The quest to make a new top 10 favorite games list

Playing IF Reviews and Essays
61

Rope of Chalk

This one really made me think a lot.

Ryan Veeder has a made a lot of great games. Earlier today I was investigating and SQL dump of IFDB for some stats. For some self-aggrandizement, I was looking up stats I thought I’d do well in, like total number of games, total number of games with overall positive ratings, etc. It was surprising to see just how dominant Ryan Veeder is in many ways. For instance, if you look up which authors have the most games with 5 or more ratings and an average of at least 3.5, Ryan Veeder has 46! There are only 6 people besides Ryan Veeder who have IFDB accounts and have published 46 games. Of those 6, 3 are members of the group DBT, who have written 53 games and only received 1 rating in total. The other 3 are David Whyld, Andrew Schultz, and Emily Short.

So it’s hard to overemphasize Veeder’s success here. Many people struggle to make a single game that is well-received. He has dozens of games that, if another author made them, would be considered deeply impressive.

And, when I made my initial list of 300+ plus favorite games, he was by far the most common author on there.

But it’s hard to narrow down any specific game that is a favorite of mine. Part of that is that the Little Match Girl and Balderstone games have names that are not entirely descriptive, and I can’t remember which good parts are from where.

So when I made my final choices for the top 50 list, I didn’t really know which ones to pick. Rope of Chalk is perhaps the one that best combines a balance of high quality and years of expertise with easy understandability and an intent to compete. Cragne Manor was an easy choice; the Balderstone game I chose was the one with Skuga Lake plus more. And my Little Match Girl choice was essentially at random; I remember liking its ending but little else. Maybe I should have chosen the one with 6 PCs you can switch between?

I guess there’s a kind of lack of friction sometimes between me and the author through the medium of these games. My very favorite games tend to feel like pumice on porcelain, scraping away at something inside my mind or showing me some part of the author. It doesn’t have to really be like that, but that feeling that either you’re seeing some deep inner part of the author or that the author is touching you is something that can be achieved in writing, and is perhaps what I look for most (which shows I guess that writing is probably my biggest key for these games; mechanics are just ways of making writing delivery effective).

But with Ryan’s games I always feel like there is an extra barrier separating me from reaching his mind. I get no glimpse or a simulacrum of a glimpse, even when it’s explicitly laid bare. I can’t construct a parasocial relationship like I can with other games. Similarly, it doesn’t touch my heart deeply; it skims on the surface like a boat on a pond.

Paradoxically, he’s probably the author I’ve imitated most, both in humor, mechanics, delivery, and level of polish. While the games don’t always touch my heart, they represent my ideal in how I want to touch others’ hearts.

I could have picked other games. Winter Storm Draco is brilliant and fun; Ascent of the Gothic Tower and Wrenlaw are weird and interesting; Last Minute Magic and Lurking Horror 2 have amazing puzzle design; Authentic Fly Fishing took me years to finish and I wrote a huge let’s play of it that was a lot of fun to do and got tons of participation; Taco Fiction and Robin and Orchid feel like amazing all-around solid games; every Little Match Girl and Balderstone game pushes forward the boundaries of interactive fiction in ways many authors never even consider; Crocodracula, Ransom Woodingdean, and Semantics are all great genre games with tongue-in-cheek twists; and there are so many others.

So I picked Rope of Chalk. It’s good! Numerous viewpoints. Distinct PCs. Strong narrator voice; clever integration of help mechanics; a solid afterword connected to the real world. It’s funny. The reveal of the evil slogan, especially.

For those who haven’t played, it tells a story that is said to be based on real life where the author judges a sidewalk chalk competition at a college when things go disastrously wrong in the heat.

But I don’t know if I’ll put it in the top 25. The frozen wasteland in the overly-built-up worldbuilding area is really funny, but it can wear thin over time. The ending area is especially cool, because it’s ‘real’, or portrayed to be real, but it still felt to me like there was a layer of Saran wrap over it, either of my perception of it or the delivery of it, that kept it from touching my heart. I guess something to compare it to is the Dev’s area at the best ending of Chrono Trigger. You can go around and ask them about the game and they say things, and some are just stupid and some interesting, and even if it’s not real it feels ‘real’, but I don’t get that feeling in Rope of Chalk. This could be real, or a sincere portrayal of real, or it could be a collection of homonculus p-zombies invented from whole cloth. I did feel sincere emotion typing Help at the end and seeing Ryan mention my game 77 verbs, because very little in life feels better than someone you respect showing respect to you.

Now I know what you may be saying. What about Shade? Isn’t that also glazed over with so much smoothness it’s hard to interact with? After all, you don’t believe that Andrew Plotkin really experienced a slow descent into hopelessness and loss of ego due to torturous conditions? No, but I can feel a message that he packages into the game and wants delivered to me. He puts it in a box, I play the game and get the box, I open it up, it’s full of creepy sand. I get it.

So maybe that’s the thing; maybe it’s that I don’t really think Ryan has a direct message with most of these games. I think they’re mainly things to be experienced and lived in (which is something I said recently on a different forum for the Choicescript game A Golden Rose). It’s kind of like Seinfeld, just setting up scenarios and seeing what can happen. What is the point of Fly Fishing? What is the point of Rope of Chalk? What is the point of the Little Match Girl series? Cragne Manor has a point. Or, I can mentally provide one for it. But for most games by this author, they seem to just exist, to be enjoyable. I don’t see the image of their creator in them.

Anyway, I’m talking a lot of nonsense here, and I do look forward to the other 3 Ryan Veeder games. I don’t think everything I said up there is necessarily true, but it is the way I experience these games, and that’s what this top ten list is about. Writing this has made me realize that I really do like the author aspect of these games. Sometimes I feel bad having spent thousands of hours on interactive games, but the real truth is that I see these games as little nuggets of people’s souls that they share with others. My reviews are little nuggets back to the author and other players. I remember loving it when I started and saw this as a dead field and myself as an archaeologist, I wanted to add reviews to all the great games missing them so people could be helped by me. I saw all the Infocom games with 0 reviews and thought, ‘someone will be glad to see a review here! It’ll help them know if they should play.’ And people would write me after reviews and say, ‘no one’s played my game in decades, thanks so much for a review’ (only 2 or 3 times but it was nice). I don’t always picture the author or think about them; my mental picture for Kyle Marquis in Night Road is very different than for Empyrean, another game he wrote. But somehow that person to person communication is what I most value in IF. A different medium could serve that purpose just as well; maybe in another world I’d be reviewing beaded bracelet art and going to craft fairs (which sounds awesome). Ryan’s games all touch me in some way, and as a whole I’d prefer his works over the collected works of Emily Short or Adam Cadre, since with their games I often think ‘I don’t see myself at all in this’.

