Let’s meet more contestants!
Brain Guzzlers from Beyond!
I was going to say “this is one of the most popular parser games from the 2010’s” but I just checked and it’s around the 40th most popular and 30th most rated of that decade from IFDB. Steph Cherrywell herself has several games more popular than this one during that time period.
That was surprising to me because this was the winner of the first IFComp I ever participated in and was impressive and well-liked when I first played it. That makes it a perfect candidate for these playoffs.
In it, aliens have invaded from space, and you have to save the world! You explore a 1950s town with a quirky set of characters and a lot of fun locations like a town fair and a secret lab. It has Cherrywell’s classic writing, like a sign on a tombstone near a haunted house ride:
This crisply painted black and white sign bears the following text:
“NOTICE:
Due to the high levels of bone-chilling fear generated by this
terrifying ride, management is pleased to offer this complimentary
tombstone to any fairgoer who dies of fright while within the haunted
house.”
Looking at the lower ratings it got, surprisingly a lot of them are by parser veterans, including Rovarsson who noted it had some synonym issues. It makes I wouldn’t have noticed it at the time, as I had just recently started reviewing parser games. Many point it out as being easy to complete and fun so this is definitely not too intimidating of a game.
Taco Fiction
Speaking of beloved IFComp winners from the 2010s set in a small town with a quirky cast that helped the author become more well known, here we have Taco Fiction!
This was one of Ryan Veeder’s earliest games (though not his earliest) and includes a lot of his style, like fancy text effects, deadpan humor, well-fleshed-out NPCs, optional content that’s as well-done as main content, and so on.
Like the tagline says, “This is a game about crime”. It’s your goal to rob a taco shop, but things don’t go as planned. In the process, you uncover a deep conspiracy that threatens the town (as well as the cute ice cream shop owner you just met).
Just because I mentioned stats earlier, this is the 8th-most played game from the 2010s on IFDB and Ryan Veeder’s highest-rated solo game on IFDB (of course Cragne Manor, which he and Jenni Polodna organized, is one of the highest-rated games of all time and is at the top).
Submarine Sabotage
This is one of several Garry Francis games in this competition and one of two in this very division.
Garry often leans to humor in his game, making things that are appropriate for kids as part of the Text Adventure Literacy Project. This is a more dark game and is, I think, one of my favorite of his games. It has you wake up after a gas attack on a submarine. You have to get yourself out of the airlock and explore the mystery aboard the ship.
Scroll Thief
When I just started IF, I thought as Scroll Thief as ‘the cool game’. I kept seeing the author announce his progress on it, and I had just started trying out Infocom games. This was around 2015 (right when it was coming out). I had no idea that IF was still being made when I joined as all the games on Frotz went up to 2008 at latest, so I was excited to see new games. I was a fan of longer, polished parser games and this was the only one that I really heard about at the time.
It hasn’t gotten very much attention over the years. It inspired me to make an IFDB list for large, polished games that didn’t get much love and attention from fans: Opus Ignored: Big games that didn't take off - Recommended List (Once and Future is on there too).
This game is connected to the Zork/Enchanter universe and uses its same scroll system. It has two acts, one with a kind of escape-room environment and one with more of a traditional Enchanter-style gameplay. You play as a low-ranking magician who has discovered that magic is failing.
I know a lot of parser players are big fans of the spell system of the Enchanter series. If that describes you, you should check this out!
The Weapon
This is a tense sci fi game set in one room. You’ve been captured by the enemy and are being forced to examine an ancient artifact under the watchful eye of your captor. Not only do you need to figure out what it does, you also have to make sure the enemy doesn’t.
This was one of two Sean Barrett games that were included on the Frotz app I first started playing IF on, so I figured he was super famous in the IF world and was surprised to see little discussion about him as my IF career continued. This game (according to my new-to-IF eyes that used walkthroughs and hadn’t encountered much) is well-written, has great atmosphere, and has complex and challenging puzzles. It’s also short enough to not be intimidating. I haven’t revisited it in years but I think Rovarsson’s recent review shows that it still holds up to the experienced player.
Hunter, in Darkness
One of the oldest non-graphical computer games is Hunt the Wumpus, a game set on a dodecahedral path where you navigate after the wumpus while avoiding bats and holes.
This game, which was entered anonymously into IFComp by Andrew Plotkin, takes that barebones concept and expands it into a dark and compelling narrative of claustrophobic caves, bloodthirsty bats, and a noble but terrifying wumpus.
While only taking 8th in its IFComp debut, it’s now the 9th most-played game of the 90s. For almost any other author, it would be one of their highest-rated games, but Plotkin has 9 other games rated higher.
I feel like it was ahead of its time, with its lighter difficulty, linear storyline and a driving sense of momentum as opposed to lightly wandering around searching for puzzles.
Search for the Lost Ark
This is the second Garry Francis game in this division, and it has a more religious bent. It’s Garry’s highest-rated game on IFDB. I think I’ll quote extensively from Mike Russo’s review for the setup:
From the title you might think that we’re in for an Indiana Jones style globetrotting adventure, but the actual setup, delightfully, is both more grounded and wackier: the Lost Ark was found long ago and had been hanging out in Chartres’ cathedral for several centuries, until being moved first to a village church and then – out of an admirable but perhaps overzealous protective instinct, Chartres being west of Paris – during World War I it was hidden in the nearby woods to keep it safe from German marauders. Now, as a priest-in-training who grew up in the area, you’ve been ordered back home to find the thing after the clergyman who hid it shuffles off to join the choir invisible. The only problem is, you’ve no idea where to start, and there’s something off about your immediate superior, the rather-wan, just-arrived-from-Eastern-Europe “Father” “Alucard.”
Expect a lot of well-polished puzzles and some supernatural shenanigans.
Thin Walls
This is one of the few non-parser games entered into this competition, and it’s a good one.
The game is pretty long. Its about an apartment building that grows and adapts over time in response to people’s desires, wants, and fears. One person described it ‘horror where the source of the horror is housemates’.
A piece of text Mike Russo quoted is a good example of the writing:
“But when you move in with people and there is no relationship, any little tension becomes all that you know of them, it becomes all that they are. Just a paper doll with ‘Noisy’ or ‘Makes a Mess in the Bathroom’ written on it.”
The text is split up into several different chapters, each focusing on a different person or group of people.
Great for fans of horror or interpersonal dynamics.