I’m very pleased to announce that the 2025 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction is now open!
This year, there are thirty-four games, spread across three categories. Authors chose whether to submit games to the Main Festival, where they are eligible for ribbon nominations and the prize pool, or the Back Garden, which opts out of ribbons and prizes but has looser entry requirements (including allowing excerpts from unfinished or commercial games).
Succor, by Loressa, Matthias Speksnijder and Dactorwatson
Twine
short
You can play the games and find out everything you need to know about the festival at the official site.
Instructions for making ribbon nominations will go up in a couple of days. There are two kinds of ribbons this year:
A Best in Show blue ribbon, for Main Festival entries. The top two nominees each year win a Best in Show ribbon to display by their game.
Audience Award ribbons, for all participants, which are suggested by nominators and can be anything they like: “Best Story,” “Best Parser Game,” “Personal Favorite,” “Alumni’s Choice,” “Cutest Vampires”… you get the idea.
The festival will be open for ribbon nominations until 11:59 PM EDT, May 9, 2025.
To all the players, and all the entrants, have fun!
In addition, this year we have two additional entries that, due to scheduling with the app store, ended up not meeting Spring Thing’s prior release rules. However, I wanted to shout them out here and suggest that people check them out!
RYFT is an audio-based adventure game played with speech commands. Featuring a full voice cast, challenging puzzles, and a compelling narrative, this mystery game is powered by the world’s greatest graphics engine: your imagination.
This is a unique entry since it is definitely IF…but it’s an audio-based experience. It uses voice commands with a text-adventure type control scheme (think Zork meets Monkey Island.) It’s perfect for on-the-go gaming or for people with visual or motor impairments. The game is fully available (free) on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Remembrance of Magic
The humdrum life of a blacksmith’s apprentice takes a turn after an encounter with a mysterious stranger one evening at the village inn.
Remembrance of Magic is a fast-paced, modern take on the multiple-choice interactive-story genre, blending classic epic fantasy, evocative storytelling, and stunning visuals with an unexpected twist. Download it for your mobile device here: windingpaths
I added shoutouts in the first post to two games that weren’t able to make it in. Thanks to everyone!
Also, I intended to make a new AI policy in time for this Spring Thing, but I failed to do so. Next year will bring AI-related changes. For this competition, feel free to follow your own AI philosophy in regards of which games to try!
Yay, congrats to all the authors – this looks like a really awesome crop to dig into!
For a change, I’m not planning on doing reviews, since I’m going on a month-long trip in a bit over a week, so I won’t have time to do my usual writeups. But I’m hoping to get through as many as I can and submit some ribbon nominations before I leave – and it’ll be kind of fun playing IF as a “civilian”, laying my analytic hat carefully aside, for once!
I am very disappointed in this year’s selection. I only play parser games and there were very few of those.
As I have a very, very slow and unreliable internet connection, I need to download the story files so that I can play them offline. Not one single game allowed me to do that from the Spring Thing play page.
I’ve spent half a day trying the online versions. Most of the downloads are HUGE and take several minutes to download! I found one or two had a gblorb download from within the game. Most did not. I tried all sorts of skullduggery (such as base64 decoding) to try the others. A couple were unsuccessful, possibly because of the huge files.
As a consequence, I won’t be playing or rating any of this year’s games.
So, please, please, please consider those of us that don’t have fast internet connections and provide downloadable story files.
Hi Loressa, I am just an author and I have created this post for author-to-author supportive feedback. It’s not for reviews, just for a kind word or two.
I know you have them now, but I’ll see if I can add download links to some of the Inform games. Some of them (especially Vorple) are not designed to be played offline and will suffer in quality, and so I will abide by the author’s judgment in such cases.
I do want to clarify for first-time authors who may be distressed at finding that some people will not try non-parser games, know that the community is very diverse and every type of game has an audience. Traditionally non-parser games have been very well received by the Spring Thing community, and as an organizer I strive to cultivate a welcoming and open-minded environment.
Are we not allowed to review other games as authors? This is my first festival and have only done jams before - jams are the opposite, where almost all the reviews only come from other game entries. I like to keep a running list of bugs, notes, compliments and thoughts as I play games, so I was curious where the best spot to share that feedback would be. IFDB?
Authors are allowed to review each others games, but since Spring Thing is positioned as the ‘friendly’ competition, we ask authors not to post negative reviews of others’ games. You are free to post notes and compliments and even bugs here, although it may be easier to message the author directly either here or using the author contacts on the Spring Thing page if you find bugs or have negative feedback.
Hullo all! I’m the author of Test Subject Synaptix. I’m having fun playing through other people’s games, although I’m finding out exactly how terrible I am at text parsers.
Delighted to see all these new stories/games to try out! Congrats to all the authors
I’m hoping to play and review some, time/health permitting. If so I’ll start my own dedicated thread for that. I need to sit down first and jot down a starting list to try out.
I’ve just made a review spreadsheet! Feel free to add your reviews and any others you spot. I’m still working on filling in the existing ones, and probably won’t get through them all tonight, so anyone is also free to jump in and work on that!
