As an organizer, I didn’t want to post in this thread while the comp was going to avoid the appearance of bias or trying to influence voting, but now that results are in, I’d like to highlight some games I enjoyed that didn’t place top 20 or win awards (in alphabetical order):
All of us Flames is a VN featuring a tense interaction between two troubled teen girls who have a complicated relationship. This falls into the IF subgenre of “a vignette about characters whom the author has clearly been rotating in their mind for a long time but about whom very little published material is available”, and that’s something that very rarely works for me at all. It’s easy to forget as an author that your audience has no preexisting emotional investment in the characters, and it’s particularly hard to convey the complexities of character and backstory that will generate that investment in a short piece. But in this case I thought the thorny tangle of feelings involved came across very clearly and I did feel the emotional punch of the situation, so I was impressed that the author pulled that off.
Arkuwar is an educational choice game about Hittite religious rituals, which take the form of making a legal case to the gods (this delights me just as a concept). I thought it was fascinating and had a good time exploring it.
Flight is a game about leaving an abusive relationship that would very nearly qualify for the Single Choice Jam; I thought it used its one significant choice well. It’s a very small slice of this character’s life and the toxic relationship they’re trying to escape, but it had a lot of specificity in its details, which I always appreciate. It very efficiently conveyed an overwhelming sense of exhaustion on the part of the PC that makes it so much easier to keep doing what you’re doing than to make a change, underscored by the knowledge that if you don’t make the change you’re never going to feel any better.
Get There on Time! is a short choice-based vignette about struggling with timeliness that I found very relatable; it may not hit the same way for people who haven’t had this kind of problem, but I thought it really encapsulated the frustration of knowing that this should not be so hard and yet being unable to do it.
Making dumplings is a sweet storylet-based game about cooking with your partner and connecting with your family’s culture (with which you as a queer person have a complicated relationship) with food, both things that are near and dear to my heart. I don’t know how well it reads if you haven’t played any of the other Pageantverse games, but I’m very proud of Karen and Em for overcoming their hangups enough to move in together, even if Karen still isn’t sure if they’re actually in a relationship for real. (I have to say that I did not put in the frozen shrimp, not because of Em’s possible concerns about the environmental impact of aquaculture, but because the thought of putting in expired shrimp horrified me even if they’re frozen.) Also, this game made me hungry.
No More is a very tightly executed story-focused parser game about abuse, and “person who has constantly been told by those around them that something is innately wrong with them finds power by embracing their inner monstrousness” is a literary theme I love to roll around in at any opportunity, so, good stuff.
Open Flame is a horror choice game about escaping from the clutches of a cult with the help of fire and some mysterious voices in your head. It’s very atmospheric. I’d never seen a non-comedy piece from Damon Wakes before and was impressed by the range on display in the pieces that he entered in the SGS.
Reunited in the Mist is a cute minimalist VN about running into your high school crush as an adult and reconnecting, and I thought it was very charming. (The author did get some recognition for another one of her entries, Seascape Paradiso, but I wanted to give this one some love too. Also, for a wildly tonally different lesbian romance(?), I also loved So You Have a Knife at Your Throat, which the author submitted last year.)
Sonnet is a choice game that’s a modern AU of Shakespeare’s life(/poetry?) featuring messy friend drama at a house party and was one of my favorite games in Seedcomp last year. Not Just Once, by the same author, is wildly different, a surreal creepy vignette about a young person in the city running into a stranger who seems to know them. I hadn’t played it before the SGS but also enjoyed it a lot.
your life, and nothing else is a surreal apartment building horror choice game that I really enjoyed in Ectocomp and was happy to have an excuse to revisit. It’s a symbolism-heavy exploration of identity that gives the player a lot to chew on in terms of interpretation and doesn’t spell anything out for you, which is not everyone’s jam, but I love that kind of thing.