#IFComp 2024

[twinegardening]

Verses by Kit Riemer

Then the externality comes apart like something wet. Then the truth reveals itself to be a nutrient or a poison. Then the sun goes away and the rain comes, and you and I freeze in it, the translucent bluishness of our skin.

[ode-to-odes]

IFComp 2024 Reviews: Traffic by D. S. Yu

It's that time of year again! I'll be crossposting these reviews on intfiction.net, where you can find reviews by many other interactive fiction freaks such as myself, links to the comp website, and other such information. Onto the review.

I'll put this all under the cut because it's... very long, but please be aware that there are spoilers in the technical section!

Time played: About an hour Completion: 2 out of maybe 3 endings? I got to the normal ending, a bit of a silly ending, and I know there’s a third ending that has a bit more substance, but I was satisfied with the run I had. Could be more “try it and find out” endings than the one I found, but I have no clue.

TLDR; Conceptually, I like this game a lot, but there were a few things that prevented me from enjoying the gameplay experience as much as I could have. Solid entry.

The writing: No noticeable typos or grammar errors, and the writing style is consistent, with some great touches of deadpan humor which I found entertaining. The characters were distinct enough to not be flat, even with the limited descriptions and interactions there are.

The gameplay: I love a time loop when done well, and I think the ability to change the timeline by switching perspectives is a really great way to keep the game engaging and interesting. I also enjoyed the variety of different puzzles – some based on interaction with others, some with the environment. It’s a small game, so there’s not very many, but none of them felt like reskinned versions of each other, which I appreciated.

The technical: I struggled a lot with interactions with other people. Different authors and engines do dialogue in many different ways, without an ABOUT or a HELP menu to explain how to talk to people or ask people things, I found myself blindly trying dialogue options, mostly to no avail. You can talk to people directly with the “person, verb” structure, or you can ask someone for something, but only rarely about anything, which I found unusual – an explanation of this early on would have gone a long way to alleviating some of the frustration I had. The biggest problem I had was similar to the verb-guessing issue, but which probably would have made the game impossible for me to finish without the walkthrough; there are some objects which aren’t mentioned in the text (that I could find) but are required. This was most evident to me with the taxi, which I hadn’t seen in the text at all, but which was necessary to examine in order to continue. Examining the street it was on yielded no description beyond the direction the traffic was going, and I never would have known to look at it. This is also applicable to the traffic puzzle, which was particularly aggravating to me for being much simpler than I thought it was. I’d go so far as to say it’s a bit misleading. I’ll spoiler this one for anyone who doesn’t want to see the solution: If you ask John about the panel, he explains how it works, and says you need to input the correct number to fix the traffic lights. The solution to this is to unscrew the panel (which has no mention of being screwed in) with a screwdriver you get from John (who doesn’t appear to have anything on him except a clipboard). The solution is NOT to do the math required to algebraically find the correct number needed (which is very possible, and requires only addition and subtraction). I chose the algebra on my first time around. Frustratingly, when you correctly solve this puzzle via screwdriver method and press a button to set the number, it gives a number which is different from the one you get when you do the math. I understand that this might be a serious case of me paying way too much attention to one thing, but I think given that the actual solution to the puzzle is much less obvious than the one which requires the player to do algebra with a pen and paper, it might as well have been a puzzle with two different ways to get to the same solution. If the number provided in the game matched the one you get with the correct math, this wouldn’t have been nearly as annoying to me, but the in-game math being wrong in conjunction with the puzzle having completely unmentioned components drove me kind of bonkers.

Misc notes: Don’t sell yourself short! Saying things like “this game is unlikely to change your life in any meaningful way” in the description of the game won’t do you any favors in convincing people to play it. It’s a well-written game, and only a few edits short of being something really polished. You should be proud of it. Plus, when combined with the depressing attitude of the main character, the game starts to feel a little too dreary, in my opinion. Despite my algebra rant, I did like this game a lot, and I’m really glad it was the first entry I tried this year! It’s setting a good bar for the rest of the parser games.

[cejpacian]

Forsaken Denizen is a traditional text adventure also drawing inspiration from classic survival horror.

An office worker on a forlorn moon finds her city has been overtaken by cyborg parasites. Scrounge for ammunition, avoid monsters, save the dispossessed.

(Placed 3rd out of 67 entries in IFComp 2024.)

🌑Play it online here🌑

(Cover art by nsjndd1.)

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2024: Phil Riley's "Bureau of Strange Happenings"

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2024, the thirtieth annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 67 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 October 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 an oddball entry and, having finished it, I'm still not sure how I feel about it overall. There's an awful lot to like about it: a huge world (not a lot of Comp games top 100 rooms, and I didn't explore all of the maps extensively), laugh-out-loud funny writing, a weirdly absurd setup that's mostly pulled off well. But there were some teeth-gnashing frustrations, too: how little signposting there is for the path that leads the plot forward, especially in the beginning; how long it takes the plot to really hit its stride; the way that the early actions that need to be taken before getting to the fun part feel like level-grinding on an 80s JRPG. All in all, I liked it; but I would have liked for it to be balanced differently, all in all.