I’ll replay Cragne Manor this summer, I suppose, but I think one thing I like about it from Ryan Veeder in particular is that I feel like it’s the game that actually gives me a glimpse of a mental model of the person. Not in his particular room, but in the way that the game was set up and divvied out and the communication between authors. Jenni did a ton of the work (I saw her do so much), but you can tell that the two of them loved this idea and loved collaboration, and I think that’s beautiful. The game delivers that message to me, along with the messages of its many other authors.

So, I don’t think I’ll put Rope of Chalk on my top 25.

Edit: In 2017, I noticed Ryan Veeder had a lot of games (23 at the time) and made up a review competition for my reviews. I called it a lot of things, including ‘The Official Ryan Veeder Weekend Review Tournament with Guaranteed Prize.’. I should do it again this year or next for the 17 games I haven’t played, or maybe replay them all and make a tier list. Because despite everything I said above, the games as a collective are absolutely my favorite collective, more than Infocom, for instance.

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62

creak, creak

This is the shortest game in my top 50 list. I remember when I made my 5-star criteria on IFDB I tweaked it specifically so I could give this short 5 stars along with the other larger games.

I have some work-related stress today so was in a rather foul mood while replaying this, but I was actually surprised by it despite having tried it over many years and it being a tiny game. It actually has branching, which I didn’t expect. I figured playing it while grumpy was a good test; if it helped me calm down or felt fun even then, that’s a good sign of a favorite.

It’s a very short game, for those who haven’t played, with some of the dreaded timed text (but not too slow and in a very short game). Timed text is mostly an issue when people make it take a long time or do it in a game with dozens of links. This game has only a few pages and can be finished in less than 5 minutes.

It’s a divisive game. Out of 36 ratings (which is a lot; only 70 games have received that many since this game was published in 2015), I’m the only one to have given it 5 stars.

I like the economy of words, and the way it lets you construct a story in your head. I feel like does better than games that explicitly spell things out.

I made a haunted house in Grooverland based on this, where stepping on the floor boards in different rooms makes different noises, and you have to get them in the right order to get the song right.

I like this but I can’t lie, the size of a game does matter to me, the feeling of getting engrossed and losing yourself in a game. So this can be high on the list and a 5-star game, but I’ve known for a long-time coming that I wasn’t going to keep this for top 25.

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63

Babel

Babel is a great game. I enjoyed replaying it. It integrates the story and puzzles together well. This was the first time I was able to play without hints or walkthrough, which was nice, though I did miss a spot.

Shocking to think how young Ian Finley was when he wrote this (it took 2nd place in IFComp in 1997 when he was in high school). It’s interesting, looking back, to see that CE Forman, author of Delusions, thought that Babel was really similar to it to a somewhat distressing degree (Delusions was one of the first IF games I played, because it either came on Frotz on the ipad or was recommended.) I’ll have to replay it at some point, I remember liking it back then.

Safe to say that ‘losing your memory’ and ‘wandering a base in the arctic’ are both really common tropes. I have a poll on IFDB for games in antarctic (or arctic) bases with 7 games on it so far: Games set in a base in Antarctica - an IFDB Poll

The implementation is solid, the story is classic 90s style fiction (it reads to me like Sphere). I’m probably projecting but I really can see the repressed gay teen in Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint culture in the game. For instance, the most horrifying revelation in this game is you violently attacked a woman. I remember growing up (and now!) thinking of that as a super-evil thing, more than violence against men, which happens a lot in the rest of the game. Other games similar to this, like One Eye Open, have no distinction really between the two. Another thing was the idea of self-sacrifice, of one person being willing to test the vaccine to save everyone else (a common Christian theme in general). And the infinite chain of Telerus dna reminds me both of the Telestial Kingdom (the ‘lowest heaven’ in LDS mythology where liars, murderers, thieves, adulterers, etc. get to be mega happy forever after chilling in hell for 1000 years) and of the way that our marriag rooms in our temples have mirrors facing each other to show an infinite chain, meant to indicate an infinity of ancestors and an infinity of descendants. The bible in the game isn’t even hidden Christian symbolism, it’s just Christianity.

Overall, the whole game feels to me like 80% strength awesome. Like the story is 80% perfect, the puzzles 80% perfect, the setting 80% perfect. I feel like One Eye Open gets the story and setting all the way perfect but has weaker puzzles and definitely weaker implementation.

Compared to a game like Hadean Lands (of which there are very few!), Babel could be more. I like it though. Probably taking it off top 25 but I’m leaving it up in the air for a bit (and will with most further games).

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My intention with creating Excalibur was to make something that would invite a lot of discussion, and different interpretations, and I’m glad it has. I’m a huge fan of David Lynch (particularly Twin Peaks) and I love the way he layers imagery to create a dreamlike experience; I attempted to do something similar with Excalibur, working intuitively to create a feeling, a kind of cloud of symbolism, rather than one true meaning. Having two co-writers meant that there were even more layers, and (I hope) that the result is more than the sum of its parts. For the record, the timing of the second season was not deliberate, on my part at least! I can’t speak for the others. But it might have been a subconscious decision!

In hindsight, the references to Crowley, Jack Parsons and Baphomet were a little obvious and heavy-handed, but I had recently read Strange Angel it was all relatively new to me.

Excalibur was a massive undertaking; six years’ work altogether, working with Duncan for the first three years and Grim for the second. It often felt as though it would never be finished, but suddenly it was and now it’s there in the rear-view mirror, and I barely remember working on it! It sometimes still surprises me that it exists at all.

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I don’t think it’s too heavy-handed at all; most of the game is vague allusions, so they provide a distinct supernatural flair which I think helps.

I didn’t realize you switched off partners halfway, that’s interesting!

Glad that you made it.

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66

Hadean Lands

This is an alchemy game where you repair a spaceship analogue by conducting alchemical rituals that can be memorized and then done in a single move later. It’s big, it’s polished, it’s fun.

