The most popular XYZZY Award winners (as judged by total plays recorded on IFDB up to circa June 1st 2025) tend to be well-recognized, but how many of these least popular XYZZY Award winners do you know?
* Note that 2011 had a one-off XYZZY Award for Special Recognition, which was awarded to Zombie Exodus; this is technically the least popular for that year.
Some of these games certainly donāt seem like they should be on this list! Which are your favorites? What would you recommend about them?
I like Night Road immensely more than anything on the list, with it being near my top 10 of all time. Being commercial and non-parser probably hurts its popularity.
After that, Muldoon Legacy and Cakes and Ale are both very solid games that I expect many people would enjoy. Lady Thalia is part of a series of games involving a gentlewoman catthief that are easy to play and fun, with a lot of idalogue.
Beyond that, there are games where I think about half of all people would enjoy based on their niche:
1893: A Worlds Fair Mystery (huge game with a very detailed map of the actual worldās fair and a plot about finding a bomb)
Tales of the Travelling Swordsman (has a lot in common with the recent Cut the Sky, as youāre a swordsman who has to deal with a series of encounters in linear order)
Fifteen Minutes (an intense puzzle where you have to work out exactly what minutes you and more than 10 copies of you enter and leave a time machine over 15 minutes, as well as doing advanced math)
1958: Dancing with Fear. Solid, short, atmospheric parser game.
Once and Future and Sand-dancer: Both were in the recent IF Playoffs, check those for some interesting insights (the first is a former commercial game hyped up for years and the latter is a demo game by Aaron Reed with spirit animals near a reservation)
Other games are interesting but Iām not sure if others would like or not. My Angel and Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory have the same concept: ensuring that the parser transcript reads like a novel. There are no error messages; instead, play just progresses. The \> symbol is deprecated and the games are formatted interestingly. My Angel is a fantasy story, Synesthesia Factory is an urban sci-fi capitalistpunk (Iām making up words) game.
I donāt think Ice-Bound Concordance is available anymore. Iāve wanted to try it over the years but havenāt been able to. The Alexisgrad game is a multiplayer game. Earl Grey is a wordplay game with lots of puzzles but not a lot of story, if I remember. And The Tempest is written in Iambic pentameter and implemented by Graham Nelson!
And rat chaos if funny and short, with pictures.
The others are all interesting (though I havenāt played Dominique Pamplemousse - Itās All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!) but donāt evoke strong feeligns in me. Although the puzzle in The Recruit that won the award was pretty great, and I stole it (with attribution) for Never Gives Up Her Dead.
It seems to still be available as a free download for Windows PC:
To play past the early sections requires a copy of the accompanying hard-copy book āThe Ice-Bound Compendiumā. It isnāt available anymore from the original distributor, āIndie Press Revolutionā, but there are used copies available via Amazon, and no doubt elsewhere.
I own a copy, but have never played it through, due to the fact that Iāve never gone to the trouble of installing a webcam on my desktop-PC.
As I say it now, that seems like a feeble excuse. Perhaps I should rectify it.
I wrote about Dominique Pamplemousseās multimedia nomination for the XYZZYs (search KIAI to get to it on that page). Looking at a video of the game brings back the music and claymation aesthetic immediately, but I donāt remember it as a game as much as I do a musical. It uses funny and sometimes deliberately tortured scansion to get all the prose across the music. Nothing as tortured as the way TOTOās āSure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengetiā falls in Africa, but if you enjoy that particular phenomenon, I recall thereās a fair bit in Pamplemousse.
I know Sand-dancer was meant to teach people the various functions of Inform 7 code, but I earnestly really liked it as a game, although I havenāt replayed it in a while so not sure how well it holds up.
1958: Dancing with Fear I remember as having some kind of awkward implementation but it was incredibly atmospheric and that Setting win is well-deserved.
The Last Night of Alexisgrad was a pretty cool weird experiment, although itās probably best if you can actually do it as a multiplayer thing instead of having it open in two windows and playing by yourself, and I have an easier time with that logistically than most other people on this forum because I live with a fellow IF fan!
Agreed that Sand-dancer is a lot more compelling than expected. It ended up being the surprise winner in its division for the Peopleās Champion Tournament, having gotten the coin flip on two ties in a row and then beaten A Change in the Weather for the division title.
Lady Thalia and the Rose of Rocroi is a great follow-up to the first episode (Lady Thalia and the Seraskier Sapphires). I only got around to the first episode recently but was impressed enough to cast a vote for it on the āGames that changed your mind about Twineā poll.
@ybodse: Iām very curious to hear more about the nature of the apparent copy protection on The Ice-Bound Concordance. Does it require you to show pages from the book to your webcam or something?
First of all ā thank you so much! Thatās wonderful to hear. This is something weāve gotten a lot of feedback about re: the first game which always surprises me (but in a good way).
Secondly, LTRR is in a weird spot where itās the least rated of the trilogy somehow despite being the second game, although itās been gaining on the third game a bit in the last year. The drop-off in ratings on subsequent games in a series is never a surprise (even if people like the first one, picking up the next one is effort) but I doubt the third one would land on this list whenever the 2023 awards happen. I think it was just a quirk of Spring Thing that year, honestly? The big bump of IF participants we got during the pandemic had mostly dissipated, we hadnāt yet gotten the influx of new blood that would come in later 2022 and 2023, and there were also a few big heavy hitter games that year that deserved the attention! (Fairest, Computerfriend, and The Bones of Rosalinda were also 2022 XYZZY winners that competed in that yearās Thing.)
Iāve certainly never felt the series as a whole was underappreciated anyway, regardless of the vote totals, and weāve worked VERY hard to make sure each entry can stand alone as a satisfying experience, so if people who enjoyed the third didnāt feel the need to go back to the second then in a way thatās a victory.
I played it today. I can see what you mean about the implementation problems, but it was relatively smooth despite those issues and a pretty solid story.
(I didnāt find either of the two āsecretā endings, though.)