Very curious if this is the Gary butterfield I think it is…
I’ve never heard of Gary Butterfield’s in general, so I’m not sure.
Six
I was saving this game for later since it’s a bit quicker than most of these big ones left at the end and because it’s fun.
It’s a game of what I call tag and the author calls tip. You’re a little girl at a party in a park and you have to chase down your six friends (oh, I just realized that that might be intentional as part of the name, which definitely references the age six as well). Some kids require directional-based puzzles, one is combat based, others require careful looking.
If you beat it once, you unlock a second version as the twin sister (who is dressed as a witch, as opposed to the fairy you start as). All of the puzzles become just a crumb harder, with combat requiring non combat actions, new commands to guess, and more social interactions.
The game makes heavy use of multimedia, with images, sound effects, and music, as well as multiple text styles. I was so impressed with this that I asked the author if I could port it to Bisquixe for web play, which he let me do.
It was fun and refreshing to play, I’m definitely impressed with it, and it’s charming emotionally. I don’t think I had it super high before, but I’ll definitely keep it in top 25 now.
Edit: We’re done to the last few games:
-Even Some More Tales from Castle Balderstone
-Endless, Nameless
-Curses
All of these are pretty big. I’ll probably take on balderstone next. I’ve eliminated all but 34 games from the top 25, so will chop off 9 more after consideration.
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Podcast host I like and I asked on Bluesky and he said yep. Wonder how he got roped in?
No t-zero?
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I love the story-based aspect of games. T-Zero has some great puzzles and the later parts of it are amazing, but the beginning just doesn’t appeal to me as strongly as the rest (I remember the future world was really cool).
I also love the conveniences of Inform/TADS/Dialog so much that playing earlier parser games just doesn’t give me as much as a thrill (I first played parser games in 2010 for 1 month and then got serious in 2015, so I didn’t play T-Zero until 2023 actually!) So I have no nostalgia for text adventures at all, I got into them in my 30s and just like how you can pick them up and put them down, or discretely play them in public without sound or images, and I like the great stories and puzzles you can have in them.
It would be fun to see your top 10/top 5/top whatever, since I did like the puzzly parts of T-Zero, so I feel like other games on your list would be fun to check out in the future. If you do have a list, feel free to post it here or on IFDB or on a separate thread. (and for you and anyone else, it doesn’t have to be ‘the top 10 best games of all time’, just 10 games that you personally enjoy.)
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Speaking of games that didn’t make my lists, there are a few I wonder if I should check as I get close to the end (I may or may not):
-Dr Ludwig and the Devil (and a couple other Linwood games)
-Andromeda Apocalypse
-Huh, guess I’m listing IFComp winners. Hunger Daemon? coloratura?
-Eurydice (I had it high before).
-I was going to say Wishbringer but I know in my heart it would be 50th place at highest.
-Anchorhead? I think some of the incest stuff turns me off from putting it high.
I guess it’s that a favorite game should be one I come back to a lot, and those games are all great but don’t pop into my head in the middle of the night (although I think Anchorhead did in 2015 and that’s how I got started again). Maybe I’ll try them again soon.
Oh, and
-Delusions
and
-Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina
When I dabbled in 2010 those seemed amazing. Heroes did too at the time (I still like it a lot).
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If you like stories, I’d say Delusions might be worth checking out. I think Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina is more on the puzzly side, so you might not be as fond of it. What did you think of The Mulldoon Legacy? I think NJAOB has a similar feel.
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I have played both those games, it’s just been so long I can’t remember how fun they are. I’ll definitely check out again based on your recommendations!
I do like the Mulldoon Legacy, but when I played it I was pretty new to IF games and I got my butt kicked by both the front door and the first area lol. I think it’s a great game though, and surprising it only has 42 ratings on IFDB.
Even Some More Tales from Castle Balderstone
This large work combines Twine and Inform games, with a twine backstory hopping in and out of different Inform minigames. There are 4 main Inform minigames with several smaller ones near the end.
