An Exercise for the Reader

Sting

(Major spoilers. Seriously, don’t read this if you don’t want the ending spoiled.)

Last year Mike Russo submitted to IFComp a comedy featuring the shenanigans of upper-class males with too much time on their hands. P.G. Wodehouse, but in a setting Wodehouse never tried: ancient Greece. The game was also partly based on actual events. His entry this year, Sting, is quite different. It’s not a comedy but a memoir. About the only thing I can see that it shares with The Eleusinian Miseries is that basis on real events.

Kidney Kwest

For a while now I’ve been interested in using interactive fiction for educational purposes, and so when I saw Kidney Kwest‘s blurb I wanted to give it a try. The game states that it was designed to help a kidney researcher reinforce, for the researcher’s child patients, a couple of messages about medicines to take and foods to avoid. Kidney Kwest is also written using Perplexity, a new interactive fiction system designed to understand full English sentences.

Brave Bear

(Some spoilers.)

Brave Bear is a short and sweet parser game in Inform 6 about a stuffed bear saving its owner. It has some elements that reminded me of the first Toy Story, but tonally the game is a lot closer to Stuffed Fables. There’s the core of a good snack-sized game here, but unfortunately Brave Bear suffers from underimplementation and some puzzle choices that don’t fit that well with the game’s overarching ethos.

4×4 Archipelago

Two hours into 4×4 Archipelago, and my barbarian PC had only completed three of the five major tasks in his quest to gather an ancient queen’s relics and restore them to her hidden tomb. He had, however, tamed a wolf, traded with mermen, joined the Hunters’ Guild, mined for silver, fetched potion ingredients for a witch, and visited sixteen different islands. He’d also bested bandits, goblins, undead, harpies, a fire serpent, and a variety of other creatures. All in all, it took him about three and a half hours of my playing time to complete the tragic queen’s quest, thus winning the game for me.

AardVarK Versus the Hype

(Some spoilers. You have been warned.)

AardVark Versus the Hype is a parser-based, science fiction comedy about a teenage alt-rock band fighting off a mind-control/zombielike apocalypse. It’s over-the-top enough to make for an enjoyable story. The game also gets in some good jabs at teenage angst, corporate sloganeering, and zombie fiction. Unfortunately, the game’s hints on timers had a negative effect on my playing experience.

The Best Man

One of the most original IF games I’ve played is Stephen Bond’s Rameses. In it, you take on the role of an alienated teenage boy at an Irish boarding school. There are no puzzles in the game; instead, the game uses interactivity (or, rather, the lack thereof) in the service of a finely-tuned character study. Rameses is so good at what it does that I chose it for one of my examples of characterization when I taught an interactive fiction course a couple of years ago. It’s a parser game, but it’s the kind of game that probably would have been made in Twine if Twine had been around in 2000.

Smart Theory

Smart Theory is a short, choice-based, satirical game made in Ink. You play as a college student who attends a crash course in a new philosophy that’s suddenly become popular on campus. Nearly the entirety of the game is a conversation between you and the speaker. As such, it’s a game that’s explicitly about ideas rather than a game that’s telling a story or a game that’s presenting a collection of puzzles to be solved.

The Song of the Mockingbird

After IFComp last year I had a curious realization: In each of the four IFComps in which I’d participated up to that point, my absolute favorite game from each year had not made the top ten. I’ve enjoyed lots of the games in the competition, but my personal #1 game in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 placed eleventh or worse. I thought it might be fun to post somewhere a non-top ten top ten list—my ten favorite games from the 2017-2020 IFComps that did not make the top ten, together with explanations for why I liked them so much.

Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg

Arthur DiBianca’s games tend to be minimalist, puzzly, and whimsical. Most of the last several games of his I’ve played lean heavily into the puzzly aspect. Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg leans much more into the whimsical — more so, in fact, than any game of his I’ve played — including even the original Grandma Bethlinda’s Variety Box.

Gruesome

Gruesome is a parody of some of the earliest cave-crawling text games: the Zork series (especially Zork I), but there are also references to Adventure, Enchanter, and even Hunt the Wumpus. You play as a grue, that “sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth” – a monster invented by the creators of Zork to prevent players from wandering around in the dark. Rather than feasting on adventurers, though, your goal in Gruesome is much more benign: You must lead five lost cave-crawling adventurers to freedom.