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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