Chorus: IFcomp 2020

Chorus is a choice-based urban fantasy by Skarn. 

This entry asks you to divide six people between three different community service projects. The enjoyable twist is that they're all monsters and mythological creatures integrated into modern society. (Oddly detailed personnel files offer scientific discussions of their abilities.) 

The story follows a run down, under-funded nonprofit that is already stretched to the breaking point. In a normal city, these organizations serve different groups of people whose needs are regularly in conflict with each other. When those people are harpies, gorgons, and beings from alternate universes, the conflicts become more interesting.

Chorus relies on a player who is willing to return to the story and learn from repeated playthroughs. Early remarks about "the reorganization of the district" hint at tensions behind the scenes, and my first experience left me eager to investigate why the city felt like Nazi-occupied Paris.    

Individual paragraphs of text fade in gradually, but a prominent "animations" toggle allows you to access entire pages rapidly. That was helpful for speeding through familiar passages to focus on new behavior from different members of the group. 

The different factions in Chorus interact with each other behind the scenes to create an intricate backstory, and the result is an experience that replaces the worst aspects of community service drudgery with tense fantasy conflict.

Artwork from Donald Conrad:

The Cursèd Pickle of Shireton: Ifcomp 2020

The Cursèd Pickle of Shireton is a choice-based fantasy adventure by Hanon Ondricek. 

This entry is not parser-based, but its choices are intricate. You will enter text in some places, select options in other places, and open windows to click links that create additional options in menus that you might not even be aware of. 

It is immense. 

Cursèd Pickle of Shireton is a choice-based facsimile of an MMORPG where you can explore, take quests, build stats, and grind for experience. There is an entire adventure outside of the titular pickle's storyline, packed with outright comedy, subtle in-jokes, and external references that are serious and silly. 

It's enormous, and it's amazing, but my experience felt unfocused. Compare this entry with others from the same author: 

• Cannery Vale: You must finish writing a manuscript before the deadline is up.
• robotsexpartymurder: You must solve a murder before the deadline is up.
• Cursèd Pickle of Shireton: Welcome to Age of Aeons, where you can do anything!

The first two titles push readers with clear motives for investigating worlds full of immersive, engaging situations. Although Cursèd Pickle of Shireton is as carefully crafted as its predecessors, its content has to do all the work of pulling in an audience by itself. 

This entry's greatest strength and biggest weakness is that it's a sprawling assortment of wonders. Without a clear motivation, it took me a long time to find the pickle — and at that point, I wasn't even sure it was a threat. 

Age of Aeons, the fantasy RPG where this story takes place, is big enough and weird enough that I wonder what would happen if the pickle was left unchecked. Why not embrace the way of the brine? Would the wizards' guild steer me wrong?

Artwork from Donald Conrad: 

The Copyright of Silence: IFcomp 2020

The Copyright of Silence is a choice-based entry by Ola Hansson. 

(PRO TIP: You have to click on the word "Welcome!" to begin the experience, which took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out.) 

This entry is laid out like a board game, taking place in a four-room apartment where you interact with the composer John Cage, his dog, and his parrot. Text tracks the four of you moving from room to room, and different actions become available depending on who is where. 

I appreciate the effort involved in implementing these characters. Their behavior is governed by logical rules that can be deduced through observation — you are expected to understand and apply those rules to engineer a specific result.

The blurb for this entry hints that it's like Elsinore or Varicella, where you are expected to fail many times and learn from your mistakes. However, those games immediately establish that a catastrophe is imminent and encourage the player to start working towards victory from the beginning. 

If Copyright of Silence explained what it wanted during my first visit with Cage, I was too dumb to notice. There's a stopwatch in the kitchen that suggested a course of action, but the how and why only became clear after my visit ended and I endured the triumph of Cage and the failure of my own character. 

The success of this entry relies on an accretive player character who can play through the scenario quickly and have fun learning new things each time. That's where I stumbled. 

I might have spent too much time thinking through each of my character's moves, or I might have missed substantial parts of the environment and the characters' interactions, but I felt burned out and frustrated from failure long before I had accumulated enough knowledge to reach the best possible ending.

Artwork from Donald Conrad:

Doppeljobs: IFcomp 2020

Doppeljobs is a choice-based story by Lei, and it was a delight. It’s told from the perspective of a doppelganger who endures situations that clients would rather avoid. Humans and doppelgangers don’t have much experience with each other, so it’s a journey of discovery for everyone involved.

The fantasy world of Doppeljobs is inhabited by stone goats and serviced by sandpipes, which encouraged me to match the story's tone of excited curiosity. Choices are smoothly integrated with the narrative: you're thrown into unfamiliar circumstances and asked to decide what your client would do. 

Are there things you don't know? Has important information been left out? The City of Sand is part of a magical foreign world, so you're never sure what will happen. 

Things are complicated by the fact that some of your choices might mean that your clients make lasting impressions on you. (The narrator chirps, "Surely, this will affect neither your business nor your life in any way whatsoever!") 

The tone of this story fits the perspective of a naïve magical creature trying to survive as an entrepreneur in the City of Sand — it's exactly the kind of blank-slate optimism that you would expect from an entity that knows nothing about humanity. 

I also appreciated the brisk pacing of the story. This entry was focused, consistent, and entertaining.

