Victor's IF Comp 2026 reviews

Competitions IFComp
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63

Ruined Temple

It’s interesting that we are commanding an entire party of adventurers, and once you get the hang of it, it works quite well. But the game could have explained this a bit better! Things are quite disorienting until you realise that you can give commands and that this changes the viewpoint character. A brief introduction or ‘about’ command would have solved this. It would also have been very helpful if the game had given some kind of hint that (a) the different characters have non-obvious skills that you can only find out about by examining them and their inventory items, and (b) that ‘attack’ is not a catch-all verb for going on the offense. Without the walkthrough, I would never have realised that the fact that ‘kyra, attack’ didn’t work was an invitation to type ‘kyra, use fire magic’.

The implementation is reasonably solid, but I ran into a few bugs. Some of these were harmless, such as an error message when searching the desk. But in the flooded room, ‘examine furniture’ gave no response… while it turns out that ‘search furniture’ is a necessary command! If examine doesn’t work on an object, I’m not going to try searching. One wonders if the game had beta testers, because this surely would have been caught.

Overall, Ruined Temple seems to suffer from two weaknesses. The first is that we need too much mind-reading. The game could a lot more to hint at the right direction; e.g., mention the mask of the goblin boss more prominently when we fail to fight him. Otherwise how am I supposed to guess that this is an item we can interact with? The second is that, wow, this is really bog standard fantasy stuff. Goblins. Evil clerics. A party consisting of a fighter, a wizard, an elf and a dwarf. Ghosts that need to be given the weapon they were murdered with. Of course you can do something interesting with all of that, but here we are just given it completely straight. The genre’s called fantasy, so let’s have some more fantasy go into it!

It’s not a bad game by any means, and I quite like the party idea; but Ruined Temple could have been quite a bit more enjoyable with more guiding and a tad more creativity.

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64

SCAVS

Stellar production values. Smooth gameplay. A well-conceived and clearly conveyed planet to explore. Two characters with different abilities. Satisfying scavenging gameplay. Some character building and a narrative twist or two, culminating in over-the-top action sequences. And all this spiced up with a fine version of the player character/focal character divide. What’s not to like?

Mainly, perhaps, the character writing. I saw most of the game through the ideas of the young female engineer, and wow, she was waxing poetic all the time. That didn’t really fit the setting very well. The interaction between her and the player character also felt off: she started confiding in me even though I had not done anything to earn her trust. (Sure, I had said some nice things. But saying nice things is cheap.) It’s not awful by any means, but it’s hard to take the characters or the setting fully seriously when much of what they say seems incongruous.

This didn’t stop me from enjoying SCAVS. It was one of the most fun games I’ve played so far in the competition, and the action sequence at the end was great too.

There’s more to say, though, and in order to say it I would like to introduce a distinction from the tabletop roleplaying community, coined by Meguey Baker. It’s a distinction between two different social contracts that a player group can have when it comes to emotionally challenging content: Nobody gets hurt and I will not abandon you.

In Nobody gets hurt, the group agrees to not seek out content that might challenge, upset, or otherwise hurt us. Play does not require vulnerability, because that’s not where we want to go as a group. This doesn’t mean there’s nothing negative going on in the fictional world; a standard D&D game where we kill a necromancers who has been murdering the local peasants might involve murder, gruesome scenes, children who have lost their parents, whatever. But we’re not dealing with it in a way that will really touch us emotionally. We roll dice and kill the baddies.

In I will not abandon you, we do as a group seek out emotionally challenging content. What is emotionally challenging depends, of course, on the players: a character who is ill and dying might mean nothing to one player, but hit very hard for a player who has just lost a loved one to cancer. When such content comes to us, players can choose to make themselves vulnerable to it and explore it through play. The rest of the group will not abandon them; that is, will take the content seriously, will be sensitive, will try to bring out their own understanding.

