My own list, limited by my own preferences and inclinations and familiarity with the IF catalog, and intentionally limiting myself to one work per author.
Admiral Jota, Lost Pig: Characterization and voice were just amazing, and the puzzles were fun. Every single thing worked toward an integrated whole in a way that’s virtually never seen. It knew what it needed to do along the way, and it knew when to stop.
Amy Briggs, Plundered Hearts: writing is pitch-perfect throughout. Action never lets up. It understands and works very well with the tropes of the genre it’s working with. I think that the PC is the best-characterized in any of the Infocom catalog that I’ve played. The narrative was very well structured, and the story was fun and satisfying.
Andrew Plotkin, Spider and Web: Of course, the fabled plot twist is satisfying in a way that few plot twists are in any medium, but (again) the characterization and voice were perfect precisely because of the way that they implement the tropes of the espionage genre (just like seeing all of the well-sketched-out purely one-dimensional characters interact in the Coen Brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy). Some of my favorite devices in an IF game. Constant rewards for poking at things. Innovative use of medium to prevent player death in a situation and genre where other IF of the time more or less demanded it–and in a way that worked amazingly well narratively.
Brian Moriarty, Trinity: The huge, discontinuous map is fun to play through, and it’s an incredibly well-structured Infocom game with many puzzles open in the middle game, all of which are interesting. The profound weirdness of the silent magical world that keeps opening back onto moments in our own history shouldn’t work, according to any reasonable theory of narrative cohesion in IF, but it does. The gnomon puzzle is maybe the most satisfying flash of insight I’ve ever had while playing IF. There are moments where Moriarty leverages tiny actions into profoundly moving moments: forcing yourself to kill the tiny lizard to move forward is a famous example, but not the only one.
Buster Hudson, The Wizard Sniffer: Puzzles are fun, the map is elegantly designed, and the writing is absolutely always on-point, with basically every sentence being a beautifully crafted micro-narrative. The PC is a perfect foil to her sidekicks, and the PC-based revelation is well hinted at before it occurs. I think this is the very best of the limited-verb parser games I’ve played.
Carolyn VanEseltine, Ollie Ollie Oxen Free: The looming threat is handled well, the NPCs are well-developed and believable, and the PC’s voice is very very well developed. The lack of broader information plays into everything and gives the game a sense of urgency that most other attempts to grant to works of IF are much less successful at. The sudden ending with no post-threat epilogue cuts off perfectly satisfying narrative resolution in a way that avoids comforting the player and resolving the larger questions that don’t quite get asked, but that are necessarily present in the player’s mind.
D.A. Leary, The Horror of Rylvania: One of the best old-school mid-90s puzzlefests, for me. Largish but not huge map is well-designed, and most locations are described tersely but well. The game has its own weird logic that makes puzzles possible to solve in your head while you’re away from your computer and not actively thinking about them: there are a lot of very satisfying “a-ha!” moments here. The early gestures toward tying multiple endings to moral choice for the player are significant, too.
Emily Short, Savoir-Faire: My favorite of Short’s many good games. There’s something about the system that’s deeply satisfying, even before realizing how deep the implementation goes. Even more than any of her other games that I’ve played, this one joyfully rewards poking at its incredibly deep implementation of basically everything.
Gareth Rees, Christminster: Another mid-90s piece that marries excellent puzzles to extensively developed narrative. Again, excellent PC characterization, done in little ways and with little gestures throughout the game. NPC characterization is very nearly as strong. Atmosphere and map-development are perfect. Frankly, I think this game understands and works with the tropes of IF at its time better than anything else I’ve played.
Jason Devlin, Vespers: The non-sympathetic narrator is done extremely well here. Virtue tracking is handled gently but has a real impact on a lot of the story. The map is continually being altered in subtle ways that contribute to the overall gradually-building atmosphere of the game. Emotionally draining, but also weirdly cathartic in exactly the way that Aristotelian drama is supposed to be.
Jason McIntosh, The Warbler’s Nest: Short, well-contained episode with excellent characterization. The creepy brooding atmosphere never lets up and builds a set of questions that culminate in an ethical choice, all branches of which are handled well. Writing is terse and well-done, and supports everything else about the game.
JJ Guest, Alias “The Magpie”: vigorous puzzlefest with hilarious solutions to everything. Characterization is again done very well, with brightly sketched genre tropes springing to life. Writing is wonderful throughout. Access to the map is carefully and fairly controlled, and the pretexts for denying access are, as with so much else about the game, screamingly funny.
Michael Gentry, Anchorhead (1998). Beautifully designed map with careful access controls throughout the game. PC is so well done; so are many of the NPCs. Gentry absolutely nails the looming awfulness of the Lovecraftian atmosphere, and he does so over and over and over. The narrative is satisfying on many levels; the puzzles, though sometimes hard, are always fair; and there’s always more going on than the player can be aware of at any one time.
Peter Emery, Birmingham IV: its pure joy for the types of game that were possible early in the history of IF and its homage to them (or incorporation and working with the tropes of its own time, if it really is a translation of the author’s Quill game from decades ago) are delightful. More so than most games that attempt to imitate the wacky “magic, but also machines” house style of Infocom, this achieves a weirdly satisfying fusion of magic and realism without ever quite showing what all the boundaries of the combined system are. The puzzles are hard but sometimes brilliant, and the characterization is handled deftly without ever being done extensively. It’s haunting in ways that are impossible to articulate simply because of its weirdness, which has an internal logic that can be recognized but not explained (at least … not by me).
Robert Arnstein, Raaka-Tu (1981): Old-school treasure-hunt romp, amazingly well executed for being written in 6809 assembly and running on a machine with 16K of RAM. Map is well-designed and puzzles are hard but fair. Kind of a shining little gem of a game showing how much can be done with so little.
Star C Foster and Daniel Ravipinto, Slouching Towards Bedlam: wonderful atmosphere that combines multiple common IF genres in a very satisfying way by finding reasons to mesh common tropes together. The gradual discovery of what’s going on and the kind of horror that it provokes without ever directing how you feel about it is very, very effective. Writing is brilliant.
Steve Meretzky, Leather Goddesses of Phobos: best job of anyone at poking fun at sci-fi tropes, for my money (though Meretzky did this very well in other places, too). It takes them seriously at the world-building level while mocking them narratively; this is a combination that IF doesn’t often do anywhere near this well. Hard puzzles, but fair, and often quite clever when the whole puzzle is understood.
Thomas Mack, Nick Mathewson, and Cidney Hamilton, The Owl Consults: Aboard the Airship Mephistopheles: Excellent multiple viewpoints, handled better than most attempts to do this. Both viewpoint characters are well-developed in different ways, and the handling of the comic-book super-villains is flawless. Wonderful dialog, excellent writing throughout.
Veronika Megler, The Hobbit (1982). Another brilliant-for-its-time work that’s still impressive: the deep flexibility and open-worldedness of the game are still delightful. The game shows, again, just how much can be done with very little. The graphics are clean and amazing (again, especially for the time); even better: it’s possible to play without them.
Wade Clark, Leadlight (2010): The creepy atmosphere makes the claustrophobic old-school parser work very, very well here. There’s not a whole lot of zombie IF that’s excellently executed (though there are other very well-done zombie IF works out there), but this shines in a lot of ways. Again, the viewpoint character is developed quite well, and her limitations work well both narratively and in terms of game balance. I didn’t love the combat system, but neither did it ruin the game for me as it did for some other people.
Magical Makeover