I’ll update this first post as a running table of contents.
Thanks to @anon66621404 for the lovely banner!
Andromeda Chained by @pieartsy
The myth of Andromeda has inspired many artists, owing to the enduring appeal of naked chicks in bondage. The backstory:
Andromeda, princess of Aethiopia, daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia is minding her own business when Mom boasts that she’s more beautiful than the Nereids, Nereus’ sea nymph daughters. This doesn’t pose any credible threat to the Nereids’ brand, but the Nereids and Nereus are colleagues of Poseidon’s, so out of some sort of classically divine professional courtesy, he goes all wrathful on Aethiopia, flooding it or siccing the sea monster Cetus on it, or maybe both. The Oracle of Ammon (Egyptian god crossover event!) says the only thing to do to save the country is to sacrifice Andromeda to Cetus. So Cepheus shackles her naked to a rock to await her fate. (By no account did the Oracle specify the naked part, that was apparently just Cepheus’ own creative vision for what a sea monster would find tasty.)
Getting involved with the gods is sort of like global thermonuclear war, but worse: the only way to win is for your whole family not to play.
Anyway, the soundtrack starts playing Holding Out for a Hero and Perseus shows up.
Perseus had just offed Medusa, having been personally accoutred by the gods, so he’s got the sickest loadout in all of classical mythdom:
And now he has all that and Medusa’s head in a bag! (Truly, we have no clue whether Perseus was really worth a damn as a hero. Iorgos the shepherd’s clumsy son could’ve kicked ass with that kit.)
Him being a Hero, and priorities being priorities, after slaying Medusa the very next thing he does with all this divine provenance is to fly all the way to northwest Africa to show Medusa’s head to a king who snubbed him once, turning him into the Atlas mountains. But if it weren’t for his Heroic pettiness (and wanting to stick to the coast 'cause he was a little nervous about getting completely lost flying across the Strait of Sicily) he might not have come across Andromeda in her time of need.
Andromeda Chained, the IF story, begins with Cepheus serving up his daughter on the rocks.
Subverting a patriarchal damsel in distress story isn’t hard. Centering her makes it inevitable. The hard part is still having something interesting to say beyond the obvious consequences of the recontextualization. Andromeda Chained is meant to be played several times, and it can be without it overstaying its welcome. It’s a choice game about not having agency, yet finds a way to play to the medium’s strengths. It’s well-written and judicious and deft in its brevity and the paths it offers and the slight variations they create, effectively dramatizing the leeway Andromeda does have: how much to resent all this.
The penultimate paragraph of the story always ends “the tale of Perseus wends on” in concession to it always being his tale. The real chains were never the ones on the rock.
How Dare You? has a cringeworthy premise: you show up at the home of our partner, Heron, who communicates very clearly that it’s over and you should leave. Yet…
…No, you can’t. You’ve got to convince em to change eir mind. You just have to show em how much ey means to you. How much you care.
You refuse to leave. The game requires you to try to win Heron over. It won’t let you leave prior to making some sufficiently dramatic gesture (and it’s a parser game, so you don’t know the options).
From the opening, we get strong hints that Heron had good reason to call it quits, and this is borne out by the options available to us, our internal dialogue about the situation, and Heron’s reactions.
If this were a romcom, you could probably turn things around: an egregious disregard for boundaries at the final act climax is always a winning move. But this was written for the Love/Violence Jam and the Anti-Romance Jam 2024.
The cringeyness of the premise and ugliness of the situation is redeemed in that it does end badly. The story doesn’t sugar-coat toxic behavior and pretend it’s sweet: it recognizes the toxicity, which is refreshing.
It’s an extremely quick bite-sized story and worth a few play-throughs.
Not Just Once by @TaciturnFriend
Not Just Once is a well-written creepypasta choice game. There seem to be just two endings, so functionally there’s just one choice: play it safe, or keep playing it risky. Try it both ways.
