@mathbrush
If you find yourself needing a break from creating a master top 10 list, I’d love to see your top 3’s for different categories of games, like sci-fi, murder mystery, fantasy, etc. Or even more specific sub-genres, like robots, witchcraft, slice of life, etc.
Not trying to put you on the spot, but for someone that seems so well-read with IF, I’m really curious about your opinions with certain genres and what made an impression with you. 
That sounds fun! I do have a bunch of genre-sorted lists on IFDB but a lot of them are outdated. It’d be fun to go through and sort them again after this.
Ballyhoo
I recall Ballyhoo as being an Infocom game that really resonated me.
Replaying it today, I tried to get as many points as I could (I think I got up to 60), then used invisiclues to get up to around 120, then used the walkthrough.
Last time I just used the walkthrough, so this was new to me. There were a lot less ways to lock yourself out of victory than I thought, and the map was a lot smaller than I remember, making a mental map easy to construct (though I did use a map).
The setting is great, I love the ‘decaying Americana’ feel, the late night sadness. I like a lot of games set at night in a melancholy way.
I really like how the game story progresses over time, with different encounters (I missed one with Tom Thumb because I had Verbose on and was just plowing around) that occur naturally. People come and go, doors open and close, things get moved. Unlike earlier games like Detective, here they happen based on player actions, making ‘just-in-time’ timing.
There is unfairness for sure. You have to LOOK IN a straw-filled cage, not just X CAGE or X STRAW or SEARCH STRAW or SEARCH CAGE to see something that should be clearly obvious. The topics you can ask Harry are unclear, or even that Harry exists (see LOOK IN issue above).
I don’t value the minimalism of old games for minimalism’s sake, but I do when it’s used in interesting ways. And this is interesting to me.
Replaying it was enjoyable. I don’t think I’d ever have beaten it on my own in the old days without working with someone else.
This one could go either way. It was fun, meaningful, and impressive. If I don’t take Spellbreaker or Zork II into top 25 I’ll definitely take this, otherwise I’ll just wing it.
Zork II
I had this on my favorites list because I remember 3-4 really cool puzzles and a couple of cool set pieces.
I did my thing where I try playing on my own at first and then use invisiclues and then hints. I hit up those favorite puzzles (dragon, maiden, cake puzzle) had fun with the set pieces of the volcano and lizard door and the wizard’s layer.
The rest of it is kind of not to my tastes. It has the infamous baseball puzzle (which I easily recalled the solution of and solved quickly) and the bank which just has to be one of Infocom’s worst puzzles of all time. I thought I knew the trick (you can walk through some walls) but I didn’t realize there was a second extremely obtuse trick (that the target of the wall changes depending on which way you come in.). I thought it was just alternating its output each time). There are a few other stinkers here and there, but not too bad. Overall its best parts are better to me than Ballyhoo’s best parts, but I’m chopping this off the list. Gone! (I still had fun. I think I kind of like MIT Zork better in some ways but that adds even more bad puzzles, while most games on this list have just good).
I’ll talk about this more with Adventure but people, I think, really didn’t realize what made games from that time fun and often emulated the wrong things. Some people still do (slow typewriter text or emulated load times, making unlocking, opening and going through doors require separate actions, etc.). I saw the keyhole/placemat puzzle copied so many times when I played through all the old IFComp games. What’s the point? It’s like cryptograms or Towers of Hanoi. You just memorize the solution and carry it out with 0 thought. You might as well have put nothing there (although to anyone who’s used it in the last few years I guess enough people have forgotten it to make it fresh again). I’ll be the first to admit that almost every puzzle I’ve ever made has been copied from someone else, but I like to copy the ‘feel’ of the puzzle rather than the exact mechanics. So I guess to me a better way to copy the keyhole/newspaper puzzle would be something like having a cannon you’re trying to put a cannonball into and fire to break down a wall, but it just won’t fit no matter what you do, so you have to realize there’s already a cannonball in there and fire that one off, or something. IDK, maybe that’s a bad idea, too.