So it's a story about a secret agent at a minor government spy agency that's just become a lot more minor; the game begins on the day when the agency is moving its office out to a strip mall in the outer suburbs of DC. You play Agent Faraji, an employee of the Bureau of Strange Happenings, an X-Files-like organization, but one a lot closer to the writing of Douglas Adams than Chris Carter. Agent Faraji starts the game needing to accomplish some mundane unpacking-related tasks on their first day in the agency's new office, but the basic tasks that the game immediately presents are immediately frustrated by a lack of tools, which motivates the player to explore the immediate area on the map.

So far, so good; it's not an unusual opening for a piece of parser IF. But the necessary tools are not readily available, and the basic tasks that need to happen are continually deferred until Agent Faraji is sent on an assignment to rescue a colleague who has disappeared. The basic tasks remain on the player's radar throughout the game, and a running gag is that you can ask pretty much any NPC in the game for the screwdriver you started off the game needing; it's not available until the very very end of the game, when you can finally answer the ringing phone that you couldn't answer before because you needed a screwdriver to disassemble the desk in which the phone had accidentally been locked. So far, so good; in a lot of ways, this resembles the basic plot structure of Infocom's Bureaucracy (if I'm remembering that game at all accurately a few decades down the line).

The real problem with the opening isn't that it's not reasonable, nor that player frustration isn't a fair thing to motivate early, but just that it sticks you wandering around what winds up being the least interesting part of the game map. The NPCs are plausibly written and sometimes rather funny, and the initially available locations are described with humor and verve, but starting off a game with time travel and conspiracy theories and lizard people and secret agents and hyperspatial travel and technology indistinguishable from magic by having the player unsuccessfully seek a screwdriver, meet their coworkers, and get a cup of coffee feels like a missed opportunity. It's frustrated by a lack of indications about how to move forward; there's a lot of having to examine everything. Once you find a necessary item or two, the possibilities for exploration really open up, and the use of the items is relatively obvious once you find them, but finding them takes a lot of carefully examining everything. It would have been nice for the boss assigning Agent Faraji the rescue mission to have simply handed them the astral glasses and given a brief overview of their use, to my mind. (Too, there's a rather cavalier attitude on the boss's part to "how am I expected to accomplish this mission once you send em back in time"; the absurdist tone doesn't quite work for me.)Similarly, the exploration of the hyperplane seems like overkill; I went ahead and used the walkthrough instead of trying to decode the symbols on the compass, and doing so takes the player through 37 spaces with virtually no variation on, say, 33 of them; this feels like overkill to me. (Maybe there is a faster route if you figure out how the compass coordinates work; I didn't stray from the walkthrough, though, going through a three-dimensional cross-section of five-dimensional space).

Once it really gets going, though, the game is an awful lot of fun; much of the late game takes place in a fictitious small town in 1954, with a whole lot of implementation over the 45 or so locations that the town is implemented on. This is where the game feels to me like it finally hits its stride; there's a nice set of fair-but-occasionally-tough puzzles all oriented around the central goal of foiling the plans of a cabal of sinister lizard people. This part of the game is well-written, reward exploration, has a good bit of momentum, and kept my interest up to the point where I found myself pondering it when I was away from my computer. In some ways, it had a lot in common with Anchorhead, where the overall goal is to avert a catastrophic series of events by manipulating devices involving beams of light. (Though it was, thankfully, a smaller task than in Anchorhead.) This was a blast, and I really enjoyed it.

One of the few genuine problems, for me, in the later parts of the game was the dependence on random gaming elements: the movements of the lizard people around the town of Enigma Lake, of instance, and what amounts to randomized combat at the game's plot climax. Random combat is hard to do well in IF, I think; there are games that do an acceptable job of it (Leadlight springs to mind; and this year's Comp entry Forsaken Denizen); but I can't think of a game where I was so enthusiastic about the randomized combat that I genuinely felt it made the game better or was an unequivocally wonderful choice on the author's part. The problem with randomness is that it's the ludic elements of the game overpowering the narrative elements: in a traditional narrative, there's a reason, at some discursive level, for the sequence of plot events; nothing is truly random because narrative is a technique for structuring our understanding of why things happen. Inserting truly random events whose only motivation is "because that's what the computer's dice roll determined would happen" breaks this basic narrative contract, I think.

In a lot of ways, I think the main problem that BOSH wound up having is simply that it had so many good ideas that they never wound up being fully integrated into a cohesive, organic whole: here's a chance to explore a mathematically abstract space. Here's a conspiracy theory. Here's another one. Here's a set of fetch quests. Here's a set of enjoyably wacky NPCs. Here's a fun group of machines to manipulate. Here's two new dimensions to explore, plus time-travel. But they never quite settle down into a game that becomes a system that you can work with to tell a collaborative story; it's the kind of game that I cannot imagine finishing without a walkthrough.

Deviations from standard IF conventions made for a bit of friction, too; frankly, I'd rather see the location name flush against the left margin, above a room description, than worked into the text of a paragraph. Bolding the name helps too, and so does the way that the title bar is used, but neither is really as good a visual signal of IF "paragraphs" as just putting the name of the room first. Too, using third-person instead of second-person for the narration felt strange to me, and I never quite got used to it.

But, with a walkthrough, it was a good time, and I think that putting the work into pruning and shaping it into a more polished edifice would really pay off, which is why I'm glad that the end of the game announces that Agent Faraji will return in a sequel. I'll play it.

(I also drew a map of the game’s geography as I played; I'm less happy with it than with many of the maps I draw while playing parser IF, in part because translating a 3D imaginary space into 2D is hard enough; but this game had five spatial dimension and time travel, so I did what I could.)