The largest minigame, Visit Skuga Lake, was pulled off into its own game and is currently Ryan’s highest-rated solo work on IFDB.
Playing through, I was deeply impressed. Skuga Lake is of course fun. There was a dolphin metroidvanian game that was harder than I remembered (I spent around 15 minutes before making any progress this time), but which did a great job at contrasting brutality and horror with dolphin innocence. The game Levatermilia (I think it was) which was essentially, looking back, a retelling of a Poe story, had a lot more code finding and solving than I remembered, which was generally fun, but had a cryptogram (which I never enjoy doing and just use solvers for), but it integrated an alternate solution that worked well with the themes. The ending is telegraphed subtly throughout. The code-solving type was riddles. Here, I was focused a lot on the solutions, feeling at arm’s length from the story much of the time.
The harvest minigame was fun. Last time I didn’t undo at all. This time I did a couple of times but it wasn’t useful. I do wonder if there’s more than one ending. I met a lady early on in the caves that I tried to meet over and over but only met and married someone else. I’d love to decompile this but I think the whole thing is web-only and not publicly-sourced. The capitalism explanation actually makes sense, I suppose. I enjoyed this but was constantly thinking.
The big Skuga lake one was fun. I had difficulty this time because I missed a drawer, even though I knew something had to be in that room.
The final game was implemented in a cool way but didn’t draw me in completely.
Overall, I feel like this game is still high in favorites but closer to Anchorhead or Counterfeit Monkey where I deeply admire and imitate it but it doesn’t strike a resonant chord. I do think it is underplayed; I put it on my IF top 50 before when Victor Gijsbers last ran it and will do so next time. After all, it only has 16 ratings while one sub-part of it has 19.
So I think the highest-ranking solo Ryan Veeder work going forward will be the timed game (!), which is pretty funny since I generally dislike that kind of thing (of course, that game has a twist).
Only two games left! Both are large.
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Endless, Nameless
By all accounts, this shouldn’t be one of my favorite games. Adam Cadre often has content I’m not comfortable with. This game has unfair and tedious puzzles in its first section, so much that it encourages you to record and replay your moves. It refers to a lot of events that are long gone and has an outlook on life and the internet that may be outdated.
On the other hand, I really enjoy this game. I played through the whole thing in one session and tried a lot of endings afterwards. I just had fun!
This is several games in one.
The first is an old, colorful adventure game (literally colorful:)
This game in-lore is an old MUD that was converted to a single player game. I didn’t realize for years that it was based on Paul Pank’s old Westfront game (or at least heavily influenced by it). Panks had a penchant for taverns and towns laid out on grids and the old man at the beginning is familiar.
It also uses a magic system that’s unique (may be borrowed from some other source, but I’m not aware if that’s the case). You load up pouches in a wand with a needle like an iv then squeeze it into you (kind of like drugs, I guess). Then you cast the spell.
This world is unfair, there’s no way you’d think of half the things you have to do to beat it.
When you die (which took me a long time to do, actually), you get sent to a more polished world with modern presentation.
This world is much more chatty and more words are enabled. There are games to play and shows to watch. No puzzles though (well, a few puzzles). Interestingly, this world has hint givers to talk to and you can go back to the old world.
Anyway, it’s all connected to levels of reality, with the real world, game world, death world, and troll world all interweaved. As you start winning you see more connections.
The themes of the game are about progress in game characters, shifts in tastes from MUDs to single player games to conversational games to whatever, and that trolls ruin online spaces and only banning them can help, not interacting with them.
I guess that latter one is true, but it’s less relevant these days. This forum doesn’t have any more of the ultra mean trolls like Jacek Pudlo. It still has people that say things like “I hate choice-based games” or “real adventures are ones where text plays 30 letters per second and there are no implicit actions” but those people tend to do enough nice things as well that they don’t get banned. I guess we did have the raid on IFDB by a group a few years ago trying to upvote all their own games. In the end, banning them really was the only option.
