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.