The Reverend's IFComp 2024 Reviews

Last year, I had the pleasure of entering IFComp for the first time. It was tons of fun, and I can’t wait to enter again; just not this year, since I’m working on something else that I’d like to finish first. That said: I always felt bad that I got so much fantastic feedback from the community, yet I didn’t review, judge or play any of the other entries. So this year, I’m finally going to rectify this, and hopefully be able to give something back, by playing and reviewing as many games as I can get my hands and time on.

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LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST by THE BODY & THE BLOOD

So I’m leisurely scrolling through the comp entries for the first time, waiting for something to jump out at me… In situations like this, a title like LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST certainly helps. Especially when it comes with the added promise of “perversions” and “degeneracy”. See, that’s the great thing about IFComp: it has a little something for everyone.

It didn’t take me long to notice that I was in for a trans coming-of-age story – almost an IF staple by now. Anyway, I was immediately pulled in. For once, there is the pitch-perfect presentation. Font, layout, timing, colors, transitions, social media elements – spotless. And it’s not just style, it actually supports the story to great effect.

But if you come for the sleek looks, you’ll stay for the writing. I did. Even though this easily more than 2-hour-long game comes without a flipping save or bookmark feature. I had to structure my whole flipping day around it, lugging my flipping laptop around, hoping the flipping battery would–

Look, the bottom line is that I really wanted to finish it once I started. Maybe it’s a me-thing, but I found L and his inner monologue extremely relatable. I don’t know how much of the writing is autobiographical, but it feels very real. It’s also funny. It can even be unfunny, if it wants to be. There is a scene at a hairdresser, and it’s so good, bringing out the best in all the aforementioned qualities. “Social horror”, a comment on the game’s itch.io page called it.

I would have liked a bit more interactivity, although there seems to be some branching going on that leads to two different endings. I only got one, but it felt perfect.

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Your review is appreciated. A lack of save/continue is an unfortunate limitation of inkrunner (unless this is a feature that does exist, which we are trying to clarify with the creator of the tool). The solution would be to not use inkrunner, but that’s doing the heavy lifting of styling and images, which you (very generously!) mentioned as supporting the game to the point it even works as art. We decided to just bite the bullet in this case.

Hopefully saves will be found in future builds. I can offer solace that one person I watched play through had to run across the house to grab their laptop charger midway through act 1.

Also, I would consider this game as semi-autobiographical. Parts of this game contain real experiences that happened to myself and people I know, but I would like that line to be kept blurred for various reasons.

Cheers,
– THE BLOOD

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First Contact by dott. Piergiorgio

Just one review ago, I said that IFComp has a little something for everyone.

Call me dense, but I surely didn’t expect where this one was going. I was simply curious, because I know that the author has been building this big, elaborate world or a while now, and I wanted to see what it’s all about. I think going in blind into this first contact is worth something, so I’m going to say that I enjoyed it, and spoiler-tag the rest of the review.

THE REST OF THE REVIEW

First Contact is an erotic fantasy romance that certainly won’t be everybody’s cup of milk.

First and foremost, it’s in dire need of an elite squad of native-speaking proof-readers, as in its current form it’s difficult to read and riddled with errors (some of them obvious italianisms, like missing pronouns in front of verbs, “having” years, etc.). It doesn’t help that the story consistently relies on large dumps of exposition. While the amount of effort put into the lore and worldbuilding certainly is impressive, it would benefit from being less explicit and frontloaded, and more naturally integrated into the story flow. There is just too much of it crammed into what I understand is supposed to be a short prologue.

Another thing that doesn’t help is that there’s almost zero interactivity. This is an almost linear “click to continue” kind of story, so there’s no opportunity to explore the setting at your own pace. The centerpiece is literally a series of historical lectures, even though, ultimately, it’s not as dry as it sounds. Wink wink.

In general, the writing is all over the place. I kind of dig the larger-than-life sense of pathos and reverence, veering into strange digressions at every opportunity. Even in the story’s most incomprehensible moments, it feels genuine and heartfelt and delightfully overexcited in a kid-in-a-candy-store sort of way. The sprinkles of comic relief clash awkwardly with the rest of the tone, but at this point we’re so deep into camp territory, we might as well embrace it as part of the charm.

Which finally brings us to the horny elephant in the room: To say that the story leans into a lactation kink would be the understatement of the century. Believe me, you are not ready for the sheer scale, epicness and gravity the author manages to squeeze from the concept of erupting mammary milk. Even if you’re not into this particular kink, you have to admire the level of glorious artistic indulgence.

So while First Contact certainly isn’t “good” in a traditional sense, its relentlessly escalating sense of genuine weirdness nevertheless brought me much joy. You tell me we may get to play a full-sized, parser-based isekai set in this world? Count me in.

