Grandma
Bethlinda's Remarkable Egg is a parser-based marvel created by Arthur
DiBianca. The egg is a marvelous toy, both as an in-game object and as an entry
in IFcomp 2021.
I really enjoyed the way that this work combined strong
writing with strong coding. You might think
that you want to pick things up, move to different locations, or interact with
a bigger world through the parser, but the story provides elegant distractions to
explain why you won’t be doing any of those things.
Grandma Bethlinda's Remarkable Egg has discarded a lot of
familiar parser actions in favor of custom commands. There’s supposed to be a
manual that explains how everything works, but… you’ll find out for yourself in
short order. Meanwhile, the new commands introduce persistent changes into the environment
that interact with each other in unexpected ways.
RetroCON 2021
is a choice-based work by Sir Slice that was entered into IFcomp 2021.
The blurb for this entry encapsulates its entire story: the player
is at a retro gaming convention in Las Vegas. Although the convention lasts for
2 “days,” you have as much time as you want to explore everything.
This entry has pulled off some feats of programming
that are far beyond my own Twine capabilities. You can play 3 different games
at the convention and gamble on 4 different games in the casino. Each of the 7
options presents a mini-game in its own right, including one that is a functional parser
experience.
RetroCON 2021 was a little disorienting — the
over-arching message of IFcomp is “come and enjoy this group of games,” so it
gets weird and recursive to find the same message inside an IFcomp entry.
It reminds me of Jeff Goldblum’s line from Jurassic Park.
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. pic.twitter.com/Wo51vZTMgb
RetroCon 2021 works as a proof of concept, but I would have enjoyed
a narrative arc that offered more than arriving at a location and leaving when
I got bored.
To be fair, engaging narratives are difficult to implement!
Especially when you’re making a game about playing other
games. It took a lot of work to build RetroCon2021,
and that deserves to be recognized.
Enveloping
Darkness is a choice-based story by John Muhlhauser, Helen Pluta, and Othniel
Aryee that was entered into IFcomp 2021.
This cleanly writtenfantasy adventure is light on
details. For example, the protagonist's brother feels like less of a family member and more
of a placeholder to provide motivation for the journey.
I did appreciate the number of choices that Enveloping Darkness offers. The passages are short, and the reader is presented with something to
do at the end of each one.
However, it would have been helpful if choices hinted at possible outcomes. I got killed early by trying to rescue an innocent victim,
and at one point I spent two inexplicable months in a boat on the lake. It was a complete surprise
when the story ended and I was praised for saving the realm.
Enveloping Darkness also includes several fantasy creatures that don’t feel connected to the narrative. Orcs are used as generic outsiders: some are helpful, some are violent, and some are infested with parasitic brain worms. If they were replaced with Canadians, the overall experience would remain unchanged.
Kidney Kwest is an educational, parser-based adventure
designed to reinforce lessons for children with kidney failure. It was created
by Eric Zinda and Luka Marceta, with artwork by Kristina Ness.
I enjoyed the writing in Kidney Kwest. It has the
unavoidable “after-school special” tone that you would expect from the subject
matter involved, but there’s a clear challenge with some basic puzzles and
multiple outcomes. I was also entertained by the Kidney Fairy's sense of humor.
I don’t normally quote the bible, but Kidney
Kwest makes me think of the one about trying to serve two masters.
This entry is trying to do a bit more than that when you consider that it’s:
reinforcing key messages about taking
medications and avoiding specific foods,
giving people something to do during their
weekly dialysis treatments,
being judged in the 2021 Interactive Fiction
Competition.
Clearly, some tradeoffs have been made.
The overall experience reminded me of AI dungeon —
specifically, the part where I endured a noticeable lag between submitting a
command and receiving a report from that command. This added extra stress to my
Kidney Kwest because a substantial part of the gameplay involves finding food
and taking medication before bad things happen.
(I knew that the delay in sending and receiving responses
wouldn’t really affect my character’s
health, but it was rough having to wait through a sequence of
commands before I could take care of immediate needs. And then it was only a
matter of time before hunger became an issue again.)
I’d call this entry a functional proof of concept, but the
real question is how Kidney Kwest is received by its target audience. If it
encourages people to lead healthier lives, then my opinions (and its final score in IFcomp) are irrelevant.
The TURING
Test is a choice-based work by Justin Fanzo that was submitted to IFcomp
2021.
The conflict at the heart of this entry is riveting: You are
the only person on board the International Space Station, and you must
determine which of the two newest arrivals is human. Will you make the correct
decision and save the human race, or will you be tricked by robotic agents of
destruction?