Artwork from Donald Conrad:

#VanLife: IFcomp2020

#VanLife is a choice-based entry by Victoria of Stimsims math games. 

Stimsims describes its games as tech enhanced evolutions of the word problem, and its website calls this entry "Van Life Challenge." It might take you less than 15 minutes if you're a fast reader who makes terrible decisions, but you should prepare to spend more time if you’re serious about completing it. 

The player makes a series of choices affecting their character’s mood, battery power, and bank balance. These attributes must be maintained at healthy levels, and there are spot quizzes that ask about things like loan repayments, energy usage, and solar panel trivia. 

Mike Spivey, author of A Beauty Cold and Austere, has explained that teaching through games is more effective when the material is kept in context. Working with this entry — making decisions to conserve either my batteries or my mood — gave me context-appropriate choices that provided a clearer understanding of the relationship between volts, amps, and watts. It was more approachable than other energy discussions I've encountered.

However, I had some concerns about the story supporting this entry. The main character publishes daily inspirational quotes, experiences cravings for avocado toast, and makes money from freelance photojournalism and product reviews. Are we laughing at their expense, or is this something today’s hip youth can relate to? 

You wanna know what's up with the youth of today? You go to millennial expert Morley Winograd pic.twitter.com/32J7XXHCqE

— kevinbiegel (@kbiegel) February 11, 2016

It felt like I was supposed to cosplay as the worst kind of millennial stereotype. And guiding this character to financial independence through smart energy consumption felt like I was perpetuating that myth that anyone can give up their daily cup of coffee to become a millionaire.

Some energy management games consider electrical tradeoffs at a city's scale, asking players to choose the greatest good for the largest number of people. #VanLife presents those choices at an individual level in a way that makes some tradeoffs clearer while making others too cute.

Big Trouble in Little Dino Park: IFcomp 2020

Big Trouble in Little Dino Park was written by Seth Paxton and Rachel Aubertin, using Ink.

I enjoyed exploring the question at the heart of this entry: "What if Jurassic Park gave summer jobs to disaffected teens?" Things quickly change gears from summer job to survival challenge as catastrophe strikes and you must find a way to escape the park's hungry inhabitants. You make choices to visit (and re-visit) areas while avoiding the park's hungry inhabitants in a search for survivors.

This entry could have used more polish, but it's entertaining in its current state. The authors explain that Big Trouble in Little Dino Park was created in 30 days, which explains why it includes a substantial number of typos. 

Some descriptions made it difficult to tell where I was in the park, or where I wanted to go, but other passages updated to show how my previous choices had changed the situation. In some places, like the Dinosaur Nursery, it seemed like I was repeating passages that were only supposed to display once. 

I was a bad employee and a worse survivor, dying 5 times and seeing 4 out of 7 possible deaths. 

Parts of this experience felt like living in one of those horror movies where the main character is alerted to obvious danger. I appreciated having the option to just go somewhere else, although calculated risks were necessary in a few places. Overall, this entry delivered thrills, chills, and the omnipresent threat of violent death.

Artwork from Donald Conrad:

Accelerate: IFcomp 2020

Accelerate is a choice-based multimedia project credited to The TAV Institute. 

This entry is set in a future dystopia (with many recognizable elements from the present day), and it puts a lot of work into creating a specific atmosphere. Some people might interpret this as attention to detail, and others might dismiss it as trying too hard. 

For me, the interesting question was whether the interactivity in Accelerate supports its story. Early chapters, which put the audience in the role of an addict trying to score drugs from a religiously affiliated medical clinic, set up a conflict that made it difficult to engage with the narrative. 

Open-minded curiosity will help readers explore this story, but that makes it difficult to act like an addict on the prowl. 

Assuming the role of a cynical addict will encourage the audience to remain distant from the religious propaganda, and that could mean rejecting the entire entry by quitting early. 

Indoctrination is difficult to implement in fiction. If you haven't created a bona-fide mind control program (in which case, why are you squandering it on IFcomp?), then it's easy to abuse a reader's patience while trying to show a change in perspective. 

During my time with Accelerate, the narrator completely embraced the cult, which was made apparent through repetition and heavy-handed metaphor. Others may have had different experiences, but this entry is large enough that I’m reluctant to attempt a new outcome.

This story is set in a future world where nations have already been remade by violent conflict, but political and economic actors are still engaging in familiar behavior that divides and controls the public. I’m interested in reading about someone who challenges this status quo — no brainwashing required! 

As interactive fiction, it was difficult for me to identify my place in this work. Accelerate is a story of assimilation with a movement that is led by an entity as controlling and destructive as the authority it seeks to overthrow. It might have functioned better with a more traditional narrative structure. 

You should try Accelerate. It sets a consistent mood, and it's quickly apparent whether this experience will appeal to you. 

I stuck with the story hoping that I would learn whether the religious movement was genuinely transformative or just a charismatic sociopath running a con. I found an ending that was open to interpretation.

Artwork from Donald Conrad:

Seasonal Apocalypse Disorder: IFcomp 2020

Seasonal Apocalypse Disorder, written by Zan and Xavid, is a parser-based mission to save the world from fiery destruction. (Xavid is also credited on Vain Empires.)

The narrative of your adventure, which may involve cow tipping and casual murder, describes impossible developments in a consistently matter-of-fact tone. I was entertained by its understated absurdity.

