Category: Competitions

IF Comp 2015: a couple of games I beta-tested

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.)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Cover for Laid Off From the Synesthesia Factory

This is a little different from usual because I saw these games in beta: Sub Rosa and Laid Off From the Synesthesia Factory. So I’m not voting them scores, naturally, and the standard bias disclaimers apply.

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IF Comp 2015: Onaar (Robert DeFord)

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.)

Onaar cover artIf you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Onaar is interactive fiction at the role-playing end of the spectrum: there’s a large world containing a lot of interchangeable resources, a number of possible goals that are presented explicitly as side missions, and interactions that are less about puzzle solving than about gathering and crafting. Objects respawn in some locations. I did not finish the game in two hours, though I didn’t ever really get stuck or turn to the walkthrough. It’s just that there’s quite a bit to do here, and a lot of the progress is slow.

I wasn’t able to play this using the hacked Mac Gargoyle interpreter included in the game package — that refused to launch for me — but WINE did run the hacked Windows Gargoyle.

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IF Comp 2015: The Baker of Shireton (Hanon Ondricek)

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.)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Cover art for Baker of ShiretonThe Baker of Shireton is a parser simulation game satirizing MMOs; it includes a large number of independently acting NPCs and different events to coordinate. Even though I did glance at the walkthrough, there was so much going on that I did not master the game in the play time allotted for competition play.

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IF Comp 2015: Two Shorts

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.)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Cover for Seeking Ataraxia

This time around I have short comments on two pieces that were themselves not very long plays: Forever Meow and Seeking Ataraxia. (Edited to reflect: initially I thought that Forever Meow was built on a rather modified base of Twine, but in fact it’s a custom engine. Sorry about that!)

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IF Comp 2015: Koustrea’s Contentment (Jeremy Pflasterer)

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.)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Koustrea cover artKoustrea’s Contentment is a pretty sizable parser puzzle game. It does not come with a full walkthrough, and no walkthrough at all was included in my original comp download, so I spent quite a bit of my available two hours wandering around making little progress — but even had that not been the case, I could not have finished it on time. The author knows that this is likely and states as much in the ABOUT text for the game.

All the same, there’s some interesting stuff going on here. The TADS 3 world model is used to good effect. It may be hard to play as a Comp game, but it combines high implementation standards and some modern design niceties with an old-school taste for freedom and open-endedness.

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IF Comp 2015 Roundup

ifcomp15 logoI have now reviewed all the comp games I am going to review, though some of the reviews have yet to be published. Most recent years I’ve done an end-of-comp roundup (2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009, 2008, 2007) in which I talk about standout games, as well as some trends I noticed arising from the competition. This year by request I’m doing that early, even though there are still a bunch of reviews still to come out. It is little lighter on trend analysis than previously, but then one of this year’s main features was having a little of everything, and being less easily summarized.

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