It’s a delightfully tense sequence, but the problem is that
you have to wade through a few thousand words of apocalypse fan fiction — my leastfavorite
variety of fan fiction — before you get there.
I would have preferred to see fewer passages concluding with a single link. This author is clearly capable of creating meaningful story branches, but most of the time they didn't.
In Twine, the story diagram looks like an enormous vertical
column:
Ultimately, your choice to determine who can access the
space station will decide whether the story is disaster fiction or apocalypse
fiction. It
turns out that they’re separate genres.
Beneath
Fenwick is the Lovecraft-adjacent story of a remote New England town full
of sinister, malformed humans lurking just out of sight. Pete Gardner created it for IFcomp 2021, and his goal was
to create an experience that is “primarily choice-based but plays like a parser
game.”
On the one hand, I didn’t encounter the branching storylines
that are seen in a choice-based game. There is only one “correct” sequence of
links that brings an audience through to the end of the story. Readers
are free to explore detours on their journey, and they're also encouraged to
save often, because the wrong links will end things early.
On the other hand, I didn’t receive the clues that a parser might provide
when players struggle with specific puzzles. Beneath Fenwick has a “combine” command
that feels a bit vague — sometimes it involves using one object on another, and
at other times it merges objects together, but the error message is always “That
combination does not work!”
I respect the amount of effort that went into implementing and
polishing Beneath Fenwick. It’s a smooth experience! I didn’t encounter any broken
links or inescapable dead ends, and things functioned consistently.
The writing in Beneath Fenwick is consistent, and fans of this
genre might enjoy themselves. I recommend experiencing it for yourself to draw
your own conclusions.
The Corsham
Witch Trial is a choice-based story by JC Blair that was entered into
IFcomp 2021.
The thing about The Corsham Witch Trial is that it contains
no actual witches — and that’s fine,
there weren’t any at the Salem Witch Trials, either. However, the blurb’s
mention of a “worryingly urgent and irritatingly cryptic” request gets a bit
confusing alongside IFcomp’s other stories of magic and supernatural horror.
The Corsham Witch Trial is a cleverly written courtroom
drama. The author describes it as “a transparent attempt to enliven a
disjointed and gimmick-laden manuscript with a few distracting interactive
elements,” but I really enjoyed how this story was framed. Court transcripts
and other documents are presented as .PDF files, and a workplace colleague asks
questions about the evidence after it has been reviewed.
Every step of the Corsham Witch Trial works very hard to
maintain an atmosphere of uncertainty. When the player analyzes the evidence to
support a specific interpretation, their colleague explains how it can also
support a different outcome.
Unfortunately, after a skillful buildup of tension and ambivalence,
the entire exercise proves to be futile.
It doesn’t really
matter what the player thinks, because the case was closed, the truth was
discovered, and the newspapers reported the results. After such rigorously
enforced neutrality, I was expecting a Broadchurch-style twist that
might suggest alternative sequences of events. Instead, I got moralizing
about doing the right thing even when it’s pointless.
The Corsham Witch Trial is well-executed fiction, but doesn't end up being very interactive. Other reviewers have made some good
suggestions for improvements.
At King
Arthur's Christmas Feast is a choice-based adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, entered
into IFcomp 2021 by Travis Moy.
This is a niche piece — almost a Medieval Boy Scout
Simulator — and I love it. To quote one of the story’s options: “I’m all in on
this. Let’s do it.”
The first thing that an audience should know about the
original story of Sir Gawain is that it
makes no goddamn sense. A movie adaptation, Sword of the Valiant, came out when I was five years old. Scenes
like this did not make it any easier to understand:
At King Arthur's Christmas Feast is written with choicescript, and it offers decisions that put
Gawain’s thinking in a more relatable context. The reader is expected to uphold
the virtues of a knight, remaining pious, courteous, magnanimous, and chaste
throughout the entire journey while also embodying the spirit of fellowship.
The expectations make Gawain’s predicament more understandable: How can good manners keep you safe from an immortal giant?
I appreciated how much extra writing was necessary to humanize
Gawain’s adventure. And the story notes many of the reader’s choices, referencing
them in future passages.
However, King Arthur's Christmas Feast doesn’t have a lot of branches, which means that people who stray from the correct path might find it less entertaining. I had fun pretending to be a rule-abiding poindexter, but I can see how that might not appeal to
everyone.