This was in my top 10 before, and is the last commercial game. I think it’s likely to stay in the top 10, since it does a lot of things other favorite games do, but better. It has you wake up with amnesia in an abandoned lab, like Babel. It appears wide open but structures puzzles in a smooth and logical way with chokepoints like Spellbreaker. It has polish and helpful checklists like Shade. It combines sorcery and programming elements like Open Sorcery; it has ritualistic elements like You Are Standing at a Crossroads. It’s as large as Curses.

The only area it doesn’t explicitly shine in is characters and story, but that’s not so much that they don’t exist but that they’re understated. There have been hundreds of posts on Hadean Lands’ story, which might not have happened if the story had been more explicit.

Replaying it, I was worried if it would be too easy, but even after beating it 4 times I struggled. I used very few hints. A couple of times I was stuck, and loaded up an old game when I beat it to see what I could do, or looked at some invisiclues to narrow things down, but in 3 out of 4 of my stuck times none of those hints or clues helped and I had an insight into what I missed (the fourth time was the very end, where I had picked the absolute worst choice (Syndesis) and redid the final ceremony incorrectly like 8 times before looking it up).

My other three stuck points were that I forgot about the cabinet with gold and tried to perform the first great marriage in chancel instead of nave due to bad memory, and tried to “think first glyph” instead of “say first glyph”.

In each case I did everything I could to progress otherwise and got very far, eventually mapping out in my mind a whole chart of what I could do if I could just solve one more puzzle. In all three cases, reading carefully helped, as well as eliminating false choices by looking at clues and saved older games. By not using hints and walkthrough as heavily this time I really got a feel for the game structure.

Overall, a great experience. By playing all my other favorite games, it really shows how well Hadean Lands shines overall for my taste in games. Definitely stays in top 10.

I definitely saw this game as my ideal when creating Never Gives Up Her Dead as a commercial game. My game is quite a bit easier than this one; the puzzles in Hadean Lands are quite a bit better for my taste. But I don’t worry about competition. With so few high-quality Steam parser games that are 10+ hours, when people beat one, they think, ‘I’d like to play more games like this,’ so I think that nothing could help me more than Hadean Lands continuing to be successful.

I’m in a different spot during the day than usual, so my play schedule will be off for a while, but I plan on keeping chugging along. It’s definitely been fun playing all my favorites; I think I had gotten burnt out a bit here and there, so playing just the greatest hits has been fun.

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67

Colossal Cave Adventure

This is the oldest IF game that I’m really interested in (there are earlier ones, but most of my favorite games are copying someone who copied someone who copied someone who copied this game).

The version I originally had on my top 10 list (where it was a bonus 11th list), was Graham Nelson’s Inform 7 port of one of the 350 pt versions. I took advantage of the natural benefits of Inform shortcuts like X and I and of a bug that lets you carry unlimited items in the birdcage.

Replaying it this time, I tried the more faithful port by Arthur Dwyer.

I thought it was cool getting a more authentic experience.

I also stopped partway through.

When I first played Adventure, I took a week or two, very carefully taking down notes and drawing a map, testing every exit. What was so exciting for me was that all of those bad tropes from early games (like mismatched or unlisted exits or batteries running out) made sense when you’re actually exploring a cave, and the different puzzles felt fresh since I knew it was the first time.

But this time, I just didn’t look forward to mapping that all out again. I loved going through a lot of those puzzles again (like the dragon). But I’m on a trip and just wanted some casual fun.

I felt bad, and like I was obliged to play it all the way through. But isn’t the point of a favorites list that you enjoy playing it? That’s one of my criteria. I think I deeply respect the game and beating it for real is a great accomplishment, but if playing it is a chore I’m taking it off the list (it can still stay on the shortlist of 50 since I had a great time the first time I won).

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But the best storywise, imo! I like that it puts the captain at the center of what’s happening.

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Little Match Girl Approaches the Golden Firmament

I mentioned up further above how I had trouble picking a little match girl game. I had remembered this one being positive/good so I tried it.

I forgot it had a timer. I closed it immediately. Really obnoxious.

I looked at the other match girl games. I like the one with 6 characters but I remembered it having lots of empty space in the first half. The fourth game in IFComp was good but I couldn’t remember much.

Looking at each of them, I remembered the most positive feelings being from golden firmament, with stuff on a catwalk.

So I sighed and started playing again. Then I remembered you could pause, and things were fine (I’m playing intermittently on a vacation and had to pause in the middle so I’m glad that feature was there).

It was great. I mentioned feeling like a lot of Ryan Veeder’s games were frictionless to me, but ironically the irritation/tension of the timer helped overcome that and helped me fully engage with the game (kind of like the ‘fulcrum’ in Hadean lands).

My dad’s been doing magic tricks while I’ve been at his house. Some of them are genuinely funny and I pretend to be angry because they are based on making you see flaws/patterns and expect to call them out and then it turns out the trick is based on that, assuming you’ll catch the ‘fake’ trick and then have a real trick behind it.

The author does similar things in this game. The timer is real but not actually real (I wonder what running it out to the end would do?). Many things in the game are set up one way, getting the player to try something that seems obvious, only for it to turn out differently than you expect (I mean, there are some theories of humor where what I said is the definition of humor, so maybe I’m just saying the game is funny).

This is a Little Match Girl game, and they both have no continuity and a lot of continuity. The games started off with lots of isolated scenes with not explanation. They can still be played that way without losing much. But if you play a lot then you see recurring characters. I’ve missed playing like 5 or so of the games, so I may be out of the loop on some things.

This game is about an interstellar band of criminals sending spaceship to try to break into heaven, which they believe is sealed inside a golden sphere. It’s not (the angels can tell you) but they don’t care.

You have to walk along a corkscrew-like map around a ship while, in classic Little Match Girl fashion, traveling back and forth using flames as a mean of Time and space teleportation.

I didn’t really see any bad parts in the game. I like dialogue a lot in writing, and this is a dialogue heavy game, with steady streams of comments from both villains and allies. I got stuck at times but there were hints; not enough to make it trivial though. It was quite the night and day between this and the 350 Pt version of Adventure; so much smooth but some parts oddly similar given how the games are about half a century apart (like the long chains of rooms in a line then little offshoots here and there, the light puzzles, random teleportation (xyzzy/plugh vs looking at fire), the random enemies like the dwarves. It’s just funny how much of Adventure endures in the DNA of even modern parser games, passed on via chains of inspired games and in the structure of Inform and other languages itself. There is also a strand of British-inspired games that took a hit with weaker earlier computers and were more based on Scott Adams games and lower-quality type-ins, and I tend to like that strand less (especially when it idolizes the restrictions of the medium more than its strengths). But that’s a side tangent.