(This review is based on the updated release of 2 September 2024.)

[jaclynhyde]

Hey, I should post my IFComp 2024 recs! I'm pretty slow this year, but there's some fantastic games in there already. Also I want to draw attention to Apothecary's Assistant, which requires playing a few minutes per day for several days before 10/12. Recs will be updated as I play more!

[golmac]

Today, I spent eight hours on something that will take a player five minutes to get through

[wigc]

At a Glance: IFComp 2024's Glorious Victors

Did you remember to vote on all the groovy entries from this year's IFComp? Sure hope so, because we're at the point where the results are in, another IFComp wrapping up. Which means it's time for a brief glance at... well... the top 10 as usual?

Continue reading

[stanwixbuster]

i cant fufking find the post where i said one day i'd make a rotk if game however

[if-whats-new]

What's New In IF? Halloween edition! Issue 26 (2024)

By Brij, Dion, Bex and Jen

Now Available!

Itch.io - Keep Reading below

If you read the zine, consider liking the post: it helps us see how many people see it! And sharing is caring! <3

~ EDITORIAL ~

Boo! Did you get scared?

Well we hope we didn’t scare you away! Our favourite time of the year is here and with it a Halloween themed Issue! Next to the regular WNIF stuff we included a recommendation section full of the best games to play in this time of the year, so be sure to check it out!

We want some feedback!

As we’re starting to get a hand of things, we would love some feedback from you guys! What you enjoy, want more or less off, how we could improve... Anything goes! We even have a nifty form!

Still looking for members!

Due to the severe changes in the Zine team, we are once again looking for free hands with a couple of hours to kill, and minds, looking to make a little difference in the community!

If you too would like to help us out in a more official capacity, please shoot us a message! You can check out the available positions here, but if you’d like to help in any other way, feel free to contact us as well!

No Small Talk for some time!

We hope you have a terror-ific time reading this issue!

BRIJ, DION, BEX AND JEN

~ BE A PART OF THE ZINE ~

THIS ZINE ONLY HAPPENS WITH YOU!

Want to write 1-2 pages about a neat topic, or deep-dive into a game and review it in details? Share personal experiences or get all academic?

WRITE FOR THE COLUMN!

Prefer to be more low-key but still have something to share? Send us a Zine Letter or share a game title for Highlight on…!

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!

Came across something interesting? Know a release or an update announced? Saw an event happening? Whether it's a game, an article, a podcast… Add any IF-related content to our mini-database!

EVERY LITTLE BIT COUNTS!

Contact us through Tumblr asks, Forum DMs, or even by email! And thank you for your help!!

~ EVENT SPOTLIGHT : ECTOCOMP 2024 ~

La Petite Mort or Le Grand Guignol? Either way, it’s going to get spooky!

Ever since October 2007 spooky-game enthusiasts all over the world have a chance to participate in ECTOCOMP, an annual competition for interactive fiction celebrating the SPOOKY MONTH OF HALLOWEENTOBER. Whether you celebrate Halloween, Day of the Dead, All Saint's Eve, or just love ghost stories and creeping people out, this is your time to shine!

Previously organized by Jason Guest for ADRIFT games, the jam is now open to all development platforms. Since the beginning of this initiative, there has been a motivation to unite and strengthen ties between international communities in the IF world. Creators can submit games either in one of the four main languages - English, Spanish, French and German or any other!

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Ghostbusters. Named after the Ghostbusters’ car license plate number ECTO 1, this year the jam pays tribute to the film that inspired the title! Some other subthemes and inspiration prompts are: Spooky adventure, Sweet supernatural, Halloween fest, Día de Los Muertos, All Saints', All Souls' Eve and any other festivity or mythology around the world.

As per tradition, Ectocomp has two categories:

La Petite Mort, for those who want to speed-write their game in 4 hours or less.

Le Grand Guignol, for games that, for whatever reason, took longer than 4 hours to write.

When the jam is over, all of the submitted games will be uploaded to the IF Archive.

~ ENDED ~

The voting for IFComp ended and the winners have been announced! Congratulations to the first-place winner, The Bat by Chandler Groover! Check out the complete results for this year's competition.

Another edition of the Bad Art Visual Novel Jam is upon us! Check out the two entries!

~ ONGOING (VOTING) ~

Entries have been submitted for the 6th Spooktober Annual Visual Novel Jam! You can vote for your favourites until October 27th! Every October Friday you can also watch Chizu's sponsored Spooktober Stream where she plays through all submissions!

Find inspiration in dusty old decrepit corners, revivify the forgotten - the Revival Jam 2024 is here! You can now vote for your favourite entries!

~ ONGOING (SUBMITTING) ~

Strip IF to it’s bare bones and all it become beautiful text. That’s what The Bare-Bones Jam is about.

It’s spooky month and with it comes the annual ECTOCOMP 2024. If it’s spooky or supernatural why not submit it?

Running until Halloween, the Phantasia Jam is a three months game jam to create a fantasy narrative game, with the theme of “Hidden Magic”. It accepts both VN and IF.

On the CoG Forum, Halloween is already there! Until Oct 31st, you can submit your projects to the Halloween Jam - but don't forget the theme! VAMPIRE, Murder, 70’s Disco!

Disabled Rep VN Jam has a very simple premise but a very important message.