The player begins by steering Mandy, the protagonist, into a
creepy old house. The rest of the story involves trying to find a way out of
it. I thought that the puzzles were engaging, but the story felt like the triangle of
identities was out of alignment.
The player and the protagonist of The House on Highfield
Lane are kept separate from each other. This happens through narrative details,
like the third-person perspective of the writing, and also through design
choices that isolate the player’s knowledge from the character’s knowledge.
I knew that brevity was the soul of wit, but Mandy didn’t know that, so one of the
puzzles involved guiding her to a place where she could discover the answer. On
the other hand, contraptions in the house were described in ways that made them
seem familiar to Mandy and entirely alien to me.
As she explored the House on Highfield Lane, Mandy might
have been fascinated by the experiments in reversing death and transferring
consciousness. Maybe she was horrified. The narrative distance left me feeling
detached and unmotivated. Escaping from the house became her problem, not mine.
Overall, this was a smoothly implemented parser experience. Many aspects of the house were confusing, but they were intentionally confusing and bound by consistent rules. I didn’t need to spend a lot of time guessing obscure verbs, and the parser generally understood what I was trying to do. The technical craftsmanship was solid, and the narrative choices might appeal to the right audience.
Brave Bear is a
parser-based adventure by John Evans
that was entered into IFcomp 2021.
Brave Bear is a child’s toy with a solemn duty to keep its
owner safe. I liked the concept, I enjoyed playing with toys, and I liked the
goal of bringing friends together to protect someone that they cared about. I
just wish that some of the clues were easier to understand.
As a toy, the bear has a simple view of the world. As people
who quote Steve Jobs will tell you, “simple” is difficult to implement. Brave Bear’s narrative voice describes an
ordinary family home from a new perspective that felt unnecessarily limiting
and confusing in a few places.
Some of this entry’s other design choices were unexpected —
two toys have abilities that are hinted at but never used in the game, and a
few of the locations have exhaustive lists of exits that are never used. They
might have been red herrings, but that seems out of place in a story where the
puzzles are so simple.
The experience reminded me of Samurai Lapin, which was an
animated flash movie on the internet from (checks
notes) more than 20 years ago.
The Best Man
is a choice-based story by Stephen Bond that was entered into IFcomp 2021. It’s
phenomenally well-written, which made it a challenge to enjoy.
The Best Man is initially told from the perspective of
Aiden. He has been asked to stand in for the best man at Laura’s wedding, and
that forces him to confront unresolved feelings about their past relationship. Their
story is vivid and uncomfortable.
For the first few chapters, it looked like the author was a “Nice
Guy” who had created an autobiography to process events from his own life. I
was concerned that I’d spend the entire time watching someone wallowing in destructive
behavior.
Then the perspective shifted, and I realized that the author
wasn’t a self-pitying doormat — just unnaturally good at creating narrative
voices. Laura’s wedding is viewed from several perspectives, and each one them feels
distinct and internally consistent.
The Best Man also uses some clever writing and supporting mechanics
to handle its character changes. Colored hyperlinks indicate that the reader
has assumed a new perspective, while Aiden’s eye-catching white suit allows
readers to track him through the scene.
The story is advanced with dialogue choices, and those
decisions are referenced in later passages. I couldn’t tell whether
it meant that I had any control over the narrative, but I managed to get
Aiden to a final state that seemed healthier for him.
It’s possible that Laura’s wedding could have ended quite
differently, but I lack the endurance that would necessary to find out.
I loved the premise of this game — it puts you in a short,
repeatable scenario as an accretive PC (something similar was used for last year’s The
Copyright of Silence), and you use your knowledge to make predictions as a
fortune teller.
After three runs through Unfortunate, you have enough information
for completely accurate predictions. It poses an interesting question: should you
predict misfortune and then passively watch it unfold? Or do you want to take action
for more positive results?
Unfortunate is an ambitious work, and that ambition may have
created some implementation issues. I found exits that became inaccessible and descriptions
that referenced non-existent objects. And I couldn’t
predict misfortune and passively watch the results, because two characters
completely disappeared from the game.
I would have appreciated it if Unfortunate set out its initial expectations
more clearly; I approach puzzles differently when it’s clear that they’ll be a
repeating sequence. This entry was fun, but more playtesting would have
improved the experience.
Smart Theory
is a short comedy by AKheon that was
entered into IFcomp 2021. It encounters one of game design’s common problems: How
do you simulate an unpleasant experience without driving away your audience?
The writing is smoothly implemented and effective. It was
fun to see how the “first rule” of Smart Theory was applied in the story. This entry works as a kind of power fantasy — you can mock transparent nonsense
and criticize sloppy thinking.