You play one of the good guys, dispatched by the Federal Bureau of Druids to travel through time and undo a global catastrophe. This is not an elaborately crafted drama exploring the deepest recesses of the human psyche, but it doesn't need to be. 

The nature themes and seasonal locations were a good fit for the time travel puzzles. The clues are fair, and you don’t need to understand druidic rituals or know which magic powers are associated with specific plants; this entry does a good job of providing necessary information. 

I appreciated how the challenges were designed in Seasonal Apocalypse Disorder. Your magical abilities are limited at the start, which keeps early puzzles confined to specific areas. As you develop your powers, you are given more opportunities to explore how objects and locations interact with each other. There's also a map at the top of the screen, which helped me keep track of time periods and spot rooms that I would have missed on my own.  

There was a lot to like about this entry. I got stuck in a few places, but it was my own damn fault for failing to pay closer attention.

Artwork from Donald Conrad:

 

Captain Graybeard's Plunder: IFcomp 2020

Captain Graybeard's Plunder is a choice-based pirate fantasy by Julian Mortimer Smith.

This entry is a smart interpretation of the phrase "interactive fiction." It's carefully crafted, compelling, and short enough that I don't need to spoil the main idea — you should experience it for yourself.

I appreciate how this author paid attention to the presentation details in this entry. Although the story uses standard colors to display dark text on a light background, style formatting is applied to differentiate specific passages. 

I'm not normally a fan of handwriting fonts, but other design choices might not have made the story so engaging.

Captain Graybeard's Plunder is a tight, focused entry that put a lot of care into smoothly delivering a gripping pirate adventure. If I have one complaint, it's that there isn't more of it.

Artwork from Donald Conrad: 

Fight Forever: IFcomp 2020

Fight Forever is a choice-based entry by Pako, and it poses some challenges. 

As a work, it is heavy on interactivity and light on story. You are given one line of explanation ("After all failed, now that everything is lost, you will fight") before being asked to choose a destiny (character?), a sensei, and a team. Then you get to a screen with your character's stats. If you select the "oracle" option, you can choose the "about" link:

"Think of it as Second Life meets GTA meets Fight Night meets UFC meets Street Fighter."

That sounds amazing. But that wasn't my experience.

Another statement from the oracle: 

"This interactive fiction is in itself the white paper. The goal is to grow this project from it's neonatal text-based existence to a console playable open-world that will bring esports to the minds of older audiences."

I was unable to find anything like a tutorial, or tooltips, or a meaningful discussion of what each choice meant. Someone who follows professional fighting tournaments might recognize some of these options, but I had no idea how choices would affect any of the stats being tracked for my character. (Similarly, I did not know how my stats would affect my performance.)

Inside Fight Forever, a walkthrough is available:

"As much as this is a fighting game, it's a word game. The further you get into it, the more cumbersome it is to take note of opponents' styles, fighter traits, strategies, and techniques. Take notes."

For a game centered around fighting, it's odd that the fights themselves involve no input from the player. Fights start, there is a loading sequence, and then the outcome is reported. If you don't die, you are returned to the screen with your main character's stats. 

As a diagram of the backdrop for an amazing fighting game, this entry looks great. As an actual game to be enjoyed by players, it needs a lot of work.

Review Roundup: The Magpie Takes The Train

The Magpie Takes the Train is a parser-based work by Brian Rushton (Mathbrush).

Under the IFcomp rules, judges may not rate any games that they have beta-tested. That prevents me from rating this game. 

However! The act of using beta-testers is a signal that the author wants to provide the best possible experience for the audience, showing a care and attention to detail that may not be present in all of the entries. 

For specific commentary on this entry, I'll refer you to other people. 

From Stian: 

"I was very excited to see this sequel among this year’s IFComp entries. To my further enjoyment, it turns out this sequel is almost just as good! Not that there is anything particularly wrong with it; I just wish it was longer and slightly more challenging, matching the length and difficulty of the original."

From Doug Egan:

“'Magpie Takes the Train' shares several features in common with its inspiration: an entertaining detective farce involving frequent costume changes; dialogue with an amusing cast of upstairs-downstairs society figures (but curiously set in the states). Both games have a well implemented full parser interface."

From Viv Dunstan: 

"Fortunately you don’t have to have played the original to enjoy this. It sets things up quickly and efficiently at the start, so you know what you need to know from word go."

From Radioactive Crow:

"The prose is excellent and laugh-out-loud funny at times (particularly when you try the amusing things suggested after you beat the game for the first time). Mathbrush is a long time IF author and one of the most passionate and dedicated advocates for IF that I've encountered."

From Josh Labelle: 

"This would be a great game to give to a person who wants to get into parsers -- they'll understand the fun without having to toss them right into the deep end."

Also, Donald Conrad has done some fan art:

Savor: IFcomp 2020

Savor is a choice-based horror entry by Ed Nobody.

I appreciate the technical work that went into this entry's presentation. It includes music and monochrome images in the background, but it also takes the rare step of allowing you to use keyboard controls to select choices and advance the story.

Not all of the technical details improved the experience.

You can hold the spacebar to speed up the timed text in this game, but that also makes choices for you.