Anyway, I knew I’d take this off the list when I sat down and didn’t look forward to finishing it off (by starting over with a walkthrough to ensure I had enough lantern light). But I still like it a lot!
Maybe it’s like when people watch a favorite TV series over and over before bed, or play these grind-heavy RPGs? Or some kind of Adventure kata?
Okay, that, I could see. Someone should make a soothing Text Adventure zen game that only has well-known chestnuts and an easy map. A light towers of hanoi, the newspaper thing, a maze that isn’t really a maze (just a big spiral where each room only has one entrance and one exit), one of the really easy riddles like ‘time’ or ‘fire’ or ‘a river’. Like 5 or 6 treasures you put in a display case before winning. People could use it for meditation
Funny, one game I’ve long wanted to write is where you create and maintain a Japanese garden over a period of centuries. Your choices and upkeep would attract philosophers and poets, which then adds more history to your garden. (A path by the pond becomes “The Path of True Wisdom,” and so forth.) The challenge would be personal pride in the result, with no score, map progress, or achievements to reach.
Sounds awesome!
This has been in the back of my mind for a while. Generally we believe that a game should be fun to play, as an activity moment-to-moment. I guess all this motivational machinery helps to clarify to the player that the “stuff” they’re doing fits together in some way. But it seems to me that if a game is fun-in-the-moment, and the art/writing/music would be attractive on their own, that should be plenty? Or do I just read books because the page numbers are an implicit progress bar?
Spellbreaker
After several ‘misses’ from playing old Infocom games, it was nice to have a pure hit.
This has a puzzle structure so different from the other Infocom games (except maybe Wishbringer and parts of Trinity). Everything just seemed so fair; it was lie Zork II was 25% awesome and 75% BS, but Spellbreaker is 90% awesome with 10% BS.
The first time I played Spellbreaker I used a walkthrough for the whole thing and thought, 'wow, it must have been impossible for players without it, with all the different cubes and options!" but the truth is, this game is tightly linear for the most part. There are generally only 2-3 puzzles at a time you can work on. You get a cube, it unlocks some spells and a new area or two, you use an older spell or item in interesting way and get a new cube, and you repeat.
For those who haven’t played, you’re a wizard from the Enchanter/Sorcery series (though you don’t need to play the earlier games), and magic is failing. You find a weird cube and a weird spell called Blorple that lets you analyze cubes, but what that does is teleport you to strange hub locations with different exits, each which take you to very small areas (usually 1-3 rooms, although there are a couple of mazes that take up more space).
With the tightly focused options and my memory of playing before, I had no trouble at all, though I did look up how to handle the fish since I wanted to get the timing right (and at the very very end I forgot how to make it so that you can unfreeze in time). The worst puzzle in the game (the gold box) I fortunately remembered.
I didn’t mind the weighing puzzle; I came up with my own method that was different than the walkthrough’s. It didn’t always work, but it worked twice (I had to repeat it since I was unprepared for the sand room). Also, the sand room puzzles have to be some of the best in interactive fiction in terms of realization and of emotional impact.
I feel like this is the game where they finally figured out solid game design and how to see things from a player’s perspective. A lot of the other Infocom games are great, and will be classics for a long time. But so many of them are filled with things like, “Did they even try playing this? What a mess!” Like the food and water timers in Enchanter. But Spellbreaker feels smooth. A lot of things I thought were really unfair for the player to guess are in the sample transcript in the manual, so I definitely recommend reading that.
An example of smoothness is the mazes. They’re not ‘tediously recreate the known solutions of all mazes’ type mazes and there is very little exploration required. They’re brain exercises. With the compass rose maze, you’re making a map and calculating how to use a limited resource. With the sliding rocks, you either know about parity or you examine the map and try to figure out why it’s shaped that way.
The gold box puzzle is rough, for sure, I can’t deny that. But I think I’m okay with one lame puzzle. It’ll be hard to top this game for me, I think it’s staying in top 10 for the foreseeable future.