However, the whole thing felt too plausible. A shamelessly inflated sense of self-importance is part
of every management training course; they all discuss overpriced-but-revolutionary
new paradigms. Attempting to debunk their transparent nonsense is just as
futile inside Smart Theory as it is in the real world.
If you view it without irony, Smart Theory is
interchangeable with a lot of the overpriced self-help literature that
currently exists. That can be read as a declaration that there are no new ideas
in this space, but it feels simultaneously correct and tedious.
This entry is meant to be explored by two players who communicate
with each other outside of the story. The strong characterization of each role
(the Dictator and the General) sets a different tone for each perspective, offering
vastly divergent interpretations from the same sequence of events.
It’s also a very lopsided experience. One player starts from
a position of strength, and the other gets the rough end of the pineapple. If Last
Night of Alexisgrad meant this to be an intentional message about different
types of government and their relative strengths in a crisis, I ignored it.
I was fascinated by the unfolding meta-game in Last Night of Alexisgrad, which asks whether the player/reader wants to consider their own motives and the
motives of their partner as something separate from their respective
characters. It was tough to avoid sharing my reactions while the story unfolded.
However, I felt much more distant from the story during the
direct interactions between General and Dictator. As the players pass messages outside
the game, their impassioned arguments and pleas for mercy get reduced to flat combinations
of letters and numbers.
This entry was fun, and I can only imagine the
work that was necessary to correctly implement different branches of the narrative
while keeping them hidden from half the audience — the hard work paid off!
I was entertained by the descriptive writing and the historical
depth of The Last Night of Alexisgrad.
The Daughter
(alternately capitalized as “The daughter” in its IFcomp ballot listing) is a
choice-based story created by Giovanni Rubino for IFcomp 2021.
I had difficulty engaging with this work because of
implementation issues. The pale gray text was difficult to read, most of the
passages included spelling errors, and then it ended abruptly. (Right after I
asked to be pointed to my room, everything stopped.)
The Daughter’s blurb makes it sound like The Children of Menmeets The Eyes of
Heisenberg, but its focus was uneven — some details were described
exhaustively while other information felt like it was missing. This might
have been translated from another language, which could explain some of its unusual
phrasing and descriptions.
If not, there were some bold style choices that
failed to resonate with me.
Overall, I couldn’t find enough relatable context to understand
the forces at work in The Daughter’s far-future setting. Yes, there were some
jokes about the broken culture of the twenty-first century, like our fixation
on true crime podcasts, but they were used to emphasize differences, not to build empathy.
The Daughter might be waiting to be discovered by the right
audience, but at the moment I think it could be improved with more thoughtful editorial
decisions.
My Gender Is
a Fish is a choice-based work that Carter Gwertzman entered into IFcomp,
and it is beautiful.
Maybe it’s not technically
beautiful — MGIAF uses Twine’s basic Sugarcube format with default font
colors — but I really enjoyed the writing. Your gender gets stolen by a magpie,
and you make a sequence of choices on the path to reclaim it. Each playthrough sees
the same choices, but the story is short and the text changes enough to make it
worth playing more than once.
I'm reluctant to call My Gender Is a Fish an allegory. For one thing, it doesn’t take itself seriously. Also, I’ve never clearly understood what makes an allegory. But that feels like a good fit for this entry's affirmative message about being okay with ambiguity.
My Gender Is a Fishasks thoughtful questions and makes sharp comparisons: How much of your
life is tied to your gender identity, and what would you do without it?
This entry starts by referencing the Final Girl convention
from horror movies, showing that the author knows how these films work. It
also suggests that the reader is equally clever. It must be simple to avoid making
the dumb mistakes that you see characters making in these stories, right?
Final Girl 2.0 argues that it’s not
so easy when you’re the one being stalked by a homicidal maniac. Suspenseful background
music and timed events work together to provide dramatic tension while you’re
fighting for your life.
This entry's clever design choices struck a balance between keeping the game accessible and maintaining a sense of
urgency. I particularly liked how some links had to be selected in a specific order,
which felt similar to performing a challenging sequence of actions in the real
world.
The resulting experience is like a magic
trick. Close inspection of the text is the only way you’ll survive, but the story’s
atmosphere prevents you from loitering and inspecting things too closely.
I reached an ending on my first
playthrough — there are clear signals guiding the player to safety — but when
you go back to experiment with some of the other options, it’s clear that some
of the illusions were meant to be dispelled.
