interactive fiction – Page 81 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

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’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

I 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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IF Comp 2015: The Problems Compound (Andrew Schultz)

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

If you’ve been following recent parser IF, the title and author name are probably a strong hint about how you’ll feel about this game. Andrew Schultz has written a whole series of games riffing on different wordplay ideas, set in surreal environments in which object and character interactions don’t always make logical sense as long as they conform to the linguistic game currently at work.

The Problems Compound actually slightly deviates from that expectation — though all the characters and situations are based on one inverted idiom or another, the actual gameplay is a bit more standard parser puzzle stuff involving manipulating objects. But the writing style, setting, sense of humor, and overall difficulty are all about where you might expect based on the author’s past work. The game is fairly sizable, and even though I sometimes resorted to the included walkthrough chart, I eventually ran out of time before finishing. This is also a somewhat unconventional review for me, and more than usually based on running notes rather than a considered retrospective after play. The reasons for that will become clear at the end.

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Fabricationist DeWit (Jedediah Berry)

Fabricationist DeWit is not an IF Comp game, but something I stumbled across this month via Twitter. It is a lovely Twine about a fabricationist that wakes after (it is implied) apocalyptic climate change, and sets about restoring the world. I wasn’t previously familiar with the author, Jedediah Berry, but after playing the game I checked out his website and was not surprised to discover that he is an award-winning author of short stories and at least one novel.

It’s not just the writing that works here, though. Among Twine games that attempt a world model, this one offers an unusually strong sense of NPC presence. There is a character who accompanies or confronts you, challenges you on your actions, and comments on what is going on. The story as a whole is about the movement from loneliness to connection, from ignorance to understanding. The interaction recapitulates this; your environment becomes more populated, your actions stop being purely functional interactions with machines and become dialogue and social gestures.

The effect is enhanced with music and sound effects, and with beautiful backgrounds to each screen, which seem meaningful in ways you can’t put your finger on — until, eventually, you can.

IF Comp 2015: Gotomomi (Arno von Borries)

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

Gotomomi is a very open-ended, sandboxy puzzle game set in a Japanese city. It took me several attempts and a look at the walkthrough even to really understand what my goal was. Once I did understand, it turned out that there were many many ways to try to pursue that goal, and the game didn’t give me clear hints about which way would be best. Even with the walkthrough, I did not complete the game in even one way within the two hours. I have the impression that multiple endings are available and that I’ve seen only a fraction of the game.

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Side note about comp reviewing

Hey, so. I’ve been following my plan of posting net-positive reviews here for the comp (and I have assorted others in the queue; not nearly done yet). There were a couple of games I played that I thought had some pretty awesome aspects but didn’t fit into that program, and I commented on those at a second site which is specifically positive in tone. But from the feedback, that’s come off as condescending/dickish/as some kind of consolation prize. So I’ve taken those down, and I apologize.

It was, if anything, a self-indulgence: it’s been a little harder than I expected to draw the line between net-positive reviews and not, and there have been quite a few times when I wasn’t sure I could write a net-positive review about a game, but I still liked some aspect of the game so much that it felt like I needed to find someplace to say so.

However. Like I said: I didn’t mean to be a dick to anyone, and I’m sorry. If I offended you and you want to talk about it, please feel free to email me.