What were everyone’s favorite games that didn’t score high enough to be featured in the livestream this year? (So, 21st place and below).
I’d personally like to spotlight OVER, which perfectly captures the feeling of going on vacation with my wife’s large family. It’s long, and surreal, and exhausting, and I can’t say I loved every minute of it but it was magnetic enough that I played through the whole thing in one sitting. I’d love to see more work by this author going forward!
It’s kind of cheating to choose the 22nd place entry, but The Reliquary of Epiphanius was very much made for me: a puzzly parser game with the premise of “what if Indiana Jones had to do actual archaeology as he searched for his vanished father instead of just shooting Nazis”. It has not one, not two, but three puzzles involving translating Latin inscriptions in the old ruins, and one of them requires figuring out the religious significance of old wall frescoes!
I struggled with the implementation in some places and needed the walkthrough to figure out the right command, but I enjoyed the experience a lot. Plus, it has its own soundtrack!
My favorite underrated entry (of the ones that I played/read during the event) was Fable, by Sophia Zhao (tied at 33rd). It’s not the most surprising thing in the world that I would be invested in a story with a gay monster romance plot and some interesting themes to turn over as I read, but I was.
I also enjoyed both OVER and The Reliquary of Epiphanius quite a bit!
I also think that Retrograding ended up with a bit of an unfortunate disadvantage because it has two routes and one they clearly didn’t have time to fully flesh out, but the other one, the Raven route, really is very good IMO, if you like a bit of weird dystopian soft sci-fi. If @curricle & co release a post-comp version with a more fully developed Zinnia route I will be first in line to play it!
A Smörgåsbord of Pain and Pharaoh’s Heir were also both quite fun and I was a little surprised at how low they placed (especially the former, since short games do tend to place a little lower on average). And Hen ap Prat was excellent, with surprisingly intricate gameplay amid the jokes.
Edit: Oh, and I forgot 3XXX! A fast, entertaining work of gonzo satirical queer sci-fi with some surprisingly melancholy aspects.
Frankly, I’m unsure about the wisdom of this debate (let’s be honest, last year will ignite fuel into a major polemic…) but thanks also to my permanent retirement from the 'Comp, I think that at least a major fuel is out of question.
Personally I consider Island of Rhyin unappreciated, because I consider the buildup with the NPC leading to a rather difficult choice at the very end is an excellent usage of a CYOA narrative.
At the risk of reigniting last year’s flame, I think that also rain check-in is underappreciated because of the underlying culture (more evident in the optional part, the NPC’s behaviour being exactly what one expects in this country)
but the real problem with Italians, not only me, it occurred to me only tonight, isn’t in authorship but in judging, because I just noted a major intrinsic bias in Italian culture, which shift Italians’s judgements upwards (that is, a cultural-based overappreciation all across the board, impacting the less-voted stories)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
OVER, 3XXX, and Cart get my vote! There’s still more I want to play… I confess I still haven’t even finished OVER but I love it. I can’t say I’ve been to a theme park with a huge family group but it captures that experience of finding connection through overwhelming alienation so well. I hope it gets more appreciation over time!
Seconding Fable, Cart, 3XXX, and Hen ap Prat, and adding Violent Delight! I also think My creation deserved better; despite the parser issues, it told an effective story, and it’s one of the entries that’s going to stick with me!
Clickbait, The Burger Meme Personality Test… the list is long, heh…
With the caveat that I usually keep a walkthrough nearby (and recommend others do so to if a bit short of time) here are 2 parser games with unusual flavor. There are games between them I like a lot, parser and choice, but I think these are the ones that may be most below where I picked them.
Frankenfingers is a good one. It was a reminder there was other stuff of this author’s too. He has a very distinct style and unusual protagonists. Having a map does help a lot–part of the author’s style is having a big world map and relatively few items, which is unusual, but it works well.
Not So Happy Easter is lots of fun once you 1) crank the emulator to 400% speed and 2) remember R is for re-look, L is for load. It has 80s and Spectrum nostalgia.
I’ve mentioned these in dottore Piergiorgio’s “IFComp '25 results” thread, but this would be the appropriate place to list them again for the annals:
Mooncrash!, A Smörgåsbord of Pain, and Operative Nine are some of my favorite games of this Comp. Mooncrash! builds an epic fantasy world that’s still unique; A Smörgåsbord of Pain is funny and polished, with great use of multimedia effects; and Operative Nine’s minigames were unlike anything else I’ve seen in IF.
This may veer into “how to appreciate a game/entry” but I hope that’s valid – I know there are ones in past years I didn’t get until someone says “psst, it actually means X, if you note Y and Z.”
Yeah, I was pretty shocked to see a DiBianca game miss the top 20, especially one I liked more than average. Perhaps part of what I liked was saying “Oh, I see how that would be coded, that’s really clever!”
