Silvercyborg's 2025 IFComp Thoughts

Competitions IFComp
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Just some quick couple sentences on the entries I’ve played so far, in semi-random order.

Burger Meme Personality Test

A satire of those awful corporate personality tests that they force applicants to endure even for the most menial jobs. Pick bootlicking or rebellious options, and watch the in-universe “AI-powered” analysis wash over you. It’s mostly variations on the same joke, but it’s a good joke.

The Litchfield Mystery

Distinguishes itself from other manor murder mysteries through a simulated real-time evidence analysis process (I think turn-based?). This was an interesting way to keep the game moving without overwhelming with found details. The clues were solid with a couple of quirky details that added character. Q: Is there is a way to actually, physically remove the murder weapon from where it is?

A small point is that I occasionally felt unmoored from the historical countryside setting by modern-sounding dialogue (“That’s all for now, buddy.”) I hope this author continues making these–I’ll be checking out the other entries.

The Breakup Game

Essentially an interactive life advice article helping you work through a breakup. I tried to engage with the premise sincerely, though I’m happily married and my last breakup was coming up on a decade ago. This meant that I didn’t relate to some of the prose. It’s a sweet little confidence booster, though, and I think someone who had gone through a recent breakup would enjoy it.

The Semantagician’s Assistant

Escape an unexpectedly hands-on job interview for a magician who can transform reality through altering the letters in a word. Most of your options are out in the open upfront, and I spent a long time trying to get something in the room to work. It goes pretty snappily once you figure out the first step. I think it was the correct decision to limit the scope for a comp game, though I would have liked to play longer (there are inevitable comparisons to the scope of Counterfeit Monkey, which Semantagician references a few times).

The Witch Girls

This was a great little cake slice of horror. Two middle schooler wannabe witches attempt to summon boyfriends for themselves, with a variety of unsettling outcomes depending on how well you raided cabinets for off-brand ingredients. “Young girl’s burgeoning sexuality” is well-trodden ground in the genre, and can sometimes veer into trite territory, but Witch Girls never falls into that trap. It feels incredibly grounded in a time and stage of life, and the multiple endings lend a creepy ambiguity to the proceedings. “We don’t do love magic” always got a dark chuckle, and made the two endings where it was absent all the more unnerving.

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Many thanks for playing Burger Meme and glad you found it a good joke!

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Violent Delights

You have to admire the cheekiness, in a competition where you only have two hours of review time, to force you to wait an hour to play the in-game game. But it’s less of a prank than a thematic subject. As you progress through the glitchy creepy pasta of a game, with its increasingly miserly timers before crashing, an NPC asks “Right now, in this moment in time with your attention on these questions and the gradually diminishing timer, do I own a stake of your mind?” It’s a quite different take on the player-game dialogue. There is a bit of commentary on the UK’s history of censorship. Not just the initial inability to distract yourself while waiting, or the increasing shift to analogue hackery to be able to view objectionable content–when I hit review time I had managed to bypass “child protection” locks that extended well into the mid-20s. I’m sure I didn’t see everything, but what I saw was really great.

Q: When I was in the first, basic kindergarten level, I somehow managed to walk into hell, and only realized afterwards that this was a later section. Was this intentional, or a glitch?

The Transformations of Dr. Watson

After discovering a murder, Watson is attacked by the killer, and his consciousness jumps between different animals (it didn’t seem like there was any particular reason why) as he tries to convey the murder to Holmes. This is more gruesome than the premise might suggest, as each form is summarily executed. I found the AI-generated illustrations a little creepy, and the fact that they sometimes did not match the text description detracted from the experience. Perhaps text styling would have gone further than illustrations.

Valley of Glass

Sometimes fairy tales will saunter right past years’ worth of time. This explores one such lull in the story The Black Bull of Norroway, as the protagonist waits seven years for a pair of shoes in order to continue her journey. You play her stuck. The prose was gorgeous, and I liked the idea of this game a lot. Given its length (only a few turns), I think it would have been strengthened by really painting every edge of what is available, such as replacing default commands. I also had to infer that the blacksmith’s was in the village, because it wasn’t a mentioned building.

One Step Ahead

It’s so tempting to have Chat-GPT do all your schoolwork–or, well, I’ve never personally thought this, but the second-person protagonist of One Step Ahead does. They gradually cede all control to their AI assistant, until they’re no longer allowed to make any choices (If only I’d asked the robot to be more careful what I wished for!). Though spurning the AI nets a game over for poor grades, so it seems like they never had a choice to begin with. I felt at least a little sorry for them. On one page there is a “…?” link which leads to a completely blank page, unsure if that was intentional.

