IFComp 2019 Reviews and Notes

IFComp 2019. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. It's the 25th year this has happened! It's also the third year in a row I've played and judged the games!

The IFComp 2019 home page can be found here.

Selection Criteria

As always, I'm making no attempt to play everything in the Comp; I'm going to be picking things that I think are likely to appeal to me personally and play through as many of those pieces as possible. That means that I'm initially restricting myself to (a) parser-based IF that (b) isn't a pain to get running under Linux.

That second criterion basically rules out works written in ALAN, ADRIFT, and Quest, some of which I might be able to get running with some effort and time. But I'd rather put this effort and time into interacting with games written by people who aren't making a development decision that includes a belief, however tangential to the main part of their development decision-making process, however subconscious, that they're OK with a development system that cuts off or mandates a lot of extra work for some potential interactors, including me. This criterion sometimes also rules out standalone Windows executables, if they don't work well under Wine. (When it comes right down to it, I'd rather be trying to figure out how to escape from the elven mound than trying to figure out which version of a Windows 'terp for some development system happens to work well under my particular version of Wine.) I'm also excluding For the Moon Never Beams from my votes and reviews, since I helped to beta-test it, but I'm looking forward at taking another look at it once the Comp is over. (It was a fun game that I very much enjoyed helping to test.)

I'm going to try to get through as many games that fit those criteria as I can during the comp period. Since that's still a fair number of games (30!), I'm prioritizing games based on how interesting their description sounds to me. After all, I want to play games that I'll enjoy, don't I? If I wind up with more games unplayed, I may expand outwards from there, but thirty parser games is a fair number to start with. I don't have unlimited time, alas, and I tend to prefer giving as many games as possible a comparatively deep play instead of rushing rapidly through everything. (This is not a complaint about people who love nothing more than a madcap downhill dash through everything, of course.)

None of that is meant to suggest that there are certain inherently right or wrong ways to develop IF, or that there are certain ways that IF should be; all I'm saying is that there are works I'm more and less likely to enjoy interacting with, and I want to spend my time on things I actually enjoy. I'm more likely to judge them fairly and sympathetically, anyway.

I'm using Jacqueline Ashwell's rubric as the basis for my scores again this year. Thank you for sharing your well-thought out rubric, Jacqueline!

Initial Plans

In any case, given all of that, here's my initial grouping of pieces I'll try to get through, roughly sorted by priority. I've tried to keep each section in my own personalized sort order as delivered by the IFComp website, but I'm not perfect and have been known to play IF with a beer next to me.

I'd very much like to play through these longish (or length-undeclared) games:

• Zozzled, by Steph Cherrywell. (My review: 8/10.)
• Under the Sea: The Treasure of the Santa Tortosa, by Heike Borchers. (My review: 6/10.)
• Remedial Witchcraft, by dgtziea. (My review: 2/10. Intfiction.org thread.)
• Clusterflux, by Marshal Tenner Winter. (My review: 4/10.)
• The Four Eccentrics, by Mild Cat Bean. (My review: 9/10.)
• ALICE BLUE, by Chris Selmys. (My review: 7/10.)
• Citizen of Nowhere, by Luke A. Jones. (My review: 3/10.)
• Fat Fair, by AKheon. (My review: 4/10.)
• The House on Sycamore Lane, by Paul Michael Winters. (My review: 4/10.)

Here is a list of shortish games I really hope I get to play:

• Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Text Adventure, by Pippin Barr. (My review: 3/10.)
• Randomized Escape, by Yvan Uh. (My review: 2/10.)
• Mental Entertainment, by Thomas Hvizdos. (Intfiction.org thread. My review: 5/10.)
• Out, by Viktor Sobol. (Intfiction.org thread. My review: 5/10.)
• Extreme Omnivore: Text Edition, by Hazel Gold. (My review: 4/10.)
• Old Jim's Convenience Store, by Anssi Räisänen. (My review: 6/10.)
• Meeting Robb Sherwin, by Jizaboz. (My review: 4/10.)
• Enceladus, by Robb Sherwin. (My review: 6/10.)

Here is my list of longish (or length-unknown) games I'd willingly play through, given enough time:

• Winter Break at Hogwarts, by Brian Davies. (My review: 7/10.)
• Very Vile Fairy File, by Billy Boling. (Intfiction.org thread. Another Intfiction.org thread. My review: 6/10.)

And here's a list of games I gradually pushed out of my play list for one reason or another as I ran out of Comp time:

• Just didn't find time to get to them, alas!
  • Hard Puzzle 4: The Ballad of Bob and Cheryl, by Ade [McTavish?] (Intfiction.org thread.)
  • Jon Doe – Wildcard Nucleus, by Olaf Nowacki. (Intfiction.org thread)
  • Gone Out For Gruyere, by B F Lindsay. (Intfiction.org thread.)
  • Frenemies; Or, I Won An Andy Phillips Game!, by B F Lindsay. (Intfiction.org thread)
• Reviews make it sound like these three are point- and/or process-optimizey, which I'm just not feeling right now. I'd like to go back to several of them after the Comp, though.
  • Skies Above, by Arthur DiBianca. (Intfiction.org thread.)
  • Sugarlawn, by Mike Spivey. (Intfiction.org thread.)
  • Pas De Deux, by Linus Åkesson. (Intfiction.org thread.)
• Reviews suggest I won't enjoy the writing and/or implementation style on these. (Though I might go back and play vegibal island later.)
  • The Untold Story, by Michael Pavano. (Intfiction.org thread. Another Intfiction.org thread.)
  • the secret of vegibal island: mass tourism individualised, by ralf tauscher
  • Ocean Beach, by James Banks. (Intfiction.org thread.)
  • Bradford Mansion, by Lenard Gunda. (Intfiction.org thread.)

And here is a list of games I'm unlikely to get to because they don't meet the criteria already specified.

I've tried to keep the lists above ordered according to my personal sort on the IFComp website, but Jeepers, I ain't perfect, and I probably messed up somewhere.

Note for Authors

These reviews are not primarily intended for authors of games, for the reasons that Sam Kabo Ashwell has explained. Some reviews are quite direct about my reactions to the games, and my reactions to pieces of IF are occasionally negative. I don't tone down my reactions to save authors' feelings; if I think the game is flawed, I say so, and if the flaws have a serious impact on my ability to engage with and enjoy the game, then that's an important component of my reaction to it.

This is not to say that authors should or should not write certain things, even if I don't personally happen to like those things: Authors are of course welcome to write whatever kind of IF they'd like, whether I think it's good or not. I don't expect to be pandered to. But, by entering it into IFComp, they are asking for judgment on it, and my judgment, partial and biased as it is, is what these reviews consist of. All of these are honest reactions to the game as it was actually submitted to the Comp. If you, author, have questions or want me to elaborate on something I said, please let me know! Similarly, if I've said something that is factually incorrect, or that is profoundly off-base, I'd appreciate hearing about that, too.