I honestly did not expect this game to place so highly in my esteem since there are lots of little match girl games and I kind of picked it at semi-random, but I genuinely enjoyed it more than a lot of others in my top 50. I’ll put it in top 25 I think.

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Rogue of the Multiverse

This game used to be in my top 10. It’s really funny! You play as a human prisoner in space being manipulated by a bossy and evil but beautiful and arrogant lizard woman who calls you her special ape and motivates you with bananas. She sends you on trips to alternate timelines to steal stuff ranging from alien creatures to sports cars to family tombstones.

While you’re doing that, a toilet worm offers to help you get out. There’s a big chase scene and some chances for lizard smooching.

The game is really funny. It’s smaller than I remember; I was able to beat it in around 30-45 minutes because I had most of it memorized despite not playing in decades. It has a lot of Pacian’s signature combos, like strange aliens whose design and personality follow conflicting traps, powerful women, grids, combat, an emphasis on outfits.

This is another game where I had great memories of a few scenes and assumed there was more filling in the gaps in my memory which made it even better. But like the others my memories were the whole game. I honestly just think Dr Sliss is just my favorite character; I like toxic and dramatic smart women in real life, to my long-lasting detriment. This game also suffers a bit from direct comparison with the last game I played, the little match girl and the golden firmament, which has a lot of similar things (combat with wild monsters, action scenes, teleporting to random worlds and then back to a ship), but which had good scenes I remembered interspersed with other good scenes I had forgotten.

I do like this game a lot, but not enough I think for top 10. For sure top 25 though; I’d rank it over Shade and City of Secrets. This is a fantastic game, and I might be just feeling bad (I’m at a high altitude and not weathering it well), but there are just so many great games at this level that I think it’ll get just nudged off the podium. For me the weakest part is the tagging mini game; while it would have taken a ton of work and probably not be worthy it, there could have been more descriptions and/or events added in. The carefully plotted side quests in Little Match Girl are for me more fun than the procedural quests, but this is like a distinction between A and A-, not between A and C. I could heartily recommend Rogue of the Multiverse to anyone, I just had the highest possible expectations for it. I’m nervous for some of my other top 10s; what if I don’t like To Hell in a Hamper as much as I remember? That’d be a bummer. But this was fun to play.

Edit: As a side note, I decided to replay and buy everything in the shop. The books are really fun; I love Pacian’s world building and humor. One was actually a real book: Lord Jim. The clothes were entirely cosmetic; I would have loved to have Sliss comment on my tux I wore just for her. Maybe Pacian should just make a Sliss dating visual novel.

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To Hell in a Hamper

This one was interesting to play it again. It’s the comedy I had the highest rated before, placing it in my top 10 list.

I’ve replayed it recently, so a lot of the jokes were fresh in my mind. I didn’t laugh out loud because of that. So how does that affect the rankings?

Well, first of all, let’s describe the game. It’s a one-room game in an air-balloon. It’s rare to see an aerial IF game, and having completely vertical movement is fun.

Your nemesis here is your assistant who is wearing an enormous overcoat that is completely filled with extremely heavy things. You have to toss those overboard.

I replayed this game last night and this morning. I thought about it. I read some of the reviews. I played the prequel.

My three categories are if it’s fun/refreshing to play, something I admire, and something touching/emotionally resonant.

For my play style, it’s very fun to play. I had no problem playing twice. Looking at the prequel, I think the prequel suffers from being a little too difficult. As a puzzle game, the prequel is superior, but comedy isn’t about puzzles, it’s about timing (the prequel was a lot of fun, though, better than I remember it). So the pacing and tempo of this game is great.

It’s admirable too; I recently really enjoyed the comedy game Slappy the Squirrel in Parsercomp, one of the funniest games I’ve played in a while. But To Hell in a Hamper has an advantage that it’s well-implemented (for the type of things I type; I’ve heard some other people have trouble). And that counts for a lot, since there’s less flailing around.

The third thing is emotional impact. And the game is funny. The ludicrousness of permanently losing things as they go overboard (and ever more ludicrous when they come back), the highly improbable objects that are retrieved, and of course the final object are all funny. The puzzle solutions are funny.

For sure I’ll put this in the top 25, but for top 10 I’ll have to stop and think for a long time. I think Rogue of the Multiverse has some strong competition here for a hypothetical ‘funny game’ slot. I didn’t feel as amused this time as before, but I played it close to midnight after taking two arduous trips in a row to get to a mountain, and most of the humor I’ve seen before. Yet, it was fun to play multiple times and experiment with. So the question isn’t, ‘is it great’; to me, it is great. The question is, “is it the best?”

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Dual Transform

I’ve been holding back on this one for the last few days. I keep seeing it and thinking ‘oh yeah, that’s fun,’ but I just did Hadean Lands, so I didn’t want to finish both Plotkin games right away.

This game strips down adventure mechanics to their fundamentals: one room, one portable object, one container, one animal/npc, etc.

You have a kind of symbolic workspace where you can put concepts like ‘pressure’ or ‘light’. Whichever one is active changes the surroundings, like skins in a game with DLC. Everything else transforms as well, like nearby objects.

Gameplay is very symbolic and ritualistic. Most puzzles can be solved by just trying every world. Those that can’t need some examination and experimentation. I like games like this where you just pursue all avenues with interesting content in each branch.

This is like the ‘mirror’ of Hadean Lands, short, mostly puzzle less, small, but with a similar feeling.

I had a good time with it, and received exactly the experience I had hoped for from it. The only thing not going for it is length, so we’ll see where it ends up.

Only 9 games left! Three of them are huge. Maybe I’ll do Worlds Apart next, which I replayed a couple years ago for the playoffs.

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Worlds Apart

I started this game fully ready to axe it off my list. I’ve seen lot of reviews recently generally saying the game hasn’t aged well. When I started replaying, I was committed to not using hints or walkthrough since I’ve played it 4-5 times, but I still struggled. A lot of scenes require you to wait for things to happen but just WAIT doesn’t work since the author wants you looking around and interacting with things. Several actions, especially those involving the dream world, are just not reasonable for players to guess as there are many ways that could feasibly be good solutions to problems but only one is implemented (like, why can’t we DRAW things instead of BECOMING things. I know we’re bad at drawing so it’s reasonable, I’m just salty).