I want to see this developed into a
full game. Final Girl 2.0 already suggests a lot of possibilities in its
current state.
Gender Exchange is a work by nDev that
was submitted to IntroComp 2021.
This entry is a visual novel, which
means I’m not going to be the best judge of its strengths — everything I know
about VNs has been written by other
people.
Gender Exchange is the story of a boy
who loves Japanese culture so much that he’ll pretend to be a girl for a chance
to study there. It’s also an unbroken narrative with no choices for the reader.
(Maybe that will change if it’s developed into a full game?)
The plot seems suitable for the VN format,
although I was a little surprised that it didn’t rocket straight into NSFW
territory. Cross dressing is central to the story, but it’s not used to
describe any sexual thrills. And horny people make suggestive remarks, implying devious plans, but the narrator maintains an innocent, unapologetic enthusiasm
for Japan and Japanese culture.
I respected how the protagonist accepts
himself, and his love of Japanese culture, in an unfailingly positive way. He endures
verbal abuse because people dismiss his hobbies as weird. He makes some
cringe-inducing choices in pursuit of his dreams. And nevertheless, he
persists.
Switching genders to attend high
school in Japan is not something that I would enjoy. But the narrator’s
excitement is so earnest that I’m happy he enjoys it.
This story created a nuanced, well-defined atmosphere in a short period
of time. The experience of poking around in a file directory showed how
different mechanics could provide variety in a full game, but it mostly
used basic text choices in a way
that didn’t intrude on the narrative.
I was struck by the elegant way handling of the player’s decision to begin the adventure. It reminded me of
an earlier discussion about implementing the Hero’s Journey in video games — the
“Refusal of the Call” needs to be handled carefully, and MISSION UNKNOWN was an example of using that decision to define the stakes involved and reflect on the protagonist’s self-perception.
It would be interesting to see how
this develops into a complete game.
The prologue used familiar themes and
recognizable conflicts to make its science fiction setting more relatable. It showed a narrator who whose workplace has gradually transformed into something
alienating and uncomfortable. And then it abandoned all that for a voyage into
the unknown.
This entry uses a minimalist interface
— you decide whether to tap a key before the timer runs out — like the one in Move On, the IFComp
2020 work from Serhii Mozhaiskyi. Although the mechanics are similar, Resist! uses a
different tone to explore a separate genre.
Wakes
is a skilled writer who starts this story with familiar scenes from
zombie movies. This time, the player is part of the undead horde, and the
narrator puts a different perspective on the violence and bloody mayhem that accompanies
their rampage.
On the one hand, text effects and strong
writing do a good job of conveying emotion and character. The design choice to
use timed text fits with the theme of the game. The player gets carried
along by the narrative and chooses when to actively oppose it.
On the other hand, it’s still timed text.
Settings are available to control the speed, but there’s no option to disable
it entirely.
This entry was polished, entertaining,
and short. Although I’d like to see a longer version, I also think it would be
challenging to maintain an engaging experience over the length of a full story,
especially when all the decisions have to be steered with binary yes/no choices.
(For the record, “challenging” is not
the same as “impossible,” and I think that Wakes is skilled enough to pull it
off.)
I chose to take this entry at face value: a sweet
collaboration where an 8-year-old’s work of interactive fiction has been
implemented by a skilled programmer.
Emily Short described this approach to game development as writing the
through-line first, starting with an ideal walkthrough and then
building out a larger experience from there. Daddy’s Birthday includes an extra
feature that lets people read their original walkthrough to see what the writer had in mind.
It’s interesting to see the mainstays of interactive fiction
interpreted by a younger author. While there are familiar mechanics at work,
some design choices have gone in novel directions. (The house is laid out along
diagonals, with most of the passages heading northwest and southeast.)
Some of the writing is understandably awkward — one description
says “A few rooms go different directions, but you decide to go down the stairs”
when a different phrase might have worked better — but that’s largely because the
implementation remained faithful to the source material.
The complete project feels like a thoughtfully negotiated compromise.
It’s an interactive experience that maintains the spirit of its original ideas,
and I hope that the creators continue to build on those ideas to explore new
frontiers in game design.
This entry starts strong, with effective writing that clearly
establishes the main character’s situation and how they feel about it. Narrative
details provide hints about a backstory, and environmental threats offer a
sense of danger.
A substantial part of the gameplay involves figuring out
what to do next, which makes it tricky to discuss Foreign Soil in a way that
doesn’t ruin the experience. I liked how the environment changed around me,
creating new locations and updating descriptions as various objectives were completed.
