I feel like 2025 was a pretty strong year for IF and it’s hard to stand out amid so many great games (especially if you write in popular categories like “Twine” and “Mystery”), so we’re very honored not only to have won an award, but to have been competitive in several categories. Watching the awards voting was enough of a nailbiter to make someone want to take up Undum and write five games in the mysterious “Travel” genre in the next year, but we’re honored to be sharing Best Plot with some other excellent games!
I hope people might take the time to look at the top three or so games in each poll, because there were some excellent games that didn’t win anything but came pretty close, often in multiple polls. To shout out some runners-up and third-place games that I personally loved and voted for: you are an ancient chinese poet…; Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider; Little Boxes; OVER; a dialect for two; Swap Wand User, A Smörgåsbord of Pain… I could go on, but this comment is probably long enough (some might say too long) already.
Anyway, we also used this as an excuse to finally finish our postmortem (even later than last year’s, but look, we were sick basically all the way from October through January), which, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, is here:
Congrats to everyone and thank you to mathbrush for organizing this!