Once upon a time, a game jam was held to create stories around the theme of fairy tales… and that game jam is the Once Upon A Time VN Jam. It’s running from October 1st to January 31st.

Concours de Fiction Interactive Francophone 2025 is for all French-speaking enthusiasts. Submissions are accepted until March 3rd 2025.

Are you perhaps a fan of more somber, melancholic themes? Then check out the Dying Year - Visual Novel Jam! You have until the end of the year to participate.

The Black Visual Novel Jam is all about working with creative professional developers who work in visual novels to bring more Black stories to life. The goal is to create a space where Black creators can show their unique storytelling through visual novels.

Bare your teeth and sharpen your claws because the Monstrous Desires 2024 Visual Novel Jam is here! Dedicated to the love of entities, horrors, and monstrosities, this jam will be full of romantic Visual Novels (VN) that heavily focus on a monster may it be original or from classics, folklore, modern media, etc.

~ OTHER ~

Jams are a great way to find new games! Don’t be afraid to check out submissions from previous years as well. There might be some gems hiding between them!

~ NEW RELEASE ~

Heavens’ Revolution: A Lion Among the Cypress (CScript) is a flintlock space fantasy inspired by eighteenth-century Iran.

Love and Death in the Shadow of the Demiurge (Twine) is an interactive tale of self-love and self-hate, beauty and the lack of it. @infimace-blog

As the Eye Can See (Twine) is a short story about the day before Halloween. @skyshard13

Larut (Ren’Py) is a fictional work retelling of the Indonesian folklore and mythological figure, Nyi Roro Kidul.

As always, don't forget to check out the submitted entries to the events mentioned in the previous pages. They deserve some love too!

~ NEW RELEASE (WIP) ~

You're only 20 when suddenly your life goes bam! Throwing you into a whole new city, a different country even. Can you find your place in the world and restart or lose yourself in temptation? Time to find out in Paved in Ashes (CScript)! @pavedinashes-if

Spotlight (CScript), navigate the red carpet, bloodthirsty paparazzi, cut-throat tabloids and complicated relationship dynamics with A-list celebrities (who may or may not be completely unhinged.)

Exit Through The Gift Shop (CScript) is about the arc of your life, from beginning to end, as experienced through the lens of trips to the museum, with each chapter moving forward one decade.

Blood of the Living (CScript), the first public demo for Blood of the Living, sequel to Fields of Asphodel is here! @chrysanthemumgames

Bridge Ices Before Road (CScript) Finding your place again in your old hometown might sound tough, but nothing is tougher than being an Olympic athlete. You have to juggle training along with all that, but you try not to let it get you down. After all, skating is your passion! @bridgeicesbeforeroadif

Fortuna Favours the Bold (CScript) is a low fantasy, high stakes, romance forward tale about self-discovery and hidden secrets. @fortunafavours

Being the only homicide detective around for miles, it’s up to you now to find out what exactly happened to your brother, why it happened, and who did it in A Bouquet of Chrysantemums (Twine). @abouquetofchrysanthemums

it's been a long, long time (CScript), a group of three find themselves reunited through their shared past, grappling with the haunting memories of a tragedy that shattered their bond. @haynahkho

In Spices of the Heart (CScript) you step into the shoes of an ambitious chef who has landed a job at a prestigious restaurant known for its innovation and artistry. @when-life-gives-you-lemons-if

Love to be Forgotten (RPG Maker MV) is a visual novel inspired by historical figures like Lucrezia Borgia and eerie vampire folklore, such as the tale of Jure Grando.

~ UPDATES ~

Keyframes (Ren’Py) released a patch update. @blankhouse

Shepherds of Haven (CScript) alpha preview has been updated. @shepherds-of-haven

One Knight Stand (CScript) released Chapter 2 Part 3. @oneknightstand-if

Weeping Gods (CScript) added new content to Chapter 2. @jcollinswrites

The In-Between (CScript) released Chapter 10. @dalekowrites

Space Captain (CScript) released updated their demo.

Hunter's Requiem (CScript) added new content to their demo. @huntersrequiem-if

The Inn Between (Ren’Py) released an extended demo. @catslilypad

When Stars Collide (Ren’Py) released Episode 1. @steamberrystudio

Made Marion released Will’s route. @velvet-cupcake-games

Wasteland Pony Express updated their Patreon demo. @katieaki

~ OTHER ~

The Halloween Sale 2024 on Itch.io is here!

Are you a Girls! Girls! Girls!? fan? You can now pre-order an artbook!

The Retro Adventurers podcast released Episode 9, where they have a conversation with Robin Raymond about the project Kingdom of the Seven Stones, a sprawling text/graphic adventure.

Studio Mansoon Games is hiring! Are you a Programmer or a Game artist? This is your chance! @allieebobo

~

As always, we apologize in advance for missing any update or release from the past week. We are only volunteers using their limited free time to find as much as we can - but sometimes things pass through the cracks.

If you think something should have been included in this week's zine but did not appear, please shoot us a message! We'll do our best to add it next week! And if you know oncoming news, add it here!

~ MAYBE YOU NEXT? ~

We did not get a submission this week. But if you have an idea for a short essay, or would like a special space to share your thoughts about IF and the community...

Shoot us an email!

~ HIGHLIGHT ON ~

A couple of games that we thought were cool.

Viatica by @fir-fireweed (Twine)

Wonderful prose, interesting worldbuilding, lovable characters! Chapter 10 was recently updated and it tore my heart out 10/10.