I also appreciated how in-game deaths were handled — the
setting is supposed to be harsh and unforgiving, so it needs to
show appropriate consequences for risky decisions. The game struck a nice
balance that encouraged experimentation while showing how dumb choices will
get you killed.
Unfortunately, I got stuck in the middle of the story
because I wasn’t willing to take enough
risk. I knew where I was supposed to advance the story, but I was reluctant to try different
commands that might move things along. After overcoming that hurdle, things
flowed logically through the endgame.
Foreign Soil was fun, and my only complaint is that I wish
it was a longer experience.
This is an intricate heist story where the player navigates branch-and-bottleneck
structures to conduct a series of thefts. Strong
writing supports the narrative while disguising the code running behind the
scenes, and it feels like there are multiple ways to achieve your objectives.
Most of the player’s time is spent Getting People to Do What
You Want — the main character flinches at describing it with a crass term like “manipulation.”
It feels like a combat system for conversation (Convat? Combersation?), and
success reveals useful information. In the evenings, that information helps
the next heist run smoothly.
Lady Thalia is confronted with a few puzzles during her
adventures, but players who find them too difficult can use alternate solutions.
I especially liked the scoring mechanism, which is embedded in playful banter
between friends.
Additional excitement comes from the interactions with Thalia’s
nemesis, a consultant with Scotland Yard. (Thalia’s pseudonym comes from muse
of comedy, and her pursuer is regularly referred to as Melpomene.)
The overall enjoyment of this work is going to depend on
personal preference; I may not be the world’s biggest fan of cucumber
sandwiches, high tea, or drawing room repartee. However, those sequences were
nicely offset by nighttime skullduggery and daring escapes from the law.
This story establishes its stakes immediately — the early text
and graphics show what will happen if you miss the Day Train. Then it transitions
into the game’s main environment, which is serene and natural, but the introductory
sequence has added a feeling of tension that keeps things moving.
Although the train platform is only a short distance away
from the player’s starting point, not much time is left before the train
departs. The countdown felt like it was managed effectively, leaving me with just
enough time to work through challenges while still feeling like it would be a
close call.
Waiting for the Day Train presents a few puzzles in a small,
well implemented environment. Descriptive details add depth without confusing
or distracting from the major challenges. The strength of this work comes from its
simplicity.
The player is returning home after completing a
quest “off camera,” and a clock on the side of the screen tracks the time while they wait for the next tram.
The author’s note describes it as a chill game that players
are meant to enjoy at their own pace, and the implementation supports that
experience. (Misty Hills also received an audience award for being the “most
relaxing” Spring Thing entry.)
I enjoyed how Misty Hills provided a low-stakes opportunity
to explore a fantasy environment that was engaging mix of the familiar and the
magical. Although I wanted to catch the next tram, it didn’t feel like a life-or-death
challenge that determined the fate of the world.
I also appreciated how there weren’t any unpleasant
surprises or unfair traps. These structures have been described as confirmation-required
choices — you might end up missing the tram, but it will be the result of
deliberate decisions that you made while exploring.
Misty Hills is an inviting, complicated world that holds
the potential for (mis-)adventure without antagonism.
This entry used effective storytelling to deliver a complete
experience in a small set of locations. The player uses simple objects to
complete some basic tasks, but relationships and memories add narrative weight
to the proceedings.
Snowhaven’s story strikes a balance between important
physical details and the emotional components that motivate the main
character. I appreciated its clean, efficient writing.
Black-and-white graphics make effective contributions to the
story’s wintry atmosphere without becoming a distraction — subtle animations in
a few locations reinforce the impression of frozen stillness everywhere else. I
initially thought that one challenge required a solution that could only be
found in the game's images, but some later digging uncovered alternative clues elsewhere
in the text.
A few parts of Snowhaven felt like the infamous “kill
the dragon with your bare hands” sequence from Adventure, and I’ll be
interested to see how a wider audience receives them. Had I cleverly guessed the
correct sequence of phrases to solve a series of under-clued puzzles? Or were
these obvious solutions that shouldn’t need to be telegraphed? (If it’s the
latter, then I salute some brilliant design work that made me feel good about
myself.)
This entry offers an atmospheric experience that focuses less
on puzzles and more on details. Overall, it’s a short, polished story that was
satisfying to complete.
It chooses a premise (“You are a Corgi on a sandy beach”), and it commits. As that Corgi, you accompany your humans on a summer vacation.
The player’s role is plot-adjacent; other characters come to terms with a divorce while the protagonist offers emotional support. Each day offers a new chance to play vacation-themed minigames, like volleyball and sandcastle building, which are meant to create some happy memories for the humans during a difficult time.