There are some bugs. One time through, passages referred to past events that hadn’t happened; another time I was left stuck with no choices at all, thus no way forward. But because I was planning to review it, I played several times, and most play-throughs were fine so your odds are good.
Overall I enjoyed it and recommend giving it a try.
Thanks for the kind review! I also enjoyed your cavalier retelling of the Andromeda myth 
I played the online version of Museum Heist by @Denk though it recommends playing it with an Adrift client.
Just like it says on the tin, you’re robbing a museum. The police will arrive in ten minutes and you’re trying to steal as much as you can carry. What story there is is a veneer to present an inventory management puzzle game. You need to play multiple times to learn the constraints.
I gave up when I realized that the backpack seemed to be implemented as a stack and I’d have to figure out how to optimize the order in which I put things in it. But this game is the sort of thing you’ll enjoy if you enjoy that sort of thing.
The cover image for Quest for the Serpent’s Eye says it’s from TextComm Games for the Xyzzy II Home Computer System. The description is:
Do you long for the days of sensational descriptions, ridiculously inconsistent monochrome artwork, and the mind-numbing frustration of seemingly impossible puzzles? If so, this might be the game for you! […]
Inspired by some of my favourite titles of the Apple II era, this game is designed to be nothing more than a nostalgic bit of fun for the young and young at heart.
True to form, I was stuck within minutes and resorted to the Serpent’s Eye walkthrough.
I had an Apple IIe back in the day. But I soon realized I was either insufficiently sentimental or insufficiently young at heart for this game. If you have a surfeit of nostalgia or cardioneoteny, though, consider giving it a try.
@EJoyce and @Encorm 's How to Make Eggplant Lasagna (with cats) is about trying to cook while your two cats are being pests. It’s a brief farce, but with significant variation if you play again with different choices. Once, I even successfully ended up with a meal!
For cat people, for whom it’ll be a familiar slice of life, I give it two thumbless paws up. Non-cat-people would probably just be confused and wondering if they should stage interventions for their friends with cats.
The webpage for Kiss of Beth by @OverThinking tells us:
[…] you have a conversation and then make a choice. […]
“Kiss of Beth” has two endings.
A man arrives at your house to take your housemate Beth on a date. For reasons that aren’t clear to the player, the player character seems to be vetting him.
To say any more would constitute a spoiler. It’s very quick, and I enjoyed it. So go find out what happens for yourself. Then go back and get the other ending. (Unless an Indie Horror Jam entry containing “adult language, descriptions of violence, and brief references to addiction” specifically sounds off-putting to you…)
My Girl by @anon66621404 is “a linear, gothic work of interactive fiction made for the Bluebeard Jam, 2024”. Superficially, it’s a fairly faithful telling of the Bluebeard story. But in Perrault’s version the horror begins with the reveal of the corpses in the basement. In My Girl, the horror is there from the very start.
His favourite endearment to employ is ‘my girl.’ Santiago smells of the sea, navy blue overcoat sun-faded from hard wear. The golden buttons are polished clean, visible signs of mending meandering over the breast pocket: small flowers sprouting from the wool. He wears the old, tatty thing, when he’s in a particularly good mood.
“My girl,” he says, reaching out to take hold of your hand, clasped lightly between both of his. He pets you like a small animal, a cosseted cat. His flesh is cold, as frigid as the arctic seas he made his fortune upon. In the trade of silks, rum, and golden fripperies: the very same with which he adorns the house he’s kept you in.
She’s implicitly denied personhood, she’s an accessory, a possession. His girl.
The writing is good: it has a distinct narrative voice that does a good job of maintaining the story’s tone even when nothing overtly horrible is going on at the moment. (There were a couple of transitions I found to be abrupt, but that’s a small matter.)
I recommend it.
(In ways this echoes Andromeda Chained, above but with a grimmer tone.)
Thanks for the review! You are certainly right, that the backpack (a big corner of the gameplay), is probably not everyone’s cup of tea. I actually had that as a big concern but it turned out, that several people liked the game anyway.
