Nah I think I just really like spreadsheets 
6 Likes
IF Derby
IF Derby is a gamble. You’re gambling, sure, but the game itself is also a gamble. It’s a bet that you the player will invest enough time and attention into what appears to be a purely random dice roll that eventually you’ll see there’s more to the game than you thought. Reading the reviews, it is clear that some players did and some players did not. I initially did not. That is partly my own fault: I was playing IF Derby after some emotionally exhausting days (including an evening of serious worry about the safety of a friend’s child), and I don’t expect I was in the most patient or attentive mood. In retrospect, perhaps I should have played a game or read a book I already knew. But I don’t think IF Derby goes free! I’m still not entirely certain of what triggers the hidden content, but I think it is betting on a losing IF Derby without thereby losing all your money. Since I was betting my entire $500 every time, this was never triggered. Even after somebody told me what I had to do, I played two full games where I lost my entire starting capital in $50 bets without IF Derby appearing among the contenders. So I suppose the stars have to align just right – both in terms of the strategy you choose and in terms of the random number generator – before you can move to the intended play experience.
Once we reach the end screen, we are treated to a reflection on IF Comp. The main ideas seem to be that the competitive nature of IF Comp can lead to (1) endlessly thinking that your game isn’t good enough for the competition yet; (2) being disappointed when a game you put a lot of love in doesn’t do well in the competition; and then (3) maybe a complaint that it is already clear in advance who is going to win, and that this is a reason to leave IF Comp aside and go somewhere else (but I’m not certain that that is the intended reading).
None of this is false. At the same time, IF Comp is also an environment where you get to have people pay attention to your game and give serious critical readings / advice, boons that have little to do with the grading and that are not at all present in a race of the IF Derby type. Even when we look solely at the competitive aspect, pretty weird and unexpected stuff has managed to do well in the past. Insofar as the point of IF Derby is that we shouldn’t think about the competition as a horse race, it’s easy to agree. If the game wants to criticise the community for making it too much about the horse race – and I’m not sure that it wants to – I wonder whether the criticism is fair. Thinking about the issue did give me a new appreciation of the fact that Spring Thing has consciously chosen to drop the competition aspect. There are both games and people for whom that simply works better.
In 2019, my game Turandot came 2nd place in IF Comp. That was great! It was, also, of course, just short of ending in 1st place. I can’t say I was immune to the ambivalent feelings this engendered. The worst is when something in your mind starts becoming extra critical of the work that placed above yours; thoughts pop up that suggest is has been over-rated, that it wasn’t really better than yours. That is something that competition does to you, or at least it can do it to me, and it takes real work to counteract it. You’ve got to overcome these thoughts. That work is worth doing. Overcoming your own resentful reflexes, especially in a low-stakes setting like IF Comp, can only help you become a better, more magnanimous person. Still, it is possible that I myself would also flourish more – or certainly not less – in a less competitive setting, and that for me IF Comp would be even better with less Comp.
Does IF Derby leave me rich? That what it says on the end screen! YOU ARE RICH! Well, I’m a little bit richer in insights, and perhaps just a tiny little bit richer in magnanimity. More importantly, my delicious IF friends, the child turned out to be safe. Who, after all, could give the slightest damn about crap like getting 1st place in IF Comp?
13 Likes
Necromanceers
Godde is dead. And we killed him. Or at least Peregrine did, which makes it all a bit more literal than Nietzsche intended, but hey, Nietzsche couldn’t raise the dead and we can!
No fewer than two reviewers comment on how metal this game is. I listen to a lot of metal, and I did not have that association at al. But maybe that’s because this is less Emperor, Moonspell or Cynic, no kind of minimalistic doom metal, or emotionally serious technical death metal, or the kind of crossover Lord of the Lost / Solar Fake stuff you get when metal meets angsty darkwave electronics, but more some kind of old-school heavy metal vibe that I’m frankly not too tuned into. No worries. I get it. It’s over-the-top inventive in an exuberant, no-holds-barred way. You can summon literal God, well literal Godde, to solve your problems. It’s turn-it-up-to-eleven Spinal Tap energy.