That being said, the game needs to stand on its own. I'm talking about the game itself, as it was actually published; and that may have very little to do with the author's vision for what the game could be, or should have been, or with the author's view of her- or himself as a person or as a creator of IF. None of that is relevant to the review; the review is about my own experience of the game. I do try to engage with each game on its own terms, and I try to be explicit about my own preferences. Some games are just not for me. I try to be clear about that, too. I'm happy to elaborate and discuss, but I'm not willing to be wheedled or cajoled.

My Preferences

Since I've referred to my own preferences, for what it's worth, here's what I tend to find appealing in IF.

• I like parser IF that understands and cares about the genre and thoughtfully engages with its conventions.
  • I believe that IF, like all genres, benefits from an understanding of, and thoughtful engagement with, its own genre conventions. This is not an argument for slavish adherence to a long list of arbitrary rules, but something more complex: an understanding that the rules are really established practices with nearly a half-century of intense critical debate and thought behind them. They can be bent or broken, and excellent IF often does precisely this: but it also understands why and how the convention came to be in place, and understands what effects breaking with that convention has for the player and what it means for the work.
• I like IF that is both an excellent story (with all that that implies) and an engaging game. I want both halves.
  • I like games that aspire to the status of good literature in their own weird hybrid medium. I want good characterization, excellent writing, a compelling plot, good pacing, and well-integrated puzzles. I want an exploration of the human condition. I want to be emotionally moved—not jerked around, but swayed with finesse. I want something that engages me and makes me think. I want to be a different person after finishing the work. I want to come back to it in a few years just because it's such a delight. I want good literature out of IF.
  • I tend to like a challenge of some sort in a game. Often, though not necessarily, this means puzzles. (Though there are other interesting kinds of challenge as well.) I tend to prefer pieces with puzzles that emerge naturally from character and plot and theme and language, and that highlight those elements, rather than being a disconnected the other part of the piece. Well-designed, clever, well-implemented puzzles tend to be a plus for me.
• I want a piece of work that is polished rather than one that doesn't care about implementation and writing problems.
  • I like games that exhibit craftsmanship. Polished writing, thoughtful mechanics, unusual and surprising plot developments. I want the author to prove that s/he has taken the time to make the little world they've created shine. I want them to go way beyond merely avoiding the error that a professor for whom I was once a TA characterized as making the mistake of obviously not giving a shit.
  • I believe that sloppy writing and sloppy implementation are often (though not always) signs that the author(s) of a piece don't care enough about the piece themselves to make me want to engage with it.
• I tend to find that good IF is a collaboration between the player and the author, not a contest in which one is trying to defeat the other. (Actively player-hostile games are a real turn-off. So is the attempt to pretend that bad design decisions are really intended to make the game more challenging—this may be the case, but I rarely find that struggling with the mechanics of a game is an enjoyable kind of gaming challenge.)
• I dislike games that are Windows-only or that are hard to get working on a non-Windows operating system. I abandoned Windows more or less entirely a decade ago for what I thought at the time were good reasons. Since then, Windows has only become more of a resource hog and more of a massive panopticon; it's slowed down and become more awkward to use, and it spies a lot more. Games that are Windows-only are low priorities for me. (On the other hand, Windows programs that run well under Wine are no more trouble than any other format. But I've found a lot of Windows executables in Comp entries that don't play nicely with Wine.)

Spoiler Alert

All of the reviews below are spoilery. You may want to avoid reading them if you're still planning on playing the games being reviewed. Or you may decide that you can appreciate a piece even if you know some of its details ahead of time.

That's up to you.

The Reviews

• 2019-10-01: Zozzled by Steph Cherrywell. Rating: 8/10 (review based on original Comp release).

  I'm glad to finally be playing a Steph Cherrywell piece! (Brain Guzzlers has been on my to-play list for quite a while.)

  Wow, that's a text dump at the beginning: my transcript file is already about 8K! Nice, sharp writing, though. Good characterization. There's more text dumps throughout, in a set of menu-based text-dumpy conversation encounters and plot-fast-forwarding, but these tend to work throughout the game just because the writing is so sharp and the PC is so well-characterized. Still, there's often quite a lot of text to plow through before getting back to interacting, and it really does push the boundaries of what's comfortable to read onscreen while waiting for my turn to talk again.

  But this was a fun game to play: it really did take right about two hours, and everything about it was well-constructed. The map was functional and attractively symmetrical, with structural variations between the three floors of the hotel, and access was controlled effectively and revealed appropriately as the game progressed. The puzzles were fun, thoughful, and well-integrated with the plot. And the writing really is a pleasure throughout: the bouncy, snarky PC voice is perfectly executed. Implementation depth is usually pretty impressive here, too—enough so that the occasional oversights are almost shocking.

  There's also a moderately open mid-game, where several different puzzles can be worked on at any given time; and there are so many wonderful little flourishes: the explorable model hotel inside the hotel; the chirpy bellhop; the art history book; the oyster puzzle. I went to the hints twice not because I was stuck but because I coudn't be bothered to work out the exact solution to a puzzle because that would stop the narrative flow.

  Some samples of detailed-world integration that characterizes the PC:

  > s

  Ladies’ Changing Room

  It’s steamy and musty, with slick floors. Lockers line the walls.

  You can see a stinky stocking here.

  > eat stocking

  You’re on a strict all-food diet. If it’s food, down it goes. Otherwise, no way! Now that’s willpower.

  > smell stocking

  What are you expecting, perfume?

  > x stocking

  Whew! Smells like someone wore this to cut a rug on the hottest day of July after winning an onion-eating/bath-avoiding biathalon and then stuffed it in her brassiere for a month. Which is all by way of saying you’ve smelled fresher.

  > examine lockers

  Rows of metal lockers. They smell damp, moldy, and unappealing.

  > search lockers

  You swore off searching years ago. That sort of prying is for the fuzz and your old lady. You’ll stick with examining things, thank you very much.

  > wear stocking

  This thing can probably stand up on its own. It doesn’t need your help.

  A minor annoyance when using the elevator:

  > push button

  Hiya, Miss Greene! Where to now?

  1) Second floor, please.
  2) Third floor, please.
  3) Seeya, Kipper.

  It would be great if the option number instead lined up with the floor number, placing Seeya, Kipper in the place of the current floor. Pushing 2 for the third floor feels clumsy every time I do it. Also a bit awkward:

  > x paperwork

  It’s mostly long lists of people who’ve checked in and checked out of the hotel at various times. Looks like Mr. and Mrs. John Smith are frequent guests.

  > read paperwork

  Nothing is written on the paperwork.

  But it's really a nicely polished piece: fun, great writing, great PC (and well-developed NPCs), clever puzzles, not too hard, everything's nicely strung together. Really nice way to start off the Comp. I'm super-glad this was the first piece that fit my criteria that the personalized sort served up!

