EnvComp

The EnvComp games are now available (both of them):

Dead Like Ants by C. E. J. Pacian (TADS 3)
La Seine by Derek Sutcliffe (ZCode)

The comp premise is that the player is in some kind of strange or unusual environment, which is a cool conceit. I’m not a judge, but discussion is allowed during this comp, so a few (only mildly spoilery) remarks after the cut:

I’ve now played both (though I am stuck on the last bit of La Seine, I pretty well understood what was going on from the beginning). Neither is especially long. La Seine trades heavily on the surreal qualities of its setting; the feeling that something is slightly wrong is entirely fitting.

Dead Like Ants is a little bigger, a little more fleshed out, a little more satisfying (to my mind), and rewards more interactions with the environment. It has the dreamy yet grotesque quality of a not-especially-friendly children’s book.

I admit, neither was quite what I expected from EnvComp. Since the prompt mentioned such possibilities as life underwater or inside a volcano, I had half-figured the games would entail some deeply different way of inhabiting the space of the game world, something that focused on survival in some alien medium. These don’t really do that, but they’re entertaining for other reasons.