I was wondering if there are specific expectations to the participants?
I decided to join because I have played a lot of games in the past and know a lot of the games drawn so I would be able to vote in many(?) matches but I can’t promise anything specific as I the next 8 weeks and more can’t really for sure say how much time I will have to play new games. I thought it would be good to clarify those expectations.
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The FAQ is specific about this: It is not expected that players will vote in every match. You are free to vote in as many or as few as you like, the only rule being that you abide by the honor system (i.e. at least try both games in good faith for a reasonable period of time before voting).
Using the Free IF Playofffs as a comparison, some early matches had as few as 7 votes total. The tournament will work fine if you vote on the games that you already know and/or choose to play in good faith.
So: There aren’t really expectations, though the purpose of the “quiet play” period and the extended duration of initial rounds is to allow more people to complete more games.
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Thanks, just wanted to be sure 
Inevitable has good atmosphere and some pretty nice features for the pre-I7 era. It’s one of the ones I had never heard of before.
(Anyone playing it should take note of the command >LIST PLACES, which allows >GO TO… to simplify moving about.)
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₩ucha ₩ierda
I admire the soundtrack selection of Heretic’s Hope; it does a lot to complement and enhance the mood.
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Here’s the next group!
The Lost Labyrinth of Lazaitch
Larry Horsfield has been making big adventures in the same world for 35 years, starting with the Axe of Kolt and going up to 2024 with the Book of Jax. For years, Die Feuerfaust was the main game on my ‘IFDB Recommends’ page (although I still need to play it!) This world is one reminiscent of 1990’s fantasy worlds like Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms. There is a main hero, Alaric Blackmoon, with a counselor wizard as well as his wife and many others. There are recurring magical spells and artifacts.
Larry’s games differ from the IFComp/Spring Thing norm (although he’s contributed enough he is a ‘norm’ in himself). Rather than making small games that give a lot of guidance on commands and focus on overarching mechanics for puzzles, Larry writes giant games in ADRIFT (and formerly PAW) with dozens of rooms and gameplay focused on take/use/drop, as well as spells. There are some classics that appear in many of his games (using your sword to chop stuff, tying and untying your house, fireplaces with mantels that need to be examined, beer, etc.).
I have a pattern with Larry Horsfield games where I try to tinker around on my own for an hour so, which usually gets me partway through the first 10-15% of the game, then I read the walkthrough to the end.
This particular game features some really clever settings and segments. It does have some commands which I think are really hard to guess, so I recommend typing HELP and VOCAB (I think) to see what commands the game expects you to consider. Larry is also famous for requiring LOOK UNDER and LOOK BETWEEN. This games also requires LOOK DOWN and LOOK CLOSELY.
The Mystery of Winchester High
I introduced Garry Francis in the earlier post about Captain Cutter’s Treasure. One thing I didn’t mention there is that Garry is heavily involved in the Text Adventure Literacy Project/Jams that are designed to be fairly easily completable games targeted towards beginners.
This game took first in its TAL Jam and is Garry’s 2nd most popular game out of 21.
It’s a fairly compact game with a lot of polish, finishable in less than an hour. You are a kid at a school that is both closing due to lack of funds and also is rumoured to have a hidden treasure in it.
Gameplay revolves around codes, an NPC and a variety of items where you know what you need to progress and you just need to find it (like something to unlock something with, for instance).
Tapestry
Before Photopia, Tapestry was often cited as puzzleless interactive fiction (or at least heavily story-focused). It was popular and often referenced, and its author went on to co-write Slouching Towards Bedlam.
This is a moral choice/agency game. You’ve ruined your life, basically, and you have the chance to go back and revisit three different events. However, you have to choose which viewpoint to see these through, with the options being Clothos, Atropos and Lachesis, the Greek Fates.
While I think parser fans will enjoy this, this is also a parser game that I think choice-based fans might like, especially if played with the walkthrough, which has a lot of effort put into it and can be enjoyable in itself.
Metamorphoses
This was Emily Short’s second break-out game. After the success of Galatea earlier in the year, famous for its puzzle-light conversation with an animate statue, she released Metamorphoses, which took 2nd place (to the multimedia game Kaged) and is a complex puzzle game.
As some background, Emily Short and several other parser authors were interested in the capability of text adventures to simulate reality. Without the need for costly graphics, programmers could really dig into things like physics, personality, and social dynamics. Each of her early games explored different facets of this (she once mentioned that Galatea and Metamorphoses were made by taking chunks out of an ideal, proposed giant game that would need their mechanics at their core).