Anyway, Adam Cadre had a knack for making visually stunning games using the z-machine and colors, something that became lost with online glulx games. Inform 11 sounds like it might be moving towards implementing css online better. Bisquixe can do these things now, but the thing about z-code is that it had colors running correctly both offline and online. I’d love to see that be common again.
The game is generally polished, the record/replay stuff makes you feel smart, like the Hadean lands implicit actions. Overall, still impressive, still fun to play. For sure top 25, likely still top10.
Only one left: Curses! Will it be overthrown as my favorite game of all time? We will see!
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History does not record how Paul Panks felt about this parody, (or is it a homage?) of his games. One can’t help feel that Cadre might have made the same point about online culture without making fun of one vulnerable individual.
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The game in question was released some years after Panks died, but I read it as an affectionate tribute. There were others, I sometimes think about the sentiment of appreciation spreading mostly after his passing.
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Ah, my bad. Yes, three years after. It’s been a long time since I played it.
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I’d forgotten that as well. 2012 is very late for a Cadre game.
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Curses
Whew! The very last game, and the one I’ve claimed for years is my favorite!
I haven’t replayed it very much since I was in my mega-walkthrough phase. I did go back in November 2023 (maybe when I was replaying all games with 100+ ratings) and made invisiclues for it. They were super-helpful this time specifically for telling me all the ways I could lock myself out of victory (and one more that I added).
This was a completely new experience for me. Since the beginning, every time I played Curses I just hit a point where I used the walkthrough straight through. The first time, I used it even to get the dumbwaiter to work. Later, I started using it well before the croquet puzzle. And so on.
This time, I didn’t need it at all except for the language numbers (I got them wrong) and the tower.
Something’s changed in my brain in the last three years where I can actually play these old adventure games and figure things out. Obviously I’m cheating by remembering past playthroughs in my mind, but that didn’t use to help me.
So Alexandria, the church and the villa were like playing a brand new game for me. I had never gotten anywhere close to playing those without the walkthrough. It was a way better experience than I thought. For instance, I was able to see why we swap scrolls for the scholars, by giving them to them in the ‘right’ tubes and watching what happened. I was surprised at how fair most things were. (I did at one point see the name of an invisiclue topic that helped me, as well).
I noticed that the clues to things were often very close to or strongly associated with the place they were used, which I hadn’t expected. The history of The Meldrews, the prayer book, and the classical dictionary gave me a lot more insight into why I was doing all these crazy shenanigans. For once everything made sense.
I loved this game when first playing because of the sense of endless wonder. So many things to find. So many side quests. I loved the little quotes that appeared when I played (so sad Glulx makes these impossible, except I figured out bisquixe can do them by just removing the css from the quote box so it floats in the middle. Regular quixe or parchment could easily do this too).
But now, instead of endless wonder and a sense of never comprehending it, I finally comprehend it, and I think I love it even more. It was awesome when the two puzzles I was stuck on at last resolved each other (the tower and the knight). So many things became clear. The reason we knew to bronze the mural. How to get Austin in Alexandria if we can’t enter it twice. Lagaching for fun.
I guess what I realized doing this is, it isn’t that I like text adventure games, and Curses is a particularly good one. It’s not, really, if you started on pretty much any other text adventure; it lacks the gentleness and smoothness of later games (amusingly, influenced by Graham Nelson’s own player’s bill of rights) and is perhaps too self-amused and has too many literary ambitions for players of earlier type-ins and such (though I suppose many Infocom fans like it).
No, it’s the other way around; I like Curses, the game, and text adventures remind me of it, so I like those as well. I picked up choice-based games to be polite to the community, and they’ve become interesting in their own right, but for me Curses defined what I wanted a text adventure to be.
It’s still solidly my number one, and I don’t anticipate that changing.
Next, I’m going to gather my thoughts and whittle down to top 25, then I’ll figure out a way to narrow again to top 10. I might do a brief explanation of why some games I highly regard don’t enter in.
Edit:
Coming back to add more of this, I think I loved this time, with how much I saw messages about the family and back rooms, how we’re never in the real manor, never with the family outside our lovely aunt. We’re always on the edges. That’s how I liked it growing up, being in a big house and knowing people were nearby but not needing to see them.