But certainly a valid point.
Somebody Else’s Story by @EJoyce is a twine game in the Goncharov milieu. It’s a brief vignette, taking only a few minutes to play. At first, it seemed so slight that I wondered if I needed to be much better versed in Goncharov lore to get something from it, but after exploring its choices through a few replays, I did get it (and probably should have been tipped off from the title).
It also echoes a theme of Andromeda Chained, above: Katya knows that she and Sofia are endangered just by their proximity to the people in their lives, but further seems to have a metafictional awareness that she and Sofia are bit players in this drama, that the plot counts them as expendable.
If you’re looking for a lunch break game, have something additional queued up for afterward: this probably would work best as an aperitif.
Hi Zed, thank you for playing Quest for the Serpent’s Eye! I appreciate you taking the time to review it and post your feedback.
Hello Zed, a very belated thankyou for this! At some point I’ll do a further tweak of this one and will hunt down those bugs.
I’m going to post my Great Play Marathon Reviews here because I review so rarely that risk of the thread growing unwieldy is low and it has a picture of my cat, Inky.
My first game, in the first square, A1, was Cat Petting Simulator 2014. It’s a quick game that does just what it says on the tin: it’s about petting a cat. There are brief interruptions to tend to one’s dinner (not eggplant lasagna) and to deal with a chore familiar to cat owners, but most of the play consists of choosing exactly where to pet next.
I played through nine times, but reached only three of at least five endings. Cat fur in the Rain. Licklicklicklicklicklicklick. Kitty smooches. The final score reports the cat’s affection for you, which apparently can reach 18, but I never topped 15, which irked me. 
The author’s end note was touching:
It’s been an ugly summer and an ugly fall, both in games and out. So it was important to me that I make a game that purely exists to make the player feel good.
The cat of Cat Petting Simulator is a real cat, and every response to every pet is a real thing she’s done. She loves me, and by extension, she loves you. I don’t know who you are, player, but I want you, for at least a few minutes, to feel loved.
Every playthrough of Cat Petting simulator should be more-or-less unique; by all means, play it again and again. I want you to feel the love both from me and little Cassie whenever you need it.
…but originally I had missed the “in games” part. Then the 2014 clicked: Gamergate.
Inky joined me on my recliner while I played the game on a laptop. I dutifully crossed a leg over the other, creating a warm overhang she could tuck herself underneath, which is sometimes what she wants. It was one of those times. So I was petting my cat and listening to her purr while pretending to pet a cat and listen to her purr.
Cat people will get it. That’s love. And sharing it is probably as healthy and productive a response to hate as there can be.
Draculaland by Robin Johnson (at A2 on the grid).
I enjoyed Johnson’s Detectiveland and Gruesome and looked forward to this. Johnson discusses its development here: The Xylophoniad (and Draculaland) post-mortem.
I’m not a fan of the Scott Adams adventures I’ve played. The obstacles were capricious and their solutions much moreso. Most of the time real-world logic was cast to the wind, but at unpredictable intervals it could apply to a pedantic degree. I didn’t feel clever when I got something “right” because the whole thing seemed like an exercise in throwing pasta at the wall to see what stuck.
The inspiration Johnson took from Adams’ games extended beyond the aspects cited above and into the sensibilities of Draculaland’s game world itself, I daresay. So you probably see where I’m going. I enjoyed the inventive silliness of the game’s fiction, but as a game I found it frustrating and it didn’t really work for me.
Later that year (2016), Johnson won the IF Comp with his next Versificator 2 game, Detectiveland. Gruesome in 2021 was the final Versificator per se game; he adapted its engine and publicly released it as Gruescript.
Johnson and Linus Åkesson share an unusual distinction: they’re the only people to have won the IF Comp with games implemented in game engines of their own invention, Åkesson having done so in 2020 with Impossible Bottle and Dialog. Dialog has seen more adoption by others: the IFDB lists ten games with system:gruescript by people other than Johnson and 25 games with system:dialog by people other than Åkesson[1]. But most of Dialog’s uptake has been in the past three years and its initial public release had been in 2018… three years before Gruescript’s. And this mobile-friendly tool to start Gruescript projects came out just a few months ago. So I wouldn’t bet against Gruescript.