Some choices are enclosed in red boxes with a warning to choose carefully, but choices offered outside those warnings can still end your story early — it was challenging for me to determine which choices would be meaningful.

From a narrative perspective, I was unable to enjoy the story that this entry wanted to tell. That might have been a personal failing. 

In my defense, a lot of the text describes terrible pain inflicted by a mysterious curse. But as a player, the option to avoid the pain by quitting is there the whole time! After facing extensive descriptions of suffering and the open contemplation of suicide, it was cleaner and less anguished to just end the game. 

This entry may be interesting for people who enjoy rural scare stories and works that dwell on the themes of life, death, and renewal that frequently appear in farm horror. I found more than one ending, but mysteries involving slaughter and unnatural harvests remained. The person who unravels them will not be me.

Quintessence: IFcomp 2020

Quintessence is a choice-based work of science fiction by Andrea M. Pawley. 

In this entry, you are one of many quanta in the universe, and you choose how the story keeps unfolding. The narration blends astrophysics with metaphysics in ways that never clearly define the reader as a character, which seems appropriate for a story about universes that are continually expanding, collapsing, merging, and separating. 

The choices in Quintesence were less about deciding how my character acted, and more about choosing which actions would affect it. Events repeat over and over in this universe until one of your choices uncovers a way "out."

I appreciated how this entry tracked details like the age of my universe and the number of times that it had collapsed. Even when I was repeating choices that I had seen before, I knew that some type of progress was being recorded. I also liked the visual details that enhanced the presentation of the story. 

I was less appreciative of the novelty cursor, which felt like it spent more time getting in the way than adding to the experience.

The language in this work did its best to relay events that are far outside the scope of my comprehension. Stars are formed, civilizations rise and fall, and black holes... do the astrophysics-y stuff that they do. I don’t always understand hard science discussions, but  I thought the animal imagery added a novel twist to the story. 

It explains the callous indifference of the universe as the extension of an aloof cat's bad behavior. 

I found a few endings and decided to stop after it seemed like the quanta and the forever cat were all happy. I liked that one, even though the story can always begin again.

Artwork by Donald Conrad:

Passages: IFcomp 2020

(Not the game's actual artwork)

Passages is speculative fiction by Jared W. Cooper. 

I had to play through this entry a few times before I got a sense of what the author was attempting, which was fine, because it's a quick read with no choices along the way. 

Quick does not mean simple. Passages is set up to read partly like a journal and partly like a one-sided conversation between the narrator and his missing partner. Each new passage (in Twine) starts with a date, and it jumps around a bit so that you can share the narrator's sense of disorientation. 

The writing evoked a sense of loss — it was clear that the narrator missed someone important. This entry kept Twine’s default white-text-on-black color scheme, and it used almost no custom formatting, which added more weight to the few instances where the font did change. As an artistic choice, it emphasized that something significant had changed. 

There is a small amount of interactivity in Passages, but it doesn't affect the story. It seems thematically appropriate, because the narrator is also given few choices and they don't seem to have much effect. 

At the end of Passages, I wondered whether I should try to piece together the chronology on my own. Then I decided to follow the narrator's example and accept things as they are.

Tavern Crawler: IFcomp 2020

Tavern Crawler is a choice-based, screwball noir fantasy by Josh Labelle. It had everything I like about fantasy RPGs with none of the tedium. 

The experience was less about fighting through obstacles and more about finding opportunities to apply your skills. Combat sequences are rare and resolved in a few choices, leaving you to enjoy conversations with other characters while you choose the best way to complete several quests.  

Even as it uses standard fixtures of an RPG fantasy world, Tavern Crawler leaves room for the unexpected. You can make choices that are in character for a Tank (fighter), Mage, or Rogue, and I found each path supported by strong writing that kept things interesting. Quests develop unexpected dimensions as new information is uncovered, and you gradually learn more about your companions and their backstories while working your way through the narrative. 

While the story unfolds, information updates in the sidebar to explain what has happened to your character. Different text formatting makes it clear when choices have affected your status, showing you which options are (un)available due to your current state. These updates helped me understand how I was altering the story. 

Overall, this entry tilts more toward "game" than "interactive drama," which I appreciated. Too much dramatic tension might have cramped the interactivity and left me feeling like an observer. Instead, I had enough slack to play around inside the story and enjoy myself.

Artwork from Donald Conrad:

Desolation: IFcomp 2020

Desolation is a parser-based horror entry from Earth Traveler.

I had a difficult time engaging with this story, and I'm not convinced that a parser was the best format for delivering it. The author wants to provide information at a very specific pace, which means that sometimes your commands are ignored so that the next chunk of story can be revealed. In other places, you know where you will end up, but you can't get there until you figure out what the author expects you to do. 

Item management was a huge stumbling block for me. When I'm in a parser game, I will pick up anything that isn't nailed down. Desolation was not prepared for this behavior. 

Some items showed up in a location description even after they were in my inventory. Some item descriptions did not reflect that they had been removed from their starting point. One object could not be picked up until I figured out the right verb for inspecting my surroundings. 

The map was another challenge. If the author wanted to cultivate a creepy feeling of pursuit, it might have been more effective to offer several connected locations with a handful of choke points — unavoidable locations could reveal more of the story and question whether the player had taken the right path. 

Unfortunately, Desolation feels like you are fleeing on rails, moving through a series of locations with only one path forward. 