• 2019-10-02: Randomized Escape by Yvan Uhlmann. Rating: 2/10.

  I only have time for a quick experimental work tonight. Lots to do before bed. I admit to being a bit leery about a game with randomized room and object relationships, because what does this actually add to the game? But there are lots of possible answers to that. Let's see what this game's answer is.

  Not that sending out an Inform source tree in which I have to find output.ulx and run it is a promising move, just as noticing that the author has truncated the last five letters in his own last name on the Comp site, but hey, maybe it'll get better.

  Sigh. As good-looking as ever. Nonimplementation everywhere. Guess-where-the-exits-are after every move.

  Also, the writing is super-awkward throughout the piece, particularly about the way that the stream-of-consciousness narration is constantly changing grammatical person. But there are plenty of other notable problems, like constant subject-verb agreement errors. In fact, instances of awful writing are everywhere:

  > x tire
  Someone had to change his tire, and left the old one in the streets. Maybe he thought that these things are degradable.

  > read newspaper
  Let’s see if there is some news on Mrs Johnson affair. This newpaper is one month old. Not a single clue in there. Let’s search somewhere else.

  > x hydrant
  Come to me.
  You froze in the middle of the Unnamed Street, terrified by those words. But there is nothing to see in the direction of this unknown voice. Come to me. What is this and where does it come from? You start to freak out. You turn around in search of a human source. Come to me. Leave me. Leave me. Leave me! You scream in fear. But then everything around you seems to stop and the Unnamed Street is filled with silence again. You calm down, but your sanity decreased.
  The fire hydrant is yet not examined.

  > x car
  This amber car is very old. You put your hand on the driver’s door handle and realize that it is slippery. Some kind of thick black oil is running down your hand. You walk back from the car and find a puddle to clean you. This car must have been abandoned here forever. Let’s search somewhere else.

  > enter car
  I already investigate the car, but I got nothing out of it.

  I guess one of the kinder things to say about this experimental piece is that it doesn't seem like the experiment was particularly successful. The writing seems emotionally charged but is vague and awkward and poorly structured; if there's an effect intended with voice and phrasing, it doesn't make for a better story. Some of the problems may be due to automatic generation of text, but since the source code is included, it's possible to verify that what was written directly in the story's source all sounds like that.

  The plot is pretty minimal. Actions and events seem unmotivated. The game mechanics are unusual and insconsistent, and it's difficult to interact with the virtual world. There's a lot of guessing. It seems that all randomly generated items with the same name are actually the same item being moved around? Weird.

  One of the difficulties of emergent narrative is that the narrative has to somehow eventually emerge. It's not enough to just randomize things and let the chips fall where they may. A combinatorial explosion is not a narrative. That never seems to happen here. It feels like an experiment in game mechanics that never exactly got around to becoming a game. I gave up after a while because I was bored with figuring out how to try to get it to produce a story.

  There are actually some good ideas buried in here, but the implentation is atrocious and the story is nearly nonexistent. There are hints that there's a structure to be found, but the process of hacking through the possibility space to find that structure is too unpleasant to make it feel worthwhile to continue.

• 2019-10-06: ALICE BLUE by Chris Selmys. Rating: 7/10.

  Intrigued to see a Linux-only entry ... written entirely in bash, it looks like, based on a quick scan. Wow. And the code looks elegant and clean, and takes elegant solutions to problems, and shows off that bash can do sophisticated things even though it's such a clumsy language in so many ways. (But I guess the language must have its affectionados, though I myself would rather write in literally any other language, given a chance.) Also, the game comes with a well-written and nicely designed manual—a short one, no less. OK, I'm intrigued.

  Some immediate annoyances: the terminal window is resized to fullscreen, covering even my system panel ... I guess that's what I get for not following the directions and running GNOME. But this makes it a pain to adjust the volume, because I have to switch to another desktop to get to the applet in my system tray, or else open up a separate application to control the volume. Also, there's so much space on a fullscreen terminal on my laptop that most of it is empty throughout play, and it's annoying that I can't reclaim screen real estate to draw out a map while I'm playing. Also, responding to HELP with If you get really stuck you can always read the source... always feels condescending to me. Another annoyance: only one saved game, in multiple files.

  Looks like there are twelve rooms, connected both along an N/S axis and along an E/W axis in two large loops: continuing to move in any single direction runs through all twelve rooms, and reversing directions runs through them in reverse order. However, moving along the other axis traverses all of the rooms in a different order. Interesting.

  First-person narration is weird. A lot of the writing feels like it could use some work for things like specificity and rhythm and other prosodic concerns. It's engaged and articulate writing, but also often quite vague. This is partly because of the amnesia trope, I think: the narrative voice can't give too much away when the game is predicated on being parsimonious with information. On the other hand, the problem that goes along with that—how to write descriptive descriptions that don't give too much away—isn't really solved adequately, and it sticks out more because it's a self-sought problem.

  Graphically, the terminal is effectively divided up into multiple active areas surrounded by blank space; interacting with a link-word causes a change in one or more of these panes, which seem to be arranged in a roughly hierarchical system, with the main action up top and a bottom pane that is used for interactions that are basically footnotes, with various current state panes in between. But with multiple parts of the screen changing as I interact with the story, it's sometimes hard to see what the relationship between the action I take and which parts of the screen have new information, especially of a piece of text is replaced with another piece of text of close to the same length (there is often a screen redraw-type flash after every command anyway, so your eye can't just watch for motion; you need to make more or less conscious before/after comparisons). It feels like there's a good idea here: interacting with a link-word at a particular screen level usually opens up a contextual pane on the same or a lower screen level, so there's a hierarchy of things that you might change arranged into a rough ontology. But not always: sometimes interacting with a link-word causes changes in a higher panel, which, on a large screen, is easy to miss: your eye is only tracking so much real estate at one time. Finding that I'm constantly forcing myself to consciously scan the whole terminal window is awkward. And when a link-word leads to changes in a higher-level pane, it sometimes (always?) leaves the existing panes at lower levels where they are, rather than resetting them; at least some of the time, it's no longer possible to interact with words in those lower, abandoned panes, though.

  The hypertext trees in each episode are sometimes awkward to navigate. I wound up restoring from a saved game because I couldn't figure out any way to get back up towards a trunk in the Witch's Hearth section. Too, in the Closet section, I encountered a number of terminal states with blank screens that didn't respond to anything I entered: I wound up restoring there, too.

  Most of the time, though, it was possible to explore without the walkthrough and without worrying about whether I'm going to get stuck.