The list includes Ryan Veeder’s Craverly Heights owing to Åkesson’s Dialog adaptation of Craverly Heights, so it’s among those excluded. ↩︎
Raising the Flag on Mount Yo Momma by Juhana Leinonen, A3 on the grid.
Raising the Flag has a great title and a solid premise: you’ve just been trounced in a Yo Momma insult battle by reigning champion Gus and a mysterious stranger flags you over. He proves to be Joe Mahma, “a living legend, the infamous grandmaster of Yo Momma insult battles” and he shares the secret to success: digging up dirt on your opponent so you can make it personal.
An eyepatch covers the old man’s right eye and a wide scar runs below it, from the right temple to the left side of his neck.
>
x eyepatch
“I can see you looking at the battle wounds,” Joe says. “Let them be a warning to you of the dangers of the trade.”He stays silent for a long time, looking into the distance as if lost in memories. Then suddenly he continues.
“It was my final and most challenging battle. The opponent was good, really good. The best one I’ve ever met and that’s saying a lot. I had battled them all and won them all. I had my reputation at stake and I couldn’t afford to lose.”
“So I took out the big gun. The perfect insult, the momma of all Yo Momma insults. The power of it was beautiful and terrifying at the same time. I had crafted it and studied it, but I wasn’t strong enough to control it.”
“I’m lucky to have only this to remind me of that day,” he says pointing at his scar, “many others were not as lucky.”
You were just a toddler when it happened, but you remember the news footage of the carnage. Buildings from two blocks in ruins, injured people being rushed to hospitals. The UN classified the insult as a weapon of mass destruction and some countries even reinstated capital punishment to keep it off wrong hands in the future.
That’s some funny stuff.
The game is set in a club that’s a simple 3x3 grid, as seen by its map command:
Vip STAGE Hangout
Bar Floor Hall of Fame
Arcade Entrance Dark corner
The Stage is where to go when you’re ready to square off against Gus again, and every other location has an NPC or two. You can get somewhere by entering its name or the name of an NPC who’s there, thus heading off the death slog of marching across the map[1]. Permissible interactions with NPCs are restricted to: give/show them something (which are considered the same), talk to them, or insult them.
The game originated as a entry to Newer New Year’s Speed IF way back in December 2009, but it was withdrawn so it could be polished; the current version was released at the end of February 2010. But some bits felt somewhat under-implemented to me…
After you’ve done the usual rounds of wandering and examining things, you’ll probably be pretty clear that the solutions involve getting past a guard into the VIP area to talk to Gus’ girlfriend, probably requiring a VIP pass or getting rid of the guard; getting into the satchel being minded by Ralph, one of Gus’ goons, probably involving screwing with the jukebox to prompt a response from him; reading the tag on the sweater Gus is wearing that you can’t get close enough to, probably involving adjusting the club’s thermostat, which the bouncer won’t let you near, so they’ll need distracting.
We’re told Ralph is sitting with the satchel. When you mess with the jukebox and he gets up to respond, you can examine him, you can examine the satchel, but nothing indicates he leaves it behind. You can’t examine the chair because it doesn’t really exist. The failure message if you try to take the satchel is the same whether Ralph has gotten up or not. You need to just take a leap of faith and try opening the satchel that Ralph might still be carrying.
I accidentally discovered a table existed when I dropped my drink but instead was told I put it on a table. It wasn’t in the room description. Looking under that table, I found the chewing gum that is, of course, a needed item. Eventually, an NPC loses an item and then wanders around the club searching for it. I think the intent is that you’d discover the table by being in the location at the same time as the NPC and thus you’d see him looking under the table, but it seems to rely on chance: you need to be revisiting a location at the right time when you don’t know there’s a reason to go there again.