Beneath all of that ‘metal’ there’s a protagonist who is the exact opposite of that. Several reviewers point out that the protagonist is a bit of a bore, a character with little to recommend themselves. I agree. In one sense it is a weakness of the piece, because it makes us less engaged and interested in the fate of Returne and Inward. Yet in another sense it feels necessary. We’re ‘the still point of the turning world’, and the world is turning so fast that without that still point, it might be impossible to get our bearings. Even the most chaotic heavy metal band needs someone to play a really boring bass line.
It’s a Pacian game, so of course the prose is evocative and assured, and the worldbuilding is grand and impeccable. In a deft touch, the game bombards us with so many names at the start that you worry that Pacian has lost their touch… and then it turns out that names are in fact the central game elements, and this is exactly how the game should start. When that clicks, you’re already looking forward to your second playthrough!
I played about two times, and looked at ten endings or so. Their sheer number and diversity is both the strength and the weakness of the game. There’s so much here that one the one hand we are blown away and engaged, and on the other hand, we’re not engaged with anything specifically. I can’t say I care whether or not these people end up fighting inside a purple octopus moon! This is perhaps also why I don’t feel much need to search for the remaining names. Here’s the ones I did find:
???
Eustace - Army Captain
Gigant - Giant worm
Gnar - Crystal operator
Godde - Supreme deity
Grissel - Early necro
???
Isah - Sky pirate
???
???
Ould - War manta
???
Peregrine - God killer
Philotesia - Warrior queen
Tryphona - Aristocratic explorer
Yru - Octopoid warlord
Lovely game, great addition to the growing undead Pacian corpus.
8 Likes
I came in second in 2016 and had similar experiences. I think one reason I stuck around so long in the community was because I came 2nd, and the mixture of negative and positive emotions that created. I suspect that if I had come first I would have “retired” early on to rest on my laurels.
6 Likes
We got lucky then!
6 Likes
My view is it probably really wasn’t! The top two thirds of IFComp entries generally strike me as great, and the top one third are fantastic. By the time you get into the top twenty, it seems to be as much about people not having disliked the games as them getting high ratings, and I’ve definitely seen the top slot taken by a game with nothing whatsoever lower than a 6. This isn’t to say that the top slot isn’t well earned - just that the judging is inevitably subjective and the difference between #1 and #2 might be nothing more than not having reached one of the judges who might have given a lower rating.
7 Likes
You are of course completely right! But also, I don’t want to be the guy who needs that thought to reconcile himself to second place. I want to be the guy who graciously accepts it when another game is better than his own, even if his own game was a true labour of love. 
6 Likes
Archive 13
For years I kept postponing buying a new computer. I didn’t really need one. The old one was fine for everyday tasks, and it was really only AAA games that it slowly became unable to play. Sure, some other tasks would have been sped up with a newer machine. But nothing essential. But then Windows 10 support stopped and I couldn’t install Windows 11 on the old PC; and while I also don’t really need an up-to-date Windows, since I do most of my work on Linux, this was the one little extra reason I needed to push me over the edge. So a month or so ago I got a new PC, custom-built to last me another decade, just as the old one did. Part of me kept wondering whether I should really have splashed on that Radeon RX 9070 XT with 16 GB of VRAM, given that only a small percentage of the games that I play will actually use it. An interactive fiction, for instance, would never…
… but then Archive 13 arrived! And you may think, wait, Victor, but isn’t Archive 13 a Twine game with no graphics? That’s right. But it’s also a Twine game with no graphics written in Russian. And one of the things you can do with 16 GB of VRAM is run a local LLM that is able to translate Russian into passable English. So, Archive 13 has the (dubious?) distinction of being the first IF game to use the full capacity of my new video card, and thereby it of course laid to rest any lingering doubts I had about the rationality of my financial decisions. Of course. Especially because the translation quality seemed fair, certainly better than what Google Translate usually gives you.
Archive 13 is a spooky Halloween story. While written in Russian, it seems likely that it is set in the USA – both the cultural importance of Halloween and the names of the people point that way, though the setting is never fully identified. Years ago, some kids went missing, but people hardly remember this case. Now, however, the protagonist comes across old newspaper filings and police reports in the archive they are meant to put in order. And something isn’t right. Reality seems inconsistent. A chapel both burned down a century ago and existed just decades ago. Documents are inconsistent with each other. The protagonist both remembers and does not remember having something to do with the case. I never got completely clear about what was going on, but clear enough for the spooky atmosphere to work.