Metamorphoses is a heavily physics-based game. You use different machines that change properties of texture, weight, flammability, etc. to solve Myst-like puzzles. There are multiple endings. This game also has Emily Short’s signature of a troubled romantic relationship that has more nuance than many other game romances.
Heretic’s Hope
Grim Baccaris is a master of Twine UI, as seen in the Twine Grimoire volumes 1 and 2 on Twitter. This was an initial standout game by this author.
It’s heavy on the worldbuilding. There is an island nation ran by sentient and religious insects, and you are a human representative. You must deal with the whims and machinations of the powerful insects while dealing with personal grief. The game is rich and heavy both in appearance and in subject matter.
This game has portraits for most characters, as well. It feels hefty but only takes an hour or so.
Nightfall
Eric Eve is one of the most talented IF authors to never win IFComp, though he came in the top 3 on several occasions. This game, Nightfall, came in second, overshadowed by the still-wildly popular game Violet. Eric has also contributed greatly to both TADS and Inform in the form of extensions, and was one of the authors on Alabaster. His main type of game is a large but polished adventure tightly focused on some specific theme and incorporating one or more sexy women.
This game is a kind of thriller, exploring a city in the dark which has been abandoned under the threat of a vague menacing enemy. You are looking for her, a woman who has captivated you and also made a request of you.
The feeling is moody and eerie. You are in constant fear of being seen while simultaneously being very alone.
The game has been noted by many, including Emily Short, to be very polished. If you get stuck, it has several layers of in-game hints, from the game itself nudging you to a THINK command to THINK HARDER to a walkthrough.
Word of the Day
Richard Otter has written over twenty games over the years, many of them quite large. I played quite a few recently when trying to go through old Spring Thing games. They have a lot in common with Larry Horsfield’s games, although with a greater variety of settings.
This game, though, is a little different. It’s a sci-fi game that took 13th place in its IFComp in 2017. For many years it has been in my mind as one of the largest pieces of Inform 7 ever written, with over 200K words of code. However, although it is big, much of that is backstory. This game is a murder mystery of sorts, as someone has sabotaged your ship and you have to inspect the bodies and find out who did it. The backstory includes lengthy descriptions of the differences of the mating habits between plant-based and animal-based sentient life.
Overall, if you want a large map rich in details with numerous characters and big worldbuilding, this is a game for you. It is also well-polished. It is not particularly hard; I used a walkthrough the first time but after several people said they got through without one I tried again, and it is good at hinting and accepting commands.
The Golden Heist
This game took 7th in IFComp a few years back, and a lot of people have enjoyed it. It’s a choice-based game with light puzzles.
It takes place in the time of the emperor Nero, whom you are determined to rob from. You have to assemble your team, which in this case is one person, who can be smart, strong, etc.
There is one puzzle that can be tricky, but other than that the goal is just to see how much loot you can make off with and the different escapades your companions can get in!
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This means “wish you the luckiest” and It comes from thester world.
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To the one who entered Winter Storm Draco: thank you!
I’ve just solved the introductory puzzle and I really like the atmosphere (aside from it being a bit nippy).
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I’m glad Nightfall made it in. I nominated that one; Eric Eve’s games are really great at polish and descriptiveness.
I was talking to people about this earlier: I think that sometimes when starting to write games we lack imagination or background on what is possible. Games like Nightfall can show parser authors how fun it can be to add subtle in-game nudges, and to program responses to everything, and to have a lot of synonyms, while still keeping the big world and classic take/use/drop gameplay.
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Looking over the Division 1 ladder, there are two games, Aisle and Buggy, that seem unlikely to be paired off in a match of their own. But it sure would be fun if they did…
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Welcome, new PCT Fan Rax – that makes 32 registered fans! (New players can sign up for the fun at any time by registering at the PCT Fans group page. Just click the “Join” button at the top right of that page.)
FYI: In case anyone missed it, mathbrush has started up a player-focused “competition” called the Accelerated IF Reader’s Program, to encourage play of longer games. Some of the games on his list are also contestants for the People’s Champion Tournament, so if that sound interesting you should check it out – you may already have earned some points for it.
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Some quick polls:
What is your general preference regarding the length of games?