I liked the mythological and literary references as well. I felt like the game loves and rewards reading. I also like how the ending recontextualizes everything you’ve done.
I did borrow from this game in Never Gives Up Her Dead. The tool in that game is essentially like all the rods combined in one. The greek mythology reference in Absence of Law were also partially inspired by this, I think.
I’m not sure that I read the ending as all magic leaving the world, like I discussed with people before. The druids enchant the hill to be protected by the Meldrews, and (I just realized that Helene was looking for ‘the perfect blue’. the blue stone!). Actually, moreover, they enchant the Meldrews to be druids by seeking after the stone. It never really says the stone itself is magic. And several of the meldrews did seem to learn druidic things by seeking for it. This leaves open several possibilities. One is that the character learns druidic magic by seeking the stone and then remains an expert (the rod of infinity can still be stricken after getting the euro note, for instance). I guess the position others have put forward though is more likely, that magic just ends, since that fits with Spellbreaker and with Lord of the Rings’s books (which were popular when this game was written).
I swear I wrote more about the game’s themes at one point, at how prominent resurrection is. I’ll try to find it.
Edit:
Some of my past writing on Curses:
6 Likes
Okay, time for top 25:
Creatures Such as We
Curses, Graham Nelson
Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road, Kyle Marquis
Worlds Apart, Suzanne Britton
To Hell in a Hamper, J. J. Guest
Cannery Vale, Hanon Ondricek (as Keanhid Connor)
The Little Match Girl Approaches the Golden Firmament, Ryan Veeder
Endless, Nameless, Adam Cadre
Deadline Enchanter, Alan DeNiro
Dual Transform, Andrew Plotkin
Hadean Lands, Andrew Plotkin
Open Sorcery, Abigail Corfman
Rogue of the Multiverse, C.E.J. Pacian
Spellbreaker, Dave Lebling
Stay?, E. Jade Lomax
Choice of Magics, Kevin Gold
SLAMMED!, Paolo Chikiamco
Heart of the House, Nissa Campbell
Cragne Manor, Ryan Veeder, Jenni Polodna et al.
Six, Wade Clarke
One Eye Open, Caelyn Sandel (as Colin Sandel) and Carolyn VanEseltine
City of Secrets, Emily Short
Map, Ade McT
Hana Feels, Gavin Inglis
Narrowing it down to these 25 was really tough! Every game I cut hurt. I cut You Are Standing at a Crossroads for being short, Ballyhoo just because, even though I love it, it lacks a few modern niceties, and Shade because it was short and I have three Andrew Plotkin games total.
Next step will be taking this and assigning them scores in each of those three areas. I may fudge the numbers anyway, but this is my attempt to make the top 10. I may replay Creatures such as we and To Hell in a Hamper one last time, and maybe play Delusions and Eurydice as controls. I might finish tonight; certainly this week!
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Okay, I replayed Delusions and Eurydice for comparison. They were opposites in some ways; Delusions had a lot of items without descriptions, difficult puzzles, uninteractive npcs and objects just listed as being in the room. I didn’t finish.
Eurydice had a single item to solve all the puzzles and rich descriptions, though there are other endings. It was good, maybe top 100, but the story didn’t call out to me, and the story is the major part.
So, with those in place, let’s rate the games! I’ll be rating out of 10 for how impressive it is, out of 10 for how refreshing/enjoyable to play it is, and out of 10 for how much of an emotional impact or connection or history I have with it. All with have high scores; that’s why they’re here.
Hana Feels, Gavin Inglis
Impressive: 7. Love the profiles, nothing much tricky here.
Refreshing: 9. I like simulating helping people.
Emotional: 8. Not personally relevant directly, but related to things I feel.
Total: 24
Map, Ade McT
Impressive: 6. Maybe some tricky coding, but some parts are a bit bare and the time of day makes most days feel empty.
Refreshing: 7.5 Simple, clean gameplay
Emotional: 9, definitely relevant to divorce and career choices. Makes me cry. Maybe 10.