This author does have potential: I enjoyed an early scene that gave me some freedom to explore while steering me towards the next confrontation. I think this work could be improved either by using more of the parser's capabilities to provide more options for the player, or by switching to a different format so that the player expects their choices to be limited.

Red Radish Robotics: IFcomp 2020

 

Red Radish Robotics is a choice-based science fiction story by Gibbo.

This entry asks you to escape from the 7th floor of a research facility that has become a giant deathtrap. There are many, many ways to end your escape prematurely, although you are given 10 "respawns" that function like an "undo" button.

Red Radish Robotics does a good job of telling a story. The narrator's childlike perspective explains why you are given some choices that are self-evidently terrible, and although the brief identity crisis is not a shocking plot twist, other developments are effectively foreshadowed with more subtlety.

In some places, the story got in the way of the implementation. A few locations and objects needed to be re-visited and re-examined multiple times because the narrator was not properly motivated during earlier encounters. The "respawn" activity was also unusual, rewinding time in some places and just resurrecting me at the original starting point in others.

Overcoming almost every obstacle is a matter of finding the right links and clicking them in sequence, which meant that I enjoyed uncovering the story more than solving the puzzles in Red Radish Robotics. As you search for a way out of the building, you gradually reveal what happened, why the facility was abandoned, and why you were left behind.

Artwork from Donald Conrad: 

Vain Empires: IFcomp 2020

Vain Empires is a parser-based espionage game by Thomas Mack and Xavid. 

Although this entry is in the "spy thriller" genre, this main character describes life-or-death thrills as a minor bureaucratic hassle. The dry, aloof descriptions of people, places, and things provide a lot of entertainment.  

Vain Empires uses an elegant trick of perspective to gloss over details that might divert players from the main story. You're exploring a seaside chateau that has been converted to a luxury hotel and casino, but you don't need to pay attention to things like heavy velvet curtains or whirring slot machines. 

If you're at risk of getting distracted by your surroundings, the noncorporeal main character reminds you that these things are of little interest to those who inhabit the spiritual realm. 

It's difficult to create characters in Inform that feel like real people who can interact with the player and with each other. This entry sidesteps that issue by having a main character that doesn't want to interact with people. His celestial nature makes him distant and unconcerned with the mundane actions of the human realm. Every human is expected to behave like predictable machinery, and you alter their behavior to get what you want. 

As an American who grew up in the 1980's, "cold war struggles playing out on foreign soil" is a familiar theme, and that familiarity allowed me to focus on game mechanics that were a departure from normal parser-based puzzles. 

As someone who is aware of my country's actions on the international stage, it was painfully appropriate and darkly comedic to be working for the forces of evil — it established the clear expectation that people would be mere objects used to accomplish my goals.

In Vain Empires, the opposite of poor impulse control lets bad guys have all the fun.

Artwork from Donald Conrad:

High Jinnks: IFcomp 2020

High Jinnks is a choice-based story about a jinni's mishaps in human society. 

The presentation is straightforward — there are no special text effects, and minimal formatting is used for the font and background colors. These design choices keep the focus on the writing. 

The story was fun and well-written. The plot moved at a comfortable pace, and it was satisfying to roleplay as a mythical creature slumming it in human society.

As the story unfolds, you learn how the main character's personality has been shaped by past experiences. Flashbacks and asides added another layer of complexity and emotion to the narrative, retelling stories from Scheherazade with a unique perspective that revealed family connections and personal encounters. 

The jinni's motives were simultaneously alien and understandable, connected to his magical nature while remaining relatable for humans. (Nobody wants trouble with the cops, and everyone can appreciate a good coffee maker.) 

Ultimately, the narrative is on rails. A second playthrough brought me to the same major plot points, but different aspects of the story changed based on new selections I made along the way. It was handled well enough that it didn't detract from my enjoyment.

It’s a bit like a magic trick: when the presentation is smooth enough, you can ignore the mechanics and delight in the experience.

Artwork by Donald Conrad:

Equal-librium: IFcomp 2020

Equal-librium: Lion & Mouse? is a take on social critique by Ima, and it does not waste any effort on subtlety.

This entry is fast-paced and dense with information, trying to create the sense of a large, dramatic event unfolding rapidly. Unfortunately, the pacing meant I had trouble following the story closely. You are the CEO of "Forest Capital," which is some kind of investment firm.

This entry uses attention-grabbing text effects in key places. They're used in moderation to successfully contribute a feeling of urgency.

On my first playthrough, I treated people with decency and respect. That approach seemed to provide a "good" ending. When I played through as a self-dealing jerk, I arrived at a terrible ending. When I tried to play the middle of the road, the story stalled with an incoming call from Vicent, the board director. I was unable to proceed beyond that point.

I expected this entry to unpack the controversy around stakeholder capitalism and the newfound corporate interest in Ethics, Sustainability, and Governance. Instead, it appeared to focus on executive corruption, setting the past actions and motivations of the character based on the present choices made by the player.

Ultimately, this scenario did not hold much appeal for me. I have abandoned my dreams of becoming a CEO — I am not a sociopath, which makes me unlikely to hold such a position.

I'm concerned that I might have missed a nuanced take on social critique in this entry. I don't understand who is supposed to be the intended audience, but I hope they find it. 