//submitted by Silly//

Do you have SALT? by BRXKEVN (Steam)

I wanted to tell you about the salt.

//submitted by Oreolek//

Your favourite game here?

Do you have a favourite game that deserves some highlighting?

An old or recent game that wowed you so much you spam it to everyone?

Tell us about it! And it might appear here!

H/T = Horror/Thriller H = Halloween themes S = Supernatural C = Creepy

~ RECOMMENDATIONS (COMPLETE) ~

It gets so lonely here (H/T) by ebi-hime (Ren’Py)

Yuri yandere visual novel, what else needs to be said? //submitted by Remm//

Deepest Grievances (H/T) by 17 confused villains (Ren’Py)

Equal parts murder mystery, eldritch horror, and office satire. This is a great adventure-style VN with a puzzle that made me gasp when I figured out the solution. //submitted by Natasha//

Hanna, We're Going to School (S) by Kastel (Twine)

You and your ghost friend go to school and everything goes sideways. My favorite piece on queerness and rage. //submitted by Emerson//

Last seen online (H/T + S) by qwook/sochinstudio (Three.js)

It is a very great and short game. It includes puzzles that are both satisfying and sad to solve. //submitted by anon//

Escape from Hell (S) by Nils Fagerburg (???)

Switch between monsters and use their abilities to help you escape! Elegant design with fun puzzles. //submitted by Sera//

Neighbourhood Necromancer (H/T) by Gavin Inglis (CScript)

Command the undead to take revenge on the suburbs! Perhaps you’ll start by taking over a convenience store.

Yûrei Station (H/T) by Atelier Sentô (Unity)

A girl takes a night train heading to an unknown destination…

Everyday Horrors (H) by Jacob Aberdevine (Bitsy)

A short Halloween game about fear and uncertainty.

Ghosterington Night (H/T) by Wade Clarke (Inform 7)

Danger-filled Ghosterington Manor appears atop the same cliff each year on Samhain night. It’s hidding four poems that are worth a fortune, and you, famous adventurer Jubilee Grief, are determined to find them.

Forever and Ever (H/T + H) by @PetricakeGames-IF (Ink)

Halloween night comes to a close and you're just settling in to get a good night's sleep when your son Lucas lets you know there are monsters in his room.

First Bite (S) by firstbitegames (???)

One night. Three (very hot) vampires. Make a deal with Death or die trying… (Alejandro Saab is in it so you know it’s good. Also very 18+.) //recommended by Dion [team]//

Well Tended (C) by danielle taphanel (Bitsy)

A short storybook simulator about wandering through death's shade-filled garden, following the spiraling path of poisonous plants to the center.

Witches x Warlocks (H + S) by Nifty Visuals (Unreal Engine)

Seven days until Halloween! Seven days until Fay Nightshade gets booted out of school for being the only witch unable to cast a single spell.

Eat me (C) by Chandler Grooverr (Inform 7)

In this castle, you'll eat or be eaten. May contain dairy, carnage, puzzles, nuts.

~ RECOMMENDATIONS (WIP) ~

We Wretched Creatures (H/T) by @darkfictionjude (Twine)

Who can you trust? What’s the truth behind your family? What are things that you see in the dark?

Sentience (H/T + S) by @sentience-if (Twine)

After a near-death experience at the hands of a crazed angel, you're suddenly thrust into a conspiracy surrounding a corpse-worshiping cult, divinely mad saints, and something buried far, far beneath the earth.

Fervency (H/T) by @fervency-if (CScript)

After getting cured from a vicious plague, you begin to feel some strange and unfamiliar cravings - namely a fervent desire for flesh or blood.

The Story of Sin (H/T + S) by @devilishmango (Twine)

You are the spawn of Satan and The Devil. You decide to defy them once again, and just like always… they aren’t exactly too happy about that. This leads them to decide to punish you one last time- only, this time, the punishment is deadly.

Reanimated Heart (H/T + S) by @doubledeadstudio (???)

Figure out how to build a life from scratch in a strange dimension where the sun never rises and supernatural creatures live freely.

Van Helsing (S) by @vanhelsing-if (Twine)

You are the last of a family of elite slayers. When you get tasked with slaying an ancient Entity in four months, will you remain the indomitable Van Helsing of legends or will this finally be your breaking point?

SLAUGHTER☆SQUAD (H/T) by @harlequinoccult (Twine)

For the most part, you’re a pretty normal mid-20-something year old who lives in a shitty apartment in the city. Well, except for one thing. Your ”Associate” Carter “Dollface” Abernathy. Who is a murderer.

Did we miss your favourite game? Don’t worry, there’s still a chance! Fill out this form and we will include it in our next Halloween issue.

WE LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU ALL! WHETHER IT'S GOOD OR BAD, OR EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN...

Have something to say? Send us a message titled: Zine Letter!

As we end this issue, we would like to thank: Silly, Oreolek, Remm, Natasha, Emerson, Sera and the awesome anon!

For sending us their game recommendations and highlights!

And as always, huge thanks to all you readers who liked, shared, and commented on last week's issue! What might be tiny actions are huge support and motivators to us!

Thank you for cheering us on this journey!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We now have a Linktree! Accessing all of our links has never been easier.

And see you again next week, even more spooky!