By the time I hit Act II, though, I was feeling more favorable, and the finale definitely solidified it for me. For some reason parts of Act III remind me of the end of Blue Lacuna (the reason Blue Lacuna wasn’t on any short list is because it has a lot of the same issues Worlds Apart has with pacing but enhanced, with a lot of the game about wandering around waiting for things to happen; and the steps made to simplify the intro make it harder for me to play. The things that happen at night in that game are amazing though).

Worlds Apart is a sci fi game about sentient dolphin people with magical healing/singsong powers. I always compare it to Anne Mcaffrey (I liked the Crystal Singer books as a kid). It’s part of a larger story that was never completed as far as I know.

I just enjoy the depth of worldbuilding, the interesting characters, and the payoff of long-term storylines. It might be appropriate to compare it to story-rich Choicescript games, but it one way it has a major advantage. CS games tend to either have solid stories involving sadness and trials but with limited player agency or to be power fantasies with a less satisfying narrative arc (not all such games, but it’s a real issue). Worlds Apart is fixed and has few choices that affect the story, allowing the author to craft a satisfying narrative, but has complex interactions and some puzzles so the player still feels agentic (if that’s a word).

Definitely has interaction flaws and I generally don’t like incomplete stories, but it’s complete enough for me and a great example of world building. Easy top 25, probably ending up in top 10.

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Deadline Enchanter

On paper, this is a game about a magical city that roams different worlds, appearing in the US Dakotas, leading to a love story between a magical picture and a minor league baseball player.

Actual gameplay is anything but. You’re playing a game written in-game as instructions for you to rescue this magical person. Inside that game in a game are helpful walkthroughs for you to follow (except for one key instance in the middle).

The game is generally hard to follow or understand but also easy to understand at the same time.

I like how I just don’t get it. That’s what I like, just the feeling that if I were smarter or wiser I’d get the themes. But right now for me it’s like reading Isaiah and getting to the part about wimples and crisping pins that conjures up images even though I don’t know what they are.

I also like the walkthroughs, as I have been a heavy walkthrough user over time. The walkthrough is the game; very little is implemented outside of that, which is a plot point. It’s fun to read the walkthrough and still be surprised by what happens.

The game comments on interactive fiction a lot and has clever in-game parts like the help menus or an incompletely erased old game.

I don’t understand the ending at all. Are the two characters related to the characters in the rest of the game? It’s the same world, if you examine yourself and look around. Entirely inscrutable to me.

I don’t know how many spots I have left in top 25 but it’s a strong contender.

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Cannery Vale

We’re getting to the heavy hitters here.

I had a strange experience I’d never had with Cannery Vale before. I got to the final scene and was so excited, only for the game to just end anticlimactically. I stared at the screen, befuddled. I read the walkthrough and apparently I had accidentally gotten the good ending every time. This time I didn’t because I walked into the sea to reset and I lost the briefcase. I tried restoring an earlier save but couldn’t find a third token after 30 or 40 minutes so finally went back to the almost-winning save and reset the story to the start to re-fetch that item. I had to re-buy clothes like 6 times (and I have low explicit setting so couldn’t strip for them).

Despite that, I had fun. It just made me wonder if some of the lower IFDB ratings are for people who only saw the bad ending, because it is pretty disappointing.

This game is a meta-textual writing game with shades of Stephen King and explicit allusions to Dante (I had seen a few allusions last time, but it was completely clear this time that the circles of the town are the circles of hell, which explains the lust behavior in the boardwalk, amnesia and being lost in the first, heresy in the church circle, etc.).

You are an author writing a novel in a hotel room. You can explore the room or the hotel (getting some explicit interaction between broken game text and the protagonist noticing it, something else I wonder if reviewers saw and maybe thought of as a bug). Most of the game is writing more of your book then sleeping and living it out.

Early chapters have a massive effect on the game. You go from a beach amnesiac drowning in the sand to a man exploring a whole town with seedy underbelly and a lot of monsters. There are a lot of side stories and characters.

Oddly enough the one thing I don’t like about the game is the different levels of napping, since they don’t really have any difference.

My favorite things are similar to Worlds Apart and Deadline Enchanter. All three games manage to give the feel of a world that exists and that you have a glimpse into, and that if you explore just enough or keep looking there’s more out there. Living, breathing kind of world building.

I also appreciate the explicitness filter in this game. I like its overall grunginess. Some writing feels like writing, where you feel distant from the prose. This game is the kind of writing that, for me, draws me in and almost becomes invisible, where I’m not reading a story, but am living in a world or immersing myself in the world, suspending disbelief.

This isn’t a good game to rush through. It’s about repeating experimentation over and over again and trying different things.

Even with the bad redo experience this was still great. Very few games give me that immersion feel, that makes me think of sneaking into my aunt’s room as a child and reading Stephen King books that were way too old for me. Deadline Enchanter has that feel, like I said, but Cannery Vale has more interactivity.

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Started a replay of Cragne Manor on mobile. It may be some time before I make my next report! I can’t remember if I played it with the cup of coffee the first time but it’s so nice this time.

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The coffee is amazing, no way I would have gotten through without it!

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I didn’t forget this project, it just took me 6 days to beat Cragne Manor again! I told myself I probably wouldn’t replay it, but here I am.

I almost immediately thought, “I’m going to include this in my top 10 list”. Then I hit the middle and thought, "No way. This is not refreshing; some of this is infuriating (though I did use walkthroughs a lot, thank heavens they exist now).

But the ending was very satisfying too.

I’m going to treat each room like its own game and throw it into different categories as I think this through.

For those who haven’t played, this game has no continuity. Each author was given the name of a room. Some signed up for puzzles that block transportation, others for puzzles that give informational clues that are used in other rooms, some for a big information puzzle, some a trading game, others keys.

For many of its authors, it’s their only published game. For almost all authors, it is the highest-rated game of theirs on IFDB. It’s common to go to someone’s page and see Cragne Manor as the number one. No author has enough games better than it to push it off the page (it’s number 3 for Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin).

I’d like to first highlight the unsung heroes. With a game this big, I deeply appreciated those who had plain, simple rooms with very little extra activity, just atmosphere.

This is self-praise, because I did the same thing, but I only did that because I didn’t have time to do much more. At the time, I felt bad, but Ryan assured me that players would appreciate a simple room at the end of one of the puzzle lines. Here, on my second replay, he’s right! I appreciated those who did that (this isn’t hating on puzzle rooms, I’m going to praise them later. But first, these people!)