The Arkhill Darkness: IFcomp 2020

The Arkhill Darkness is a fantasy combat RPG by Jason Barrett. You have been dispatched to lift the Darkness and save the town of Arkhill.

This entry has ambition, and it works hard to include the RPG staples you'd expect in a quest to banish an ancient darkness from a fantasy realm. However, more work was needed to simplify the experience for the player.

For example, using a healing potion requires you to open the inventory screen, click on the potion to get a description that says you can drink it, and clicking again to actually drink. It seemed like I was only able to buy two potions at a time, while I was regularly in situations where I could have used four or five.

Most of The Arkhill Darkness involves grinding: fight monsters, collect gold, use gold to get better equipment and fight more monsters. You can buy either a sword or an axe to help in combat, but buying one prevents you from buying the other. I never got a chance to learn how the two weapons were different (or how they were different from punching or kicking).

In my experience, it's very difficult to program a combat system with Twine that manages to be interesting and fun.

I did notice that substantial effort was put into adding variety for this entry. The hero's quest takes place in stages, investigating new locations and searching for things like missing keys and potion ingredients. Several different patrons visit the tavern, and each one has multiple conversation responses.

The text formatting was appropriate for the story, with white letters on a black background creating a suitable atmosphere for a town shrouded in darkness. However, the presentation felt cramped on the screen.

Different layout choices might have made the menus and exploration options easier to understand — font colors change to indicate magic and combat effects, but it was confusing to have the same blue font for clickable links and inert magical objects.

Overall, a lot of creative work went into The Arkhill Darkness, but it didn't take itself too seriously. Jokes reference source material ranging from Princess Bride to Super Mario Brothers. (Mercifully, I don't think I noticed anyone mentioning how they took an arrow in the knee.)

Artwork from Donald Conrad: 

A Murder In Fairyland: IFcomp 2020

A Murder In Fairyland is a choice-based fantasy mystery by Abigail Corfman.

This entry takes place in Open Sorcery's unique fantasy world, blending spells and magical creatures with code and computer protocols. It's a rich experience with carefully selected fonts, colors, and backgrounds that tell a detailed story.

Every IFComp entry has players interact with text, but A Murder In Fairyland structures those interactions in unusual ways. Moving past obstacles can involve selecting letters, moving words, and changing passages to perform actions that look like writing code or casting spells — sometimes, it's both.

At times, things were a bit too detailed. It took me while to I realize that I had an accessible inventory, and then I didn't notice that spells were a separate inventory screen, which meant it took longer than normal before I began the murder investigation at the center of the story. However, I enjoyed the detours.

I also enjoyed this entry's sense of humor, which employed puns (you fly a Steam-powered webship, fueled by frustration derived from playing video games) and clever design choices (you can try to refuse the queen's request, but "This is one of those situations where you don't say no").

Fairyland is strange and full of wonders. I'm still wondering who killed Prince Blacktree, and it may be a while yet before I figure it out.

Stoned Ape Hypothesis: IFcomp 2020

Stoned Ape Hypothesis is prehistoric fiction written by James Heaton, using Ink. 

This entry has a friendly gauntlet structure where you solve puzzles to unlock parts of the story, beating computer opponents in a series of challenges before you arrive at the ending. 

As a game, it works: your victories earn a series of power-ups, and your final reward is full integration with society. 

As a story, I found it difficult to engage with this entry. It felt like the triangle of identities got in the way of allowing me to understand the character's motivation. 

Curiosity drove me to move from location to location and uncover new options, but there was no clear reason for the character. I never got a sense that food, water, or shelter were matters of survival — they just felt like background details.  

The association with the Stoned Ape theory introduced a disconnect between the scope of this game, which covers a few days (?) in the life of a single organism, and the scope of the evolutionary theory, which plays out across generations. 

Developmentally, I couldn't tell whether this character was starting from farther back than everyone else, making it the "rite of passage" story of journey that each member of the tribe must compete, or whether this character was a prehistoric Prometheus bringing enlightenment to his tribe.

From a mechanical perspective, the challenges were well developed. You make strategic choices based on the actions of your opponent, and it's possible to fail. This entry was well implemented; I never felt stuck, and I found my way through to the end without any major confusion. 

I respect the work that went into this, and it's a solid effort.

What the Bus: IFcomp 2020

What the Bus? A Transit Nightmare is a surreal comedy, written in Twine, created by E. Joyce.

This entry is quick and dreamlike for good reason: it's a transit nightmare. In your rush to arrive at work on time, you only see a brief slice of content before arriving at one of many endings. Multiple playthroughs uncover a much larger range of outcomes.

What the Bus? pulled off a clever trick with my expectations, although discussing it ventures into spoiler territory: the word "Nightmare" is not hyperbole. The author has created an experience where you start off sleepwalking through your daily commute before realizing that you're fully asleep and not walking at all.

The tediously familiar routine of commuting was presented so effectively that the various detours, delays, and redirections steered me to some very weird places before I realized what was happening. I like how it played with the assumptions embedded in city commutes — of course you take everything for granted, you've done it a million times before.

There's a back button at the bottom of every passage that seemed confusing and unhelpful on my first playthrough. Then I realized that it was an essential mercy to let me back out of paths leading to endings I'd already seen. Background colors that change to show the different subway lines was another nice detail.