I ended up resorting to the Club Floyd transcript of Yo Momma for hints (note that this was with the original version).
It’s nothing new that IF player characters are terrible visitors. They’re always opening everything and looking under things and stealing everything not locked down. They never met an authorized personnel only sign that they didn’t view as an invitation. They’ll push and turn and put things inside other things just to try to feel anything at all see if they can.
The characters in this game are pretty awful. One NPC stands out as truly monstrous, but our protagonist, Jen, is a solid choice for second place, conspicuously worse than a typical IF player character. The only attendee who seems decent is Norbert. You insult a bully and pin the blame on Norbert so the bully gives him a beating. And the staff seems fine. You’ll roofie one of them before the night is over.
Ultimately, the setting and these characters were sufficiently ugly that I didn’t really enjoy spending time with them. I didn’t feel good about bringing Jen to victory. And the game’s humor peaked with Joe’s introduction at the beginning.
It seems like you can get into an unwinnable state without an indication thereof, specifically, by losing access to the jukebox before you’ve done all you need with it, but I’m not sure: maybe there’s a way to get out of the situation. I don’t view this as some crime, but with a puzzler I prefer it if the about section gives a warning if it’s the case.
kidding, these are convenient and a kindness to the player. ↩︎
Miss Gosling’s Last Case by Daniel Stelzer, A4 on the grid.
I had played through the opening scene of this, the first entry in @Draconis’ Old Women’s Dogs Cinematic Universe, in 2024’s IFComp, and vaguely intended to continue but never got to it. This didn’t owe to any perceived flaw in the game; it just goes that way some time and I’d looked forward to getting back to it in the course of the Great Play Marathon.
It opens with the realization that you’re dead. Oops. In the night you recognized that you’d been poisoned and tried to call for help but never made it to the phone, instead falling down the stairs and breaking your neck. Luckily, death itself poses no obstacle to the love of a good dog. Your loyal collie Watson remains eager to follow your directions.
Most of the setting’s obstacles are staples of IF puzzlers. Getting behind closed doors. Needing light in a dark place. Creating diversions to get people to go elsewhere. Inventory management is a persistent challenge because Watson can only carry one thing in his mouth.
Two levels of meta-obstacle pervade: it’s the police who can take meaningful action, so it’s ultimately them you need to manipulate. And your only means of doing so is through Watson’s actions, thus you’re limited by what he can do and understand. The first challenge is to give the police a reason to think it had been something other than a fatal accident.
I enjoyed the narrative voice. Miss Gosling is a classic cozy mystery detective: brilliant, ornery, idiosyncratic. She sees what others don’t, a distinction among red, yellow, and green notwithstanding (she’s color blind). She’s aware that she’s a little arrogant… and she’s comfortable with that.
And the frame that we’re giving our commands to a dog is a neat device for parser errors. Instead of “That’s not a verb I recognize”, we get “Watson looks up at you with a sad little whine.” In many parser games, there’s a point (or many of them) when I feel frustrated with the parser. But here, I ended up feeling like I wanted to do better so Watson wouldn’t be sad and frustrated. He’s just a very good boy who wants to do what you want so much!
To say this game is polished is an understatement. It’s pushing the frontiers of what polished should mean. Whatever criticisms I may offer below should be understood in context: this is a very good game with an excellent implementation. Parser game authors with aspirations of attracting new people to the medium would do well to look at it.
We get a pretty full slate of all the quality-of-life features players might hope for:
help command, including alerting you to think…think command (also in the navbar) spells out what your tasks are. You may have no clue what to do next at the level of taking action, but at least you’ll always have an idea of what you need to accomplish.hints command/navbar link provides Invisiclues-style incremental hintsmap command/navbar link provides a comprehensive map. 32 locations is sustantial for a single-house-and-its-grounds setting and we’re spared needing to scrawl our own. (Miss Gosling knows her own home so there’s no need for incremental revelation)But a lot of the heavy-lifting is done by using Dialog’s inline status area (more specifically, the Å-machine web terp’s inline status area) to provide a command bar.