These rooms have essentially nothing in them, nothing to solve, no story segments or fancy events, just movement (and possibly locked things).

(I know some people just gave descriptions to Jenni and asked her to make them, so maybe some of them were these rooms).

Simple transit rooms

Church Exterior (Andy Holloway)
This did a good job of setting up the church as interesting, which I couldn’t get into for quite along time.

Circular Room (JP)
This is a relatively early example of the game’s discontinuity. It’s reach by going down a well, but is described as " This room really looks like a capped well, but its location in the building suggests otherwise."

Constabulary Road (Harkness Munt)
This room has more stuff than the others (like archaeology student) and a gate that opens, but all that can be skipped. Fun to check out though.

Narrow Straits (Mathbrush)
That’s me! Looking back, I’m glad I made it gross. Maybe could have added more drama to the thing you get here.

Amorphous Tunnel (Bill Maya)
I’ve enjoyed Bill’s other games. This is one of the few places to mention non-Euclidean geometry.

Outside the Greenhouse (James Eagle)
This room fits so well with the other outside-manor locations and inside the greenhouse itself, nice serendipity.

Foyer (Greg Frost)
This room has some special interactions, and you’ll see the room a lot. But the interactions are subtle. Some walkthrough writers omit them entirely, others are not sure of the use of what you find here. Thematically very cool.

Dining Room (Roberto Colnaghi)
This has some story, essentially ghosts or time travelers you can listen to and a machine to fiddle with. But you can pass by and/or be passive.

The Kitchen (Edward B)
I like this description a lot for some reason. Very ambient.

The Cragne family kitchen. Light from a naked bulb feeds shadow down the spaces between old cabinets, counters and bookshelves. A dusty, doorless fridge overlooks an oven just as worse for wear. You’d guess it’s been a minute since anyone’s used this room to cook. A doorway leads east, and a wooden door set in the floor appears to lead to a cellar or basement.

Malign Tunnel (Damon L. Wakes)
This room by the acclaimed author of several genitalia-themed games as well as Uninteractive Fiction 1 and 2 is surprisingly understated, and works well here:

The space beneath the boiler room is damp and narrow, little more than a dogleg corridor set into the earth. Something about its shape, its proportions, is deeply unsettling to you. There is a rusting iron ladder leading to the floor above, and a green door leading to the southwest, its paint flaking onto the uneven stone floor. The curving brick walls on either side of you arc gracefully inwards to form a vaulted ceiling. You would be able to stand comfortably were it not for the pipes that stretch like tendons above your head.

Next are some rooms that sent me running to the walkthroughs. This doesn’t mean they’re bad, just that their puzzles were so complex or required specific synonyms that I knew I couldn’t do it alone.

Rooms I dreaded

The Old Well (Reed Lockwood)
Pokemon simulator! Kind of. You need a special item to get started, then you find an entire miniature world with eggs you can pop out and then raise into creatures by first forcing them to go through different arches that change their evolution. Even getting started is hard, and the winning solution requires very specific combinations. Fair, but hard.

Bridge (Daniel Stelzer and Jemma Briggeman)
The bridge! The accursed bridge! Well, not accursed. This is the big filter to Cragne Manor. It’s the first room that is completely out of character with the rest of the map (a deep underground bridge which is adjacent to two sunny outdoor areas). It has hard puzzles, as I’ll mention next. It requires an item from outside (or at least interacts with such an item) in a way that’s not obvious, especially when you have dozens of items by now. Removing it wouldn’t help anything, since there are many other rooms that do these things, but it’s the first one that is unavoidable, as it gates most of the map. Regarding the implementation, now that it’s 8 years later and Daniel Stelzer is one of the best IF authors with numerous award-winning games, I’ll say it: this is a bit clunky. I think modern Daniel Stelzer could completely fix it up in 2-3 hours, but right now, it’s hard to guess some of the right verbs and knowing what interactions work can be tricky. It is better than many other rooms, but I just bring this up precisely because Daniel Stelzer is currently what I consider an IF star.

The Shambolic Shack (Michael Fessler)
This infamous room has a mold effect that can spread to every item in the game. I definitely followed the walkthrough strictly! It also for some reason has multiple keys that work in it, something I think no other room has, and must be visited at two different times and with some actions that are hard to figure out. Tricky place! But memorable.

Cragne Family Plot (Mark Britton)
This one isn’t quite as hard as the others, but with a bunch of pillars with doors and urns and some unexpected actions, I definitely had to get help on it. Again, the writing was fun here.

Boiler Room (Eric W. Brown)
Super hard room! tons of punch cards that can be tricky to differentiate, lots of red herrings, a bunch of machinery to hook together, lots of ways for things to go wrong. When I think of ‘walkthrough immediately’, this is what I think of, though technically I didn’t use the walkthrough at first.

Hillside Path (Jack Welch)/Carol’s Room (Ben Collins-Sussman)
The two rooms with by far the highest amount of code. Nothing really wrong here, just a huge amount of actions and text. I was able to get through without a walkthrough except checking every now and then to see if I had the right idea. Lots of funny parts here, lots of good writing, just an enormous amount of content that slows the play through down.

Science Tower (Riff Conner)
Another room with a lot of complicated devices and patterns to find out, similar to Boiler Room but with slightly easier puzzles and more red herrings (including one particularly important red herring).

Bathroom of the Meatpacking Plant (Chris Jones)
This room! This crazy room. The boneless horse, the extended puzzles, the trilobyte milking, the Minnesota erotic magazine, the naked space corpse, the huge journal. My two playthroughs are both divided into ‘before boneless horse bathroom’ and ‘after boneless horse bathroom’. Maybe that’s how my how life is divided. Certainly the room I most associate with this game.

Disheveled Studio (Katherine Morayati)
Actually has awesome writing and puzzles are interesting. I just never can figure out how to do the puzzles on my own, I definitely need walkthroughs but the walkthroughs, I think, don’t cover everything.

Next up are rooms that have either obvious puzzles that are easily solved or that solve themselves.

Very light Puzzles, no big story chunks

Upstairs Hall, North End (Jason Love)
This had a unique feature where a puzzle solves itself quietly. Also going north from here is interesting, but I can’t tell if it’s from Jason Love or the room north of here.

The Meatpacking Plant (Kenneth Pedersen)
This has a bit more interaction than the no-puzzle rooms, in that you cut open a gutted animal. Its placement between intense rooms makes it an important hub. (I’m not including this as a puzzle since it’s clear what to do once you have an item).

