I’m looking for recommendations for games that meet two specific criteria:
The game should be deemed good by the person making the recommendation.
The game should have fewer than four ratings at ifdb.org.
For anyone wondering, yes, I welcome self-promotion, but keep in mind that I intend to post honest ratings and reviews for all the games I play. If you’d rather not open yourself up to the possibility of honest criticism, this probably isn’t the thread you want to reply to.
Also note that I don’t promise to play every game that is recommended to me. It’s really not in anyone’s interest for me to endure a game I think is absolutely repulsive just so I can give it a scathing review.
Emily Short’s first game ever has exactly 4 reviews:
It’s a physics simulator, and was released on usenet but never intended as an actual game. It’s not really ‘fun’, but it’s really interesting to see what her original thought process about games was. I think there’s a camera that can photograph things, flammable things, etc. So I would say this is only ‘good’ if you enjoy seeing an author’s progression and are interested in IF history.
The Usher Foundation series is a series of short (often very short) fangames about each of the entities in The Magnus Archives. I did enjoy most of these, but they don’t connect to each other, so you could just try some of the top few (which have 4 ratings or less. There are a couple with 5).
I made an IFDB poll a bit ago to collect recs for games with fewer than five ratings; some have now risen past five, but there are still a lot on there with three or fewer!
It seems like it works. Note reviews (words) are not the same as ratings (stars). You may notice that NGUHD is listed as the highest-rated game given #reviews:0-3. Despite having 27 ratings, there are only 3 reviews listed.
I’m an idiot, apparently, because I carefully looked for “ratings” in the list of search terms to make sure I wasn’t confusing it with “reviews”, and then somehow typed in “reviews” anyway when I was actually doing the search.
Hi! If you’re open to trying something small and experimental, I’d really appreciate your thoughts on a short interactive sci-fi story I made called “Neon Case”.
It’s a narrative-focused piece with meaningful choices and a moral dilemma, and one scene uses an in-story AI-style interrogation mechanic as a narrative device.
Here’s the IFDB entry:
Any feedback would be very welcome if you get a chance to try it.
When I wrote about it before on here, she replied and said:
NMWH was never designed as a full-scale release, though! It was written to illustrate a point in a rec.arts.int-fiction discussion; it’s like sub-speed-IF.
A lot of self-published games, especially Twines, don’t even have an IFDB page and lie forgotten. If you’re seeking seldom-played IF, dig on itch.io, philome.la or in the Twine archives and maybe you can even create pages for them. Highlights can be found from Twine Revolution era, but by method of searching, anything you can find now are works people still do talk about.
I forgot just how many games are on philomela. would be interesting to play through a bunch & add to ifdb. i dont think i have the time atm
edit: the site itself has no links to games, but the twitter feed lists the ones that were publically posted. then again, a lot of those arent complete