Inadvertently mixing these play styles can be a recipe for disaster. It might mean that somebody who expects to not get hurt gets hurt. It might also mean that someone makes themselves vulnerable, only for other players to dismiss the serious content with a joke or a perfunctory fight scene. Both are not what you want. It’s not that one play style is better than the other. It’s that you all need to be on the same page (or talk to each other if it seems that you’re not).

Why do I bring this up? I bring it up because SCAVS seems to present itself – or seemed so to me – as a game that is going to deal with heavy themes. It feels I will not abandon you. There’s several levels of dysfunctional power dynamics at the same time. There’s the threat of death. There’s a setting that is presented in quite a realistic fashion. And then things ramp up, characters become more vulnerable, it seems like we are on the way to some kind of thematic reckoning…

But nothing is farther from the truth! SCAVS is pure Nobody gets hurt. It doesn’t want to explore its theme seriously; it wants us to have fun, and not get hurt. Perhaps one slowly starts to realise this as one slowly starts to realise how easy the game is: the planet can’t really hurt us, shelter is easy to find, there is no resource management, and getting good rapport with your team is very simple. The System is a toothless thing, sending some vaguely scolding emails but never doing anything threatening. We’re being handled with kid gloves!

And then, when we approach the climactic scene, and the great reckoning about revenge and guilt and forgiveness is going to come up… man, then we turn the Nobody gets hurt up to eleven. Not only do we get the most cheesy of all possible reasons for reconciliation – she’s your lost daughter! – but, and this is far more important, it turns out that neither of the characters did anything wrong. We’ve been led to believe that this game is going to be about guilt and forgiveness, but then the big revelation is… there’s no guilt and nothing to forgive! He wasn’t even there! Han did not only not shoot first, he did not shoot at all!

I can’t even be disappointed. This plot twist would be very wrong if this was an I will not abandon you game, because it abandons us. But it’s not! It’s Nobody gets hurt. We’re just having a good time and are about to do a big action sequence!

Ah, I can’t be disappointed, I can’t be mad. I just went in with the wrong expectations. Whose fault is that? Perhaps just my own. And to be honest, by the time these plot twists were going on, I was getting on the same page as the game, and could abandon myself to the non-hurting fun.

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Thank you for the review! That’s really interesting to hear. I made a game once that had quite a dark, depressing ending. This time I set out to make something much more optimistic and fun (and aimed as much at new IF players as anyone else). I do wonder if the initial CW is actually hurting the game (it does touch on those things, but not really). I might look at making the game a little harder in a post-comp release, but to be honest, it’s just not that sort of game.

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I agree, it’s not that sort of game! I don’t think it needs to be harder.

It might just be me, but I guess it’s also possible to signal a bit more early on – even in the blurb or intro text perhaps – that it’s more light-hearted / fun / forgiving than the premise and the aesthetics might suggest.

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67

On Repeat

At the end of a day that didn’t go well… and I don’t mean a day that was awful, I just mean that it wasn’t a day that fills you with joy or satisfaction, so you end up tired and a bit down… at the end of such a day, you might cast around for something that will make you happy. There’s this vague thought whirling around in your head that if only you could find the exact right game to play, playing it would wipe away all the dissatisfaction and reconcile you with yourself. It doesn’t have to be a game. It could be a movie, or a series, or an album, or a book, or a glass of alcohol, or a piece of erotica, or an act of online shopping, or a message in your social media timeline, or… point is, it’s something external. You want there to be a thing, ready-at-hand, that you just have to get into contact with. And then things will be alright again. Then you will feel good about yourself.

It never works.

I mean, games, music, films, books, and so on, can of course help you out emotionally. But they all require you to bring yourself, to do the work, even if it is only the work of letting go of dissatisfaction and allowing yourself some enjoyment. Nothing external can fix you on its own.

On repeat beautifully enacts this idea by giving us a protagonist who is estranged from their life. They continually make choices about what to do, but whatever they choose, they’re rarely really into it. They think they are into a new album, but that’s just a transitory experience; they never relate to it on a deeper emotional level. They have social interactions that they sort of enjoy, but there’s little real connection. And so on. Now and then they have ideas for new things they could do – but they never actually do them, because doing them requires us to change ourselves. It’s not ready-at-hand.

