link to the alcove, I put two and two together. It’s a really clever puzzle!
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The Libonotus Cup, by Nils Fagerburg
Highlight : I feel churlish picking this given the embarrassment of riches this game offers, from the Monkey-Island-ish humor to the surprisingly open-ended race that caps things off, but Libonotus Cup has the best Easter Egg of the Comp.
Hate to threadjack your own impressions here and tell you that you are wrong about the best Easter Egg from the Libonotus Cup, especially since that is a personal preference, and personal preferences can’t be wrong (“Don’t yuck a yum”, as my kids tell each other when one of them puts ketchup on grapes), but you are wrong.
The best Easter Egg from the Libonotus Cup is the response to XYZZY, and the fact that it changes room chats. There’s one particular “setting” for the XYZZY response that triggers a particular chat for the jungle puzzle in the boat race that actually made me laugh out loud, and curse Nils for being TOO CLEVER.
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Oh my gosh, I’m an inveterate XYZZY-overlooker so I had no idea! Ugh, guess my arm has been twisted and I’ll have to replay Libonotus Cup after all.
Anyway, that is I believe the lot! I’ll be migrating cleaned-up versions of these reviews to IFDB once the Comp wraps up, and also probably updating this thread with a couple closing thoughts on the Comp overall.
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Aww, rats, I was hoping to overtake you briefly in review count 
. But I’ll settle for appreciating the nice words on WII and a bunch more neat insights on other games I liked.
Good job fully running the IFComp reviewing gauntlet and keeping engaged with authors who added their own thoughts. Reviewing every entry is so much rarer now that IFComp’s bigger!
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Thanks for the nice review! And the beta-testing too, of course.
Actually, that is - kind of - how it was originally designed. The objective was to teach children the horrors of people/companies have monopolies - the perils of capitalism. Instead, it ends up teaching them how to be a good capitalist.
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And that’s a wrap! I’m adding a couple short post-Comp thoughts to mark moving this thread out of the Author’s Forum:
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The quality seemed really strong across the board to me this year, meaning both that there were fewer outright incomplete or broken games than I’m used to seeing, but also that the number of games I think will do really well is bigger than I’m used to. It also feels like there are a bunch of first-time authors who turned in really solid games, as well as some folks who haven’t participated in the Comp for a while coming back in with strong entries. I also feel like there was a lot of creativity in settings and genre – there were very few generic fantasy adventures or Lovecraft pastiches (and to be clear, the games that best fit those categories, Finding Light and Beneath Fenwick, I thought were quite good!) and no “you wake up from cryosleep on a spaceship” games at all. All very good news for the health of the scene!
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Similarly, I feel like production values are getting higher and higher. Partially this is because my impression is there were fewer plain-vanilla parser games this year – potentially due to ParserComp bleeding some of them off, though this could also be a mistaken impression because I tested a lot of these so I didn’t replay them. But there were a lot of games with really slick presentations and clever designs, especially of course on the choice-based side of things but even extending to things Closure’s text-message cleverness. The days of barebones zcode and default-format Twine games definitely feel over.
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Speaking of ParserComp, I wonder whether it’s responsible for also bleeding off some of the parser games written in less-standard languages. I was surprised to find only two Adventuron games, only one in TADS, and only one Dialog game too – and nothing in ADRIFT or PunyInform. Amid the sea of Inform and custom parser games it was nice to see two games in Quest 6 at least, but it feels like there was less diversity here than usual.
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In terms of my experience of the Comp, having much more time-pressure than usual due to being a new parent meant that I was even more aware of pacing than usual. I usually don’t mind too much if a game takes a while to get going so long as it’s got something else I like, but this year I think I got much more impatient with games like Paradox Between Worlds and SpamZapper 3.1, which have interesting ideas and strong characterization but are also really in need of an editor – I think what other reviewers justifiably viewed as venial sins felt more like mortal ones due to my circumstances. Thinking about this some more, I think this is the rare issue where parser authors have an easier time of it – if a parser game starts to drag, I usually just stop looking as closely at all the scenery or have quicker recourse to hints, whereas in most choice-based games the player often has fewer tools at their disposal to speed things up.
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The author gag rule being lifted definitely feels odd to me and I didn’t taken advantage of it at all – but I still remember the days when nobody could talk about the games during the comp period, and there was just an overwhelming orgy of reviews and conversation the day it finished! This way is definitely better, though, since I can’t imagine stewing without any feedback at all for six weeks.
Anyway, congrats to the authors, thanks to the reviewers and players, and good luck to all!