Sunny’s Summer Vacation is described as a spiritual successor to Adventures with Fido, and Wheeler’s enthusiasm for Corgis gives both works an unapologetic charm. This entry improves on its predecessor by focusing on a smaller set of characters and a consistent story.
Although the setting was entertaining, I had difficulty enjoying a few of the minigames. I had read similar concerns about Adventures with Fido — it felt like some experiences were designed by asking “Could this be programmed?” rather than “Would this be fun?”
Sunny’s Summer Vacation is a solid work from an author who is dedicated to improvement, but additional feedback from thoughtful playtesters might have made it even stronger.
This entry is described as a story about creative block. It’s short and relatable, but I approached it with some skepticism — can such an experience really be created on demand?
The answer was a pleasant surprise. You cycle through a narrator’s creative routine, choosing different activities that might lead to the start of something meaningful. It’s presented in black text appearing on a white background, providing a mix of links that either cycle through words or advance to a new passage.
(Unfortunately, I noticed some minor typos and spacing issues that were more prominent due to the story’s clean presentation. On the other hand, the author is based in Spain, and their English is much better than my Spanish.)
Intentional style decisions establish that this is not a joke entry. It’s a deliberately crafted experience offering a sense that something will happen eventually, after you experiment with the available options. These choices might be mere procrastination, or they could be an important part of your creative process.
I enjoyed the conclusion of A Blank Page because it felt like an authentic ending to the journey. Or at least it made a good place to stop.
Fightdown! takes place inside an RPG that loses its “connection” right before the final showdown. The experience is like being on a movie set when the cameras stop rolling, and every character has something to say.
This is a choice-based story where the player talks with other characters while they wait for their connection to be restored. Minor puzzles are involved in negotiating and trading items among the cast, which changes how the ending unfolds.
I enjoyed how Fightdown! explored the relationships between its different characters. The story blends stock fantasy roles with recognizable Hollywood stereotypes to create entirely new personalities — and then it encourages the player to ask them what they think about each other.
Does the embittered burnout want the hard-working underdog to fail? What does the overachiever think about a coworker acting like a role is beneath them? Text effects are judiciously appliedto convey some phenomenal sarcasm.
Overall, this felt like an approachable, safe-for-work version of Midnight, Swordfight. (It also reminded me of Janitor, asking the player to work behind the scenes for another person’s enjoyment.) Playing through to the end unlocks enhancements that make it easier to explore different branches of the story.
None of my projects could have been completed without the McDonald’s Theory. It’s one of the most useful pieces of advice I’ve encountered. As Jon Bell puts it:
“There’s no defined process for all creative work, but I’ve come to believe that all creative endeavors share one thing: the second step is easier than the first. Always.”
Bell’s theory makes that first step less difficult — when you start with the worst possible option, it’s easy to improve from there.
Good creative work involves making gradual improvements to an initial idea. That’s tricky when your inner critic won’t let you commit to something, but it’s simpler when you commit to making that idea terrible.
Once you’ve declared that the plan is to eat at McDonald’s, it becomes much easier to make better plans.
Jon Ingold made a similar observation when he discussed his approach to writing games with meaningful choices. “No one has the time to be brilliant all the time,” he said. “You need to just get it down, and get it better.”
After you’ve gotten it down, the terrible idea might look too terrible. Things can seem so dismal that there’s no hope for improvement. That’s when it’s important to remember that everyone has difficulty judging the value of their own work.
Authors never know how their writing will be received. Editors always overlook typos in their own material. Charles Darwin thought he was “the most miserable, bemuddled, stupid Dog in all England,” although other scientists disagree.
It’s impossible to tell whether you’re working on something amazing or something awful — Kara Cutruzzula spent a year setting herself up for failure and described it as a process where you “vacillate between extreme narcissism and extreme self-loathing.”
The narcissism helps you create things, and the loathing helps you improve them, but the risk of public failure is the only way to learn what other people think.
The good thing about failure is that it presents opportunities to learn and improve. Cutruzzula ultimately viewed every failure as a brick. “As long as you keep laying bricks,” she wrote, “you will build something.”
The key is to learn from each failure and move on to the next project. To start that project, you need to come up with an idea. That’s when it’s useful to return to the McDonald’s Theory.
One of Carnegie’s rules says that if you want to be interesting, you should be interested in others. That’s helpful advice for game design.
