Your favorite game(s) -- what touched you the most on a personal level?

Playing
21

A few skimmed off of games I’ve played and rated recently-ish:

  • let the lights bleed - trans trauma related to objectification (very evocative.)
  • NYX - the final transmission from a doomed spaceship (the juxtaposition of the horror and humanizing through what/who they loved was brilliant.)
  • a bunch of you in a room - transgender identity discovery, scifi edition (this one was important in my own conceptualization of gender.)
  • wild oats - on food, hunger, and fatherly love (i’m Obsessed with how jinx has explored fatherhood and its inevitable failures here.)
  • the livid emissary - a lovestory through letters: bizarre, inscrutable, mysterious (one of my favourite epistolary works, and how the interplay of distance/desire plays out.)
  • return - a mycological horror about you coming home. (FANTASTIC example of this odd particular preoccupation of horror.)
  • erostasis - erotic biohorror at its finest. (absolutely nightmarish in all the best ways.)
  • you’re going to make a great mother someday - nauseating reproductive horror. (been very useful in explaining tokophobia to people.)
  • her pound of flesh - a horrifying heartache. (one of my favourite doomed romances. self/sacrifice.)
  • taxi bargains - make a wish, among the memories of your beloved dead. (this one made me cry.)
  • nine months out - on motherhood. (i am a mother, and this is one of my favourite works on parenting.)
10 Likes
22

Fully concur and agree. (with better results, admittely… but I have to learn not one, but two complex English jargons: hacker/coder’s and The Navalese.
(I think is wise giving to everyone an useful tool re. my posts:

HTH :wink: )

back in topic: I remain convinced today that IF still IS the best CAI tool in teaching foreign languages, I daresay to affirm that translating an IF library in foreign languages is not only a service to community, but also to the whole world…)

of course, from the above descends that EVERY english-language 80s IF I player has touched me in a personal level, and this very post is more than enough proof, no need to explain, I suppose :smiley:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

5 Likes
23

Figured I’d chime in on my own thread at last – my picks are:

walk with me, by cerberus. Equal parts hopeful and devastating.

The Archivist and the Revolution, by Autumn Chen. I am enraptured by the world in this game, told in such a haunting way that I feel it will never leave my bones.

eurydicesloveletter, by Tamber. I hold this game near and dear to my heart – Tamber is my girlfriend, and we initially met through writing interactive fiction. The game itself is a short one, a self-described love letter, a kind of promise – one we’ve finally made good on. A happy ending to the myth and an “I’ll see you at home” realized.

13 Likes
24

If I listed all the works that touched me on a personal level, I would list a number of works already mentioned in this thread, but I will instead list only two I have yet to see anyone else mention here: Metamorphoses and Howling Dogs.

On the surface, these works are very different. Metamorphoses is a simulationist parser IF, and Howling Dogs is choice fiction that is not at all puzzly. But they are both demonstrations of the power of minimalism. While neither work spells out much about its respective PC, what we are given is nothing short of enthralling. And each offers amazing examples of world-building in speculative fiction. (For more on this, one could hardly do better than read what the creator of Metamorphoses had to say about Howling Dogs.) Each in its own way broadened my perspective of what a creator can do with IF, and though it has been years since I have played either, I still find myself thinking about them quite frequently.

10 Likes
25

Hmm well I did love Zork 1-3 and Beyond Zork and Zork Grand Inquisitor (still laughingly remember the main bad saying something like “Who is the boss of you? ME. I am the boss of you!”, this was one of the first games to my recollection that had voice acting).
Zork 1 Zork I - Details
Zork Grand Inquisitor, this is a point-and-click adventure, not technically IF?
Zork: Grand Inquisitor on Steam

I also loved Enchanter, the only one of the ‘spellcaster’ infocom ones I finished.

I loved Graham Nelson’s CURSES:

Loved Emily Short’s Galatea:

Loved Andrew Plotkin’s Spider & Web:

I would say that the IF that touched me the most on a personal level and probably the first IF that made me cry was Adam Cadre’s Photopia:

Sadly it is not a good GAME, per se, but it is worth the experience of it.

I played so many other games I don’t remember them all, kind of jumble together in my head now. Probably should replay some of them. Most of the IF games I played were from 2005 or earlier. I think I dabbled once or twice after that with a few from the IF Comp a few times. But yeah, I’m old and so is my list, lol.

-virtuadept

7 Likes
26

Stay? is one that really moved me by slowly expanding my mindspace and then bringing things together in a way that I can only describe as awe-inspiring. That feeling of awe is why I love time loop games so much (not really a game-ruining spoiler, but I was glad I didn’t know about that detail going in).

A Dark Room was an early influence, with its storytelling subtly delivered while you’re busy with something else. It made me realize gameplay can tell a story. I aspire to that level of sleight of hand.

I often come back to Antique Panzitoum and its cool experimental concept. Playing the game itself (how much of it there is to play) and then reading the source code feels like a weird kind of participatory poetry. The fact that it repurposes the syntax of Inform for artistic purposes makes it even more haunting somehow.

I might have to come post more later because there are so many others!

6 Likes
27

Well, what do you think?

Of course, there are some other great games like According to Cain and the aforementioned The Wizard Sniffer, but those have already (and justly!) got their accolades.

A game that is really fit for this thread (i.e. that it’s not a very good GAME but it was emotionally touching,) and accordingly hasn’t got that many accolades, is Voices. If you are at all interested in being surprised by this 15 minute game, don’t click the spoiler yet. It’s a very good surprise.

Once I realized from Jhenette’s responses who I really was, I was shocked. And especially knowing who Jhenette would grow up to be. For most people, we insult them when they say they’re hearing voices, but for Joan of Arc, we glorify her. The ultimate irony, of course, is that we do that because the voices she heard told her to save France, but this caused the English to kill her before she even turned twenty. God saved French independence, but not without cost. If you were God, what would be the smallest thing that you’d be willing to sacrifice a human life for?

[spoiler]It’s a minor thing, but I love how Satan not only poses an impossible question to God, but becomes the narrator for a part. >LOOK AT SATAN: “I’m always myself and always your enemy. There’s a pride in that that you could never understand, omniscient or no.”

And, of course, this contrasts nicely with Michael’s complete obedience, to the point where he doesn’t rebel against you/God even if you reject his request to be besides Jhenette in body as well as in spirit.[/spoiler]

After you’ve played it, you can have some fun using some of the various Inform standard verbs in the various scenes, SORRY, especially.

>GIVE
(myself to you)
Never again.

2 Likes