“The Shadow in the Cathedral” is one of the best IF games released this year. Maybe not the best, but that would be a large claim to make considering that it’s competing with Blue Lacuna, Make It Good, The King of Shreds and Patches, the top couple comp games… it’s been a good year for IF.
But Shadow definitely belongs in the top tier.
On Fatale, a treatment of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome.
…is on “The Path” by Tale of Tales. This is a weird, brilliant, frustrating, sometimes dull, sometimes terrifying, sometimes incoherent piece of work, and it’s already been written about by a number of other people (I link some other reviews from the beginning of the column). But Tale of Tales is doing some of the most interesting boundary-pushing work out there on interactive storytelling. (I also have a discussion of their shorter, more recent Fatale coming up.)
What follows the break will be a discussion of which games I liked best overall this year, and a couple of other comments on the competition. This is necessarily very lightly spoilery.
But first, I would like to tell you about pie. Pie is delicious. Pumpkin pie is especially delicious. People in many parts of the world do not eat pumpkin pie, but they are really missing out. Pumpkin pie filling has a complex spicy flavor and aroma, with cinnamon and sometimes nutmeg. It is all smooth and silky in texture, with a glossy upper surface which, incidentally, is an excellent receptacle of whipped cream. Then you have the crust, which should be pleasantly flaky. Unlike other kinds of pie, pumpkin pie is hardly ever too sweet or too tart, and it does not leave tiny seeds or skin or fibers stuck between your teeth. Though the best pumpkin pie is homemade, you can also get some very nice frozen or store-baked pumpkin pies. Finally, if you don’t finish the whole pumpkin pie at dessert, you can have some more for breakfast the next morning. It is just as delicious before noon.
(And that should just about do it for the RSS feed.)
As has been my practice for the last few years, I’ve set my RSS feed to truncate entries so that I can post reviews without spoilerage. Within an entry, there is a short, spoilerless discussion (though the comp purists may want to avoid reading even that before playing for themselves); then spoiler space; then a more detailed discussion of what I thought did and didn’t work in the game.
I’m also pursuing an approach I came up with last year: I’m playing and reviewing games that have listed beta-testers, and skipping those that don’t. Last year that turned out to be a pretty fool-proof indicator of which games were going to end up scoring 4 or less on my personal scale. I’m hoping this will mean I have more time to devote to the remaining games, which in turn will (I hope) be of higher quality, and you, dear reader, will have fewer rants inflicted on you.
Currently: Grounded in Space.
You too can play it if you download the comp games, or even try it online.
As has been my practice for the last few years, I’ve set my RSS feed to truncate entries so that I can post reviews without spoilerage. Within an entry, there is a short, spoilerless discussion (though the comp purists may want to avoid reading even that before playing for themselves); then spoiler space; then a more detailed discussion of what I thought did and didn’t work in the game.
I’m also pursuing an approach I came up with last year: I’m playing and reviewing games that have listed beta-testers, and skipping those that don’t. Last year that turned out to be a pretty fool-proof indicator of which games were going to end up scoring 4 or less on my personal scale. I’m hoping this will mean I have more time to devote to the remaining games, which in turn will (I hope) be of higher quality, and you, dear reader, will have fewer rants inflicted on you.
So without further ado, “Rover’s Day Out.”
You too can play it if you download the comp games. It is not as far as I know possible to play online.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 