Unlike those two, though, it was an entirely in-person collaboration!
It does not appear that this web-based emulator version of The Abbey is going to be accessible with a screen reader…hmph.
I didn’t find anything particularly dated other than the existence of phone booths.
Welcome, new PCT Fan davidjhall! We’re now at 33 registered fans, and there are still a little over 5 weeks to go until matches begin.
All registered fans can vote in the polls higher up in this thread, and I’m keeping a list of all polls to make it easy to catch up at any time.
Wow!
Enchanted, slowly sobering from a hypnotic slumber. I just finished Eidolon and it’s quite the trip. Dark fairy-tale / psychological thriller, mysterious threads left untied, tantalising hints at further backstory, gripping unsettling images…
I would probably not have played this if it hadn’t been in the People’s Champion Event. Consider me grateful.
Lime Ergot . I knew ergot from medieval tales about flying witches and visionary farmers. It’s a mould that grows on grain which has strong psychedelic (and toxic) properties.
Aside from direct reference, this telescoping deep-level examining quest evokes some of those hallucinatory properties in its interactive mechanic…
Lime Ergot is one of those games that grew on me after I’d finished it. I gave it a “meh” immediately after completion, but its imagery really lingered in my mind afterward. And I completely forgave all the minor implementation issues I stumbled across during play when I realized that this was a 3-hour ectocomp entry.
There’s a great crop of games this week with a lot of variety.
For a Change
This was one of the first IF games I played and is a real change of pace from most IF. Like a milder version of The Gostak, this game is written with strange language which can make comprehending what’s going on a little tough. Unlike the Gostak, it’s not really necessary to figure out the language usage to progress.
Here’s an example of the text:
Under the High Wall (on the resting)
Sweetness fills the shade of the High Wall to your east. Under this sweetness lies a small expanse of fod. A mobile releases mildly to the west; far in that direction a tower proudly plants itself, while the ground rises more slowly to the south and relaxes to the north.Spread on the resting is a guidebook.
Sleep gradually departs from your eyes. A small stone has been insinuated into your hand.
>
The world here works on magical principles and is filled with bizarre changes in physics and biology. It’s not a very long parser game and the map is pretty small, and its fortunately pretty polished, so you can get through much of it without hints.
The Legend of Horse Girl
Bitter Karella is a longtime IF writer with a great talent for writing (he’s the author of Midnight Pals, a popular series of imagined conversations between horror writers). He’s made several IF games over the years with settings that are both funny and gritty, and Legend of Horse Girl is a particularly good one.
It’s a fun western adventure where you go up against a corrupt judge. The game is full of gags. I’ll quote from Mike Russo’s review:
My notes file is filled up with little copy-and-pasted bon mots, from the way you go up against twin baddies, Butch McCreedy and his sibling Femme McCreedy, to the snake-oil salesman’s patter noting that his product is sovereign against ills including “juggler’s despair”, to the just-slipped-in-there detail that the bartender is “a tall slender woman with hands like enormous spiders.”
The implementation is pretty solid but has some rough edges here and there; fortunately, David Welbourn has a walkthrough if you get stuck.
A Change in the Weather
In this game, you play as a young adult who wanders away from an event to explore nature. A rainstorm happens, and you have to navigate this treacherous environment to keep yourself safe as well as everything else around you.
This game is one of a few that solidified Andrew Plotkin’s early dominance in interactive fiction (he had already released System’s Twilight, a graphical puzzle game, in the previous year and the next year would see So Far released, the first XYZZY winner).
This game was the first winner of the (Inform 7 division of the) first IFComp, in 1995, and, in my opinion, helped solidify and popularize ‘story-first’ IF that only used puzzles when they helped the narrative. The puzzles here are very hard (it’s probably the hardest IFComp winner) but all are related to the story. It’s also very polished, but has tightly timed sequences at the end.
Yes, Another Game with a Dragon!