  All in all, there's a lot to be said for ALICE BLUE, and its score doesn't reflect how much I liked looking back on it when it was done; and this is because I followed the Comp rules at rated it at two hours, when I hadn't finished playing it, whereas a lot of its payoff is late in the game, and especially at the very end, where you get the real stories behind the fairy-tale segments; I'd have given it an 8 if I'd finished it before rating. System awkwardness aside and flaccid writing in many places notwithstanding, this was an interesting experimental piece, and writing it in bash certainly is an impressive move. The map is elegant and thoughtful, too. But there are plenty of awkwardnesses, and the writing sure could use some editing. The system is unusual and, in a way, innovative; but that doesn't make up for the rough spots. The final room is disappointingly short; it immediately presents you with a not-terribly-difficult puzzle that can be solved in one move and that ends the game.

  But in the end, it winds up being a rather engaging piece of hypertext, and the custom-built interface basically works for it. The basic problem I have with it is the same basic problem that I always have with hypertext: I feel obligated to go through the motions of lawnmowing. This one mostly makes the lawnmowing pay off, and it would be fun to go back after the comp is over and see how high I can get that score by doing some initial exploring before I start marching through, but for now, I feel sufficiently exhausted after a few days with it that I'm not eager to jump back in immediately. Plus, there are other games waiting. I'm behind!

• 2019-10-09: Under the Sea: The Treasure of the Santa Tortosa by Heike Borchers. Rating: 6/10.

  Um. Back to more normally authored parser-based IF. This looks like a fun little game. The writing in the opening bits certainly is enthusiastic.

  There are some awkwardnesses and linguistic infelicities:

  > n
  The terrain in that direction is impassable.

  seems incongruous when you're in the water, for instance; and naming all of the kinds of coral in one room, then aliasing them all to a single object, seems clumsy. There are plenty of little errors, but nothing substantial; and there was never any guess-the-verb going on for me; in the places where others had to turn to the walkthrough, something I tried always worked, and often the first thing I tried. Similarly, there are issues of underimplementation, such as merely saying In the glass jar is some plankton without mentioning that the jar is now a light source.

  In a lot of ways, this is a very workmanlike first piece of IF piece: essentially a toybox, with a thin puzzle veneer over it; good characterization and sometimes very good implmenetation, and the writing is clear and exuberant. (But it often suffers from naming instead of describing, and being comprehensive instead of representative: listing rather than evoking. Similarly, the NPCs are just puzzles who want something; but the descriptions are rather charming.)

  But a good, workmanlike first game, with enthusiasm for its own subject and moments of enjoyably quirky observation and wonderfully felicitous phrasings here and there. I'd play another from this author.

• 2019-10-12: Clusterflux by Marshal Tenner Winter. Rating: 4/10.

  Another awkward-writing game. Why does it keep referring to the neighborhood street, time after time? Why not just the street? Is this the only one in the neighborhood? Everyone's house sits right on this one street? (Or maybe we should be talking about what Orwell meant when he referred to a style of language usage as a prefabricated hen-house?) Similarly, finding the exits from the early locations is more a conscious exercise in hermeneutics than it should be: at the South of House location, for instance, a path that leads north from the PC to the house is described as leading south from the house to the street. Similarly, there are plenty of directions that turn out to be trompe l'oeil descriptions of directions you can't go mentioned along with the actual available exits. I don't mind some interpretive work, but this is a super-awkward way signal to the player what zir options are. Making sure the player is always conscious of the difficulty of moving the PC around doesn't promote a feeling of transparency within the game world.

  

  ---

  

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  There's plenty more harassment from Marshal Tenner Winter, but it'd be silly to document it all here. Most (not all) can be followed by subscribing to this Atom feed, should you be inclined, for some reason, to follow this rather dreary story that's not interesting to anyone but Marshal Tenner Winter.

  Similarly, the map is poorly worked out: your kitchen seems to hang out into space next to your apartment landing, but there's no mention of it being visible from the landing. Your bedroom also hangs out even further into space from the kitchen, even further east; it's still not visible from the landing. This is the most egregious, though not the only, situation in which the map just doesn't add up: there's some amazing four-dimensional architecture in this dilapidated old building.

  Non-exhaustive sample of bits of ugly writing:

  • His hands are those of a tiny human’s (those of is a rather archaic stand-in for the possessive; including both is redundant).
  • The sunset’s glow streams in from the window to the north, spilling orange on the small kitchen table; big enough for only two retro-looking kitchen chairs. (Comma, semicolon, who gives a shit? They're the same, right? How old are the retro-looking chairs, and what makes them retro rather than old?)
  • A counter barely fits a coffee maker above which is one of the only two cabinets
  • On the full size bed are a comfy blanket, a flat pillow and your hooded sweater.. (Period, ellipsis, whatever: why choose when you can split the difference?)
  • A medicine cabinet is affixed about a small porcelain sink with faucet.
  • I really don’t know. She says and you spy her fidgit for a moment with a wedding ring on her finger.
  • The walls are either white or off-white and painted over many times over many years. (Why bother to give a shit about grammatical structure when you haven't even bothered to give a shit about realistically representing the structure of the house the story is set in?)
  • There’s an emptiness in the air, yet there’s also a strange, electricity as well. (How does the air contain an emptiness? Why is electricity being treated as an adjective? We'll probably never know.)
  • An annoying humming sound emits from the large amplifier. (That's not what emits means.)
  • It’s a large living room with mismatched furniture likely procured from a Goodwill store. (That's a pretty specific conclusion to draw purely from the fact that the furniture is mismatched.)
  • Something about staring out into a decade in which you don’t belong makes you queezy and you have to look away.
  • You must be anxious to get back to your husband. You venture hamfistedly.
  • Whoever wrote all this is either crazy or a genius or both; no inbetween.

  There are also plenty of disambiguation problems:

  > x northern window
  Which do you mean, the northern window or the northern window sill?

  And despite the number of mentioned objects, the missing objects are rather incongruous:

  > x eastern sill
  It’s a sill that’s wide enough to hold some reference books and a reading lamp.

  On the eastern window sill are some reference books.

  > x lamp
  You can’t see any such thing.

  Well, fair enough: all the text actually says is wide enough to hold; there's not, in fact, an assertion of existence. But still, that's more fine-grained hermeneutics than I necessarily want to have to engage in when I read a room description. There's a level here at which the writing could be more helpful to the player's goal of exploring if things were phrased a little more carefully. I think that that phrasing work would pay off for the game.

  So there are implementation problems at multiple levels everywhere, and there's plenty of bad writing, and the parser occasionally feels actively hostile. There are things that are nearly impossible to figure out without a walkthrough. There's a whole encyclopedia of beginner-type mistakes from a non-beginner. These are real faults, but there's something else underneath: a set of good ideas that almost turned into a fun time-travel game, which you can sort of reconstruct from the game as it actually turned out. The map, weirdly inconsistent as it is, is kind of elegant in its own way, and it's possible to try hard to ignore the faults and get into a sympathetic groove where that hypothetical game is mostly visible ... until an implementation problem shows through again almost immediately. Or a bit of obtrusively terrible writing rears its ugly head.