Playing this makes it so clear again that Curses is based on it. Cubes->rods, both games have mini areas, themes of the ending and uses of cubes/rods at the very end are similar (including both having one very powerful one), and overall just the feel of the two games is very similar (and ‘laghach’ could be considered Curses’ gold box). I spent years trying to make my own ‘Curses’ with Never Gives Up Her Dead, so I guess this is like the grandmother of my game.
I was going to do all commercial games first, but I’m going on a trip soon, and I like playing hadean lands on trips when I don’t have wifi. So I’ll move on; the other games should be much shorter, except of course for Cragne Manor (and Curses)
Excalibur
This one is interesting. When I made my initial list of 50, I wrote down a varying number of pounds signs or asterisks or something in front of games, and there were about 7 or so that had a bunch of extra ones where I for sure wanted to include it. Excalibur was one of them. But now I’m not sure.
Excalibur is a brilliant idea. It’s a fake fan wiki for a show that, in-universe, might not even exist. It draws heavily on early Dr Who and other 60s/70s British tv shows that were low-budget, high-concept, and often ephemeral, as tapes were recorded over for reuse.
It also encapsulates vintage/retro nostalgia dynamics where small groups of people get together, become important in each other’s lives, meet up, have drama, feud with each other, pick weird internet names, have powertripping mods.
It was engrossing and I admire the style; there is some dynamism but its basically a static labyrinth filled with text, almost the same genre as My Psuedo-Dementia Exhibition in a few ways.
Getting started rereading it was a bit hard, as I zoned out. The middle was a lot of fun. The ending…I had remembered pieces of it but, like with Creatures Such as We, what I thought were the incomplete pieces were pretty much everything. The truth is mostly hinted at; there are many alternate explanations for the wiki, like curses or tulpae or mandela effect or just pure fabrication. It has some things in common with SCP-2747, which I also liked (there’s no relation between the two works).
Overall, is it impressive? Yes. Is it refreshing/fun to play? Not as much as some others I’ve played recently, but decently so. Is it personally meaningful? Yes. I remember it being even more so, but 5 years ago I was in an entirely different mindset and world, obsessed with becoming a better writer and dealing with loss of people I knew both from death and from moving on.
(You know, I just reopened it to see if I missed things with the curse-theory, and I remember it saying the audio recordings suggest the ritual performed was the Babalon Working. Looking it up, it’s apparently a sex-ritual by Alistair Crowley, a fact I missed when I first played. It’s supposed to result in the conception of a child. Is that child the show? Or maybe you can match up the dates of the working to the ages of people listed to see if any of them are the child. But the ‘real’ babalon working also didn’t result in a child, so maybe it’s a dead end. This whole thing fits with the bowl of car keys story.
It’s been a long time, but I think I dimly remember doing the math on the date of the working and found something/someone who lined up - don’t recall the details though.
Amusingly, there’s a famous book that’s quite big in IF circles with a similar Easter egg: House of Leaves.
I just checked the code a bit and the big thing I saw was that Season 2 started almost exactly 9 months after the ritual.
I’ve often thought of reading House of Leaves but from reviews I’ve seen it has consistent enough profanity and sexual content that I don’t think I’d want to read the whole thing (that’s one reason I enjoyed old IF and much of modern IF, both of those things are a lot less common than in modern literature). Although I’ve read and played tons of fiction influenced by it so I have a fake version of it in my head.
It’s been fun going back and playing these games
Dead Like Ants
I had some extra time to squeeze one more in (and these should be faster now that most of the big ones are out of the way).
I’ll probably keep this one on the fence; I have about 23 left to play and need to cut out 13 of them. This one won’t end up in top 10 but is pretty good.
I like ritualistic games where you can import meaning, and I like games that play with perspective, and this is it. It’s an essentially puzzleless game where you play as several version of the queen ant’s daughter and have to go deal with 5 different invaders of the ant colony’s tree.