Balcony (Reina Adair)
Just have to look for a key. Fun writing, nice new trolley line.

A Shadowy Closet (Molly Ying)
This room felt like a different take than a lot of the other rooms, and though it’s just a simple item-use puzzle it took the game a different direction (the idea is that it’s a really messy closet).

Invasive Library (Justin de Vesine)
So nice to find a well-described, interesting room near the very end of the game with almost no puzzle at all. Huge relief.

Front Walk/Mudroom (Matt Weiner)
I think this implements some of Cloak of Darkness, which is cool. Also has a lock and a vital item, along with some cool descriptions.

Top of Stairs (Q. Pheevr)
Just need a little bit of examination to solve this one. Also has a cool clock.

Wine Cellar (Nathaniel Edwards)
A little tricky, but drinking a lot helps.

Abandoned Nursery (Harrison Gerard)
Some red herrings here, and I had some trouble with typing, but it’s pretty simple (and spooky).

Train Station Restroom (David Petrocco)
This room looked trickier than it was. These people need more opsec! Fun side interactions.

Courtyard (Finn Rosenloev)
I thought this was just a transit room but apparently I missed a puzzle with a knight. Very distinct style, sticks out completely.

Chapel (s. hammack)
Lots of red herrings with interesting religious implications. A little bit tricky solving the main puzzle, just because there are so many items.

Family Crypt (Justin Melvin)
Not too hard, but I still missed something important here this play through.

Rooms with light puzzles but a quick, interesting story

Study (Ian Holmes)
This room has great character in terms of descriptions. It takes a bit of work to get the key you need from here, and I think it is possible to die, but overall you can be in and out in just a few turns.

Master Bedroom (Rowan Lipkovits)
Kafka’s metamorphosis in a short, optional story sequence with minor puzzles. This was fun; I looked forward to it.

Mausoleum (Gary Butterfield)
Cool room that makes you retread the entire game up to that point (story-wise). I came here as one of my very last rooms so it’s fun to imagine redoing the whole thing.

Outside the Library (Gavin Inglis)
This room has stories that I think actual schoolchildren wrote, incorporated onto a noticeboard.

Drinking Fountain (Lucian Smith)
This is kind of not a simple puzzle since it’s tied into the books, but the main story happens automatically as you play the rest of the game. Meaningful, interesting.

Sitting Room (Buster Hudson)
This room has an awesome flashback to a historical time; kind of reminds me of the great game The Spectators. Pretty intense story!

Landing at the Bottom of Stairs (Mark Sample)
Very atmospheric, adds an element of danger, easily finished.

Curiosity Shop (Rachel Spitler)
A charming area, cute and simple. Lots of red herrings (including a particular one). Good writing.

Rooms that I look forward to for helping the game in general

Train Station Lobby (Shin)
The first simple room you experience. The coffee cup was placed here, which tells you (extremely important!) whether you’re ready to solve a room or not yet. This gives a grimy, neglected feel to Backwater and meshed well with nearby rooms.

Attic (Lane Puetz)
A room I like to see, because it has the solution to a puzzle from long ago, is the opening to the final main area, and has the final ‘author’s notes’ walkie-talkie

Exterior of Train Station (Emily Short with additions from Graham Nelson)
This has a light puzzle, but gives you a cool doll with procedural generation that can help you find things).

Estate Agent’s Office (Jenni Polodna)
The backpack is essential! This puzzle is actually kind of hard for me, I think I used the walkthrough for a command or two. But man I love the backpack. Ironically, I kept wishing there was a main pocket, only to realize near the end I could put stuff in the backpack, and not the pockets.

These next rooms stuck out to me more for puzzles than writing (though many had good writing) and were non-trivial.

Puzzly rooms with moderately tricky puzzles

Railway Platform (Naomi Hinchen)
The very first room, and fortunately it’s good. Has a lot you can do right away but requires a much later item to fully solve it. Very glad this room was first.

Padded Cell (Marius Müller)
The puzzles in this room are actually pretty hard. You lose all items and have your arms tied. Reminiscent of a similar room in Anchorhead, I think (unless I’m mixing it up). Needed walkthrough.

Steeple (Michael D. Hilborn)
Lots of reading to do and some takeouts. Cool bells, makes me think of Poe. The end of one long puzzle line.

Church Office (Llew Mason)
Has a hard puzzle box to solve. I like the atmosphere in this room.

The Churchyard (David Jose)
Should have been easy but still threw me for a loop. Has the flashlight that connects to the bridge.

The Cragne Manor’s Back Garden (Austin Auclair)
The atmosphere is great here, and there’s a lot more to the puzzles than you might expect. Several stages to solve this tricky area that fits in well with the rest of the map.

Outside Pub (Jason Lautzenheiser)
I always have trouble with this one, even if I know what I need to do. Doesn’t say it’s set in night time, but gives me a major liminal nighttime feel. Fun to walk through.

Branching Corridor (Zachary Hodgens)
Solved without hints, but you can die and it’s honestly pretty tricky experimenting here.

Rec Room (Zack Johnson)
Not too bad except for figuring out the first game to look at, which is pretty hard.

River Walk (Adam Whybray)
Really hard for me to figure out how to use the objects. ‘Hook’ and ‘pole’ not meaning the same things and trying to hook the buoy really threw me off. Cool finish thought.

Under the Bridge (Tenth)
The payphone is really memorable. Reminds me of the one in Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing. Is it related? Not sure.

Library (Mike Spivey)
Mike and I raced to beat the game first. I think he won? Such great memories. I wrote him while playing this game, reminiscing. Cool math puzzle here.

Basement (Ivan Roth)
I always use the walkthrough here. Is this the one with the fake keys? Ivaaaannn!!!

Tunnel Entrance (Grueslayer)/Subterranean Tunnel (Drew M)
This area seems pretty bugged. One room removes your items and light sources and you have to go the next one. The one with the candelabra is quite a complex and interesting area and the creepy woman in the other area was directly copied by me in the Stranger area of the horror area of Never Gives Up Her Dead. But the item dropping thing didn’t happen to me this play through and some light source didn’t get extinguished. I’ve heard of others having similar issues.

Dusty Office (Matthew Korson)
Good match for the meatpacking plant. A little tricky.

Balanced story and puzzle mid-size rooms

Station Security Room (Monique Padelis)
Can’t get here till very late but has a neat puzzle that requires close reading and an interesting story.