  There's a good game buried under there. It's just that the author signals in so many different ways that even he's not interested in digging it out and polishing it up to that hypothetical good game level.

  EDIT, 26 November 2019, in the interest of fairness and transparency: Marshal Tenner Winter has written a blog post that is (presumably) intended to respond to this particular review. (I say presumably because he said only your review of my game, and he could, after all, be referring to this review from IFComp 2017. When I asked him which review he was talking about, he told me that if I was too stupid to keep up with what was happening in his head, there was no point talking to me, apparently without appreciating the irony that it's exactly that fuck you if you're not awesome enough to already know what's going on in my head attitude that makes his games so painful to engage with in the first place.) In any case, he's posted his explanation of the real motivation for why I'd have the temerity to review a game he submitted to a competition where game-reviewing is a normal part of the cultural practice—that I'm a sad fat bastard who makes up for my sad fat bastard life by tearing down awesome people, like him.

  Anyway, you'll have to judge for yourself how likely it is that an amateur psychoanalysis by someone who's never met me is a meaningful response to the content of the review above. All I'm saying is that that kind of pissing-and-moaning how-dare-you-ery correlates strongly with being a shitty writer, in part because people who immunize themselves against feedback tend not to develop their writing in the same way as people who listen to feedback. Working on craftsmanship is hard; it's easier to follow someone from one social network to another, repeatedly posting insults. Because, as you can see from the responses that my friends have made to his insults, he totally accomplished his goal of making all my friends understand what a fat sad loser I am. Man, that'll show me.

  There are plenty of things that could in theory be said about his response, because there's always plenty to say about sneering, dishonest, low-quality writing. But that would give it more attention than it deserves. Looking briefly at one of numerous problems with basic factual accuracy is maybe worthwhile, though: Winter complains that he couldn't even find a normal email for [my] stupid ass. Which is weird because he visited the front page of my site to grab an image that he used to make memes of [my] ugly ass—it's the only page on that site where the image is used—but seems not to have been able to find the Contact Information link right in the middle of that same page, which leads to a page containing an email address. It's weird he couldn't find that link, because it's been in just about the same part of the middle of the screen through multiple site redesigns for six years now. But his inability to find that link right in the middle of a page he definitely visited is apparently his pretext for following me from one social networking site to another, assuaging the grief he feels at getting a less-than-glowing review by posting insulting image macros (which are of course not the same thing as memes, but who cares about whether the writer can write, or even knows what he's talking about?). Similarly, he seems to have just made up his claims to have access to data about my vote on IFComp (my actual vote is recorded above, publicly, just as it was submitted in Comp judging) and my relationship to an academic institution.

  But I just make up facts and pretend they're true is characteristic of shitty writers, too. It's easier to claim you've done research than it is to do research, just like it's easier to attack people who honestly said that they thought your game was mediocre than it is to get better at writing games.

  EDIT AGAIN, 3 July 2020: MTW takes his claim that this review constitutes bullying to the people here.

• 2019-10-12: Remedial Witchcraft (updated copy of 8 October) by dgtziea. Rating: 2/10.

  The premise is charming, but the writing is once again vague and full of low- to mid-range grammatical errors (does English capitalize the first word of a parenthetical comment in the middle of a sentence?). The text is one big long sea of adverbs used to suggest how the reader is supposed to feel about the action, because that's easier to do than writing good, evocative text. Once a word has been chosen, it gets used over and over and over and over in the next few paragraphs.

  It's the kind of writing that people do when they've been told all their lives that they don't have to care about editing or revision as long as they're expressing their ideas. The problem here, again, is that ideas are formed and refined by evaluative critique, and someone who ignores critique from self and others in favor of expressing their vision typically has a shoddy, ill-formed vision they're trying to share. Hiding behind an alias when not covering controversial content is not a promising sign, either, though of course that's a personal choice and I don't know anything about the author's life or what motivated that choice.

  In confirmation of my general theory that lexical confusion drives conceptual confusion, the first puzzle in the game is apparently not solveable, due to a bug introduced when other bugs were solved. Rating low and moving on.

• 2019-10-14: The Four Eccentrics by Mild Cat Bean. Rating: 9/10.

  Nice to see immediately thoughtful writing, but it looks like the text for at least some of it was converted badly from the MacRoman encoding?

  In the unravelling threads you can see a dog racing up the hill, faster and faster, the wind exhilarating on its rider’s face as the steed accelerates. Suddenly the hill runs out, rider and dog racing through thin air, rider twisting back to look at the cliff’s edge and wonder how they didn’t see it coming. Your destrier dog is gone and it is just you, falling, fallingÖ

  Also, what is a destrier dog? Sigh. The initial impression of well-proofread writing starts to evaporate as play continues; things slip through. There are also many places where the game would benefit from Aaron Reed's BENT philosophy of implementation:

  > l
  Dusty Afternoon
  A drab and dusty plaza. Anonymous buildings sag together like sleeping beasts. Lobed patches of sunlight drape over the stone like blankets. The windows are all shuttered, the doors sealed, the awnings furled, and the trees at each corner sag their leaves as if in torpor. A drowsy street heads east to the market.

  A single sequin blazes up from the ground to catch your eye, perhaps an indication that this place is sometimes more lively.

  > i
  > x sequin
  Up close, the sequin looks less striking; scratched and dusty, it speaks forlornly of lost grandeur.

  > get it
  Taken.

  > x light
  You can’t see any such thing.

  > x windows
  You can’t see any such thing.

  > x doors
  You can’t see any such thing.

  > x awnings
  You can’t see any such thing.

  > x trees
  You can’t see any such thing.

  (Notice, too, that the inventory command fails silently. In fact, the inventory is not even empty here: there are normally body parts listed in the inventory, and they can still be interacted with, but they don't show up in response to an inventory command.) There is also this:

  > in

  Gauzebo
  Though the structural material of the place looked flimsy at a distance, its walls support bookshelves, dark mirrors, detailed reference posters for chiromancers and neuroanatomists, and structural blueprints tacked up on corkboard.

  The draped ceiling appears to be decorated with a thorough diagram tracking the planets through the zodiac. A large spiral-woven rug covers the floor beneath an upright drafting table and is partly obscured by a pile of unopened letters.

  Opposite the door is a reclining couch, upon which lies the Dream Architect.

  > x architect
  You can’t see any such thing.

  Weirdly, x woman in that last one works just fine, which is a problem: why should she be identifiable by her gender but not by her career? This is probably not intentionally sexist—synonyms are probably assigned at NPC creation time, and when you see her, you don't initially know who she is; but this is the kind of thing that should be cleaned up in beta testing, in my opinion.

  Because of these problems, I re-started with the modified version of Oct 5, hoping the inventory issues are corrected. In any case, this means that I'll be following the walkthrough to try to make it in the two-hour deadline, but that's all right.