I appreciated this entry's use of procedurally generated text. You will see a lot of familiar passages, retracing your steps to arrive at new endings, but if you pay attention you'll see mimes, former schoolteachers, zombies, and other dreamworld inhabitants. I checked my GPS app every time the option came up, because I knew the results would be entertaining.

I never thought I'd say this about public transit: "That was fun. Let's do it again!"

The Turnip: IFcomp 2020

The Turnip is a short, linear story (described as "hypertext flash fiction") written by Joseph Pentangelo.

I appreciate the effort put into this entry's presentation — the technical choices made to select fonts and colors, but also the information that is shared and withheld. 

It's the terse story of an ominous turnip discovery: you play as someone with a job digging holes in a field, and the story is delivered in a fitting tone. The story advances one link at a time, but you can take detours to examine different things along the way. 

Those detours make The Turnip stand out. Something is not quite right even before the turnip appears, and the narrator's world-weary tone conceals oddities that would only be present in a world much different from our own. When you click to examine something closer, you might get the bland description of something dismissed as commonplace, or it could be the wild perspective of someone seeing the world as a swirling, colorful omelet.

I enjoyed this story’s skill and restraint. It didn’t get bogged down with excess description, and it didn’t trip over itself trying to deliver an in-depth examination of a world that is Not Like Our Own. A measured amount alienating details did a nice job of keeping me off balance while methodically trudging along an assigned path. 

IFCOMP 2020

 

Image credit: IFcomp/Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation

Last year, Donald Conrad and I entered IFcomp, the annual Interactive Fiction Competition. We don’t have an entry this year, which means that I can talk freely about the event and its entries. I’m happy about that, because past entrants would get amazingly catty about rule #4 — don’t encourage judges to violate the rules — and whether someone’s public comments were a violation. 

I won’t be as prolific as someone like Brian Rushton, who manages to play and review every entry each year. However, I’ve got to play at least 5 entries to be counted as a judge, so I should be able to write at least 5 reviews. 

The real challenge is going to be the pacing of the reviews. Games are released today, and even if I threw myself at the very first 15-minute entry I found, I’d still have to organize my thoughts and edit my sentences before I published anything. That delay can be difficult. 

I found it agonizing to wait for public mentions of my past entries. I kept telling myself that I wanted that delay so that people could give my work serious consideration. I’d say it was okay to wait for a month if I got a detailed review — and then five minutes later I’d be willing to sell my soul for any kind of public mention. 

How to Regression: Dragon Quest XI

Back in May, I read an article about handling a crisis. It started with a bunch of quotes from high-performing leaders and CEOs who declared that things had never been better for them. 

Then it warned everyone to expect rough times ahead: 

“for many, the first weeks of managing a crisis feel extremely meaningful and energizing. But when I revisited the same leaders a few weeks later, they reported that something had happened to their energy and to the way their team was collaborating. The adrenaline-fueled pace of the initial crisis response began sputtering. Problems became more complex and exhausting. The varnish started to crack. The glory faded. Fuses were short. 

What explains this shift? In my experience as a psychologist and executive advisor, I’ve found that crises follow a rough pattern: Emergency. Regression. Recovery.”

After almost six months of dealing with a global pandemic and ongoing economic uncertainty, I’m seeing a pattern that looks more like this: Emergency. Regression. Recovery. Regression. Recovery. Regression. Recovery. Regression. Recovery. (Repeat until death.)

The good news is that Dragon Quest XI has done a fantastic job of accommodating my regression phases and my recovery phases. Minor spoilers after the image.

On the one hand, this plays like a completely new game. The DS versions of earlier installments in the series are old games with new graphics. This one feels like a modern game taking place in a more immersive environment, paying tribute to the rest of the series. 

It tells a compelling story that builds up to the main confrontation. It introduces a mid-game plot twist that strengthens the villain, and then it expects you to work your way back up to the showdown with the Lord of Shadows in the Fortress of Fear.

And even as I played through all that, I worried that I had missed something. 

This series has three keys for the player to find: a thief's key, a magic key, and an ultimate key. And Dragon Quest XI establishes that the ultimate key exists, because it walks you past an ultimate door on your way to collect other necessary items for defeating the Lord of Shadows.  

I worried that I was doing something wrong. Parts of the story left loose ends that didn't make much sense. Had I forgotten something? Would this "Fortress" be revealed as a sham, or another plot twist? Eventually, I pushed through the last battle. 

And that was it. The game is won, the world is saved, roll the end credits. 

As a stand alone game, it kind of works? It provides a complete experience, even if it was an oddly disappointing one. I wondered whether my expectations were unrealistic, and maybe I need to make my peace with the fact that tastes have changed. 

But the sense of something missing had bothered me, so I went back to work on the post-game content. That's when the game served up another story, and I realized that the end credits are the equivalent of a mid-game plot twist — they've hidden a traditional Dragon Quest experience behind a full JRPG. And it was clearly planned that way because you only find the ultimate key after you've started playing through the post-game story. 

It's a clever design. People who are new to the series get a fresh experience that familiarizes them with characters and concepts found elsewhere in the Dragon Quest universe. But the series mainstays also included for the die-hard fans, and they're left in a place where they won't interfere with rest of the experience.

