"Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane"
by Willershin Rill "Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!"
by Tarquin Segundo "Terror in the Immortal’s Atelier"
by Gevelle Formicore
I have played IF before that had three games in one. This is the first time I have encountered one game in three. These games tell three sides of the same story and are in fact impossible to finish without each other. While I see that it could be confusing for someone who stumbles upon just one of them, I had fortunately already noted their connectedness and expected some degree of intertextuality, though perhaps not at such a level. Regarding their entries in IFComp, they are not exactly benefited by a random shuffle of the list, but the alphabetical listing will show them together thanks to the quotation marks, no doubt included for just this reason.
As for the game(s) [it|them]sel[f|ves] (referred to in singular from here on), I quite enjoyed it! The Knot (as I hereby choose to call it) features a very curious mix of cultural references, including, but not limited to: Nazis, spaceships, magic, alchemy, youtubers, fairy tales, Jabberwocky-type Nonsensish, and several religions, both existing and imagined. For some reason, for me, this mashup works rather well, probably because it actually feels linguistically grounded. The puzzles in The Knot are easy, especially since they are overly clued, which is done in a very funny way, and the whole thing should take no more than half an hour to play.
Due to its detailed historical portrayal, A Catalan Summer gives the impression of being based on the story of a real family, describing not only the conflicts between love and family duties, but also the question of Catalan independence and the emerging anarchist movement. Whether or not the Vidal family in the story was real or imagined, the issues are approached with care and understanding. The interactivity here is similarly impressive, probably more so than in any other choice IF I have played. Part of this is the constant change of protagonist, which admittedly was slightly confusing, but lets you shape the paths of several family members, and in turn the family’s place in history. Also a bit confusing was the inclusion of parser-style navigation, with links to go east, north and so on. For a choice IF like this, it would have been more practical with simply a list of the possible destinations. Still, it provides an interesting read, no matter your choices.
High Jinnks is a funny and well written story about a Jinn trying to get home. As a choice IF, it is more or less completely linear, the choices mainly being between funny responses.
With 70 games reviewed, and all but three of them rated, I have reached the end of my long but enjoyable participation in IFComp 2020. I can’t help but feel that the voting period was too long this time; the focus on the comp, both for me and on this forum, seemed to drop off after a point. Also, we had Ectocomp in the middle of it all. Then again, it was tremendous fun playing so many games.
There were a few games I played, but did not review. One of these, which definitely should receive all kinds of honourable mentions, was The Cursèd Pickle of Shireton. The implementation of this truly blew me away: three games in one, seemingly impeccably done and fantastic on so many levels. However, I found the RPG part tedious and wasn’t really motivated to play beyond two hours, and thus never got to the good stuff. There were a few other games too that I started playing but had to give up on, for various reasons, before getting a good enough sense of them.
This year, there were too many excellent games to decide on a personal top five. Eventually, I managed to narrow it down to a top nine (in alphabetical order):
Alone (most immersive game)
BYOD (coolest game)
Flattened London (most intriguing exploration)
For a Place by the Putrid Sea (most intriguing story)
The Impossible Bottle (just brilliant)
The Magpie Takes the Train (most elegant game)
Sage Sanctum Scrambler (most addictive game)
Stuff of Legend (funniest game)
Vampire Ltd. (funniest game with vampires in it)
Admittedly, I am partial to parser games, though I would like to give another honourable mention to Tavern Crawler, a choice IF that I really enjoyed, with clever puzzles! The hilariously funny writing helped too.
A heartfelt thank you to the authors of these and to all others who have participated in any capacity in IFComp 2020!
Thanks for all the work you’ve put into the competition. I appreciate all the people that tried to judge this many games.
Now that voting is over, authors are starting to talk about it. So for what you pointed out (heavy spoilers):
The bum should not promise you a scarf for a drink after you break the cat. Each part of the time machine that needs to be fixed has two solutions. That was part of the other solution, and if you went down that path, it would’ve given you a different ending.
At the end, the game was looking to see how many people you asked about their names - not “found and talked with.” It was something that got changed late in development and would need to be fixed in a post-comp release.
As for your score being low, there are other things you can do to increase it. Like if you helped the bum out, that would count towards it. Though, there’s only one way to help him for a full score.
I hope this clears some of that up. Thanks again for all the work you put in this year.
Wow. Playing all these parser games and having enough active braincells left to write clear and concise reviews up until the last one. I bow down in awe.
I especially look forward to playing Putrid Sea and Eleusinian Miseries. Thanks for bringing these to my attention. (Bottle and Magpie were already on the list of course.)
Kudos on your reviewing. Hope I do half as good in the upcoming ParserComp.