This 2000 game was a counter-culture reaction to the prevailing trend of favoring literary, serious games (like A Change in the Weather!) and moving away from Zorkian goofy fantasy games. It deliberately reaches into the past, with a dragon (of course), Zork-style combinations of science and magic, goofy references, and a kind of light male-gaze view of sexuality. It’s meant to resemble the games of a bygone era (i.e. the 80s).
This makes it one of those period pieces that’s now closer to thing its referencing, which makes me think of this XKCD article:
Gameplay consists of using different machines and objects, notably including four ‘essence spheres’ that you can throw at things to change them.
The game has been noted for its writing style. The intro includes this:
A few deep breaths later, your head clears enough to look up once more. Past the mound of your flabby middle you see a face - the toothless wizened face of Old Thom. He prods you with his stick. “Git up, ye great fut slug!” he crows, “Th’ King’s t’ make a programation.” He gives you a parting jab and hobbles off with the passing crowd as you struggle to your feet.
and Rovarsson noted this phrase:
“The oily swamp farts wetly.”
The game is polished and also has a really cool ASCII opening animation of a dragon (once you get past the prelude).
The Bible Retold: Following a Star
Religious games are a pretty small contingent of IF (excluding mythology, which is a pretty big contingent). They can include poorly made games catering to the faithful (like my Book of Mormon Adventures) or serious polished games that question the underpinnings of the faith (like According to Cain) or small, respectful and polished games like Cana According to Micah.
This game, one of three Bible Retold games, has been described as a ‘slapstick comedy’. You are one of the wise men, and your goal is to go visit the newly born Messiah. You have to do things like calculate with an astrolabe and get money from a market. There are a lot of sidequests as well.
Augmented Fourth
This is probably the best-regarded parser game I know of that gets no discussion. It’s in the top 20 Inform 6 games of all time, and in the top 30 of all games not entered into IFComp or Spring Thing.
It’s a very polished game with an absurdist fantasy kind of humor. You’re an awful trumpet player who gets thrown into a literal Orchestra Pit that takes you several minutes to hit the bottom of. From there, you explore a strange community where you can learn to do magic through the power of different songs.
Has a lot of different funny parts. Another game from the 2000s, and similar in some ways to Yes, Another Game with a Dragon!
Eidolon
This game was in my top 10 of all time for a while, and I still consider it my 11th. Although now it’s been so long since I played that I’ve forgotten much of it!
I’ll write what I remember, then look up the rest. I remember it being a moody nighttime game where a young girl ends up transported to a realm of shadows and you have to explore. It’s also fairly long for a Twine game without any chapter or similar divisions.
Now, I’ll look it up. (I immediately note that I gave it only 4 stars and wrote a review before finishing, which is annoying to present-time me). Upon replaying the opening, I’m struck by how fun the writing is. I like the line:
In the mirror there’s an apparition that moves whenever you move—but it couldn’t possibly be you. You are solid: You have skin and bones and there is blood rushing in your veins. The thing in the mirror is barely there, a loose bundle of shadow stitched ineptly with spider silk. You don’t like looking at it, or it looking at you with its nothings for eyes
The game uses a world model effectively, having different locations to explore and things to mess around with. It could use a save feature (so make sure you have some time set apart to play).
This is one I’ll definitely replay when it comes up in the bracket, and write a new review for.
CC’s Road to Stardom
This game is one of the newest in the whole playoffs, from 2022. It also has some of the best graphics:
It’s a cute Adventuron game that is kid-friendly. You’re basically a cute animal and you wander around a ship, hanging out with your other cute animal friends, and solving logic and language type puzzles in your quest to became a social media star. Probably one of the most ‘feel-good’ games in the playoffs.
(Inform, not Inform 7; Inform 7 came later.)
I’d perhaps describe it as Sorcerer but less cruel and more polished. Also with lots and lots of musical humor. (For one example: there’s a piece of music, a lively jig, that’s too long for you to memorize. You have to solve a jigsaw puzzle, so you can use the jigsaw to saw the jig in half.)
Oh yeah, thanks for the correction! It’s Inform 5, even, so I was way off.
I didn’t remember that about the jigsaw, that’s fun!