The prose is perfect for this set-up. Short. Distant. Pedestrian.

And the game ends on a note of hope – there are different endings, but they are not that different – suggesting that the protagonist has had the insight that they have to change themselves. In some endings this involves the music the game starts out with, in others it does not. But that’s not the point. This is not a game about music. It is a game about where the fountain of life is to be found. Spoiler alert: it’s never out there in the world.

9 Likes
68

The Two Seasons: Encounter with a Vampire

Good-natured, that’s what this is. A light-hearted puzzle game set in a high school (though it has some pretty unexpected locales, including a car workshop, a woodshop and a kitchen), where we follow the comedic pair of music nerds as they kill their IT teacher. Don’t worry. He’s a vampire. He totally deserves it. The best scene is surely the one where we leave the victim tied up because he needs to serve as bait. Great comedy.

The puzzles didn’t work too well for me: most were trivial, but then there were a few that I cannot fathom solving on my own. I’m looking at you, unlocking a car with a shoe lace puzzle! Even after following the hints I still have no idea how you could possibly unlock a car with a shoe lace. That just doesn’t seem to make any sense at all?

But who cares. The whole things just wants to be enjoyed, and even the hints themselves are enjoyable! So we follow along for the ride, kill the vampire in the most cheesy we-need-to-work-together way you could think of, and enjoy it.

Also, Persuasion absolutely is Jane Austen’s best novel. Don’t tell my wife, but I’d marry Anne in a heartbeat! Bonus points for that. (Not really. But sort of.) (Also, I don’t think Anne would marry me if I first divorced my wife in order to marry her. What a pickle.)

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Definitely true, both as to the critical judgment and the conundrum. Maybe if you set to sea and capture some prizes in between you’d have more of a shot?

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70

Meet the timesheet

I’m afraid I didn’t get much out of this. After a quick intro we are sent into a featureless, donut-shaped office space where we have to seek out working laptops. Some of those are locked, and you need to interact with the screensaver to unlock them. (I needed hints with the first one, because it wasn’t clear to me that you could physically interact with things on the screen. After that, I found the puzzles fairly trivial.) Once behind a laptop, you type ‘work’ until the laptop dies. Every so many turns you get a message that an enemy is approaching, you type ‘hide’, and then the enemy is gone and you can resume what you were doing. Okay? At no point was I engaged. I see that some other reviewers actually had to run away from horrific enemies; perhaps that would have made the game more tense and interesting? Perhaps I should have played on hard mode?

This doesn’t even really count as a review, I think, much less as an analysis.

(I was hoping that playing Meet the timesheet would make me understand what ‘dreamcore corporate liminal horror’ is, but I’m still as baffled as before. I get corporate horror. I’m not sure what transitional state of experience I’m in that would count as liminal. And I have no idea what ‘dreamcore’ means.)

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71

I think the main lesson is not to listen to other people’s advice!

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72

Ass in the Woods

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a group of Athenian workmen are rehearsing a play that they will perform at the wedding of the duke. The play is Pyramus and Thisbe, which is about two star-crossed lovers whose families do not want them to be together. In the end, both tragically die. Sounds familiar? It is indeed an ancestor of Romeo and Juliet, hitting many of the same story beats. Anyway, in Pyramus and Thisbe, the lovers are actually neighbours and talk to each other through a chink in the wall.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the workmen are bad actors and it also seems as if they have written the play themselves. The most enthousiastic of them is Bottom, a man who never shuts up and who seriously suggest that he could play all the role simultaneously because he would be so good at them. But he only gets to play Pyramus. Here is the brilliantly bad soliloquy he speaks when he looks through the wall (the wall being played by another actor):

That’s pure comedy gold. It fits perfectly with Bottom’s over-enthusiastic nature. We should also not forget to mention his continual abuse of style, as for instance when he’s using difficult words that he doesn’t really understand:

Bottom is a beloved character in the Shakespeare canon, and when a mischievous spirit gives him the head of an ass and then the queen of the faeries falls in love with him because of a love potion, well, things become even more… droll? I think this is the perfect place to use the word ‘droll’, perhaps for the first time in my life.