BRIJ, DION, BEX, JEN

WHAT'S NEW IN IF? 2024-ISSUE 26

[manonamora-if]

May Check-In

Hi. It's been.... almost a year since I did one of those. And until Harcourt, I hadn't posted here since October. During that time, things... happened in my personal life. I'm not going to get into it* here, but it affected greatly my ability to create and interact with IF in general. I'm getting back on the tracks, slowly returning to my original routines and circles. *maybe through more cathartic writing? after more settling.

Let's get into the longer things:

Recap of last month's progress what I've been up to since July

The 2024 To-Do List

Plan for this month

Some general lines for the rest of 2025

TLDR on the important things because it's really long: Harcourt was my announcement of some return to normalcy. I'm in the process of moving. There's going to be an announcement later this month. It's good to be back. Here's to a healthier rest of the year!

What I've been up to since July?

Some posted here, some missed (I should make some separate posts). Instead of comparing posts, I'm just recap'ing it all.

The 100% Good Assets

I created a Harlowe guide for Saves and Settings, updated the huge SugarCube Guide to match the 2.37 release, generalized the Tweego Folder for Mac users and other Twine formats, expanded the ChoiceScript to SugarCube Guide, made a Harlowe template to resemble Chapbook, updated all the SugarCube templates to 2.37, ported Cloak of Darkness to Adventuron, started Chapbook templates (Save System out, Config.style still a WIP), and finally, made a Chapbook Reference Page for convenience*. *the Guide is already chef-kiss, but the Ref Page is easier CTRL+F'ing stuff

Releases

I participated in a secret jam from the Sacred Veins collective with Svipul (an excuse to create in Twine 1/SugarCane). The theme was Righteous. This is not a happy story.

And as a final hoera in 2024, Dénantir for the Partim500. It's a mini French parser made in Donjon.FI (which had been on my to-try-list for at least two years). Some more sadness and reminiscing.

As you can see, there was a mood...

Updates

Aside from the assets listed above, obviously, the major one: the final story update of The Trials and Tribulations of Edward Harcourt. Released 6 months later than announced, but out nonetheless. Granted, the game was 90% done last October, but I dragged my feet (when IRL wasn't in the way to begin with) to deal some major coding issues that messed a lot of things.

Neo-Interactives and other Events

After the major success Neo-Twiny Jam, where we raised more money than last time (help us repeat it?), there was the Single Choice Jam, Bring Out Your Ghosts, Anti-Productivity Jam, The Bare-Bones Jam, (from here, I was less involved) Educational Jam, ShuffleComp 2024, Smoochie Jam, and the recently ended Dialogue Jam. A lot of participation overall with pretty neat entries! After a very busy, but very exciting, first full calendar year of events, we've decided to scale it back a little*. In 2025, at least, only the month-long jams will be held. *I have a huge backlog of stuff to play now... and NTJ25 is coming soon...

In other events I've helped, there was the IFCOMP for which I did Socials and Moderation, and the SeedComp! that kinda fizzled out at the end (tbf being completely MIA didn't help).

And finally, the Interactive Fiction Showcase 2024 which had so many entries. Which reminds me, I didn't announce the 2025 Showcase yet, which I should do sooner rather than later.

I did play some games, and reviewed a bunch last winter, but that fell off as well earlier this year.

Awards and other cool things that happened

I interviewed Chandler Groover for @the-rosebush-mag, following his win at the 2024 IFComp. This was such an honour to sit down with him and talk about his journey through IF.

I PROMISE I AM WORKING ON THE GAME and machina caerulea was included in the 56 edition of Indiepocalypse! A double feature~ And included with some really cool other people too!

I PROMISE I AM WORKING ON THE GAME was in a 1st-place tie for Best Use of Interactivity at the IF Short Game Showcase.

Les lettres du Docteur Jeangille won Outstanding French Game of 2024 at the IFDB Awards!! And a bunch of nominations for most of my 2024 games (though none came as close). Really proud of this. Twice in a row too! Won't happen this year, because no French Comp for me.

And David Welbourn included Not Another Sad Meal in his monthly parser walkthrough (January 2025). It's kind of wild. I've been using his amazing walkthroughs when playing many old-school parsers. And now I'm in the list! That reminds me, I need to fix some things.

~ And I think that's it? I've missed some pretty eventful periods, so a lot of stuff fell through the cracks.

It does look like I've done a lot, even during my quiet times, but it's really been more in spurs. Short periods of extreme activity and long ones of nothing (half of the summer, the whole of November, most of December, most of January, and from February until mid-April). In other words, when I had some quiet time to actually do something and when shit really hit the fan. It's been hard to balance, but I think I'm regaining my footing. April's been somewhat of a blessing in disguise.

~

The 2024 To-Do List

... has not really been followed. I haven't fixed the bugs on any of my older projects, or finished any of my WIPs (well, Harcourt, but 6 months too late). Instead, the first half was filled with unplanned game releases. On the bright side, I've fulfilled my wish of testing out new programs, or getting better at them. Well, and with Harcourt now out, I guess one thing got crossed out.

On the other hand, I haven't reviewed/played as much as I had hoped*. Even updated my website is completely out of date. Also dropped the ball on all the social media stuff. Very lacklustre year. *esp. the Neo-Interactives entries. It was important to me that every entry got some comments, to ensure everyone knew people looked at their work.

So hum... yeah. ⭐for "participating", lol.