There are several endings; which one you get depends on a choice that seems, at the time, fairly inconsequential. The causality here is a bit opaque. The blurb tells us: ‘Three outcomes. Only one is a true victory.’ But I have no idea which of the outcomes – being dismissed, not being believed by the police, or disappearing – is supposed to be the true victory! I don’t think there are winners here.
I had a fine time with Archive 13, but there doesn’t seem to be too much to it. (It could also have done well in Ectocomp, by the way! Good Halloween game.)
6 Likes
Under Loch
This is a review of both Under Loch and Enkii. These games only work if you have them both open at the same time. By itself, that is fine; but it seems a very unwise design decision to not just tell this to the player upfront. There are 71 games in IF Comp and most people play only a fraction of them, so chances of people naturally finding out how to play the game are very slim. My personal experience was one of intense frustration as I tried to solve the puzzle of how to make Under Loch work. That won’t influence my grading of the games, but I think it’s worth mentioning, because hiding the fact that these two games require each other brings real risks for, as far as I can see, no gains at all.
Once you open up both games, they turn out to be a short story about communication. One character is locked in a room under a lake, the other has to find their key. The story doesn’t make a lot of sense, what with the absolutely random turned-on walkie-talkies. At the end, one of the characters teleports past the other, or maybe teleports through time, or something? It’s hard to know exactly what is going on, or what it has to do with the rest of the content of the game.
The idea of using different browser windows for different characters is genius, and I can see how you could use it to make really interesting games. But Under Loch / Enkii doesn’t do much with it. I must admit that it left me a bit nonplussed about what the point of the story was supposed to be.
5 Likes
Enkii
See Under Loch.
5 Likes
just now seeing this. it’s fixed and will be in the post-comp release but will leave it as-is for now. maybe it will make a few more people in the comp feel clever
thx!
1 Like
The Count and the Communist
It’s gorgeous! I love the entire presentation, the ASCII interface, the little pictures when you talk to someone. Add the crisp writing and deft characterisation, the useful in-game maps (one reviewer complained that not all exits were indicated, but I never ran into that), and the many carefully researched historical details; and you have a game where the texture itself gives sparks of joy. At one point I was wondering what the early 20th century Dutch Hegelian Gerard Bolland had to do with ‘flight’, but it turned out to be a reference to the early 20th century French aviator Adrienne Bolland. Of course, our protagonist would never cite Gerard Bolland, who had become quite a reactionary, whereas Adrienne Bolland became a left-wing activist!
From what I’ve seen, having played about two hours and having completed Act 1 and a small part of Act 2, The Count and the Communist is a relatively tight puzzle game. The map is small, but opens up depending on which puzzles you have to solve. There’s always a fairly clear goal to pursue. The number of items is small, and the game has been designed to nudge you in the right direction: the very same place where you find the switch is also the place where you find the item needed to make the switch work. Solving puzzles makes the story advance in concrete ways, which is good design.
One also has to mention all the peeking and hiding that is going on. This is well-implemented and atmospheric, although if you truly engage in it – and sometimes you have to – the NPCs are quickly revealed to be comically limited. The count spends hours walking back and forth between two rooms, washing his hands dozens of times. At one point I was hiding under the bed of the cook, and every few minutes he came in to consult his cookbook. Rather unlikely! Plus, in the latter case I seemed to be stuck; I spent many cycles trying to leave the bedroom, but every time there would be someone blocking my way out and then the cook would come back again. Perhaps I needed to be even more patient, but I had already spent a large number of turns trying to escape.
All in all, the game feels well-implemented and interesting. I managed to solve Act 1 on my own, and am fairly confident that later parts of the game will be as solidly made.
It’s unfortunate that The Count and the Communist combines all this goodness with a singularly clunky user interface. Instead of accepting normal parser commands, you have to navigate menus. You cannot just save, you first have to go to a Story Menu and then choose Save, which brings you back to the Story Menu that you then have to close again. That’s three actions instead of one. Actually, it was four actions instead of one for me, because I typed ‘save’ literally every single time, got an error message, then did the three action sequence that the game wants me to do.
