WHO AMONG US is a choice-based murder mystery/thriller set in post-Soviet eastern Europe. It’s fairly substantial for a choice-based piece, and took me 30-45 minutes to complete. Review after the jump.
Category: Competitions
IF Comp 2013: Further (Will Hines)
Right! Time to do some IF Comp reviews. As usual, I am not reviewing parser games that list no beta-testers. (I’m a little more flexible with Twine pieces because there’s not really an obvious place to put that list.)
Further is a parser-based, lightly puzzly surreal story about a ghost negotiating its passage to the afterlife. Play time, roughly 10 minutes. Review after the jump, light spoilers in the sense that I describe what the gameplay is like.
IF Comp 2013 is now on
As usual this time of year, the annual IF competition (the 19th!) is now in progress, featuring both parser-based and choice-based works in a range of systems, including games in Inform, TADS, Twine, Quest, Undum, StoryNexus, and some other hand-rolled systems.
Games can be downloaded or played online here, and most do have some sort of online option. As usual, anyone who didn’t submit a game can judge as long as they rate at least five games. (Some of the games are pretty short, so this is unlikely to be a very onerous task.)
I will review as I have time. My usual rule is try to review every game that a) either has beta-testers or has a reasonable cause not to list them and b) can be played on my machine with reasonable efforts. I make no guarantees this year that I can actually do that: there are 35 games, and I have a lot of work and travel in the next month or two. But we’ll see. If you’d like to check out what other people are writing about the same games, this thread on the intfiction forum is meant to list some of the other bloggers who are also reviewing.
You may also like to review the games yourself; people who don’t have blogs or sites of their own often do this by posting comments to the intfiction forum.
Spring Thing 2013: A Roiling Original
A Roiling Original is a wordplay game by Andrew Schultz, a sequel to 2012’s Shuffling Around (my review). It uses a similar mechanic of changing one object into another via anagrams, and is an entrant in Spring Thing 2013.
More detailed thoughts after the break. If you’re planning to play and vote on Spring Thing games yourself, you may want to wait before reading this.
Assorted News and Events
First round voting in the XYZZY Awards is open through April 15. This is a nomination round, and a list of eligible games, interactive fiction, CYOA and choice-based games of other types can be found on the website. There will be a second round to pick winners from the nominees. Anyone may vote, though you’re encouraged to have played several eligible games (ie, not to vote tactically just for one or two special favorites). But please don’t think you need to have covered all the eligible options to vote; it’s a really really long list and no one’s played all of it. The XYZZY Awards also now recognize innovation and technical tools released during the previous year, so if there’s a great interactive fiction language, tool, or piece of documentation you would like to recognize, feel free to write in your nominees.
Second: now available are the three games entered in Spring Thing 2013. This year includes “Encyclopedia of Elementals” (Adam Holbrook, Quest); “A Roiling Original” (Andrew Schultz, Glulx); and “Witch’s Girl” (Mostly Useless, Twine). If you want to vote in Spring Thing, you’re encouraged to make a good faith attempt to at least try all three games, but there are no other requirements, and if you can’t get something to work on your platform, that’s fair enough. Voting is open through April 28.
Third: there now appears to be an interactive storytelling meetup group centered in Ottawa, looking at various types of content including hypertext, IF, and tabletop games.
Ectocomp 2012
Ectocomp is a Halloween-themed IF comp, which takes entries just before Halloween and then runs judging through the month of November. All of the games are written in 3 hours or less, which means that they tend to be very brief and a bit on the buggy side. Even with that caveat, though, several of this year’s crop were rather entertaining, and of course none takes very long to play, so it’s worth a look.
If you’re interested, there’s still time to play and vote!
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 