~

The PLANtm for May

Not so much of a plan, more of what to expect this month, which... won't be much. Because the thing is: I'm moving at the end of the month. So between packing, selling, cancelling stuff here, and unpacking, opening, and probably buying things there, my IRL To-Do is arm-length at this point. It's both super stressful and a huge relief. I picked such a good time to come back, lol.

But I hope to have time to do some things. If not in updates/engaging, at least in planning for the rest of the year.

Harcourt: while the story is finished, there are still some kinks in the code/interface that can be handled better. As mentioned in the the update post, it's currently an Open Beta. There are a couple of things I'd like to add in-game. Nothing major. I don't expect the polished version to be out this month, but I'd like to make some progress on it, at minimum.

Secret Project: this will have a proper announcement later this month, but I'm currently planning a summer project for myself. It's both related to IRL and IF. Some good stuff I hope.

Really Bad IF Jam: is back by popular demands. The whole month of May, you can let out some steam by making terrible stuff. If I manage some free time, I might wing something?

Website Update: because it's a long time coming. Half a dozen games are missing, so does a bunch of new info. And it could do with a new interface.

Reconnect with the community. As a whole. I want to catch up on a lot of stuff I missed, and return notes that have been sitting in my inbox for too long.

I think if I can update the website and manage to tick off enough from planning of the secret project, I'll be pretty pleased with myself.

~

Some general lines for the rest of 2025

Normally, this is where I whip out my yearly to-do list of things I want done but probably not even manage to make a dent into it. You know the list from the start of the year, when I do my retrospective. Which hasn't happened this year either. So there's no list.

But for now, my main goal is to get back into a good healthy rhythm, where I can balance IRL stuff, IF responsibilities, and my own projects, without burn out looming or me being unable to do the things I enjoy doing. I think I'll need to make peace with my own capabilities, and stick to proper limits.

In terms of limits, the first has to be participating in events. It's not sustainable for me to try and make a game for all the IF events/game jams that catch my eye - even if I really want to or find them inspiring, and even if I can combine them. Almost all my projects have been created for or ended up submitted in a competition or jam; with ~90% of those being done on a whim/last minute. And because nothing I put out is a perfect bug-free experience, that means re-adding more to my plate with each submission. Because I still like those events very much, I need to be more realist with what I can do, and back out when things are not attainable. Like I have so far this past year. I had full planned or some form of ideas for the SingleChoice, Anti-Productivity, Educational Jam, ShuffleComp, the French Comp, the SpringThing and the Text-Adventure Jam, which all passed without a peep from me; as well as projects I've pushed for a later time for the ParserComp, IntroComp, IFComp (can't since helping organising), and EctoComp from last year. It's both been a disappointment (because I can't work on those ideas), and a relief (less stress to meet a too-short deadline!). So, for now, I'll most likely stick to just @neo-twiny-jam (for a good cause), and the Partim500. In huge part because it's only 500 words max. But also because they are the most fun experience I recall having, consistently. For any other jam, I'll restrict myself to long length (>= 1 month dev) only if I have actual time and a concrete plan (not just a vague idea/vibe - even if I want to test a new program). As for competitions, no submissions until I've finished at least one more WIP - and the entry is actually polished and tested properly (maybe I'll get better reviews now lol). That should leave me with more time to fix older projects, and complete current (and secret) WIPs. Actually actively removing stuff from my desk. For actual realsies now.

In terms of limits pt.2, IF responsibilities. I've been a part of a bunch communities, at different levels of organising, and with different amount of required efforts. Since getting more involved in the community, I've given more than 100% of myself to everything I've said yes to. It was working great for me... until I realised how much piled up. It was already too much last year, and I knew it - I couldn't keep up with most things then. Which is why I said my goodbyes to the great @interact-if last summer, and left a bunch of other discords/spaces. As mentioned above, Neo-Interactives is scaling back as well in terms of events. I had the foresight of preparing a bunch of stuff in advance (this is why @neointeractives has had scheduled posts with reminders). It's been less hectic and stressful, since not having something looming and having to untangle every 2-3 weeks. Gotta give major props to @lapinlunaire-games and @cyberpunklesbian for all their work too (esp during my breaks), they've been real rocks! As for other events, I can be pretty laissez-faire with random unranked events (like the Showcase or Really Bad IF), like posting it and let it be. But comps (and anything with more than one clear rule) require a minimum of admin and promotion*. Time and energy I need to see if I can spend (especially if I delegate) and reevaluate. *seriously... it's more work than you think it is, because it's very concentrated on specific days. It's exhausting. Rewarding too! but exhausting. That would give me a a more balanced planning at least. More time for updating stuff (the reason why yall are following me) :)

A potential path for myself in the soon future (brought to me by moving) is maybe being able to start a Ko-Fi or Support author button on itch. There's a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo attached to that, but it's definitely something more attainable than it was while being here. It's something I'll be checking out this summer, and if possible, there will be an announcement (maybe even a new dev name?). Anyway, that's at least for late-2025-me to worry about. Also will need to find a new job first...

In any case, a slower, calmer, healthier "normal" on the horizon. And a new website! 🤞

[ifcomp]

Welcome to the 30th Annual IFComp!

2024 IFComp Logo, by Lauren Davies

We’re glad you’re here. If this is your first time joining us, welcome! If you’re already familiar with us, welcome back! Either way, we hope you have a great time and enjoy exploring some of the over sixty new games we have for you this year.

What's next? 