Returning from the Story menu will have wiped out the contents of your screen, you so will have to look again. Looking is also two actions instead of one, because it has been implemented as first going to the Examine Menu and then choosing the surroundings. So the trivial action of saving the game – something you need to do often – comes down to: (1) erroneously try ‘save’, (2) go to the Story Menu, (3) save, (4) close the Story menu, (5) go to the Examine menu, (6) choose your surroundings. Many times I was tempted to just not save in order to avoid this hassle. That’s a clear sign of something being wrong with the design!
What I don’t understand is the point of it. I see how the menu interface can be helpful to new players. I’m fine with having it. But why disable the standard commands? Why is ‘save’ not simply accepted? Why can’t I just ‘drop basket’? It is trivial to check whether or not the player has given a 1 character command, and to then run either menu-based or normal parsing. You can have your cake and eat it.
It’s really sad to be talking so much about the interface, but it did have a major impact on my enjoyment of the game. Every little snag felt deflating. Oh no, I thought to myself, I’m in my bedroom and I have to go back all the way to the cellar to put back the copper coils. It’s not as such a huge task, but the interface made it feel like a chore. If I could just have typed in my commands, I would almost certainly have made more progress in the same time, and felt more motivation to continue.
I still might continue after the competition, but for now my verdict must be that this is a very nice game marred by clunky interaction.
12 Likes
This is a random case thing. The cook goes downstairs on a fairly regular but large interval of turns, and sometimes the maid or housekeeper are in the kitchen during the free time, so you might have to try going north 20 or 30 times before it succeeds.
3 Likes
Purgatory: A Horror Story of Redemption
There’s subtle psychological horror. There’s weird cosmic horror. And then there’s ‘you’re covered in vomit and peeing down your pants while stabbing your boss in the eye with a pencil until blood covers everything’ horror. To each his own, I say, but be prepared to encounter copious bodily fluids when you start playing Purgatory. After that first murder, things really start going downhill.
To be clear, I don’t object to this. There’s actually some pretty effective scenic elements in the story. Opening the trunk. Dropping the television. Everything is more unhinged than the last thing. And then we come to realise that this is a time loop game, and we’re climbing Mount Purgatory, perhaps slowly spiraling towards a redemption we do not, at the moment, seem to be earning. It was interesting to see new options coming up in the list of choices, and just as it says in the title, we finally end up with some kind of redemption.
Purgatory is a short game, and attempts to bring us through a narrative arc that requires more time that it gives itself. By the end, you have little idea who this protagonist is and what he has done, and even less idea of how he has reached redemption. I take it that we never actually murdered anyone; that, for instance, the uncle in the trunk is only the interiorisation of, perhaps, resentment. But there are not enough specifics to make the protagonist feel real or their redemption anything more than abstract. (This is basically me agreeing with Mike Russo’s review.)
I’d certainly play a Lorenzo Cellier work again, because there’s ambition. But I think the author needs to think bigger: the concept is there, but the execution is too humble. I won’t insist on terza rima, though of course it can’t hurt.
10 Likes
The Last Voyage of the Warsaw Queen
The cultural impact of Lovecraft remains, to me, a bit of an enigma. I do not find his stories especially compelling. But beyond that, this entire brand of horror leaves me cold. Be afraid, o mortals, of Yo-shob-Shagoota from beyond the Stars, an entity that Man’s Mind Was Not Meant to Understand! Seeing It will drive you MAD! And by the way, it also has tentacles. Yo-shob-Shagoota is always going to be far less terrifying than actual human dictators and cult leaders; the very fact that the cosmic horrors are incomprehensible makes reading about them an abstract endeavour. This is no doubt why so much Lovecraftian horror turns to humour or parody. I have very fond memories of the 2023 IF Comp game Eat the Eldritch, for instance.
The Last Voyage of the Warsaw Queen takes a different approach: it is Lovecraftian horror where you only experience the Lovecraft at one remove. The person really involved with the eldritch horrors is your ancestor from back in the days of the Mississippi steamboats, an era I otherwise only know from having seen the Buster Keaton movie Steamboat Bill, Jr (or did I only see the hurricane scene?). As far as I understand the story, it is the eldritch horror itself that teleports you back in time – in a more or less ghostly fashion – so you can prevent your insane ancestor from invoking the horrors and killing everyone on board. Pretty nice guy, that horror. Maybe they were just misunderstood? Perhaps Cthulhu just came to borrow a cup of sugar, and it was genuinely surprised when people offered him the blood of virgins instead?