A Winter Morning On the Beach

My mother-in-law is into getting her 10,000 steps in, so Winter Morning presents a familiar dilemma with the elderly character’s medically-mandated stroll along the beach. I thought the hybrid parser/link format was really neat and played smoothly. Unfortunately, after several attempts I couldn’t figure out how to finish this one. A seagull poops on you if you wait for too long (I’m not sure if it’s random, it seemed like 3-5 turns, not very long). I eventually resorted to having the poor guy book it N, N, N, N, deep breath, S, S, S, S, deep breath… which didn’t feel like it was in the spirit of the thing. In the end, my seagull pursuer was inescapable.

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This happened to me too on one playthrough, but I was unable to recreate it on my second playthrough. It made the game weird, because the second level seemed way more tame than the first one!

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Yeah, I thought it was a jump scare.

Especially because one of the dead characters (who I assumed had been hit by the crashed car on the edge of the Playground map) says “This was surprising to us too!”

But it only happened the once for me, too.

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Willy’s Manor

This was fun! It evokes old-school parser games where you’re in a house, castle, etc. that seems to have been constructed as a venue for riddles. In this case, it really was, by an eccentric old prankster who’s dangling shooting rights to said puzzle house as a carrot. You’re given riddles and have to find the corresponding object, usually with some wordplay. There were some good puzzles and chuckles to be had. It also wins the award for most bizarre parser command I didn’t have to use a walkthrough to figure out: Shoot termite at branch. A post-comp release could maybe add some more synonyms and generic commands, but it’s still very enjoyable as-is.

Island of Rhynin

Explore the titular island as part of a two-man scouting expedition. And I do mean “man”, because despite letting you input your name, your player character is stated to be male. Likewise, while you’re given the choice of a spear, hatchet, or pistol, there is only one correct answer, and the NPCs will admonish you for picking the wrong one. Your choices affect your stats, which affect which options are available later. The secret turns out to be that the island is home to a nameless, undifferentiated “tribe” of people in need of an anglophone ruler. Even if you have (what I think were) all the choices available, the ending is very abrupt. Either you kill your friend for the “good” ending, or just die in a “bad” ending.

whoami

I can only describe whoami as “Pyrrhic”. It reminded me, both aesthetically and in a vague sense of grief for a world you are unfamiliar with, of Messages from the Universe Graveyard. Alternatively, Configuration Uploader if it was a tragedy instead of a horror story. L. Garcia has decided to upload their consciousness digitally. Doing so will kill them, but they are already dying of radiation poisoning. You navigate an initially impenetrable console directory (given the format, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out certain links were clickable) to put together the context of what you need to do, and how. When you set the pieces up correctly, there is an incredibly cool transition to an in-game parser game. I would love to know how this was implemented. Depending on how you handle that, there are four endings. These are really abrupt in a way that works in the game’s favour. OK, great, you’ve created a communist society! But that’s not the real society, which may be long dead. Mia is certainly long dead. Garcia’s body lies on the floor as a hundred years pass in a loading screen.

The walkthrough notes that you can use Mia’s low-res brain scan instead of your own. This had crossed my mind, but I didn’t realize the file attachment was real. I may try this on a subsequent playthrough.

Errand Run

Initially seems to be a “man, groceries are expensive in 2025” piece, but ends up being something else entirely. The background is so ambiguous and the descriptions so weird that the twist landed for me despite suspecting it.

There’s a memorable scene in Shaun of the dead where he goes to the corner shop for his usual order while failing to notice the zombie carnage around him, and Errand Run is a more serious piece that plays in the same space. Is it a commentary on the absurdity of going about your day while the world goes up in flames? Or does it speak to the specific psychological state of the protagonist, trying to enforce a routine to avoid breaking down?

WATT

A young man named Watt goes on an allegorical journey to collect seven keys across different stages of life. I spent some time after playing WATT pondering the ending.

Rather than a SURVEY_PROGRAM.EXE style bait-and-switch about player agency, I think the opening choices are aimed at Watt himself. It initially confused me that during the more realistic final section of the game, he experiences memories that we didn’t actually play through. On reflection, I think the various houses are allegories not just for life stages, but the life stages of this particular character. You only live once. There’s no going back to correct his mistakes. But at the end, you get to decide if his life was really about checking a series of boxes in order to see his dead mother again, or…

There were a couple of rough bits re: typos, and I sometimes found the text effects a little intrusive, but there were also some very memorable images (the girl in the vase, the empty Chinese opera, the stairs) that made it a very worthwhile experience.