- I prefer games that take an hour or less to complete
- I prefer games that take at most a few hours to complete
- I prefer games that take longer than a few hours to complete
- I have no preference about game length
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voters
What are the reasons (if any) that you prefer shorter games over longer?
- limited time to play
- can finish in one session
- easy to remember entire map
- prefer faster pacing
- less likely to focus on puzzles
- something else (which I’ll mention below)
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voters
What are the reasons (if any) that you prefer longer games over shorter?
- closer to a novel-length experience
- enjoy slower pacing
- more likely to focus on puzzles
- enjoy more opportunities to explore setting
- enjoy more opportunities to explore mechanics
- something else (which I’ll mention below)
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voters
Most of the games that I liked enough to not regret the time I spent playing them are short. Most of my favorite games are on the longer side. Writing a long game acceptably well takes more skill than writing a shorter one, but presents a higher ceiling for what the most skilled writers can accomplish.
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That was me! It’s a great game, isn’t it? Very clever in a number of ways. Structurally fascinating. Great writing. And one truly awesome NPC: the storm itself, which makes the entire game the NPC. I love meta weirdness like that.
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A Change in the Weather, another classic I had not yet played.
Very atmospheric world that changes over time. Small, almost miniature map with only a few things to manipulate. The puzzle made up by these few things in this small world is grand though. Clues are present, but they’re oh so subtle…
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Let’s meet more contestants!
A Dark Room
This is an idle/clicker game that eventually branches out into more complex options as the game progresses. It starts out with very minimalistic UI and writing, like this: (the history of the game is read from bottom to top):
Your goal is to light up the room and keep it warm.
Eventually you gain more options, like going out to gather wood, which is dangerous. You can recruit other people and make tools and even structures.
The main conceit of the game is that it has constant surprises, so most people will say ‘play it without reading anything about it’, and I think that’s pretty accurate, but it’s also fun to play even if you know what’s going on.
There’s a free version online (that I played) and a paid version on commercial platforms like Steam that unlocks more. I felt like this was both a great game in the video game sense and a great game in the IF sense, and it’s nice to see this on the list.
Tales from Castle Balderstone
A lot of great innovation in parser game voice and storytelling has been happening in the Balderstone series for the last 6-7 years. These are horror story compilations Ryan Veeder has put together each Halloween that include features like twine/parser integration and complex magic systems.
This game is the original one. Here the innovations are mostly in the fact its an anthology at all (you play several different games in a row with their own parser banner text) and in the way the stories are written.
These stories are designed to be unsettling and/or disturbing. Club Floyd called it ‘weirder than Cragne Manor’. It’s more ‘terror’ than ‘horror’ in that you’re more afraid of what might be happening than of jumpscares or traditional gore or anything.
The first story really sets the tone so I’d recommend trying it out for a few minutes.
Illuminismo Iniziato
Throughout the story-focused and puzzle-light revolution of the late 90’s and the 2000’s, there were frequent callbacks to older-style games. One of the most prolific genres was ‘silly fantasy where a wizard’s apprentice is given tasks by his master’. There were at least a dozen of such games, probably more, usually long with fairly complex puzzles.
Two of the most popular ones were Risorgimento Represso in 2003 and its much later 2018 sequel Illuminismo Iniziato, which is this game. Both are very polished, with puzzle difficulty tuned to feel challenging but fair, and with a lot of humor.
This sequel uses a variety of graphical features, like a newspaper and map:
As a sequel, it has connections to the first game, but as others have noted in their IFDB reviews, you can play, understand, and enjoy this game without having played the earlier one. It’s more like Simpsons or Sponge Bob or Family Guy continuity than like a serial drama.
If a person who has primarily played polished puzzleless or story-focused parser games wanted to get into old-school games, this would be a great option, as it has great hint systems and is very polished.
Christminster
Inform was made public in 1993 with the big game Curses, which took over the interactive fiction forums and revolutionized the field. The next year, in 1994, only one major game was released, the demo game Balances.
But in the third year, besides the IFComp which resulted in popular small games, three big Inform games were released that became pillars of the Inform catalogue: Jigsaw, Theatre, and Christminster.
Christminster is an academic drama that dives into thriller and occult sections later on, kind of like The Da Vinci Code in genre but not at all in style. It has a female protagonist, which was rare for the time. The idea is that your brother has gone missing and you have to find out what happens.
