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. ↩︎