Here’s the last batch of games! This had two games I hadn’t played before, and two of mine that were submitted (thanks!). Otis has volunteered to provide a description of my two games.
The Little Match Girl, by Hans Christian Andersen
This is the game that spawned a franchise. Since it came out in 2021, there have been 12 Little Match Girl games published.
In the original story by Hans Christian Andersen, there is a girl in abject poverty selling matches on a cold day. Freezing to death, she strikes her remaining matches one at a time to feel any warmth at all. With each match that she stares at, she envisions a different warm and comforting scene until, at last, she dies.
In this version, instead, the Little Match Girl is alive and adopted by Ebenezer Scrooge. She’s given a gun and turned into a time-travelling assassin who teleports to new areas by looking at sources of flame.
While the series has grown, it has mostly maintained negative continuity, where you can jump into any entry in the series and still get the full experience.
This one is a complete experience but is briefer than the later ones, making it a good introduction. You get a wide variety of settings here, including a fantasy one and ones in Japan and Paris. Fun stuff.
Please Answer Carefully
This game’s author, litrouke, is a master of the technical and UI side of choice-based games, and this is a good showcase of those abilities.
It’s a very short game, but great at producing a creepy atmosphere. You have to answer a series of online questions that become progressively more odd. It includes animations and sound and some either neat tricks that are psychologically effective.
Right now this is the author’s second-most popular game after the recent January.
Lime Ergot
Lime Ergot is one of the shortest influential games and one of the most influential short games. Numerous authors have cited Lime Ergot as a direct inspiration (including me!) and its influence contributed to limited parser trend at the end of the 2010’s.
Its a psychedelic kind of game. You’ve been tasked with finding some limes to make a drink, but you can’t go anywhere or do anything. Eventually, you realize that there is only one way to interact with the game: by examining small details.
This was made for Ectocomp, and while it’s been updated, it was always meant for a speed-competition designed to bang out ideas, and not for a super-polished experience. If you don’t figure out the mechanic early on, and even if you do, it can be a frustrating experience trying to figure out how to interact.
Searching on this forum, it’s been mentioned 66 times, so if you’re looking to acquaint yourself with ‘touchstone’ games, this is a good one to try!
Winter Storm Draco
Ryan Veeder makes many unusual games; this is one diverges even more from expectations than usual, in a good way.
Even the cover art is unusual. It is white text on a transparent background, making it invisible on IFDB in light mode (which is the appropriate for the game, as it is about a whiteout blizzard).
I like streever’s review on ifdb a lot, so I’ll quote extensively from it here:
Even though the game starts by getting you lost in a strip of woods between the highway and your neighborhood, it felt believable and real; I could easily draw a map of the area from memory alone.
One of the highlights of this work are the in-game clues. A slight bending of the 4th wall and a charming writing style lets Veeder directly suggest unusual actions and moves to the player, and it improves the overall work.
This piece has a mix of puzzles: a combat mini-game, a riddle, and a ‘combine the items’ puzzle. The variety makes it challenging, but all the puzzles are fair, logical, and obvious post-solution.
Buggy
Two of my games made it into this competition: one of my shortest and my longest. This is my shortest; here’s what otistdog had to say about it:
Buggy is a tongue-in-cheek work of “horror” with a wordplay theme, based on common frustrations when interacting with Inform games. It’s very short and gives the feeling of a one-move game without actually being one.
The action starts in media res as the protagonist and a sibling desperately flee the Suchthing (as in “You can’t see any Suchthing.”) A large variety of actions are possible, most resulting in responses based on an amusing misinterpretation of (or unexpected compliance with) the player’s intent. Several impossible results are taken in stride, while others result in an immediate end to the scenario. It won’t be long until any individual run encounters something that causes a “crash.”
Many of the jokes seem oriented towards a programmer’s perspective, but they are equally amusing from the viewpoint of the player of a poorly implemented game. It’s a great choice to play when you want a short and surprising experience seasoned with levity.
Never Gives Up Her Dead
This one is also mine (I tried to find a Fiddler on the Roof meme for this but couldn’t find the scene online).
Here’s otistdog’s comment:
In Never Gives Up Her Dead you play Emrys Tisserand, the aging Storyweaver of an interstellar colony ship, whose job is to remember everything immportant that occurs. When disaster threatens the ship and the mission, you undertake a mystical journey.
I have yet to play it beyond a short exploration, but I’ve noticed that of all the games that recently have made their way onto the IFDB Top 100 list in recent months, it’s the only one that has broken into the top 20.
It’s a large game, written on a scale rarely seen in recent years. The prose style is old school lite, with references to classic IF tropes and frequent interjection of humor. It’s definitely a puzzle game, but from what I’ve seen it’s the friendly and fun type of puzzler, the type that’s fun to play with newcomers to IF.
Scents & Semiosis
I’d heard of this one for years and probably played it when it came out, but hadn’t reviewed it before. I had fun (re?-)playing it.
It was made by Sam Kabo Ashwell (XYZZY organizer) with the help of a small team for an audience of one: Emily Short. At the time it came out, Emily Short had done a lot of work with procedural generation and would go on to do more, such as with The Mary Jane of the Future and her Cragne Manor doll.
Basically, you are going through a large collection of perfumes and smelling them, which brings back memories. Each perfume has a distinct collection of smells associated it. You can pick which part of the smell reminds you of which part of the memory. Then at the end it recaps what you’ve done.
It’s a meditative game with an emphasis on variety and personal opinion rather than plot or puzzles. The Vorple technology looks great here.
Sand-dancer
This was the last new game for me in the competition. It’s Aaron Reed’s game, apparently made to serve as a tutorial for how to write Inform games for new authors as part of his book on the subject.
It’s got a strong setting and character design, set in a Native American reservation with a protagonist who straddles several different cultures. He ends up crashed outside of an abandoned building in a cold night.
It makes sense that it’s a tutorial for writing with Inform: it exemplifies several features of Inform, like darkness, tools, containers, supporters, closed things, locked things, conversation trees, etc.
The game has several different endings and allows for real agency. It also includes supernatural things and lets you carry memories as physical inventory (something I’ve been fascinated with as a concept for games over the years, so this was fun).
While it is polished, it could be touched up in some places, but I think as a game made to show what beginners is possible it wouldn’t be worth it to have dozens of lines of code that’s just special responses. I think people will like this.
And that’s it! I plan on commenting on the matchups once the voting period starts just because I love talking about that kind of stuff. Looking forward to people experiencing new stuff, and congrats to the person in the poll earlier who said they played 40 games during this preparation period!