As part of the IF Comp review collective project, I asked Stephen Granade — scientist and science educator, author of space escape game Fragile Shells, and former IF Comp organizer — to look at Life on Mars?. He came through in style with a Twine review that demonstrates his feedback interactively.
Category: Competitions
IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Harry Giles on Cape
This post is part of an ongoing project to bring more voices to the IF Comp conversation. I have been reaching out to players and authors who aren’t part of the intfiction community, and also to some veteran intfiction denizens who might not have time to cover the whole comp but who are likely to have especially useful feedback in particular areas.
Harry Giles, creator of (among other things) Raik and the spoken word performance Drone, has written here about Bruno Dias’ Cape.
Continue reading “IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Harry Giles on Cape”
IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Lucian Smith on Darkiss
This post is part of an ongoing project to bring more voices to the IF Comp conversation. I have been reaching out to players and authors who aren’t part of the intfiction community, and also to some veteran intfiction denizens who might not have time to cover the whole comp but who are likely to have especially useful feedback in particular areas.
This time, Lucian Smith talks about his take on the Italian vampire puzzler Darkiss.
Continue reading “IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Lucian Smith on Darkiss”
IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Duncan Stevens on Map
This post is part of an ongoing project to bring more voices to the IF Comp conversation. I have been reaching out to players and authors who aren’t part of the intfiction community, and also to some veteran intfiction denizens who might not have time to cover the whole comp but who are likely to have especially useful feedback in particular areas.
Here Duncan Stevens, one of the prolific reviewers of IF in the late-90s newsgroups, takes a look at Map.
Continue reading “IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Duncan Stevens on Map”
IF Comp 2015: Darkiss – Chapter 1: the Awakening (Marco Vallarino)
The 21st annual Interactive Fiction Competition is currently on, through mid-November. Voting is open to the general public; the only prerequisite is that you not be an author, not vote on games that you tested, and submit votes on at least five games. (You emphatically do not have to have played them all!)
If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.
Darkiss Chapter 1 is a puzzly parser game in which you are a vampire. You’ve partially recovered after an attack of vengeful villagers, but your strength is still low, and you need to gather your possessions and regain your powers before you move on. The puzzles are mostly of a fairly straightforward and traditional kind, though there were one or two outliers. I played through the game with occasional recourse to hints over the course of about an hour.
Continue reading “IF Comp 2015: Darkiss – Chapter 1: the Awakening (Marco Vallarino)”
IF Comp 2015: Arcane Intern (Unpaid) (Astrid Dalmady)
The 21st annual Interactive Fiction Competition is currently on, through mid-November. Voting is open to the general public; the only prerequisite is that you not be an author, not vote on games that you tested, and submit votes on at least five games. (You emphatically do not have to have played them all! In a year with 55 entrants, it is very unlikely that most judges will get through anywhere near all of them.)
Arcane Intern (Unpaid) is a Twine piece with three endings, in which the player goes to work at a publishing house that turns out to be tangled up with actual magic; it’s a branch-and-bottleneck structure with an intro, three segments with light puzzles and exploration, and a conclusion. I played to all three endings.
Continue reading “IF Comp 2015: Arcane Intern (Unpaid) (Astrid Dalmady)”
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 