#ifcomp 2023

DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS by Hubert Janus

for those who don't know what ifcomp is, it's basically a competition where authors submit their interactive fiction to be judged for $$$. read the about page, i guess lol. i'm writing reviews on games, which have provoked me into the thinking emoji.

Go check out some games and rate them if you like. Lots of stuff to choose from. Judging is open through November 15.

Day one of IFComp is finally here, and I've already started playing through the 75 entries we have this year. With a plethora of new authors, an abundance of nautical stories, and a fuckton of mysteries (not to mention the amount of nautical mysteries!), I have high hopes for the season. In order to give the uninterested less to scroll through, I'll leave my full impressions of games under the cut, with a TLDR for each one above.

I'm using IFComp's personal randomized list as my playing order to do my part in eliminating the quantity-of-votes bias that can occur in comps like this one. Thank you to whoever implemented that; I love the IF community so much.

Anyway, the first three games of the day are as follows:

Lake Starlight by SummersViaEarth TLDR: Polished, complete, with no (discovered) bugs and only a few comma mistakes, but I am very much not the target audience and as such didn’t enjoy playing it.

How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title by John Ziegler TLDR: Hot Diggity Fizz! Play this game. Right Now. Seriously, it's one of the best parser games I've ever played, and I had to stop at the two hour limit. Be warned though, it's long as hell. Two hours is probably about 10% of time needed to complete.

All Hands by Natasha Ramoutar TLDR: Short, haunting, and while not (in my opinion) worthy of a place on the podium, it's definitely worthy of an attentive playthrough.

Full reviews below the cut!

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2023, the twenty-ninth annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 75 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

This was a fun little gem. It's a small game, only eight rooms, a few dozen objects, and four NPCs, but it's well-polished and the writing really shines (with infernal light) here. It's a mad-scientist story combining the two best-known plots in that genre—Frankenstein and Dr Faustus—but, as a good postmodern narrative so often does, it ditches the serious concerns and gloomy atmosphere of the source material it draws on and turns the story into a lighthearted, funny puzzlefest, full of humorous obliviousness on the PC's part and little pratfall-type jokes.

You play a mad scientist who had succeeded in animating a creature stitched together from grave-robbed body parts. Not content with simply creating a shambling monstrosity like those other mad scientists, your character yearns to create "true life":

Any fool can reanimate a body and have it shamble into town to terrorize the villagers, but to do more, to imbue it with true life? What I sought was far greater.

And so the PC, seeking knowledge, summons the Devil, trapping him (or her, if you prefer: you can set a preferred gender for supernatural beings during the game, if you poke around) in a magical summoning circle. When the game begins, the Devil is in your lab already, encouraging you to sign the contract that grants her your soul in exchange for knowledge. Your task is to sign the contract after finding a loophole that lets you keep your soul. There are of course complications along the way, and those form the majority of the puzzles.

Most of the, oh, say dozen or so puzzles are straightforward: they require you to locate objects and talk to NPCs to obtain information, and the solutions are mostly not difficult to figure out, because the game gently hints at what needs to be done. It also anticipates partially correct solutions that are on the right track, and tends to nudge the user in the right direction in a productive manner: for one magical concoction, you need eyes; well, there's a pair of eyes contained in another implemented object that would naturally have eyes, and the eyes are mentioned naturally, in a non-heavy-handed way. But they're out of reach. An object that can put them in reach is in another room, not far away, and getting it into place and usable is a tiny puzzle of its own; that puzzle, too, is hinted appropriately. Using the object once it's in place also requires solving a tiny puzzle; that's well-directed, too.

Many of these sub-puzzles are easy enough that they barely register as puzzles at all; and all of them effectively manage the player's knowledge and frustration level. In a lot of ways, this is really good puzzle design for a game that doesn't make hard-puzzle-solving its primary focus: it keeps things moving along, hinting as necessary; most of the time your first attempt fails, and often this is for reasons you could not possibly have anticipated without trying; but every attempt yields new knowledge or a small hint. All in all, puzzle design is great here. (Though one of the final puzzles, executing the find-the-loophole goal, is fiddly and could do with a bit more hinting; and another, getting the Devil to stop playing music, requires remembering an offhand fact from much earlier in the game. These weare the two problems that sent me to the walkthrough.)

An annoyance, though one that didn't affect my rating: the game contains an in-game to-do list to help the player keep track of sub-tasks that need to be performed, which is a nice affordance. Tasks that have been completed are marked on the list with a check-mark, or what I presume is supposed to be a check-mark. But on my system (playing with Gargoyle under Linux Mint 20.3), the check-mark just displays as a question mark, probably because the font the 'terp is using doesn't include the checkmark glyph the game is trying to use.

But all in all, I really liked this: excellent characterization, funny upbeat writing throughout the game, and a much-better-than-merely-competent management of game pacing and structure. I'm going to have to go back and play this author's IFComp entry from last year, which I missed.

My rating: 9/10.

The Gift of What You Notice More by Xavid and Zan

Spoiler: It's really good!

Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head by The Hungry Reader