  Well. I haven't hit an inventory problem yet, even with additional exploration past what the walkthrough explitily authorizes, so here's hoping the bugs are fixed. This is a fun bit of dream surrealism, and the rules of the dream world are cogent and fair. The writing is wonderful, too, sparkling and funny and very descriptive.

  But I'm still disappointed in the under-implementation in places; especially for a game with an implementation that's so deep in so many places, it's weird to see such drastic under-implementation in others:

  > x safe
  Something like a freestanding wardrobe, made for the secure storage and the display of extraordinary clothing. A wonderfully complicated crystal lock ensures that security.

  In the garment safe are a Clock Smock, a West Vest, a Bicycle Suit with Wheels and Shelves, and a Gown Chair.

  > unlock safe
  (with the crystal key)
  You unlock the garment safe.

  > open safe
  You open the garment safe.

  > get all
  Clock Smock: Taken.
  West Vest: Taken.
  Bicycle Suit with Wheels and Shelves: Taken.
  Gown Chair: Taken.

  > x smock
  A garment of some stiff fabric. Gears spin and click, and somewhere inside its folds a pendulum swings. The front of the smock has hands like a clock, which swing drunkenly, seeming to indicate it is no particular time here.

  > wear it
  You put on the Clock Smock.

  > x vest
  You see nothing special about the West Vest.

  > x bicycle
  You see nothing special about the Bicycle Suit with Wheels and Shelves.

  > x gown
  You see nothing special about the Gown Chair.

  There are so many missed opportunities for the writing to shine in there. There are other, similar places where the game would benefit, I think, from filling in these blanks with more of its beautiful writing, because there's so much here that's so good that the lack of implementation is jarring.

  But there really is a lot that's good here: the underlying story is beautifully weird and handles its surrealism with panache. The map is elegantly organized, with 33 rooms falling into several major clusters along one path that wanders more or less east-west through the game, and several others that run north/south and/or up/down. The world really does have a cohesive and sensible set of rules at the base of it, and the magical tingle of weird possibilities runs through the whole game. The repeated theme of imprisonment and release that's played out repeatedly at multiple levels becomes a powerful kind of meta-fairy tale that runs throughout the piece. It reminds me in some ways of Birmingham IV from last year, but with a better-worked-out narrative and a more resonant set of symbols.

  There's an awful lot to like about it, and a lot of the writing really is beautiful. I just wish the implementation holes were filled in and the bits of awkward writing were cleaned up.

• 2019-10-23: Citizen of Nowhere by Luke A. Jones. (Review based on release of 10 Oct.) Rating: 3/10.

  Uh ... real basic implementation in a lot of ways. Items described in room descriptions are re-mentioned in a "writing a paragraph about" paragraph, with no grouping or sorting. There's a clumsy auto-generated list of exits at every turn. Writing is really basic, too, consisting of long chains of simple declarative sentences favoring vague nouns and verbs. There are basic stylistic consistency issues throughout (what case are room names in?).

  Everything is unmotivated. The map is narrow and seems to be gated and the puzzles don't seem to make any sense? Like why am I trying to win a sandcastle competition?

  I dunno. I'm almost an hour in and I'm just not having any fun. Finally went to the walkthrough and the solutions to puzzles seem to require mind-reading. There's also a huge amount of game left, and I'm not enjoying it. If the writing were engaging, I might keep playing, but it's dull, so ...

  Moving on.

• 2019-10-23: Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: the Text Adventure by Pippin Barr. Rating: 3/10.

  Um. Apparently the author has done a whole series of ancient Greek punishment games in various formats? Weird.

  I guess what I don't get is what this adds to the original stories. Sure, they're faithfully implemented, but so what? The simulationism doesn't really seem to do anything that the original story doesn't do. Why re-cast it as IF? It feels more like a project for a game-dev blog than something that actually offers anything at all to someone interacting with the game.

  Like, what is the point? Why would I play this? There's no story and no progress because the author has picked narratives from Greek mythology in which further progress is impossible, because the protagonists are dead. I already know the stories, and the whole point of the interactivity is to be illusory, because that's the situation in the stories. What does the format translation actually accomplish?

• 2019-10-24: Mental Entertainment by Thomas Hvizdos. (Review based on release of 18 Oct.) Rating: 5/10.

  Dunno, conversation games are not my thing. I always feel like the NPC is a puzzle I don't know how to solve. Nothing draws the attention to the inadequacies of NPC conversation in most parser IF like a conversation game.

  In this case, the conversation was at least rather well done; but it was still a matter of guess-which-nouns-open-up-branches: it's hard to write a conversation in which plausible noun leads plausibly to a plausible and well-implemented conversation topic. This was better than many other attempts, but it still showcases how far conversation in parser-based IF has to go.

  Too, the writing in the conversational segments was good, clear, and evocative; it did a good job of characterizing the people in the stories. But the writing outside of the dialogue sections was bland and flat, generic; and it seemed like the implementation of the game world was pretty bare-bones, too. (Here's another game that would have benefited from getting BENT: there were plenty of places where scenery was described but was unexaminable. Being told about a waterfall, and then that you can't see any such thing when you try to EXAMINE it, is disconcerting.) There were plenty of other places where a little polish would have gone a long way: being able to use names as aliases for a person's file, for instance.

  The story also has the narrative flaw of touching on important and heavy topics without actually engaging meaningfully with them. It merely showcases viewpoints without bothering to actually advocate for them. It's a kind of prissy hands-off-of-delicate-material that's particularly inappropriate for the topics it brings up especially because the topics that get brought up with kid gloves are current problems that are created and exacerbated by the general desire of many people to not be hassled about them. In which case, bringing up the topics in such a way as to not hassle people seems like a weird move.

  In general, the implementation for everything but the conversation was pretty thin. Which is too bad: because without a real plot, everything else about the piece needs to shine, and this just hadn't been polished enough to make it really work. There's some interesting material in here, but it's not yet a good piece of IF.

• 2019-10-27: Out by Viktor Sobol. (Review based on release of 20 Oct.) Rating: 5/10.

  Kind of a weird slice of life that meditates on sexuality and cosmology. The two strands don't really come together, except insofar as they both relate to the PC, but it's short enough that it can just be what it is: it certainly didn't take much time to play. There's not really much interaction in this particular piece of IF; it's very much at the interaction-means-controlling-the-pace-of-new-text end of the scale (as opposed to the interaction-means-meaningfully-interacting-with-the-model-world end of the interaction scale). It would be nice to see more PC and NPC developement here.

  But it's competently executed for what it is, with few grammar or implementation bugs and practically no incongruities. A little nugget of sometimes-pretty writing. It's disappointing, though, that its one issue gets brought up and then not dealt with in any meaningful way.

• 2019-10-27: Fat Fair by AKheon. (Review based on release of 23 Oct.) Rating: 4/10.