The opening area is iconic to me because this game was included in Frotz when I downloaded it in 2010 and I didn’t know how to play parser games, so I remember wandering around the college green (or whichever place this is), fascinated by the smooth polished npcs, random events, etc. like a parrot or a busker that is hiding balls under cups. Later on it includes things like a tense lobster dinner.
Jon Ingold said of it:
In thinking of great IF I keep coming back to this one - it’s puzzley but not too puzzley, it executes set-pieces in a way that might even have been novel for its time, and it balances progression and frustration excellently. Add to that the well-rendered setting that changes over time, the characterised NPCs and I think you’ve got something really special. One of my all-time favourites
The Abbey
This game belongs to the in-between time when Infocom was mostly ending and Inform wasn’t strong. This era had a lot of games made with PAWS or AGT or the commercial TADS engine or (in this case) a custom parser. The dominant genre at this time was ‘classic adventure’ where you go around a mostly-empty landscape grabbing everything you see and running into complex puzzles that wouldn’t necessarily make sense in the real world, while throwing in funny jokes or pop culture references with all sorts of genres. A lot of the modern retro community seems to target this era, so think PunyInform games or Garry Francis. The Unnkulia games were some of the most popular free games around this time.
This particular game was inspired by The Name of the Rose, which was really popular when I was a kid and was pretty cool when I read it. In the book, a monk investigates murders in an abbey and discovers ancient manuscripts hidden in a maze.
This game takes place after the events of the book. You explore an almost empty monastery and search several mazes, including the library and some catacombs. There are numerous code-like puzzles which require getting to unusual locations and finding patterns that wouldn’t make much sense in real life. You have to die to learn how to solve a couple of puzzles. I ended up using the walkthrough after about half an hour and enjoyed it.
Space was a premium in this era, and so almost everything is undescribed, even things that you’d really think ought to be. Many commands are also unrecognized, like LOOK UNDER. But if you just map out everything and pick up everything you see, you should have a good time.
I had to play using the online DOSBox link.
The Edifice
This was, I think, the third IFComp winner, and is mostly famous for its clever language puzzle, one which has been imitated several times (including by me!)
This is based off 2001: A Space Odyssey in its themes [actually, BG says that Lucian says that’s not true: The People's Champion Tournament: Lottery Results/Meet the Contestants/"Quiet Play" Commentary - #60 by bg]. You are a primitive proto-human who has experienced a black obelisk. Touching it transports you to important moments in human history, like learning language and taming horses. So, basically, you become different cavemen (or the same one at different times?) creating the most important points in early human pre-history.
The language puzzle involves trying to request medicine from a stranger. You learn the words he speaks by pointing at things or showing things, and you have to parrot the words back in different ways to get a response. Pretty neat!
Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle
Along with Alabaster, this was the other major game known for multiple contributors before Cragne Manor.
It’s a riff on two games, Pick up the Phone Booth and Die and Aisle. The former game is a dumb one-room game where, if you pick up the phone booth, you die. Only one other action lets you win. The second game is a one-room game in a supermarket where different actions you take let you remember your love in Italy (but in different variations).
This game takes the setting of Pick up the Phone Booth and Die and matches it with the mechanics of Aisle. Every action gives you a different ending. I’d recommend seeing the solution sheet on IFDB after trying a few on your own. They’re all completely random and there’s quite a bit of variety, so it’s basically like seeing a time-capsule of early 2000’s internet humor.
First Things First
This is a classic and well-known time travel game, so much that I’ve seen several people classify other games as ‘like First Things First time travel’.
It has a town that you can visit in 4 or 5 time periods, with your actions in the past affecting the future in a ripple effect. You can do things like money shenanigans or tree planting and have it affect the future.
The setting includes a lot of nature and suburbia and caves. You can lock yourself out of victory in a few ways, so be careful about that. The map is fairly compact, so while this game is long, it’s not super super long, and is definitely finishable.
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For what it’s worth, the word “closely” is given when typing the VOCAB command. When I get stuck by a door or something in those games, I usually type the VOCAB command. If there are some atypical words there I can try them. Without the VOCAB command I would never have guessed it, but if you regard the VOCAB command as part of the game, it suddenly seems more fair.
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Lucian Smith has said that people have assumed The Edifice was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that it was actually inspired by something else: ISSUE #13 - February 5, 1998 - SPAG
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Thank you! I’ll put a link to your post in mine
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