Inspired by this great thread and due to the fact that I never posted the IFDB xyzzy polls this year, I thought I’d make a similar thread for games to consider for XYZZY awards.
Feel free to reply with some ideas of games, things that you would have put in the poll on IFDB if it had been running. I’ll mention some in a post of my own, but I’m going to look through to find a bunch of ideas first.
(Like the original post linked to and the polls, this isn’t to vote on; the main idea is to suggest additional games that aren’t already listed by someone else so that people remember what games were in 2020, especially the write-in areas like puzzles and NPCs)
This is my contribution to the thread. If I don’t mention someone it’s not because it’s bad, it’s because I’m trying to remember as many as possible and it’s been months!
Some ideas for best game (from stuff I’m aware of, I hope people post more ideas!):
Blaseball (I don’t know much about it but a lot of people are obsessed)
Tavern Crawler
Impossible Bottle
Vampire: The Masquerade–Night Road
Several other tales from Castle Balderstone
Mask of the Plague Doctor (I just liked it personally)
Best Implementation (“This award is meant to honor proficiency in use of the parser, default messages, and so on.”)
(these first two games are the ones from Ryan Veeder’s competition where the source code itself is beautiful in some way) Caduceus Antique Panzitoum
There are more than 400 game titles in the list at XYZZY voting site. It’s an amazing number for a year. I realize that there are more than a game released by day in last year. It is impossible for a gamer having played all of them.
Edit: By the way there are 483 games listed at ifdb in 2020 including 45 commercial titles. Almost a quarter of all was released at IFcomp.
I’d suggest The Eleusinian Miseries for “best setting” too; the historical setting combined with the differently-associated writing style is essentially a genre-mash setting.
I listed this as “Untying the knot in The Knot”. Hope that gets counted as the same game since it’s listed as both three separate games and one meta-game.
I also voted for “Shaving your chest hair” in Turbo Chest Hair Massacre, which is basically the whole game.
Did you mean Andy? He’s definitely the main NPC and kind of the subject of the game.
I didn’t play a whole lot of games in 2020 but I wanted to shout out The Pinecone for having exceptionally good writing-- it could easily be a published short story, which IMO is pretty rare for writing in an IF game. I also quite liked the setting and PC (Elizabeth Boldan) for Sense of Harmony; looking forward to the next chapter if there is one!