The same idea featured in Linus Åkesson’s aforementioned Impossible Bottle. Above each command prompt there’s a selection of links corresponding to commands for the actions you might like to take. The offerings are dynamically generated, inspired by where you are and what’s around you. Selecting one is equivalent to typing the command (and the old selection of links disappears, both removing visual clutter and neatly avoiding leaving links referring to outdated context lying around where they’d still be click-able).
It’s a very nice feature and my guess is that it would make Miss Gosling a much easier sell with experienced players of choice-based IF who normally don’t consider parser-based IF to be their thing… and I would love to hear about it if anyone does know about such players’ reactions.
The command bar also routinely offers actions that are useless. Daniel has released the game’s source, so we can see the approach to generating the command bar and it’s, well, facile. It does the job of avoiding suggesting things that are physically impossible or completely nonsensical, but it doesn’t really test for relevance.
The list of suggested commands is bound to shape a player’s expectations and understanding. It calls attention to particular things within the game’s fiction it mentions and toward specific courses of action, given that it’s… a list of suggested commands. But it turns out that sometimes it offers affordances and sometimes they’re false affordances. I think it ends up promoting misdirection often enough that it ends up subverting its own utility.
I want to stress that I’m praising with faint damns here. I think features like this are crucial to the future of the medium and I nitpick because I think scrutinizing it has value.
A much smaller issue is that after you select a link, the focus on the input field for keyboard input isn’t restored. Any time you use a link, you need to manually click before you can type another command. And just clicking within the page isn’t good enough. Anywhere within the game’s main output window[2] works, which sounds ample… if you know that. While I was playing, my experimentation after clicking in the margins didn’t work made me think I needed to click in the input field itself, and it wasn’t until writing this that I disabused myself of this conclusion.
It’s taken me a while to write this because I had a lot to say. And in talking so much about the interface, I fear I’ve given short shrift to the content of the game, but I don’t want to go on even longer. It’s a good game. You should play it if you haven’t.
Thank you so much for the review! I’m so glad you enjoyed the game.
One note on this, for other potential players: if this gets frustrating, go to the options menu in the top right corner and turn on “always re-focus”. New versions of the Å-machine interpreter have a tooltip to explain what this means, because “always re-focus” is distinctly opaque! But it means the input bar will always take focus again after you click a link.
(It’s not enabled by default because it means the window will automatically scroll down to the input box after you click a link, which can be annoying if a lot of text got printed at once.)
Social Democracy: Petrograd 1917 by Autumn Chen, A5 on the grid.
One candidate for the first work of interactive fiction is the Sumerian Game, predating Crowther’s Adventure by more than a decade. It indirectly inspired Hamurabi, popularized in David Ahl’s BASIC computer games books, which I played a long time ago.
The game is composed of three segments, representing the reigns of three successive rulers of the city of Lagash in Sumer around 3500 BC. In each segment the game asks the players how to allocate workers and grain over a series of rounds while accommodating the effects of their prior decisions, random disasters, and technological innovations, with each segment adding complexity.
(The original source is lost, but there’s a stab at a reconstruction of the Sumerian Game on Steam.)
There’s a degree of narrative involved, but really it’s more directly an antecedent of city/empire management games like Civilization, but with a wholly text-based interface.
Social Democracy is in this vein, but instead of Civ’s epic scope or even the Sumerian Game’s development over years, it covers a little more than half a year in 1917. This makes it land very differently. It’s grounded. You’re not playing around in an abstraction of societal development, you’re engaging with alternative history in close-focus.
I was, frankly, miserable playing this game. At every turn, your choices are between frying pans and fires. Should you make a Faustian bargain with this devil or that devil? The situation is so dire that people are going to die en masse due to your decisions. You get to influence who dies and you can try to minimize the carnage… but you won’t get out clean.
Some time when I have a surfeit of stress-tolerance, I look forward to trying again…