Playing Sand-dancer is interesting… I knew it “from the inside” while working through Reed’s book many years ago, but I’ve forgotten enough about it that it seems like a new game now at the prompt.
Thanks to its anonymous nominator!
Some quick polls:
- not a one
- 1 - 2
- 3 - 5
- 6 - 10
- 11 - 20
- 21 - 40
- 41+
(Note that the preceding poll will be closed around the end of Sunday February 9th.)
- Six vs Alabaster
- Illuminismo Iniziato vs Everybody Dies
- Tales from Castle Balderstone vs A Trial
- Buggy vs The Abbey
- Heretic’s Hope vs Tapestry
- The Bible Retold: Following a Star vs Submarine Sabotage
- The Legend of Horse Girl vs Aisle
- Winter Storm Draco vs Augmented Fourth
- Lime Ergot vs CC’s Road to Stardom
- Perdition’s Flames vs Nightfall
- A Dark Room vs A Change in the Weather
- The Lost Labyrinth of Lazaitch vs Over Here!
- Taco Fiction vs Eidolon
- Inevitable (2003) vs Word of the Day
- The Edifice vs Pogoman GO!
- Sand-dancer vs The Mystery of Winchester High
I’m playing Sand-dancer too. Intriguing.
I only ticked one box in each of the polls above. My interpretation of an “interesting” match-up is one where I feel a significant technical, thematical, or emotional overlap betweent the entrants, while each is still clearly its own thing.
- Heretic’s Hope vs Tapestry: melancholy, regret, sadness
- The Lost Labyrinth of Lazaitch vs Over Here: very differing approaches to old-school text adventures.
(I have a feeling that Perdition’s Flames vs Nightfall might also be interesting, but I’m only just starting the former now.)
I think one thing I’ve learned so far is that I don’t play enough games by Ryan Veeder. From Tales from Castle Balderstone:
The Wolf’s Mind
You are now inside the Wolf’s mind. Every aspect of his conscious, subconscious, and unconscious is open to you.Obvious exits are WEST and NORTHEAST.
>
I put together a little toy for fun: An interactive “maze” of the competition games.
PCTmaze.gblorb (696.9 KB)
The links between games are driven by affinity according to IFDB data. Outbound threads mean that the game at the other end is among the top 10 games from the game where you are, and incoming threads mean that the game where you are is among the top 10 games from the game at the other end. I bent the rules a little bit in cases where the affinity group is dominated by games in a particular series and counted the series as one “game” for top 10 purposes. If threads go both ways, only the outbound thread is mentioned.
Some non-competing games are included if they have at least two incoming threads from competing games, to create more paths between games. These are marked with asterisks. Outgoing threads from non-competing games are limited to competing games (skipping any to another non-competing game). Any game that was in the Free IF Playoffs was also excluded, even if it had multiple inbound threads.
Not every game can be reached from every other. Four games are isolated and cannot be reached by following threads.
If you’re having trouble deciding where to start, or which game to play next, maybe it will help. Let me know if you find bugs.
We’re at the halfway mark for the “quiet play” period. The polling above indicates that about three quarters of respondents have played five or fewer games, but let’s look on the bright side and note that fans have sat down and played games between 66 and 116 times so far at a minimum. (If you’ve played some game since first answering, you might want to update your answer before the “how many games” poll closes today.)
Today I was working on All Things Devours (a double nominee by SomeOne2 and dfranke), which has been on my list for years and years. I’m curious about discussion of the game around the time of its release. Was there any commentary by the author anywhere?
EDIT: Ah, there’s a fair amount of material available via the author’s website (linked from the IFDB page).
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.
I should also note that Scroll Thief was a massively over-ambitious first work whose planned sequels collapsed under their own weight. I spent the next few years unwilling to release anything unless it was up to Scroll Thief’s standards, in terms of size and complexity, which practically meant not releasing anything at all.
I’ll polish up the remains for some comp or other in the future—there are some good bits there, but the scope creep really got away from me!
Daniel, this is why I’m keeping the possible post-Isekai plans well under wraps…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.