Total:22.5
City of Secrets, Emily Short
Impressive: 9. One of Short’s biggest works, pretty neat stuff.
Refreshing: 7. Got stuck a lot, otherwise pretty cool
Emotional: 7. I just like the ambiance more than anything
Total: 23
One Eye Open, Caelyn Sandel (as Colin Sandel) and Carolyn VanEseltine
Impressive: 6. Kind of buggy/missing synonyms
Refreshing: 9. Fun to go through the laundry chute that is also a giant fanged mouth.
Emotional: 8. Just cool to me, not relevant to my life.
Total: 23
Six, Wade Clarke
Impressive: 9. So much care and attention put in, graphics, sound, multiple playthroughs. Gold standard (only reserving 10 for things like Hadean Lands).
Refreshing: 10. Very lowkey chill
Emotional: 8. Just fun.
Total: 27
Cragne Manor, Ryan Veeder, Jenni Polodna et al.
Impressive: 7.5. Some of the most impressive feats of all time, mixed with some dross.
Refreshing: 8. Frustrating in parts, to a level of 4 or 5, but the rush of finishing is high.
Emotional: 9. Lots of community connection here, and some good rooms.
Total: 24.5
Heart of the House, Nissa Campbell
Impressive: 9. I’d love to write like this.
Refreshing: 8. Sometimes not as engrossing as other COG.
Emotional: 8. Good old horror story that makes me care by the end.
Total: 25
SLAMMED!, Paolo Chikiamco
Impressive: 7. Definitely surpassed in technical feats by later games.
Refreshing: 8.5. Breezy and easy to play.
Emotional: 10. Love this game and its storylines. I’ve shared this with many people.
Total: 25.5
Choice of Magics, Kevin Gold
Impressive: 9.5. Awesome choicescript game.
Refreshing: 9. Not always the most fun, but generally really cool to play with the toys.
Emotional: 7. Don’t feel a strong connection to it but it’s fun.
Total: 25.5
Stay?, E. Jade Lomax
Impressive: 8. It’s mostly simple branching and tracking state, but what isn’t?
Refreshing: 8. Gets annoying sometimes skipping through stuff.
Emotional: 8. No big moments, just overall deep.
Total: 24
Spellbreaker, Dave Lebling
Impressive: 10. Perhaps the greatest Infocom game for my tastes.
Refreshing: 8. Infocom still lacks some modern conveniences
Emotional: 9. The last two time travel puzzles always get me.
Total: 27
Rogue of the Multiverse, C.E.J. Pacian
Impressive: 8. Grids are kind of lackluster, rest is solid.
Refreshing: 8. Ditto
Emotional: 9.5. Lizard women is cool, motorcycle sequence is fun, toilet worm is bizarre.
Total:25.5
Open Sorcery, Abigail Corfman
Impressive: 8. Twine with good graphics, layout and sound. Cool system.
Refreshing: 10. Got a great play loop style. I’d put it at 8 for the Jingle Bell DLC, but I’m not counting it.
Emotional: 7.5. I like the flame spirit growing up part, didn’t super love the humans.
Total: 25.5
Hadean Lands, Andrew Plotkin
Impressive: 10. Hard to get better than this.
Refreshing: 10. Hard to get better than this
Emotional: 8. The characters don’t really call out to me. Ambiance is cooler than story.
Total: 28
Dual Transform, Andrew Plotkin
Impressive: 7. Awesome but simple concept.
Refreshing: 10. Satisfies my lizard brain.
Emotional: 8. Nothing special, just cool ambiance.
Total: 25
Deadline Enchanter, Alan DeNiro
Impressive: 8. The concept is cool, implementation is spotty but with a good reason.
Refreshing: 9. I like following a walkthrough without guilt lol
Emotional: 8. Just a bit confusing is all.
Total: 25
Endless, Nameless, Adam Cadre
Impressive: 10. Amazing use of color and different layouts, complex magic system, combat, clever puzzles.
Refreshing: 9 annoying replaying sometimes but lots of fun.