Being interested in your audience can help you find ideas that resonate with them. An interest in psychology can find better ways to keep that audience engaged. Being interested in topics, methods, and concepts from other disciplines will improve your final product.
Here are 6 ways that being interested has led to more interesting games:
Be interested in travel. Xalavier Nelson Jr., an award-winning narrative director, created An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs after spending a lot of time in airports. In an interview, he explained that “when you spend that much time in airports, they break your brain.” (He also worked on Hypnospace Outlaw, which has been described as a flawless piece of historical fiction — much of its impact comes from an interest in 1990’s internet culture.)
Be interested in medicine. Jane McGonigal has designed alternate reality games and written two New York Times bestsellers. After she suffered a serious concussion in 2009, she faced lasting complications that meant a long and difficult road to recovery. McGonigal saw it as an opportunity to apply design theories in a new context, and the result was SuperBetter. It's a healthcare game that has been used by more than a million people fighting depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury.
Be interested in mythology. Emily Short created Counterfeit Monkey and Galatea, and she also helped build interactive fiction tools and procedural storytelling projects. Short used her knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman mythology to discuss how an in-game pantheon can create more interesting mechanics and enrich stories. More game design topics and techniques are discussed on Short’s blog.
Be interested in pioneers. Aaron Reed has received recognition for innovative narrative and story design, and he created Blue Lacuna, which is considered to be one of the top 10 interactive fiction titles of all time. In his 50 years of Text Games project, Reed has tracked the evolution of a genre and discussed how dynamic stories have connected with audiences across generations.
Be interested in communities. You might have seen Victoria Tran playing Among Us on Jimmy Fallon’s Twitch stream. Tran is community director at Innersloth, and she has built healthy, engaged communities around video games by being interested in the players. Her work focuses on nurturing practical, more sustainable, and kinder online communities.
Ultimately, your own work can be improved by studying the work of other designers. Game jams, competitions, and online events are a good way to see how people have solved common problems and taken new perspectives on familiar issues. One example is the Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction, which happens every April.
Jon Ingold, co-founder of Inkle Studios, talked for almost 50 minutes before addressing the main question posed by the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain: How do you make choices matter in video games? When he finally considered it, his answer was brief.
“You don’t,” Ingold quipped. “Choices are a tool for getting the player to do two things: Firstly, to buy into the game and be hooked by it, and secondly, to take some responsibility for it.”
Honestly, it was how good professional education events play out — the real value came from hearing Ingold exploring the ideas behind the question and discussing the challenges of telling interesting stories.
When Ingold writes complicated story plots for interactive fiction, they branch less frequently than it appears. “I tend to work in scenes,” he said, and his scenes have a single entry point and a single exit point. The space between those points is where players explore how characters to relate to each other.
Ingold explained that the emotional interplay happening between entry and exit distracts the audience from more conventional work that steers them towards the next part of the story. “It’s all there to make you feel like you’ve been moved through an experience, and that’s the game,” he said.
When this approach works well, it produces a game like Heaven’s Vault — game designers have praised it for tracing a single broad arc while providing completely different experiences each time it is played. Andrew Plotkin described Heaven’s Vault as “a game with multiple middles.”
From a design perspective, Ingold opposes the idea of players having complete control over a story. “If a player can just walk into a room and do whatever they want, then what’s the point of playing this game?” He added, “You might as well play with Lego, because Lego does what you tell it to.”
Ingold prefers stories that respond to player decisions in ways that offer surprise and entertainment. He repeated a point made by Meg Jyanth during her 2016 discussion of the design decisions behind 80 Days: “Who ever heard of that story where a protagonist gets exactly what they want?”
Ingold also dislikes updates and notifications that clearly indicate what has been altered by player choices. “I might as well be the game designer, I might as well just control the numbers under the hood.”
This contrasts with game designers who clearly indicate how the player’s choices change variables within the game. Josh Labelle’s game, Tavern Crawler, successfully used such an approach to tie for first place in the 2020 Interactive Fiction Competition. (Like Ingold, Labelle included tradeoffs in his story where players lost access to some plots by choosing to explore others in more detail.)
One attendee seemed to think it was clever to demand a direct answer to the event’s question about making choices matter in video games, which seems like it misses the point. If there was One Right Way to tackle this challenge, then we could just distribute a .PDF and be done with it.
Well-written games make conscious design choices to support a specific philosophy. Ingold spent an hour describing the philosophy that guided his choices, and the event’s moderator, Samantha Webb, did an excellent job of keeping the conversation moving to explore adjacent ideas about game design and the craft of writing.