The characters are like Thumbelina or other small-level stories where insects are protagonists (like Hollow Knight or @alyshkalia’s bugfolk games), with each character having a personality and some human-like aspects. This game lets you infer a lot. The widow wears a veil, the artist has black and white wings, the damsel flies and is delicate, but we’re not told exactly what they are or how they would look if we could see them. It’s an excellent use of text as a medium.
It’s funny, it’s morbid, it’s memento mori, it’s a clever use of IF mechanics. Classic Pacian, and I find it more cohesive than a lot of other Pacian games (which I tend to enjoy).
I also notice it’s experienced some popularity recently, with three ratings just in the last month or so. Impressive for an older game; I wonder if the bugfolk games made people look for more fun bug games (Strings, a bugfolk game, has a lot of positive things in common with this game and could likely place high in my lists, except I have a strong preference for the morbid here).
There is more than enough stuff in the world that nobody should feel bad for passing on anything that doesn’t appeal to them, but FWIW if you’re interested in House of Leaves, I’m not sure the profanity and sexual content are omnipresent enough to be a reason not to at least dip into it. The way it’s structured is that there’s a guy named Johnny who comes into possession of the notes of an old man who’s written a long description/exegesis of a documentary film that doesn’t appear to really exist. So the narrative proceeds in three layers: 1) the stuff that happens to Johnny; 2) the old man’s recounting of what happens in the film, which is basically the stuff that people think of when they think of House of Leaves, and 3) the old man and Johnny’s various footnotes commenting on 2), though these are like 80% old man/20% Johnny.
It’s the Johnny pieces of the narrative where the stuff you don’t like is concentrated, and it’s a pretty small chunk of the book overall – maybe like 10-15%? The majority of it is exploration of supernatural liminal space, strained family dynamics, and postmodern jokes about Camille Paglia. Johnny’s interjections definitely tend to be profane when they come, and there is a sequence where he’s trying to deal with some psychological issues by engaging in lots of meaningless sex, but that sequence at least is eminently skippable by just knowing “oh, this is the bit where Johnny tries to deal with some psychological issues by engaging in lots of meaningless sex!”
So yeah, not to pressure you at all since I think taking a pass on it is totally reasonable, but if you are strongly interested in reading it and have a high tolerance for skimming over objectionable content, I think it might be manageable. You’d be missing a small piece of the whole, but House of Leaves is so dense that any reading necessarily focuses on a subset of what’s in there anyway.
Wow, I had no idea House of Leaves was so complex! Interesting to know there’s variety in how it’s written.
Let’s do a game on my list that I haven’t replayed in a very long time.
Stay? by Jade Lomax.
This game is in the top 25 or so on IFDB, so it’s not exactly unknown, but it has the least ratings of any non-commercial game in the top 25 (and there are only 2 commercial games with less ratings than it). So it is kind of a ‘sleeper hit’ in the sense that I suspect several people reading this will never have played it. Go play it! One ‘loop’ takes less than half an hour.
This is a time loop Ink game (I thought it was Twine before replaying). A single playthrough is not that great of a game in and of itself; lots of scenes are just sketched out. Conversations are just 2-3 choices, etc.
But on replay that’s all very helpful, as you play through a lot. It took me close to 20 replays this time to get what I wanted. I get a substantially better ending this time than I did 5 years ago, but apparently there’s even more I missed (people say Gemma is the best romance and I never even met her!)
The idea is that you go to college in a magical kingdom and can study to be a soldier, mage, or scholar, deal with war, watch one of your friends use forbidden magic to turn into a monster, date people, etc. only to find out that a comet is going to destroy the world and that your former college roommate has been living in a timeloop for countless years trying to save the world and has done a ‘good enough’ job for their time loop, leaving you to take over.
It’s not just a static structure; new options are unlocked each playthrough as you discover what’s important and what’s not. I got a better ending this time because I neglected Jo completely and so never found the extremely important things you can in Jo’s paths, and instead became perfect at the rest of the game. It really felt like the last loop in Groundhog’s day where Phil rescues everyone and makes everyone happy.