Here’s what I think about Ass in the Woods: it is nice enough, but it doesn’t give me enough Bottom! He’s just a fairly obnoxious guy who is getting high on his own supply. Where’s the gloriously failing wordplay, or the disarmingly naive style figures? Where’s the fun? There’s not enough fun here. The game is fast-paced (excepted for some slow timed text) and allows us a certain amount of interaction in bringing the troupe back together or not, but it never really felt like interacting with Shakespeare’s characters. It could have been more over the top. It could have been more daring. My advice would be to follow the queen of faeries and give it all you got… droll-Bottomed games, you make the rocking world go round!

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73

Forensic Necromancy

One of the great things about being an academic philosopher is that I can write about whatever juicy topic catches my eye. The papers I’ve finished most recently were one about instantaneous velocity, one about whether LLMs have understanding, and one about the nature of knowledge. Now all those at least fall within the area of the ‘research group’ I’m part of, theoretical philosophy, which deals with epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. But when I recently told my colleagues that I was writing a paper about mercy – in no way part of that area – they said ‘cool’. No eyebrows were raised. If I want to work on mercy, that’s fine.

But I do not believe that I could solve a murder mystery in one of my papers. And so it turns out that no matter how great it is to be an academic philosopher, it might be even greater to work in historical linguistics. That’s what I learned from the background notes to Forensic Necromancy!

O, yes, there’s of course also a game here. It’s very pleasant. I’m still not entirely sold on this interface: it’s hybridity keeps feeling unnatural to me, and I notice that clicking a link removes focus from the text input fiels. But that’s a small matter. Forensic Necromancy is a smooth, simple parser game (the puzzles are really just there to give us a path to follow, not as a main attraction) that allows us to slowly piece together the elements that make up one particular interpretation of an old Assyrian mystery. This is fun stuff. Also, maybe I need to go to Berlin and revisit the Pergamonmuseum? I had time for no more than a brief visit the one time I was there, an unimaginably long time ago, with my then-partner and her mother and her grandfather, as we were returning to the Netherlands from having attended a Polish wedding. I’ll never forget that Polish wedding. But that’s another story.

I enjoyed this a lot. As a game, it treads well-trodden ground. But the content it brings us is unique and interesting.

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74

The Rat

In Chandler Groover’s The Bat, we played the long-suffering butler of a guy you might suspect to be Batman, but who is mostly a super rich dude throwing a party for other super rich people who share his absolute disregard for all those with less money than they have. In Daniel Stelzer’s The Rat, we play the Fox, the central decision person of a heist crew who are going to break into the house – a highly similar house – of a super rich dude – not quite the same one, but highly similar – while he is throwing a party for other super rich people who share his absolute disregard for all those with less money than they have. This time, the long-suffering butler is our main opponent, although redacted for serious spoilers I take it that the big reveal is that Fox actually is the butler, filling in the spot of the person who hates the Count, just as all your allies hate the other rich people.

The game has a great interface for making it possible to command a multiple-person crew. I was less convinced by the puzzles, but this could be my fault. The game is winnable by just queuing a lot of distractions and doing a little dancing with the Chameleon, but I felt that I never grasped or needed to grasp the complexities involved. Like, there are certain items that get tracked on the map, like the newspaper, and maybe you need to think about them? But I never did. However, I ended up with $5000, and others with vastly more money than that… However, I have no idea at all about where or how in the game you can find more treasure. I had the idea that we were laying our hands on some valuable info, and we also were going to go short on stocks with our inside information, so why do I have so little money?

What works very well, on the other hand, is the humour. This game has some glorious writing, with characters – especially the enemies – getting pithy phrases that reveal their nature. Although it was sometimes hard to keep track of the banter in between the game relevant messages, this nevertheless was what kept me engaged the whole time. Fun game!

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