I haven’t had a chance to really look at much yet, but decided I wanted to start with something light hearted (there are so many dark games/games with heavy themes this year, (which is fine, nothing wrong with that. I just needed to hunt for one that looked like being lighter) and picked up You Are SpamZapper and found it a lot of fun. Even though it’s one of the first I’ve had a chance to read, I can already tell it’s going to be up near the top of my list I think.
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I don’t think this is a good way to give an opinion. MB is playing first odd system games, I am playing full lenght parser games this year, so anyone can be his favourite game regardless other player say.
So I’m giveing a list of some full lenght parser based games I like in any order.
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed.
D-Arkun
The house on highfield lane.
The ghost within.
…
- Jade
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I don’t think it’s fair to say which I liked best, but I can give the good news that there really hasn’t been a game I’ve played so far that I think was a waste of my time. I’ve got something out of all that I have played.
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So far, Ghosts Within is my favorite. I still have lots of games to go.
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Haven’t played much, but so far, my favorite (out of the ones I didn’t test before the comp opened) has been And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One.
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To be really clear on my intentions in starting this thread: this is just intended as a way to recommend games to people wondering what to play next, not as serious reviews or as a way to marginalize authors whose games you haven’t played yet. I certainly hope no one thinks I (or anyone) thinks that this is intended to be a hard and fast decision that anyone will hold you to- obviously our opinions will evolve as we play more games. I meant it to be just a snapshot of what we are playing, and liking, at this early date.
And of course I have played quite a few games that I simply loved (some of which other people have mentioned here) and which I would highly recommend if I were going to do a big list.
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I certainly didn’t take it in a negative way. After the first week, I’d think a lot of people have only had a chance to read a small proportion of the overall field. (I’ve already read another which I enjoyed since I replied to this post, and have seen a few returning authors in there whose work I’ve liked in the past so plan to play their games when I have time.) I felt it was kind of more a “get hyped about the games entered this year” kind of thread. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with giving a shout out a game that has impressed you so far. There’s full length reviews coming out for in depth thoughts on the games for anyone that wants a better breakdown for whats on offer if you want it before you play 
.
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I completely appreciate your intentions and enthusiasm, so this isn’t a knock on you.
Perhaps another way to approach this is, what games aren’t getting enough attention? I worry about entries being overlooked due to “book cover” reasons.
I’m looking for my next game to review, so if anyone can recommend one that’s not appearing often in these review threads: I’m listening.
That said, I’m limiting myself to parser-based games. Other folks might be interested beyond that scope, though.
– Jim
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I mentioned it above, but looking at the review spreadsheet, Off-Season at the Dream Factory currently only has one public review, and I’d definitely recommend that one!
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You’re absolutely right. If you look at this thread, there’s a spreadsheet in the first post with an ongoing list of reviews for each game. You can see which ones are languishing.
And I encourage all reviewers and gamers to look at this for inspiration on what to play next.
Alternatively, I should have gone through the authors’ intro thread and found all the first-timers and listed them here. There are some heavy hitters with entries, and the little new guys won’t get as much attention.
Thank you for this suggestion.
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Jinx!
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Of the things I’ve played that don’t currently have a lot in the way of reviews, I liked How it was then and how it is now.
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In the, ‘I used to have to walk twenty miles through the snow’ stakes… I remember being a young man during IFComp 2010. We had no review spreadsheet, authors mostly couldn’t speak during comp time, and we just sat in the private forum sweating on strangers reviewing our games in their blogs. You could go weeks without a review from anyone!
In weird and embarrasing anecdotes: Late in the piece, I hassled Emily Short to review my horror game, since she appeared to be this character who reviewed everything. She didn’t like it or get it. Knowing her taste better these days based on her games and reviews, I’m unsurprised. Though paradoxically, at times I notice she and I have given something else almost exactly the same critique.
Anyway, yes you all deserve more reviews, but at least you’ve all got one already
-Wade
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It’s still soon for playing less reviewed games. This is first week. When last week becomes we will do these games a try.
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Yes I was impressed to see that everything has at least 1 review already 
I think it’s too soon to be panicking about low review games yet as well. Games without eyecatching (or any) coverart or long games (especially the 2hr+ ones) I think often seem to get not picked first by a lot of players in large numbers, but can make up lost ground later on(I know I’m guilty of this, I can find 15mins during a break fairly easily, but over an hour requires progressively more scheduling to manage successfully.)
I do like the idea of having anything that still has low reviews after the first month getting a shout out for attention through 
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I’d also like something like this. I handpicked the first batch of longform parsers I definitely wanted to play, but it would be great to have a list of maybe the five least judged games. That way, people could choose to level out the playing field a bit and perhaps discover games that didn’t immediately draw their attention.
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I wonder if I’m the only one playing a random sample? You are Spamzapper and The Miller’s Garden done; Aardvark vs The Hype, Kidney Kwest and An Aside About Everything to go. If I get through them before the judging deadline then I’ll probably start on the least reviewed games. If not, then it’ll be annoying to have failed to get over the judging threshold and the organisers could consider lowering the bar fractionally (3 or 4 games?) for busy tortoises like me.
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The judging deadline is still more than a month away. Looking at the blurbs of the games you want to play before the deadline, this should be doable.
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Yes, should be! If the hand of fate had delivered me three or four parser games then I would have been stuffed.
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This is a tricky one. I think you’re correct that, at first, random variation/statistical noise will make it less valuable to target the less played games. But I think after 3 weeks it may be clearer which games might not be getting reviews. We don’t want to wait too long, or we might not meaningfully be able to fix discrepancies. Or, worse, we might have a choice between a game we want to play versus a game we feel we should play just to even things up. I know I’d wind up doing nothing in such a case. I think ideally we’d like to use lazy-day times to review a game here and there, and it should add up.
But I think as reviews come in, we’ll also see why games might be tough to play or hard to access.
Some might require two players (Last Night of Alexisgrad seems to.) And, in the case of The Belinsky Conundrum, people may be pushed away by it being on Facebook Messenger, even though it doesn’t throw any nasty technical curveballs at you.
It would be neat to have a knowledge base about how to run certain games as well. That’s the sort of thing that makes people say, hey, I’d like to review this or hey, this isn’t really an obstacle for me, I’ll take a look.
One other thing–I’m curious how # of reviews correlate to votes (okay, probably positively) but also how it combines with game length, etc. (Yes, it’s not trivial for organizers to decide whether # of votes–totals or ranked–should be made public to help people choose) I know in the author’s forum a few people have started with 15-minute games. And I’ve seen a reviewer start at the end of the alphabet, and I’ve seen bias towards games at the start of the alphabet even though IFComp.org allows a random shuffle. This of course leaves mid-range games in the lurch. It seems one will always fall through.
So I think there are all sorts of odd factors we could analyze in the off-season. And of course we have to ask ourselves when we want to switch to/from “hey this game looks neat to review” mode to “hey, let’s look at an odd game” mode and play it by ear.
Having said all this, I appreciate reading people’s favorite works, even though I reviewed nothing the first week. It helped me get going or gave me confidence that something with a blurb that said, hey, this might not be my sort of thing … might be really worth it when I’m in the right frame of mind.
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