Fun playing, felt meaningful, very complex and impressive. To me it’s a little below Open Sorcery, but still in top 25. I definitely think people should play it. Let’s pump up those ifdb rating numbers!
Yeah, a first run is not that great: I found this pretty annoying at first because of the small-scale choice design – I felt like I never knew if a choice was going to continue the conversation or small-scale event or respond with “anyway, three years later…” – but yeah, stick with it. The time loop stuff opens out in a bunch of different directions and it’s pretty cool. One of my favorite games even though the “magical college student” and dating game aspects are usually not my thing
Shade
A quick game to play.
Shade is in the opposite situation as Stay?. It has the 4th-most ratings of any game on IFDB at all. With 42 reviews (more reviews than Stay? has ratings!), it seems like almost everyone’s had an opinion on this game. And not all positive; it has 12 1-star ratings. (I wonder what game has the most 1-star ratings? Probably a popular game).
For those who haven’t played, this is a one-room ‘my apartment’ game (a genre where people implement their apartment, though this one is in some ways a parody/twist/deconstruction of that type of game). You’re going hiking in the desert soon at a big festival, and you want to make sure you’re ready. It’s also a horror game.
This was one of the first IF games I played. I like to immerse myself in characters when I play, and playing this the first time, at night, alone, I was genuinely creeped out.
A lot of people get frustrated, not knowing what to do. There’s a checklist on the desk; if you use it as a guide, it makes the game much easier.
This is an impressive game. Someone asked recently about the best-implemented one-room game, and it’s hard to think of anything better than this; maybe Violet. Trying to mess with the scenery and objects, it’s clear that a ton of responses are implemented.
I like the kind of hopeless feeling of the game. When I first played it left me depressed and I thought it was too dark. Now I don’t feel too bad about it; I’ve had to confront a lot of my life’s worst case scenarios in that time and now seeing someone else go through it in-game feels almost comforting.
Overall, I like it a lot. It’s another one I’m not going to for sure mark one way or the other yet, since I need some leeway. But I like it.
Like Spellbreaker and Curses, playing Shade again is very different than playing it for the first time. All 3 games have moments that break immersion and make you beat your head against the wall. But with replay they’re complex enough that they still have something interesting and fun to do but memory helps keep it from being overwhelming.
Edit: I decided to go and see which games have the most 1-star ratings, and I was partially right. Shade is the first game on the list that has overall positive ratings, and Galatea the second.
| Game Name | 1-star ratings | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die | 34 | ||||||
| The Absolute Worst IF Game in History | 32 | ||||||
| The Lift | 25 | ||||||
| Uninteractive Fiction | 23 | ||||||
| Toiletworld | 19 | ||||||
| 4 Edith + 2 Niki | 19 | ||||||
| rendition | 16 | ||||||
| Vestiges | 16 | ||||||
| A Quiet Evening at Home | 15 | ||||||
| 9Lives | 14 | ||||||
| The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane | 13 | ||||||
| What-IF? | 13 | ||||||
| The Lighthouse | 13 | ||||||
| The Chronicler | 13 | ||||||
| The Challenge | 13 | ||||||
| Popstar Idol Survival Game | 13 | ||||||
| Detective | 12 | ||||||
| Shade | 12 | ||||||
| Reels | 12 | ||||||
| Human Resources Stories | 11 | ||||||
| Annoyotron | 11 | ||||||
| The Fat Lardo and the Rubber Ducky | 11 | ||||||
| Gleaming the Verb | 11 | ||||||
| zork, buried chaos | 11 | ||||||
| Amazing Quest | 11 | ||||||
| Uninteractive Fiction 2 | 11 | ||||||
| Ninja | 10 | ||||||
| Burn the Koran and Die | 10 | ||||||
| 100,000 Years | 10 | ||||||
| +=3 | 9 | ||||||
| Galatea | 9 | ||||||
| Riverside | 9 | ||||||
| Dead Hotel | 9 | ||||||
| Fog Convict | 9 | ||||||
| Signos | 9 | ||||||
| Valkyrie | 9 | ||||||
| The Cardew House | 9 | ||||||
| Laterna Magica | 9 | ||||||
| My night | 9 | ||||||
| Amnesia | 8 | ||||||
| All Roads | 8 | ||||||
| You are a Chef! | 8 | ||||||
| A Walk in the Park | 8 | ||||||
| The Minimalist Game | 8 | ||||||
| Out of Babylon | 8 | ||||||
| Transit | 8 | ||||||
| Our Boys in Uniform | 8 | ||||||
| The English Restaurant | 8 | ||||||
| Equal-librium | 8 | ||||||
| Tower of Plargh | 8 |
I also noticed that lots of reviews have ‘unhelpful’ votes. I wanted to see which game had the most total ‘unhelpful’ votes on reviews out of any game. Turns out it’s second (this is really biased by total number of reviews but still interesting it’s one of the 2 games people have spent most time on saying ‘no, you’re wrong’ about other people’s opinions).