  Weird entry. I'm going to say little about its basic lack of sensitivity because I'm sure everyone writing a review of the game is already thinking plenty about that. That's not to say that it's all right or that I approve, but merely to acknowledge that someone who looks for people with physical problems to make the basis of humorous situations probably doesn't care what I think about his (presumably, his) sense of humor: it's somewhere on the scale of tone-deaf to mean-spirited, and it's the kind of sense of humor you don't have if you care what other people think. It's anti-literature, in a way: a refusal of literature's empathetic capabilities in favor of laughing at pratfalls, or like going to an Arthur Miller play and complaining that it doesn't have enough fart jokes.

  But, then, it's also the kind of protagonist that one writes if one is going to write a crime sandbox. (Is it actually a failure of the parser IF genre that it doesn't have a more commercially successful in-genre equivalent of Grand Theft Auto?) Insofar as creating a narrative game creates a vehicle that unleashes a fantasy that's a collaboration between player and author, what good does creating this particular fantasy do? What needs are satisfied by providing a safe space for the player to let his (presumably) violent and bratty side have free play with no real-world consequences?

  All in all, playing this felt kind of grubby. I suppose it's no surprise, at the end, that the writing was also flat and showed evidence of basic structural problems: how much does the player know about the PC? The author? These are interesting questions, but they are (once again) raised without being dealt with in any meaningful way. There are a half-dozen or so other things that aren't worth expanding on.

  Which is too bad, because its multiple-solutions-to-puzzles and rather detailed world-building and odd narrative viewpoint make it kind of ambitious in some ways, and there are places where the implementation and the story are clever ... but there's just not enough actual material there for it to rise to the level of being enjoyable.

• 2019-10-28: The House on Sycamore Lane by Paul Michael Winters. (Review based on original Comp release.) Rating: 4/10.

  As good-looking as ever. Misspellings and your/you're, there/they're/their, and its/it's. Guess-the-phrasing, right off the bat (UNLOCK BIKE WITH 382 does not seem to have any alternate phrasings that I can come up with). No meaningful response to ABOUT, HELP, INFO, or CREDITS. A character who has been traveling north swerves off to the east; this is described as a left turn. The map takes a fair number of other geographical liberties. And the list of writing problems just goes on and on. And of implementation problems.

  At its core, though, it's kind of a fun little haunted-house game with elementary not-too-difficult puzzles. If it were actually polished, it might turn into a good little game.

  But I hit a point past which I couldn't get any further, and the walkthrough turns out not to be any help—it refers to objects that don't seem to be implemented anywhere in the game world—and that was how I found out that there was a revised edition. Fun little game in some ways, but buggy, and with writing and implementation problems; I'm not interested in starting over from scratch. Rating low and moving on.

• 2019-10-31: Extreme Omnivore: Text Edition by Hazel Gold. Rating: 3/10.

  I'm not sure it has a formal end to the story? At least, I can't find one, but I think that I've reached the final room and done everything possible there.

  Pretty thinly implemented. Everything is solid, but there are unimplemented-but-mentioned objects everywhere, and it's missing a lot of polish for a six-room game: a lot of the point of an exploration game is the pleasure of discovering objects, but these objects are predictable and described in flat, boring prose. Feels very much like a programmer's demo of a system.

  There's just not really any game here. At least I didn't find any bugs isn't much to go on.

• 2019-11-01: Old Jim's Convenience Store by Anssi Räisänen. Rating: 6/10.

  Decent little 17-room cave crawl with not-too-difficult puzzles. Everything was implemented decently well. Writing was occasionally flat, but there were no major problems. It's a limited-scope treasure hunt that understands and plays to its size. There's nothing amazing here, but I'm glad to run across a game that actually understands the basic expectations of the genre and that manages to construct a decently satisfying narrative using those conventions.

  Six, six, six, six.

• 2019-11-01: Winter Break at Hogwarts by Brian Davies. Rating: 7/10.

  Everyone talking about this game seems to be talking about how massive it is. Think I'll lean heavily on the walkthrough all the way through to see as much as I can of it.

  Four days later:

  Well, that was a rabbithole.

  Rated 7 at two hours, but I hadn't seen most of the map. Still, I'd seen enough to get a feel for it (though I'd rate it higher if I'd seen the whole thing, but then, that would have been absolutely impossible in two hours). At two hours, I still hadn't finished my initial quick scan of the game's geography; I'd just recently found my wand and picked up one point (of forty) accidentally, by picking up a random object that looked pick-uppable and turned out to be needed for a future puzzle. Having a series of hints instead of a walkthrough would generally have been a fair way to package the game, but they don't really help a player to move through at a Comp-appropriate pace because the hints presume familiarity with the game's geography. Not only is this not a two-hour game, it's a game where there's no possible way you could get through it in anywhere near two hours without rushing through a step-by-step walkthrough. I didn't even have a mostly-complete map until I was more than three hours in.

  So yes: quite a game, but not so great as a Comp game. I suspect it'll score lower than it deserves.

  But there's a lot to like about it: it's the largest map I've ever drawn in a Comp game (182 rooms!); and it's Hogwarts, recreated as an obvious labor of love, with a whole lot of detail; that on its own is a huge project. Minor deviations aside, most aspects of the story were pretty well congruent with the Potterverse: the tone was generally right, the NPCs behave in character; there's no obvious deviation from Potter-canonical castle geography that I noticed. The geography is clearly worked out in great detail, and was surprisingly consistent for a world of this size: everything is clearly related to everything else geographically, with a well-worked-out layout on eight (!) levels. None of the puzzles are terribly difficult, and there's a good general sense of pacing throughout.

  That being said, the fact that this takes on the mantle of an established franchise with such a large, enthusiastic fan base mandates a more complete implementation than is found here: the NPCs do in fact need to be fleshed out more (to pick just one character: there are so many things we should be able to ask Hagrid about, but can't), and the many many many empty rooms have literally hundreds of nouns that should be implemented. While all of this is of course a massive task, it's also one that's inherent in doing an excellent job of doing what the author has set out to do. Related, but at the opposite end of the scale, is a kind of disappointment that there's not more possibilities in a game about a milieu that's about opening up possibilities: there's only one small bit involving flying? There's not more magic? You can't have a conversation with Dumbledore, or enter the Chamber of Secrets? Or get under the Whomping Willow? Where have all of the house elves gone during the holiday? The list goes on and on: partly these regrets are the same more should be implemented complaint, but it's also a complaint that, all of this stuff having been implemented, even if only on a skeletal scale, more of it hasn't been used. There are too many missed opportunities here.

  Too, there were guess-the-phrasing moments that were avoidable with more care, and there were plenty of nouns that needed more synonyms.

  But it's ambitious, and there are many many good decisions made here, and small moments of excellence throughout. It's a good start to an excellent game, and it's already finishable. It just has a lot of work left to do.

• 2019-11-06: Enceladus by Robb Sherwin. Rating: 6/10.