The variety is really nice but maybe it can cut both ways. I think there’s a definite tradeoff between “for tough puzzle lovers to REALLY appreciate” and “appealing to everyone” and this is the first. I enjoyed being able to plan things out and see how my plan went. (On the flipside, since the puzzles are longer and not turn-baed, there’s a REALLY harsh penalty for a finger slip, even if you can reset.)
There’s a distinct lack of fun-busy-work in O9, replaced by having to sit back and reason things out. The second to me is less exhausting, but I’m in the minority. However I think even if people just look at the solutions after stumbling about they’ll say “Oh, that’s really cool, that makes sense now.”
Perhaps it’d be neat to have big-picture hints for how to do things. I do really like how O9 had several levels of the same puzzle that helps people poke around.
Dead Sea is another one that, if you missed it, it could potentially be very neat. It is a Twine game but has the feel of a Scott Adams (not the Dilbert guy) game from the 80s but without parser wrangling. That’s not just nostalgia. It actually has a story beyond “collect treasures, defeat baddies.” The inventory (which is laid out nicely) has clear mechanical bug, but also it’s a manageable enough world that if you’re in the right mood to forgive this fault, it’s a good experience for the time put into it.
(like some other Di Bianca games where he’s tried to translate something from graphical games into IF) is that there are a lot of graphical block-pushing puzzle games and I’ve played a lot of them over the years so this felt very ho-hum and didn’t do anything I hadn’t seen many times before. And with there being increasing sizes/“difficulty” of each idea, all of the puzzles overstayed their welcome well into “OK now this is just tedious” territory.
It just didn’t feel like there was anything interesting about it other than “sokoban implemented in a parser engine”’ (and of course the doubling of characters, but that’s not a new thing in ASCII-art games either, though it has never really caught on).
Not So Happy Easter
The 80s nostalgia may be in the medium, but what I like about this game, and games like it, is seeing the current year done as an 8-bit IF. The Czech setting is also a given, so I also like to see a different country, that I don’t know a lot about, today, done as an 8-bit IF. This is a solid 8-bit puzzler, period, but it’s these other factors that I think make it more interesting in the comp context.
Temptation In The Village
I liked Temptation In The Village very much (obviously - see my review) but I can understand why it probably doesn’t land widely. For instance @DeusIrae likes Kafka but didn’t accept the happy ending. I thought the happy ending was unlikely, but I could still accept it. And this is from poles of people who like Kafka or know about his stuff. If you don’t or didn’t, and are more logically likely to be interested in the interactiveness rather than psychological angles, I can imagine the experience of its fobby NPCs, the linear sensation of being trapped, and the lack of clearer outcomes is likely to be experienced as – maybe disappointment or ‘I didn’t do much’ or ‘I don’t get it.’
If I switch to @VictorGijsbers 's reviewing mission for a moment, to help make better players and authors, then I’d encourage you to read my review if you feel you didn’t get much from Temptation. It will offer a different perspective about what’s there.
Appropriately, this reminds me of a shoe-on-the-other-foot story. Of me recalling the IF Gigantomania as being ‘that game where I plowed a bunch of potatoes’ versus @VictorGijsbers 2300-word article about it for SPAG. Did he convince me? Definitely. Now, to me, the game is both ‘that game where I plowed a bunch of potatoes’ and something more.
I remember writing the author of Gigantomania during that IFComp to tell them about how at dinner with my parents that night, I’d told my parents I’d played a game where I plowed a bunch of potatoes.
EDIT - I originally said ‘peeling’ potatoes, but it was plowing them.
-Wade
I was apparently the one judge that gave ‘Fable’ a 10 
The story I got was absolutely perfect for me in particular. But I got the sense from other reviews that there were a lot of other paths through it that didn’t resonate with people nearly as much (and indeed, probably wouldn’t have resonated with me!)
I kinda liked valley of glass. Yeah, the implementation is rough, but the ideas are original and interesting.
Here are those that jump out when I look back at my scores:
A Rock’s Tale: probably my most favorite “fun” play, I was sad to see it just miss the top 20 cut off because it really stood out for me
Burger Meme Personality Test: funny enough to want to send to my co-workers!
3XXX Naked Human Bombs: a premise I will most definitely bring up as a little tidbit at cocktail parties (or whatever kind of social situations that require random bits of interesting conversation), should the topic of censorship come up. It’s funny but also piercing commentary.
Hen Ap Prat Gets Smacked in the Twat: I admit I’m not familiar with the canon here, but I found this one pretty amusing. I had a good time!
OVER: I usually see it as a testament to a piece of writing that is long and captivates my attention the entire time (I get very easily distracted). It took me a few sittings but I just kept wanting to get back to it. I did find myself wondering why it was written as an interactive piece. I’d honestly just eat up a novel about Lou, which was the magnetic draw for me.
A Conversation in a Dark Room: I’m not sure why this ended up so low. I thought it was of decent quality and played through a few different outcomes that were significantly different in ways that were interesting.