Okay, we’re reaching the end of the list pretty soon! Lots of fun games today.
The End Means Escape
This whole time I had this game mixed up with In The End and thought for sure Drew Cook had submitted it, as he often mentioned how that dramatic and puzzle-light game had an effect on IF history.
But, no, this is The End Means Escape, a bizarre but fun, surreal game that consists of several vignettes that are solved in unusual ways. Many rely on wordplay, none make any sense, and they are categorized by interactions with the world in ways we aren’t used to (for instance, one scene contains an old man with tons of his body parts implemented, down to the instep).
I think there are enough hints in game to win several of the puzzles alone with some trial and error, but some are likely to elude the solo player, so I’d recommend asking for hints on here or checking out the solution.
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
This is the highest-rated game of Amanda Walker on IFDB, which says a lot, as she’s won the Best Game XYZZY (for this) as well as the Author’s Choice Game of the Year for IFDB awards among a pile of other IF awards.
This is a limited parser game. You are a ghost, impotent and constrained. All you can do is act on objects using emotions. The further you progress, the more emotions you unlock.
It’s a puzzle-box, with limited options that combine into combinatorial complexity. It’s also a riveting and gruesome story that delves into the dark story of a dreadful family.
All Things Devours
One of the most well-known time travel IF and a difficult puzzle-box.
In this game, you have six minutes to destroy a time travel device to keep it out of military hands. To do that, you have to use the device, but if you violate causality, the game is over.
This becomes a game of careful trial and error, together with logical reasoning. If you’re a fan of sci-fi or single-puzzle games, you’ll like this one.
Delightful Wallpaper
This is two fun games in one. The first is a game that explores what exactly you can do puzzle-wise with pure movement. The map is a kind of maze, and not only do you have to map it out, moving through different portions affects others.
Once you have this solved, there is a second portion where you navigate a mystery at different times where you encounter scenes of frozen people and must take their ‘intentions’ in a kind of physical form and swap them around. This idea is great in my opinion, and I copied it in my murder mystery games by having a ‘clue inventory’, which later influenced the twine murder mystery Erstwhile, so this idea has had a pretty big downstream influence. Another great Plotkin game.
A Trial
I’m guessing Chandler Groover nominated this as he’s a big fan. The history of IF is studded with enigmatic poet-type authors who write games that focus more on story and word and surreal modernist-type work and less on puzzles or genre conventions. Other such authors that come to mind are Kaemi and some of furkle’s work, or the author of Baby Tree.
This game has many endings, and playing through it just now and reading mine and CMG’s reviews, this can result in wildly different content, including stories, pokemon apocrypha, legalese, scripture-style writing, and more.
Each playthrough is short. There is some world modeling which may appeal to people who like more structure. It feels substantial.
Over Here!
This was one of the few games that was new to me in this playoffs. And it was fun!
This is a compact game in Adventuron that is thoroughly in the minimalist adventure-focused puzzle style of Scott Adams and early graphics-enhanced parser games.
Your goal is to help 13 ghosts in a mansion. There are a bunch of different rooms, each with one or two objects of interest. Puzzle variety is high, which is nice. Definitely check the VERBS keyword before getting far as I could make almost no progress before learning some new verbs. Puzzles interconnect in unusual ways so make sure to check if actions in one area have an effect in others.
A must-play for puzzle fanatics, a bit light on story for plot enthusiasts.
Everybody Dies
This game was notable on release (and still is) for several reasons, including having multiple protagonists and for the well-timed use of several high-quality images, unusual for IFComp parser games before Adventuron.
In this game, well, everyone dies. Kind of. The protagonist works at a grocery store in a kind of grungy world; the game calls him a ‘metalhead’, and that’s apt. There’s violence, some slurs, drugs, even Canadian slang, and so on, making this more ‘adult’ than many past IFComp games. It’s also one of the few IF games to use the N-word.
Gameplay is light and easy and many have praised the writing. The author has numerous well-regarded games and later created Texture and taught writing workshops with it that resulted in several Texture games being entered into IFComp, one of whose authors later wrote LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST in this most recent IFComp.
The Moonlit Tower
This is a beautiful game, one well-regarded for many years for its writing and setting.
CEJ Pacian wrote of it:
A beautifully written, evocative, almost poetic game, The Moonlit Tower is a short tale of strange myth and melancholy longing that, in its final moments, gave me goosebumps in the best possible way. Best of all, though, contrary to what you may expect from a game praised for its writing, The Moonlit Tower is far from florid or long-winded, its tightly written imagery packing a lot of content into a few sentences per action.
The setting is a kind of magical tower with East Asian influence–quite a few different parts of East Asia. The author says:
The setting itself draws loosely from Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Mongolian sources.
Gameplay is light, mostly about exploration and about interactions with magical objects, with an emphasis on atmosphere and wonder.
The author has several other games (such as the wonderful shufflecomp game To Spring Open which unfortunately is no longer available; I’ve written the author but haven’t heard back yet about recovering a copy from IFArchive).
All in all, this set of games has many with beautiful settings, stunning writing, and good plots, together with some fun puzzleboxes.