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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