[This reminds me of a Gary Larson cartoon where two female American tourists are carried up a volcano by members of a ‘primitive’ tribe, and one lady says to the other: ‘wow, these people really liked it when they heard we were Virginians!’]
The Last Voyage of the Warsaw Queen is a solid parser offering. Research has clearly gone into it: the ship feels real, there are nice maps, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the gambling tricks that give much of the couleur locale are also all from the books. The game has been solidly implemented. I encountered no bugs and interaction was smooth throughout. In the early parts of the game, I found that just exploring the ship and doing obvious things was enough to make the story progress.
Later on, things become a bit more opaque. Where the game struggles is in giving direction to the player. It is not clear what our overall goal is. But after a while, it even becomes unclear what our proximate goal is. There’s a strange sequence where we have to sneak into the cabin of our ancestor, read his journal, sneak out, then repeat this twice more – with puzzles in between to get our ancestor out of his room – so we can read more of the journal. But why didn’t we read all of it in the first place? Perhaps the idea is that the guy only writes the journal now… but how could we know or expect that? Our behaviour seems highly unmotivated, and I was also unclear about how it helped that I let loose an alligator. In this part of the game, I relied on the hints not so much to tell me what to do, but to give me an idea of what my goals even were. That’s a place where the design could certainly be improved in a next game.
But overall, this is a very pleasant game and I had a good time with it.
11 Likes
This made me laugh out loud so thanks for that.
2 Likes
Ha! Hilarious stuff about Cthulhu. Thanks for the review!
1 Like
Thanks for the game!
El Ruido
Wow. Okay. First I stabbed my rival with a knife, because she’s my rival and I have a knife why are you looking at me like that? Didn’t end well. Then I slapped someone, pleaded with someone else, all of which didn’t end well. But hey, after a bit of talking to the Virgin Mary I realised that the real point of it all is sisterhood and we all know what sisterhood means, it means establishing the Society for Cutting Up Men and shooting Andy Warhol not marrying the guy that provoked rivalry in us, probably it means not marrying at all (ask yourself: did the Virgin marry? I guess technically she did but it doesn’t count when you don’t consummate the marriage now does it) and also, by the way, we are robots and this guy we’re in love with controls us and we’ll go into the desert and enact sisterhood there! I think. And all of that within the space of ten minutes.
I have more or less no idea what the artistic intent of El Ruido is, and whether or not it would have been more successful if we had had some time to come to know the characters and/or understand what on earth is going on. Maybe we just want plot twists to explode all over us! It was certainly a pleasure to read, and did not outstay its welcome. Also, good use of Texture – which is rare and thus worth a special mention.
5 Likes
TOITŪ
Every year, Adam Cadre organises the Lyttle Lytton contest, for the worst short opening sentence of an imagined novel. One of my favourites – I’m not sure whether it was an actual entry, or an example given by Cadre himself – is the sentence ‘Jennifer stood there, quitely ovulating.’ It’s not necessarily a good sign that I was instantly reminded of this when TOITŪ gave me the following poetic line:
The ovulating clay? What is that supposed to mean? What, as a metaphor, is it meant to convey? Does it mean that the clay will conceive if the ‘heathen spill theirs on the dusty ground’? Is it a Hayy ibn Yaqdhan reference (where a man is born from clay and raised by a deer)? I have no idea. The word ‘ovulating’ is just weird.
I’ll return to the question of language later on; first, we should talk about everything that TOITŪ does well. And that is a lot. Once we get past the prologue, the game turns out to be a very interesting trip through the New Zealand city of Dunedin. In fact, the set-up is highly original and something of a tour de force. It is both strongly anchored to present and past reality, and also magical realist. The guiding thread, so to speak, is the presently underground stream Toitū, which has been channeled, diverted, blocked and turned into a source of power for the city. This is not only factually accurate, but also a very rich metaphorical landscape to explore, where the stream can stand for the original Maori inhabitants, for the unconscious, for history, and for the poetic impulse. The main story of the game has us first unblock the stream on the instructions of a strange plumber, giving it the strength to flow again; then go on an underground journey through the city, visiting famous landmarks where we always get to see small unexpected scenes and areas off the beaten path. This is a fairly amazing way to explore Dunedin, a city I had never even heard of: everything is suffused by meaning and by history, and Toitū is extremely good at building connections between the disparate elements of the city. From point A you will see point B, find something that reminds you of point C, and so on. This makes the city far more organic, far more alive, and far more real than the usual tourist trip with nice pictures. I loved it, and am even somewhat eager to visit real-life Dunedin. (Although I suspect I’ll never do, it being literally the city on earth that is farthest from where I live.)