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Thank you for playing and reviewing my work! Have taken note of your feedback and will try my best to improve future works. In response to your question:

you can’t technically “remove” or “take” the murder weapon from where it is, but you can send the murder weapon for analysis and you can also check the results of the analysis in the case file.

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Ah, good to know, thanks! I’ll be looking forward to your future games, the analysis mechanic was cool. (:

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Fascism - Off-Topic

Was not expecting this to be a joke game from the title! I only learned from Mike Russo’s review that it’s an in-joke, and a pretty obscure one to base a game on. It does a great job of evoking the feeling of sitting on a subway while forcibly-eavesdropping on an argument. While you can’t do anything (save for the single command INTERJECT or INTERRUPT, the environment is saturated with character detail and a few IF references. At the risk of over-analyzing, it seems like the characters already live in a fascist society. The “white, male, patriotic” PC might not even have the level of political consciousness to think of himself as a fascist–it doesn’t affect him, so why would he need to think? His facile analysis that fascism is “uncertainty and fear” (contrasting with the definition in the game description) is on-topic for the conversation, but completely fails to engage with the society he’s actually living in.

Your Very Last Words

And speaking of fascism… this is a very dark piece in which you play as a young man about to be executed in a coup for supporting the democratically-elected president Madero (or not, it doesn’t matter to the soldiers). As Juan ruminates on his life, family, love, and political activities, you can save snippets of his thoughts as “last words” you can choose to say right before he dies. In my playthrough, they were “God has abandoned us, but I am not afraid.” Continuing on the theme of waiting-as-gameplay, regardless of how long this takes, you have to wait ten real-life minutes for the officer to come back and give the order, eyes open or closed, listening to the sound of the rain and your own whimpering. Switching between keyboard and mouse felt a bit clunky, but overall very evocative.

A Murder of Crows

Cute concept, you follow an entire murder of crows throughout their day. You only have enough time to pursue one plot thread, as far as I can tell. On one playthrough I figured out what happened to Penny, a girl favoured by the crows, and on another I got a dog loose before hitting time. I will confess to struggling with the crow argot–it wasn’t always clear whether I had solved my objective or not, and I based it off of what tasks were described by the ending. I think the crow “dialogue” being offset in some way would be useful.

Let Me Play!

Let Me Play! is about the player watching a play called Let Me Play, whose characters are played by the Let Me Play players. There are what seem to be dialogue options on the screen, but attempting to select them gets you in trouble for interrupting the play, in the course of play. The proceedings gradually unravel in their fictionality, and you can make more choices. Of course, the choices are determined by the game, so in a way you still don’t have a choice, especially if you wouldn’t pick these ones. Maybe that was the point? Nice design and music.

The Little Four

A slice-of-life tale from the later years of Poirot and Hastings. Set in their apartments on a rainy day, the background details are lush with character notes and novel references to pick up on. Their warm relationship came through more than in some of the books. The title is riffing on The Big Four (complete with allusions to the generally-recognized worst entry in the Poirot canon), but I felt like The Little Four was directly in conversation with Curtain, the final Poirot novel. Spoilers for both that book and the ending of this game: The false suspicion cast on Hastings’ children, the culprit, and the growing awareness of Poirot’s advancing age all foreshadow these characters’ final outcomes. It almost felt like a trial run, so to speak.

I had slightly mixed feelings about how the mystery was implemented: To find the item you’re looking for, you have to examine most of the bolded objects in the apartment, leave, come back, and examine it again. There is a good in-universe reason for this–in fact, it’s the only way for it to be solvable–but I think a dogged player who took the objectives prompt seriously could get really stuck here. (Which, by the way, I thought having an objective in the header was incredibly useful.) A fun outing that may make you very emotional if you read a lot of mystery novels.

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Thank you very much for your review of The Little Four and for the kind words! I love hearing from other mystery fans, and am so glad you enjoyed the experience.

Just one small point I should clarify about the mystery, to avoid confusion: the ‘clue’ does appear upon leaving the apartment if enough items have been examined, but it will also appear under the same conditions while the player is in the bathroom or either of the bedrooms.