| Game | Unhelpful review votes |
|---|---|
| 9:05 | 184 |
| Shade | 132 |
| Lost Pig | 119 |
| Photopia | 118 |
| Galatea | 118 |
| Violet | 110 |
| Anchorhead | 90 |
| Spider and Web | 88 |
| rendition | 87 |
| Zork I | 82 |
| All Roads | 57 |
| Lock & Key | 56 |
| Aisle | 55 |
| Blue Chairs | 55 |
| Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die | 48 |
| Everybody Dies | 46 |
| De Baron | 45 |
| I-0 | 44 |
| Curses | 43 |
| Shrapnel | 40 |
| Blue Lacuna | 36 |
| 69,105 Keys | 35 |
| Suicide | 35 |
| Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom | 33 |
| Slouching Towards Bedlam | 31 |
| Bronze | 31 |
| Ecdysis | 30 |
| The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | 29 |
| Rameses | 28 |
| Varicella | 26 |
| You are a Chef! | 26 |
| Vespers | 25 |
| Gigantomania | 25 |
| Suveh Nux | 24 |
| Gun Mute | 24 |
| The Elysium Enigma | 24 |
| Special Detective Agent | 24 |
| The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode | 24 |
| when i was shot by elephants | 24 |
| Worlds Apart | 23 |
| Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents Detective | 23 |
| Alabaster | 23 |
| Winter Wonderland | 22 |
| In Good Company | 22 |
| A Day for Fresh Sushi | 21 |
| The Dreamhold | 21 |
| Conan Kill Everything | 20 |
| Delightful Wallpaper | 20 |
| The Absolute Worst IF Game in History | 19 |
| shadows on the mirror | 19 |
my father’s long long legs
This one will be off the list. It’s narratively cool, has some themes I like but barely misses the mark on my niche interests; in almost every aspect I like Polish the Glass better; only the typography and flashlight aspect are better (I think most people would like the pacing in this story much better than Polish the Glass, so this is just my personal opinion).
Storywise, this is a mostly linear (though with some areas with lots of options) horror story about a father in a poor factory town that spends all his time digging in the basement and growing larger. Junji Ito was cited as a reference, and it definitely fits with some of that author’s themes.
It’s good, I admire it, but it just doesn’t stir my heart. I do think people should try it though.
(on a side note, back to House of Leaves, apparently the author grew up as a teen in Provo where his father was a BYU professor, though neither was LDS. Someone asked him in an interview:
I asked him what he was like as a kid, and he starts telling me about the time, in Provo, Utah, he decided to construct a “corn mash still,” from which one can make moonshine. “You have to remember,” he says, “this was in high school in Provo, Utah, in the early 80s. So it was 99 percent Mormon. My friend was a devout Mormon, and yet somehow this seemed like a very good idea to explore.”
So there’s something in common there with Ian Finley and my earlier discussion about people raised in Utah.)