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Just a final note to this thread to say that I’ve started moving reviews over to IFDB – Andrew Schultz, who also reviewed all the games, and I are coordinating embargo dates to avoid overwhelming the IFDB “what’s new” thread. We’re starting from the bottom of the rankings to hopefully highlight some games that got less attention, but all of them should go up over the next two months or so.
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Dumb question but why is blasting the “what’s new” thread with a hundred fifty reviews bad?
I don’t think that’s a dumb question! My sense is that lots of folks visit IFDB every day or so to see what’s new, but if the reviews all go up at once probably folks will only click on a couple, likely looking for games they already played or saw finished high up in the rankings. So maybe spreading the reviews out increases the chance that more people will read more of the reviews since it’ll be less overwhelming, and hopefully that’ll be especially helpful for getting more attention to middle-of-the-pack entries (many of which I really enjoyed so I’d like to highlight them a little!)
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To add to Mike’s response, I also think that dumping a bunch of reviews might discourage others from writing reviews for, say, EctoComp right now. It’s a bit intimidating to have too much to read at once. Even if they know intellectually that someone’s reviewed all the IFComp games and there won’t be more, there’s still a fear your review might get snowed under, because that’s how the human mind works.
(That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate days where 2 or more people posted 5 reviews in a day during IFComp. I’d be thrilled if that happened even more often next year! It’s just at some point, probably 50 reviews, a reader can’t keep up and in fact it might cause them to give up for a few days. We don’t want that.)
I also like the idea of having something new up there every day to help give people an excuse to come back to IFDB more often and, as Mike alluded, to play or review some IFComp games they may’ve missed. Especially since embargoed reviews always appear at midnight Greenwich time, so the timing’s predictable. People who want to avoid them can check in a few minutes early, and people who want to see them can check in a few minutes after.
Though I don’t suspect people will have remembered the order all the entries finished in, so there’ll be some small neat surprise. (Note: for those who do want to prognosticate, Mike started with #71 and I started with #70. We’ll start our second go-throughs on December 28th and 27th, respectively.)
Seeding reviews in advance seems like the sort of thing that could help IFDB become more busy all year around. There’s a tendency to wait for IFComp or whatever, or even to say “I’d like to review this game from way back, but why bother?” But if there’s something through February, perhaps people will say “Hey! Those reviews are over. Maybe we can pick up from there.”
Also, Wade Clarke started posting some reviews from his old blog to IFDB during IFComp, where (based on posting time) it looks like he’s embargoed one a day. I think it’s worked really well as a not-too-intrusive nudge to clean up my reviews from 2018 or earlier.
Stuff probably applying to me more than Mike, so I'll collapse it since it's his thread
I’m really glad I took the time to clean up the reviews I’ve embargoed/posted so far. But for me it does take time! I think Mike taking the ironman challenge of writing so many IFComp 2020 reviews probably helped him hone his review-writing procedure, and I haven’t run the IFComp gauntlet for a while, so I wasn’t quite as ready.
Looking over my reviews now, I think that was the right choice. I started my own thread a bit late, so I had to play catch-up. I left in some pretty clear mistakes and oversights. I’m happy I got through them, and I think they will be worth posting to IFDB, but the key phrase here is “will be.”
The most obvious review in need of an upgrade is/was Infinite Adventure. where I said “Okay, folks, there’s more to this than on the surface.” However, my final draft to IFDB should probably describe what is below the surface, but with copious spoiler tags, of course. (I do recommend people giving it another whack to find the secret stuff. It’s fun whether or not you have it spoiled, though.)
Also I never did get 100% in Grandma Bethlinda, and I still want to finish Highfield Lane and Ghosts Within, if/when they post walkthroughs. I felt like I gave all 3 games short shrift.
And there are other trickier games, especially ones with complex narratives, that I don’t think I did full justice to in the author forums, or maybe I missed an alternate ending. Having the one-a-day review quota, for me, is a solid way to get something done without overwhelming myself.
Oh, also, I will be posting reviews for semi-random stuff
- on the days my entries will be up, and
- in place of Wabewalker and Cygnet Committee, two entries I reviewed during the comp in an attempt at signal boosting
The semi-random stuff is something I might not have gotten to if I’d just done a review dump. I’d like to keep it a (relative) surprise, just to give a tiny bit more incentive to visit IFDB.
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Thank you Mike for your thorough review!
Showing a wide range of responses and encouraging the player to replay the game almost obsessively was central to my concept, but when systematizing the idea I think I underestimated how much writing it would take to make each playthrough uniquely compelling while preserving a sense of continuity between the main narrative and each ending. I realize now that I could also have clarified the logic behind my point system to prevent players feeling like they were being betrayed by their choices. Anyway, thanks for sharing your perspective–it’s really useful to hear this kind of feedback for edits + future work!
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