That being said, I hope to make a few adjustments and additions to the game after the competition ends, and will certainly take feedback like this into account as I try to eliminate pain points—thanks again, it’s much appreciated!

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Ah, I bet I missed that because I had already exited and re-entered the relevant room, in case I’d missed something, before going to the bedrooms. After that, I did re-check almost every room except the one that had to be checked. Bit of bad luck. Well in any case, thanks for sharing it!

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Thank you for playing both our submissions.

Pretty dramatic last words!

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Lady Thalia and the Case of Clephan

Alright, I have to call time on this, even though I’m not finished and enjoying myself. This is the fourth game in a series that I haven’t played (though I intend to rectify that) about art thief Lady Thalia. It follows both Thalia’s quotidian relationship struggles, now that she works as a PI alongside her LI Mel, and the investigation of a Thalia copycat. The gameplay is a mix of social manipulation and break-in mechanics. They are difficult in the sense of trial-and-error on a timer, but forgiving in that you can often recover when you mess up. There are also some sections where you play as both Thalia and Mel at once, having to choose judiciously whose approach should be followed. I was pretty “locked in” for these puzzles. The detail that you can’t manipulate Mel (or refuse to) was sweet.

Bug report: During the seance, I fastened the lockpicks under the tabletop–when I came back to retrieve them, I didn’t have the option to search there, ran out of other options, and had to reload.

Fired!

A comedic revenge romp about getting one over on your evil ex-boss, and maybe burning down the house on your way out. Lots of loony choices, but in a fun way, and got many chuckles (“You are carrying: No printouts”). Generally the madness was intuitive, with the exception of SMEAR BLOB ON VELVET, which I needed a hint for, and that final point for a non-required action–I didn’t realize that you could PUNCH CARDS when you can’t TAKE them.

My Creation

I really wouldn’t have anything negative to say about My Creation if it weren’t for the way it is implemented. The writing was creepy and atmospheric, the Frankenstein metaphor was compelling (even if I do not personally relate to it, but trans people are different), and it engages with the under-explored topic of trans parenthood. But the lack of cardinality and the fact most nouns could not be examined made it exceedingly difficult to play. I initially thought the baby was a hallucination, because I couldn’t look at it when it was apparently in the “room” the PC was in. But again, none of this would have been an issue if I was e.g. clicking on links. It’s not in comp-ready state, but with some parser fleshing out it could be a really solid piece.

Penny Nichols: Troubleshooter

In the TTRPG circles I run in, there have been many debates over the idea that D&D is a system that can “run anything”, and whether that would even be desirable in a system. Sure, the argument goes, a particularly devoted GM can put a herculean effort to create new material and new rules to run a low-combat social politicking game set in a high school for young superheroes, but at that point you can’t really credit the system, since it didn’t provide those tools. Likewise, I played Penny Nichols: Troubleshooter (no relation to the girl sleuth) by feeding the rules and story prompt into ChatGPT, and it was basically coherent. But I don’t feel like I can credit the game-as-submitted with this, in the same way that I wouldn’t excoriate it for being puerile and hyper-violent just because I declared that Penny had a chainsaw, and proved the scientist was a fake by messily hacking his legs off.

OK, then what are the tools provided by the game? There are some character descriptions; Penny is a “Circle Trigonist”, which is apparently a pseudo-Nazi from US Military war games during WWII, but not described in-game. She apparently has “mana” and “aspects”, which are not stats the game explains. There are instructions for dice-rolling, something an LLM can’t do unless it’s built with the ability to execute code. There are spell levels, but no spells.

And there’s a scenario, in which Penny investigates an insurance claim on an “artifact” that “has vanished from a lab”, only to discover that “the Artifact was a hoax staged by the lab’s lead scientist to secure funding”, but also that “the “scientist” himself was the Artifact’s projection. The Artifact is actually a dragon’s hoard, camouflaging itself as a laboratory.” What? Both of these twists resemble what you might see in an adventure, but they don’t make sense together. Is there an artifact or not? And why would a dragon commit insurance fraud? Anyway, I considered getting ChatGPT to write a review for me, as a bit, but the review it wrote was thoughtless, so I had to do it myself.

Uninteractive Fiction 2

You know what, I did have fun, and it was kind of interactive. Taking the game apart, at least. Did not figure out if there was a second layer to the base 64 text.

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Thanks for the bug report, and I’m glad you’re enjoying the game! I’ll investigate that when I get a chance.

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