Between the start of teaching, moving into a new house, and injuring my arm, I’m not sure how much free time I’m going to have during the IFComp judging period. Which means I almost certainly won’t complete the entire slate.
But there’s some very cool IF here! So this is where I ask for recommendations: which entries should I not miss?
So far, my list is:
Hildy (Enchanter magic system)
Where Nothing Is Ever Named (linguistic puzzling)
The Maze Gallery (massive collab; this one’s only if I have time, since it’s very long)
Redjackets (vampires and heists, hell yeah)
Forsaken Denizen (great reviews)
Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allen Poe (I love the Gothic and also mysteries)
BOSH (reification and math tricks)
Winter-Over (mysteries!)
Focal Shift (I want to see cyberpunk in IF)
Killings in Wasacona (mysteries!)
Is there anything else I should add to this? If I have time, of course, I’ll start selecting randomly from the personal shuffle; but when I don’t know if I’ll have time for more than a few entries, I want to prioritize the ones that are my particular brand of catnip.
Or in other words—what games do you think are especially awesome, and want to say something nice about?
I second pretty much every recommendation above (I haven’t played Redjackets, though, or Where Nothing is Ever Named).
I liked your game, of course, and out of games I tested, Dust was a lot of fun (a Western with a compelling story). I originally played it in German and only reviewed some of the English transcript so I don’t know if it’s beauty carried over into English, but it was fun.
BOSH had some neat math tricks that I haven’t seen done very much (I took a screenshot of the exits screen at one point because it was pretty funny).
I haven’t seen Forsaken Denizen mentioned on here; it has pretty much everything I liked from Killing Machine Likes Slime Prince and rogue of the Multiverse by the same author. It doesn’t have the scope of Superluminal Vagrant Twin but that’s good since 1) it needs to fit into IFComp length and 2) it’s probably not helpful to compare games to one that is by many measures in the top 4 of all IF of all time.
I tested part of Sidekick and the part I tested was pretty funny, I don’t know yet how the game overall turned out, it was very long.
Oh, and Winter-Over I tested (maybe you did too?) and it was a fun mystery. It’s a very different genre of mystery than Miss Gosling (more of a suspense and schedule-based).
I might be playing Winter-Over next, as it sounds similar to Killings in Wasacona which I just reviewed. Killings is a Twine FBI murder mystery with great helpful mechanics. If this is to your taste, I would definitely play Wasacona.
I’ve added a bunch of these to my list; I don’t know if I’ll get through all of these before the comp ends, but I’m certainly going to try! Thanks everyone for your suggestions!