Emotional: 8. Was more emotional in the past but still good now. Endings feel cinematic.
Total: 27
The Little Match Girl Approaches the Golden Firmament, Ryan Veeder
Impressive: 10. Ryan Veeder has great skills.
Refreshing: 8. Designed to be played smoothly and easily. Navigation on the circular track can be annoying a bit but not a ton.
Emotional: 9: Cool setting, fun characters.
Total: 27
Cannery Vale, Hanon Ondricek (as Keanhid Connor)
Impressive: 10. Very cool game, very complex. Love the settings of explicitness.
Refreshing: 9. Grinding money is annoying, don’t like the nap settings, otherwise great.
Emotional: 10 for the real ending, 7 or 6 for the bad ending. But I consider real ending canon.
Total: 29
To Hell in a Hamper, J. J. Guest
Impressive: 8. Redone several times, has some genuinely tricky things coded (like boomerang).
Refreshing: 9. It’s funny to replay!
Emotional: 9. Some jokes don’t hit as hard the second time but still very funny.
Total: 26
Worlds Apart, Suzanne Britton
Impressive: 9. Huge in size, complex.
Refreshing: 8. Annoying at times to figure out right command.
Emotional: 10. Awesome storyline.
Total: 27
Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road, Kyle Marquis
Impressive: 10. Kyle Marquis’s best IMO.
Refreshing: 10. Really fun to play.
Emotional: 10. Love the decaying ambiance.
Total: 30
Curses, Graham Nelson
Impressive: 10! Love it.
Refreshing: 10. Had a great time replaying. I don’t recommend it to anyone. Either this game finds you and you love it, or you find it through others and tolerate it.
Emotional: 10. Love the ending!!!
Total: 30
Creatures Such as We
Impressive: 7. Not as tricky as I once thought it was; I’ve played lots of really intricate CS games since.
Refreshing: 8. Just a chill game.
Emotional 9. I still don’t like the suffering part but the game really hits home in many ways.
Total: 24
Final top 10 listed in next post for easy linking.
1 Like
Top 10:
- Curses by @GrahamNelson
- VtM: Night Road by Kyle Marquis
- Cannery Vale by @HanonO
- Hadean Lands by @zarf
- Little Match Girl Approaches the Golden Firmament by @Afterward
- Spellbreaker by Infocom.
- Endless, Namless by Adam Cadre
- Worlds Apart by Suzanne Britton
- Six by @severedhand
- To Hell in a Hamper by @J_J_Guest
New games on the list: Little Match Girl Approaches the Golden Firmament and Six. I’m not too surprised about Six; I think I just misjudged it as ‘light’ in the past. I am surprised that Golden Firmament made it this far since I just randomly subbed it in earlier. I don’t even know if I actually love it or it just represents Ryan Veeder’s games in general, but it is honestly great and I do find it memorable (like the bird god thing, that’s cool, or the endings).
Falling off the list: Cragne Manor and Creatures Such as We. Cragne is great but just kind of choppy. And Creatures Such as We just hasn’t held up in terms of emotional resonance with where I am in life.
Overall, this wasn’t really necessary to do, especially publicly, but I thought it was fun and hope some people discovered new games they liked or fun insights into games they already loved. I know I had a great time and rekindled my love for IF in general. I love this community and had a great time writing this! I’ll probably revise my list again in a few years. I’ll just rename my old one and post the new one. Thanks!
Edit: One thing they all have in common is that they’re packed with interesting and cool things. There’s very little boilerplate or standard/expected things. As many actions as possible are rewarded. That made a real difference both in my final rankings and in my initial selections.
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I’ve enjoyed reading this thread, and I’m glad to see that To Hell in a Hamper still brings you joy! It’s why I write 'em! 
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we’re podbuddies from back in the day, I guested on Abject Suffering a couple-few times : )
Ryan & I got a pretty good mix of complete strangers to IF community veterans to personal friends; for example, Horse Bathroom Guy & I are now married with a toddler (who has thus far retained his own skeleton)
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