Milkweed (Caleb Wilson)
A great room to have early on. Cool surrealness, common with Caleb Wilson, and has strange geometry, weird plants, and Chumba Wumba.

The Invisible Worm (Sam Kabo Ashwell)
Very solid writing, some of the best of this author imo, and a relatively simple puzzle that feels satisfying once you realize you can do it.

Church Basement (Sean M. Shore)
Very cool combination of story and puzzle. Realizing how to turn on the vcr is truly awesome (even if you need a hint or two).

The Dim Recesses of the Forest (Jacqueline A. Lott Ashwell)
Subtle enough that many people didn’t realize there was a puzzle at all (thank heavens for coffee cup!). Great writing, the talents of the author of Fire Tower used for evil (or, in this case, horror).

Shack Exterior (Michael Lin)
Creepy writing doll is a great setup, fun to see.

Town Square, Backwater, VT (Marco Innocenti)
Kind of hard to know what to do, but the guy at the first is one of the most interesting PCs, and the puzzle is unique.

Backwater Jail (Marshal Tenner Winter)
Some light puzzles, very dramatic ending.

Gallery (YerrikTRB/Erica Newman)
I copied this in Never Gives Up Her Dead, adding an art area where you have to tear stuff down to proceed. Memorable.

Greenhouse (Petter Sjölund)
I never quite know what I’m doing with this room or what’s happening but it’s very visual distinctive and fun. It reminds me of other things somehow like Babel’s animals section or some part of that Monkfish game.

Great story-based areas with light puzzles that I look forward to

Narthex (Hanon Ondricek)
I always look forward to this one, and one hallucinated library in the horror area of my game Never Gives Up Her Dead is based on the library here. Makes have use of hallucination, surprise, possession. In the Magnus archives lingo, this is a realm of the Spiral. High school story with sad ending.

Inside the Shack (Daniel Ravipinto)
Excellent end to another long puzzle sequence. Amazing story about multiverses, agency, etc. I wonder if the spider in this also influence NGUHD’s horror area, where I have a spider pulling strings.

Laboratory (Michael Gentry)
Couldn’t remember how to deal with this without walkthrough. Great story, many have enjoyed how the original Anchorhead author responded to Cragne Manor.

Hallway South (Matt Schneider)
Such a deeply cool idea. I love this. Kind of makes the rest of the game make more sense. @mattlaschneider tagging so you know I love your room.

Pantry (Chris Conley)
I do need hints in this room but the concept is really funny and I like the whole information chain. Also who would have thought two rooms next to each other would independently use peaches so distinctively? Makes me scared of peaches.

Culmination areas

Backwater Public Library (Carl Muckenhoupt)
You spend a lot of time here. A dozen or more books have to be deposited here. Funny ending, good area.

Court (Ryan Veeder)
I speed ran getting here so I didn’t have to take notes. Getting here on a first play through makes you brain make a major connection and is super cool. Nice atmosphere.

The Observatory (Joey Jones)
Second to last room. Very fun assembling everything, feels appropriate powerful. Good work.

The Great Purple Unknown (Adri)
Love agri’s games. Usually small and fluffy in a good way. This room adds a lot of poignancy. Puzzle a bit tricky, needed walkthrough/hints both times.

This last category are sections that fulfill all my criteria for favorite games (refreshing, impressive, emotionally resonant)

Rooms I really look forward to for puzzles and story

The Music Room (Wade Clarke)
Very intense and gruesome area, fun location shifting system. Very, very creative puzzles. Could be its own game.

Outside the Plant (Chandler Groover)
Very gross, but also not gross. Puzzles aren’t too long but require creativity. I get walkthrough help. Look forward to this.

Cold Storage Room (Jeremy Freese)
Funny and fun to look forward to. Much easier since I played Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy first. Don’t think I fully understand what happens here but I like it.

Workroom (Andrew Plotkin)
Probably the room I most look forward to. Like Hadean Lands, but I actually think this room is harder than any comparable segment of Hadean Lands, since that game relies on its large size and numerous rituals and objects to make it harder for you to know what to do next, while this game requires more intuition leaps.

Overall

I think I’ll keep it in the top 25, maybe top 10, maybe not. Has some incredible parts, some great payoffs, some amazing writing, as well as some awful parts, some writing I don’t enjoy, and some bugs. Games in general feel like a way to communicate and be part of a community, and this game excels. Very interesting. Easy top 10 if it weren’t for my criteria, so when we go from 25 to 10 I’ll have to examine that.

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I definitely agree with your assessment of the bridge room! I think Jemma’s writing holds up well, but my implementation is patchy and I would have done it differently with what I know now.

Also, the Music Room is what made me immediately go invest in Wade Clarke’s then-current kickstarter.

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Theatre

Hmm, this one was interesting. Definitely fun to play. For those who haven’t, it’s a game that predates IFComp and Anchorhead, and which had some influence on Anchorhead. It’s a horror game set in a haunted theatre with journal pages scattered throughout telling you the story of Trent and Elizabeth. It also acknowledges Curses, with names referencing Meldrews and Graham Nelson.

It’s a long game, but not too hard. Unlike the Infocom games and One Eye Open, I was able to beat this without opening a walkthrough. I used hints once or twice but couldn’t find any relevant to my situation.

I remember I used to think that it felt unfinished due to the cave area having a bunch of exits that went nowhere, but now that I’ve played more games I think it was just a classic reference to maze-like rooms like Bedquilt in Adventure (Hadean Lands does this with a few rooms, too).

I loved playing this, but I don’t think it will make the top 10. I saw a review saying that it lacks cohesiveness, and I think that’s true. Playing without a walkthrough this time, it just felt like a grab bag of random things not really fully explained. Each individual set piece works, though. The greatest amount of writing and detail is in a several-pages-long info dump about the history of a real-life theatre (which I didn’t read this time).

I think puzzle-wise it has perfect pacing. Storywise I think it suffers to its influences (The Lurking Horror, Curses) and to its influencees (Anchorhead, maybe One Eye Open which shares several characteristics). Overall it’s like cake without frosting. The cake is really good, it’s just missing a crumb more pizzazz for my tastes. Definitely enjoyed it.

Replaying this made me feel like I’ve definitely improved in adventure gaming over the years. When I first played I had no idea how to progress and heavily used the walkthrough. Now, I find that the game is constrained pretty tightly and only gives you a few ways to progress, making it very fair. Fun to see an old reviewer call it ‘almost full size’.

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