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Thank you for your review (and more so for the feedback implicit in the review)

For the elite squad of proofreaders, don’t worry for the “main dish”: having watched the handling and proceedings of the final public beta of Never gives up her dead I have a precise idea of how to handle the 0.99RCx version of Isekai, during the fall of '26… :wink:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Focal Shift by Fred Snyder

From the moment I saw Focal Shift on the ballot, I knew it was going to be up my alley. The blurb alone: perfect. Because, you know, sometimes you just want to pretend to be a hoodie-clad mercenary hacker on an infiltration mission, preferably gone wrong. I took the dive and wasn’t disappointed.

From the intro paragraphs on, I got what I came for. Focal Shift is a cyberpunk short story that hits the expected genre beats with laser-focused precision. There aren’t any big surprises here; it’s all about indulging in the fantasy. The writing is sparse and effective; it knows how much it needs to say and keeps it there. Characters, the PC included, have exactly the amount of personality needed for their role in the story. Terms like gadget names or in-universe slang are dropped without much explanation, but put into context and named in such a way that you can pretty much understand what they are if you’ve ever read a cyberpunk story before. I had to double-check whether “grid jockey”, for example, was taken from somewhere else, because it sounds like it’s been around forever. (Unless I’m wrong, it’s something the author came up with. There have been grid runners, there have been desk jockeys; but no grid jockeys.)

The basic gameplay is similarly straightforward. Strictly speaking, you need nothing more than directions, “look”, “take”, “talk”, and the game’s special commands, “identify” and “hack”. (Considering that the parser is servicable, but not outstanding, the game may even have benefitted from a limited verb set.) The environment you are set loose in is reasonably confined, but leaves enough room to explore and experiment.

Now, pardon me while I have a strange interlude go off on a paragraph-long tangent about hacking mechanics in games.

When you make a game about a hacker, one of the big questions is, obviously, how to gamify the actual hacking part. And because no one on Earth knows what real hacking actually looks like, the possibilities are literally endless. Pseudo coding? Check. Floating through cyberspace shooting at geometric shapes? Check. Playing a game of Frogger? Hell, why not. You don’t even have to do a “minigame”. Just roll the dice. Or don’t. In the best cyberpunk game of all-time, Deus Ex, hacking is completely passive and succeeds automatically. You just sit there and wait. The challenge is not getting caught, because there is a simulated world going on around you. The later sequels had a minigame, and it was pretty good, with small optional challenges and rewards. Anyway, my point is, it doesn’t matter. It has to get the feel across – a sense of mischievous satisfaction; like you just got away with something.

So how does Focal Shift fare then? It goes for two kinds of minigames that manage the “feel” part pretty well. For the most part, I enjoyed them. I won’t spoil how they work, since figuring out their actual rules is part of the puzzle, but that’s exactly where I had some problems. Unless I missed something, the first minigame seems very underexplained in-game. Without the walkthrough, it would have taken a much smarter man than me to figure out what I was supposed to do. I think it would be worth it to convey the mechanics a little more explicitly, because once I understood, the actual mingame was enjoyable enough. The second one was easier to figure out for me, but I still had to abuse the “undo” command at its “final boss” instance.

I don’t want to end on a negative note though, since Focal Shift is a solid little game that I had fun with. So here’s a joke. What do you call it when I’m rummaging through my backpack, going “Where’s my damn phone?” A vocal sift.

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Another one for the list of entries I definitely have to play!

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Thanks a lot for the thorough review! I agree that it would have benefited from some in-game explanation of how the word hacking minigames worked. I wanted it to be an interesting puzzle, but a simple explanation of the clues would have been helpful without wrecking the challenge.

I look forward to dropping a post-comp version of the game that takes this kind of stuff into consideration.

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KING OF XANADU by MACHINES UNDERNEATH

I’m going to be completely honest here: When I came across KING OF XANADU, I realized that I didn’t really know what Xanadu even is. I mean, I knew it’s something old from an “exotic” culture. I knew that Charles Foster Kane’s mansion was named after it. So before starting the game, I checked Wikipedia, and learned that Xanadu was the city where Kublai Kahn spent his summers.

Kublai Kahn! I did remember him. He’s the guy who tried to invade Japan with a giant fleet, but it was destroyed by a taifun. So he tried it again, with an even bigger fleet, but it was destroyed by an even bigger taifun. (There is a lesson in here somewhere. I’m not sure what it is.)

The Xanadu in KING OF XANADU is a different Xanadu though. Before we get further into that, let me put up a spoiler tag. I’ll try to avoid specifics, but, as so often, going in blind is recommended.

THE REAL REVIEW STARTS HERE

KING OF XANADU is a short piece of Twine-like hyperfiction about the fall of an empire, and you, its mad king. But the way it’s written makes it feel even bigger and more terrible than that, like a fever dream of the end of the word.

The tone is grand and harrowing, with an undercurrent of gallows humor. There are a few moments when this subtle layer of knowing snark feels a little too exposed, making the prose veer into tropey-ness, but most of the time, the humor adds an intriguing “unreliable narrator” feel to the biblical horror and its strange, flowery style, which reminded me of Alexis Kennedy’s works.