A second strand of the game has us finding book pages from works by Janet Frame. I didn’t know Frame, but these excerpts make me eager to read her! In the fiction, Frame’s literary genius was destroyed by a lobotomy, which means that these pages, which are from one of her later books, would actually never have been written. Of course the thematic connection to the damming and blocking of an underground stream is obvious, but it is not belaboured by the game and it works. (In reality, Frame’s lobotomy was cancelled because she won a literary prize days before the operation was scheduled – an unbelievable but apparently true story.)
Toitū is a unique game that gives us a peculiar and beautiful experience, and succeeds at many of the things it sets out to do. Once I got past the prologue, I really enjoyed it.
One minor point of criticism is that the nature of interacting with the text is sometimes opaque. What was especially unclear, was how to make choices. At certain points, you might have a clickable link saying ‘Take the coins.’ and a clickable link saying ‘Yes, that’s right.’ If you click the first, it will change to ‘Do not take the coins.’ But how do you take the coins? Should you click ‘Take the coins,’ then ‘Yes, that’s right’? Or should you not click ‘Take the coins’ and then click ‘Yes, that’s right?’ Totally opaque. I think it’s the second, but I certainly had some weird experiences in the game where my character went back to get an item that I thought I had chosen to taken along much earlier.
My major point of criticism is the language. Sometimes, it’s fairly pedestrian and just works. Sometimes, it’s great. Here’s an example of greatness:
That’s great! However, far too often, and especially when the game attempts to be most poetic, it fumbles. There are fairly frequent typos, and there’s a weird thing where the game consistently misspells ‘through’ and ‘though’ as ‘thru’ and ‘tho’ (I looked it up, but this does not seem to be NZ spelling). But those are small issues. The real problem are passages like this:
This doesn’t work on multiple levels. To see the setting sun, you should not look up but straight ahead. You cannot gracefully devour. And surely it is the ocean that devours the sun, rather than the other way around? The sentence fails to evoke a coherent image.
How do you use your teeth as a grate when eating? But the real problem here, apart from the misspelling of ‘coercive’, is that the phrase ‘soft coercive pillow of flesh’ only makes sense when you think about a tongue pushing food into your throat; instead of shining new light on the idea of a tongue, as a simile surely should, it can only be understood through our prior understanding of the very thing it is supposed to shine new light on. It reduces to ‘using your tongue as a tongue.’
The sound of the quiet city is already mysterious. But what are atomic leaves? Leaves that cannot be divided? Leaves that are very small? This phrase evokes nothing but bafflement. (I don’t like the running hills much either, but that’s a minor issue.)
Here’s what the game tells us about a green tractor:
I have a hard time imagining a kind of green that looks purple under a grey light.
And a final example:
Couldn’t they just be described as, you know, steps? Especially because I have not the faintest idea what steps look like that look like ‘a set of lungs hoisted side-by-side’. Flabby? Pink? Bleeding? Gross? Still breathing in and out?
All of these complaints are basically the same complaint, but I had to give multiple examples to show what I mean. Time and again, the text is trying its very best to be literary, but it hasn’t thought long enough about what it actually says. And it tends to say either less or more than, but certainly not precisely what, it intends. In the main game, this is merely a frequent distraction. In the prologue, which has a different form and really turns the poetry register up, it is almost fatal. I was very close to just exiting the game; and I would not be surprised if a large contingent of player stop in the first ten minutes. That would be a shame, because the game becomes so much better once we get to Part 1! I think it would be worth it to go through the game critically and correct some of the passages; but also, to omit, change, or shorten the prologue.
As happens so often, one spends far more time on what one doesn’t like than on what one likes. I’ll just repeat what I said earlier: Toitū is a unique game that gives us a peculiar and beautiful experience, and succeeds at many of the things it sets out to do. Once I got past the prologue, I really enjoyed it.
And let me add: surely it’s too humble that the game tab is named ‘Toitu working mess’!
11 Likes