  Um. How long has it been since I've played a Robb Sherwin game? I don't even know. Quite a long time.

  But this is an interesting artefact: something right out of the 90s, almost, with its Amiga-made MOD music, its tiny Hugo clumsinesses alongside the uncanniness of the Hugo interface, the awkward banter between members of the crew, the sometimes-clumsy enthusiasm for the plot that drives it forward: like a new game out of the past, warts and all.

  But man, are there some warts. Lack of editing and being on rails, for two; plus, the characters are just so one-dimensional. But it's kind of a weird space-opera with only nominal interactivity, and it was kind of engrossing in its own way. The sense of narrative voice rescues it sometimes, too.

  All in all, an interesting artefact. Makes me curious to play some of the Robb Sherwin I've missed. Also, props for providing something that's genuinely multi-platform.

• 2019-11-14: Very Vile Fairy File by Andrew Schultz as Billy Boling. Rating: 6/10 (review based on release of 13 November).

  Um. This is an incongruous piece.

  On the one hand, it's quite clever. The basic premise of working with interior rhymes is promising and sometimes the execution of the premise is quite funny. The writing is often hilarious, and the basic step-by-step execution of the premise is usually fair to the player and tends to reward lateral thinking. The premise is maintained consistently throughout the game, which is no small feat in itself.

  On the other hand, the premise is implemented bare, without any supporting structure that would connect it to a narrative. What narrative there is is largely nonsensical, not actually explaining character motivation. There's no larger explanation for what exactly happens when a magical alteration is made by a rhyme, nor does there seem to be a coherent theory operating in the background. In the absence of any sort of larger structure, the logic of the game becomes purely associative; and the associative links are the kind of random unmotivated links that come from pure sonic coincidence. This sometimes works and sometimes doesn't: it can be clever and illuminating, or it can be an impossible guess-the-verb puzzle. The puzzles tend to fall into the first category, but there are more than a few that are much more difficult and essentially require brute-forcing appropriate rhymes in an American accent. Having a few of the latter offsets the virtue of mostly being the former. And there are plenty of places where the concept, more or less stretched to its breaking point, doesn't quite come off as being as funny as it needs to be to work.

  I suppose that what I'm really saying is that, for this to work well, the associational phonic logic needs to connect, even if only behind the scenes, with some other form of logic. There needs to be a connection between levels that's absent here (or, at least, I can't see it). There needs to be a form/content linking of the type that happens in poetry. What this really wants is to have been written by Shel Silverstein, actually. But as it is, it's clever and funny in places, and was a pleasure to play. Mostly.

• 2019-11-15: Meeting Robb Sherwin by Jizaboz. Rating: 4/10 (review based on release of 3 October).

  Well. Let's see if I can get one more in before judging closes.

  Nice to see something in Denver. However:

  >e
  

  Park Avenue Bridge
  This large bridge has plenty of sidewalk on each side for pedestrians and an excellent view of the Rocky Mountains. Downtown Denver is to the south. Up the street to the northeast you see a large box-shaped building with a plain sign next to it. The La Quinta hotel is to the west. In the far distance to the east, you see the peaks of the Rocky Mountains.

  The Rocky Mountains are never visible to the east in Denver!

  It's a competently executed mini-game, but it's on rails and there are essentially no puzzles. It's not even particularly interactive, except insofar as exploration is one form of interactivity. There's not even that much of that. It's just too small.

  Nearly rated five, but the lack of basic modern affordances (What do you want to unlock the door to room 302 with?, synonyms, etc.) and the occasional typos convinced me it should take the lower score if I'm on the fence. Which I was.

  There's just no game there, nor is the story told in a particularly engaging way: we don't get any real insight into any of the characters. The author's enthusiasm counts for something, though, which is why it didn't score lower, I guess.

Games Not Played

Divided into categories that give a rationale for each of those decisions.

… because I helped to beta-test them

• For the Moon Never Beams, by J. Michael

… because they're Windows/macOS-only

More often than not, this means one or more of the following things: there's no (good, easily available) Linux interpreter for the system that the work of IF was developed for; the Windows 'terp doesn't play well under Wine; or, there is no 'terp, and the game is just a Windows executable that doesn't work under Wine.

• Poppet
  • QUEST game. Might get to it if I wind up starting a Windows-running VM for some reason other than playing the game. Might not.
• The Call of the Shaman
  • Windows executable that crashed immediately under Wine. Moving on. (EDIT. Looks like it's now available online, so it's possible I'll get to it.)
• The Shadow Witch
  • Has an INSTALLER. Under Wine, the installer windows substitute an empty box for every single character. Moving on.
• Treasure Hunt in the Amazon. (Intfiction.org thread.)
  • An ADRIFT blorb. Doesn't work with Gargoyle. Another I might run it if I start Windows anyway game. (EDIT. Looks like there's an online-play option available now. Maybe I'll get to it if I have time.)
• Abandon Them
  • macOS only! Is this the first such game in the history of the Comp? Surely it can't be. (EDIT. The situation turns out to be more complex, and I may give this a go if I run out of other things.)
• Language Arts. (Intfiction.org thread.) Game doesn't do anything when double-clicked from a Linux file manager, unlike other Windows executables, which open using Wine after being double-clicked. Going to try it in a terminal.

  17:06:57 patrick@linawesome Language Arts$ wine LanguageArts.exe wine: Bad EXE format for Z:\home\patrick\games\IF\competetions\[2019] IFComp 25\Games\Language Arts\LanguageArts.exe. 17:07:03 patrick@linawesome Language Arts$ mono LanguageArts.exe Cannot open assembly 'LanguageArts.exe': File does not contain a valid CIL image.

  Oh well. There are 30 other parser games that open up with less effort. Moving on.

… because they're not parser-based

• Rip Retold
• Faerethia
• Black Sheep
• Limerick Heist
• Flygskam Simulator
• Flight of the CodeMonkeys
• Turandot
• Summer Night City
• Pirateship
• Truck Quest
• URA Winner!
• robotsexpartymurder
• The Sweetest Honey
• The Mysterious Stories of Caroline
• For the Cats
• Eldritch Everyday: The Third Eye
• Iamb(ici)
• Dungeon Detective 2: Devils and Details
• De Novo
• Arram's Tomb
• Planet C
• Roads Not Taken
• Night Guard / Morning Star
• The Legendary Hero Has Failed.
• Break Stuff
• Skybreak!
• Each-uisge
• Heretic's Hope
• Island in the Storm
• The Ouroboros Trap
• A Blue Like No Other
• Valand
• The Surprise
• Eye Contact
• Chuk and the Arena
• The Chieftain
• Lucerne
• Dull Grey
• Girth Loinhammer and the Quest for the Unsee Elixir
• The Milgram Parable
• Saint City Sinners
• The good people
• Slugocalypse
• Bad Water
• Río Alto: forgotten memories