Much of this “unreliable narrator” component lies in the choices. KING OF XANADU is an excellent example how interactivity can be used to great effect even if there isn’t a lot of agency. Without it, the events of the story would seem like some random divine fate, cruel and undeserved, slowly driving you insane. But add the choices, and it quickly becomes clear that this is all your fault, because you and system that keeps you in place have been head-over-heels bonkers from the beginning. Parallels to current political issues are, as they say, “purely coincidental”…

Two more quick things: 1) The presentation could use one more layer of polish. There are a few pretty notable typos, and the text is just standard black on white with blue links. (Maybe that’s why I was so inclined to use the old-school moniker “hyperfiction” when describing it.) 2) Even if there are some close runners-up, this may be my favorite cover art of the comp.

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Though in my experience, “Xanadu” spelled like that usually isn’t a reference to Shangdu, but an unfinished opium-inspired poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

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Okay, I ran out of steam a little when it comes to reviews. Sometimes life just happens (a lot of it). But! I spent every moment I could spare playing The Bat on my phone, working through the protagonists’s increasingly absurd to-do-list, bit by bit. (I used the “think” command all the time.)

The Bat by Chandler Groover

That was the second weirdest Batman game I have ever played (the first being the one on the Spectrum where he has to find all the parts of his car to get out of the batcave).

That the genre of The Bat is listed as “superhero” may be a cheeky joke, but it’s also accurate. The superhero is called Albert, and his power is being the best damn butler valet of all-time, no matter what his occupation throws at him. Like a true samurai (“one who serves”), he has a job to do and he is going to do it. And his job happens to involve a master who… has issues. If you’re wondering if making the servant the hero of the story amounts to some kind of theme, then you’re on the right track. Albert is a straight man in a world of “eccentric” asshole millionaires who don’t consider him much of a human. Midway through the second act you’ll be ready to get out some guillotines.

At the same time, the writing stays clever and funny throughout, because, after all, it is a Chandler Groover story. The slapstick antics of Master Bryce are a standout; he’s probably the most sympathetic of all the millionaires. A guy who has no idea what he’s doing, with ambitions that are clearly out of his element. (Ending spoilers: That all changes at the end, of course, when it turns out that, when Bryce does come to his senses, he’s a just another asshole millionaire.)

The game design is excellent. The concept is so simple, yet I’ve never seen anything like it. The map is small, and the puzzles are very straightforward. You’re always more or less explicitly told what to do, and you only have one verb, so the “solving” itself is not terribly complicated. But there is an abundance of items, and the inventory space is severely limited, to a small pocket and two hands.

You’ll spend a lot of time dropping items, picking up items, remembering where you dropped items… It sounds awful, but it isn’t, on the contrary, because it works so well with the scenario. Frustrations like “My hands are full” or “Where the hell did I leave the damn broom?” become a part of the narrative and the comedy – and, because everything else is so streamlined, they turn into the game’s semi-emergent main mechanic. I can’t remember ever playing another game where I enjoyed a limited inventory, where the fact that I can’t do something because both of my hands are currently full actually filled me with delight.

“A crossword at war with a narrative”? Not at all. The Bat is a perfect example of how to make peace.

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One more for the road before I enter my votes, since I’ve played this one anyway. (For what it’s worth, I could say of no other comp game that I’ve played through it multiple times!)

Uninteractive Fiction by Leah Thargic

A game like this only works in something like IFComp, because it needs an audience that happily accepts the challenge of thinking of something clever of funny to say about something, even if it has the least possible amount of substance. Of course, the IF community did deliver on that front. I think the thread for the game is the biggest for any comp game (55 posts as of now)!

So I’m not going to try and be funny or clever; that’s been done. Instead I’m going to use this game’s premise as a jumping-off point to reflect about this comp and decide on my ratings, because the question of the “I” in IF is something that I’ve thought about a lot for the past few days.

Two of the games I’ve played have basically been “uninteractive”; another one was at most slightly interactive. Yet I enjoyed all three of them on account of their writing. How do I rate something like The Bat, with its intricate, expertly designed, highly polished game mechanics against something like Sixtuple L, which I basically just clicked through for three hours, but which strongly affected me through its writing?

But even the writing itself has a creative and a mechanical side. How much weight do you give to grammar, spelling, punctuation? How to rate something that is seriously flawed on a technical level, but bursting with creativity, personality and passion?

And, of course, how to rate Uninteractive Fiction itself, its commendable (?) commitment to low effort? It could be worse, couldn’t it? I like a War Games reference. It plays a funny sound. I mean, it’s competent? Then again, it’s not very generous. I usually prefer my jokes more needlessly elaborate. (Like my men.)

[Smoke break]

Alright, the jury is back. I’ve now decided on all my ratings. As far as Uninteractive Fiction is concerned: Whatever goal the author set for themselves, I wish them the best.

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