NOTE TO SELF: Hello, me from the future! Remember how 2020 was completely nuts? This post title was chosen because it's the weekend before the "staff action" kicks off, and TikTok continues to be a thing under discussion.

Truck Quest: Geographic Bias

People think it’s a good idea to publicly reflect on building your game after you publish it — Emily Short recommends it in her post about the 2018 IF Comp Post-Mortems, although the 2019 IF Comp was followed by some active author discussion (and disagreement!) about whether those reflections should be called post-mortems.

A few things could be done differently with Truck Quest, like communicating the player’s movements through the territory of the game. When I was trying to write code to handle the player's movements, I learned that I have a hidden — but powerful — geographic bias.

My thinking was that a long-haul delivery from California to New York would involve more risk (earning more of a reward) than a shorter delivery between two cities in Kansas, and I wanted to show that. But cross-country trips were going to be the final phase of the game. In order to give the player a sense of progression, they were going to start making deliveries in town, working their way up through deliveries across the state.

I had to keep track of whether the player was in one side of a territory, the center, or the other side, and I used three different arrays to hold potential destinations.

If the blue oval is the available territory, then it doesn’t matter whether we call it a city, state, or country. Moving from A to C travels across all three regions, which is clearly the risky long haul. Staying inside a region would be playing it safe. And the AB or BC deliveries would involve a moderate potential for failure. 

Destinations were put into arrays that I named $aPool, $bPool, and $cPool, because I read from left to right. This decision was a terrible mistake. 

When I tested it, you could select a destination in the eastern region and arrive in the west. Or head west from the center and wind up in the east. Or the message would say that you were heading east when the game was actually sending you to the west. Or you’d head east from the western edge and wind up in the center, which is correct but confusing because the code refers to A, B, and C. 

It reminded me of the “missing exit” in Zork, when you’re at the “south end” of a large temple and expected to travel north based on the description alone. Geography is hard.

The main lesson learned is that things are less complicated when your code resembles the information presented to the player. I should have used $westPool, $centerPool, and $eastPool for the names of the arrays. 

A less important discovery was that I put “east” first every time I list directions, even when I’m intentionally trying to start with the west. 

I’m not entirely sure why that’s the case, but I have my suspicions.

Order, Chaos, Tea, and Toddlers

Absurdity sees its best comic effect when it opposes the non-absurd. It’s the principle behind the comedic foil, and it’s the reason why you have characters like Michael Bluth in Arrested Development acting normally while everyone around them gets silly. (A show following Michael on his own would be tedious, but so would one that ignored Michael and only followed the rest of the family.)

Traditional fiction can have a comedic foil perform two functions, providing someone for the audience to identify with and using that character to balance out absurdity elsewhere. Interactive Fiction doesn’t have that luxury — how can you tell whether the player wants to be a normal person navigating the chaos or the zany character causing the chaos?

Two different games from Damon Wakes offer a chance to try out both of those roles: GUNBABY and Lovely Pleasant Teatime Simulator. (You shouldn’t need more than fifteen minutes to go and enjoy both of them now if you want to avoid spoilers ahead.)

Lovely Pleasant Teatime Simulator is described as “the finest competitive text-based tea party simulator in all the world.” Its finery is evident from the first screen:

Presentation details establish that this will be a nice teatime, it will be pleasant, and everything is expected to be normal. Obviously, the player is going to change that.

The game’s early choices feel weighted with significance because it looks like specific protocol must be observed. Cream first, or jam? Do you correct a mispronunciation, or ignore it to be polite? Will your ignorance be the reason why this social gathering turns ugly? And what will happen when it does?

The player gradually learns that Teatime Simulator is serious about keeping things lovely and pleasant, and the initial choices are less important than they appear. The other guests are unfailingly polite, and it’s not possible to disrupt the stable equilibrium of this gathering through a minor breach of etiquette. Something more extreme will be required.

You may even have to mention Brexit.

The player’s score, counted in “points” that aren’t linked to anything meaningful in the game, increases as long as the simulator continues without interruption. (And the encouragement to share those scores at the end is a clever bit of embedded discoverability.)

The other characters in the game are determined to keep things pleasant, and tension develops over time as the player is shown increasingly absurd choices for disrupting this elegant social gathering. The desire to see what happens is pitted against the satisfaction of a high score, and the stakes increase every turn.

GUNBABY is the opposite of Teatime Simulator, putting the player in a situation on the brink of disaster.

Can you protect a city being menaced by an unstable, heavily armored cybernetic weapons platform? It has to run out of power eventually, so the player is only asked to maintain order for a specific amount of time. Not only does the game last for a set number of turns, it can end early if the player’s choices fail to stop Officer Giggles from causing a wide swath of destruction.

GUNBABY makes it clear that a heavily armed toddler is a bad thing, and the player is encouraged to prevent the worst from happening. the scoring system is directly linked to the action in the game, making it clear that the player is failing to prevent crimes, allowing casualties to happen, or causing property damage worth hundreds (or thousands) of dollars.

Both GUNBABY and Lovely Pleasant Teatime Simulator show the absurd in conflict with the mundane, and neither game would work without the two elements opposing each other. But what’s interesting is how the games offer different roles to play in that conflict — one of them dares the player to cause chaos, and the other begs the player to maintain order.