Check out the games, now live at ifcomp.org 

You have until October 15, 2023 at 11:59pm Eastern to vote. 

You only have to play & rate 5 games to be a judge! (Yep, just five!)

We would love to expand the number of judges! You can help!

Talk about the competition on social media, and encourage others to check out all these new games. Consider playing with a friend or family member who is new to interactive fiction, talk about the games together, and encourage them to vote as well. Thanks! 

We will do a post-competition survey to capture your ideas for improving the competition in the future, so if you have thoughts about improvements, please watch for the survey in October.

Email us at ifcomp@ifcomp.org if you have any questions.

Thank you in advance for judging!

—Jacqueline Ashwell, September 2024

[twinegardening]

ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG by Hubert Janus

Once again, it's exactly what it sounds like.

[the-rosebush-mag]

An Interview with Chandler Groover

by Manonamora

Manon (@manonamora-if) interviews Chandler Groover, an interactive fiction author known for his influential games such as Eat Me, Toby’s Nose and Midnight. Swordfight., as well as his contribution in Fallen London’s storylines. He recently released The Bat, which won the 2024 IFComp.

Read the full article on The Rosebush.

The Rosebush | Submissions | Mastodon

[adz]

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Universal Hologram is a posthuman inquiry into the human psyche. it is an investigation of the most irritating qualities of the mind, the myriad ways we spoil our lives and relationships, and martian horticulture. it is very silly and very serious. it samples ABBA.

The game follows a member of a far-future Martian colony. Playing as this person, you explore the colony and surrounding area, learn its history, project your consciousness out of your body using astral projection, and save or destroy civilization.

from mathbrush's history of IFcomp 2021: "Universal Hologram used early AI art models. At that time, AI art was noticeably non-realistic and generally had severe deformities or issues, which was perfect for a surreal game. Many reviewers praised the AI art, which was a novelty. It wouldn’t be until later years that the art would get more controversial."

this game (and nearly 500 others) are included in the 2024 Queer Games Bundle, available for $60 (as well as a sliding scale version for less).

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2024: Daniel Stelzer's "Miss Gosling's Last Case"

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2024, the thirtieth annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 67 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 October 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 an elegantly designed murder-mystery with a clever premise and very polished gameplay. There's a well-developed hint system and a great set of NPCs to work with. The execution is very nearly flawless and the plot is engaging. It's a freaking delight, I tell you, and you should play it.

The PC is one Miss Gosling, an elderly detective very much in the style of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. (As a tip-off, there is a call-out in the game to The Mysterious Affair at Styles ... though that was an Hercule Poirot mystery. Never mind, the nod gives credit where credit is due.) Miss Gosling wakes up one morning to discover that she has been murdered most foully, and the beef-witted local inspectors are apparently about chalk her death up to an accident. Haunting her own house, she has to solve her own murder; and since she's a ghost, any interaction with the physical world has to be done through her trusty dog, who is the only living entity who can see her.

It's a good setup; and the execution follows through, with a nice set of not-too-difficult puzzles (I admit to turning to the walkthrough several times, not because I had given up, nor because I was convinced I couldn't solve the puzzles in the end, but simply because there's too much good stuff in the Comp to ponder too long, and time has been short this week. Though, on second thought, and looking back, I'm not 100% sure I'd ever get around to solving the "accessing the laboratory" puzzle, which requires some lateral thinking and intuitive leaps). The characterization is quite good, with Miss Gosling being characterized effectively by every little observation—another thing Stelzer picks up from Miss Marple and does quite effectively; and with the NPCs being well characterized by Gosling's own incisive, and (I think) often too generous, observations about them and their backstories. Watson, the dog, is a delight; having to work through him to interact with the physical world imposes a nice set of constraints that make the haunting make sense and also tweaks the parameters of standard parser IF in a way that makes those constraints feel like an interesting challenge instead of like a set of pointless additional difficulties, as is often the case with limited-inventory and limited-verb-set games.

I used the phrase "elegantly designed" above to describe the game's structure, and did so intentionally: the game has clearly been thought through in advance in a way that brings structural elements into a pleasing balance. One of the more obvious ways that this is true is the map, where most individual areas have a meaningful symmetry or near-symmetry, and the four stories of the house together form a three-dimensional spiral that the PC is constantly traversing; it pays off in the way that the player quickly learns the details of the parts of the geography that are currently accessible, because they all fit into an intelligible pattern; the map is easy to learn and gets out of the player's way. (The most obviously symmetrical patterns are in the exterior garden and in the attic; both of these are sub-maps where the individual nodes in the spatial graph form a regular geometrical shape. But it's also true on the ground and first floors of the house, each of which is divided into a near-mirror-image of itself. As you solve puzzles and gain access to more parts of the house, the overall effect of the map opening up feels like a flower unfurling in the sunlight, which is a nice metaphor for the structure of well-made detective fiction of many sub-types, interactive or not.

This design elegance is also true with the plot structure, which is neatly divided into an opening, an endgame, and, in between, a middle-game with four open problems. There are thus six major checkpoints throughout the game, each taking more or less the same amount of time and effort to solve, and each worth three points in the game's scoring system. As with the nearly-regular map structure, this regular meter of the plot could have made the game dull, but there's enough variation from one point to the next to keep the game interesting, and the puzzles in each sub-component avoid just being transpositions of each other, so the game never gets to feeling like it's just grinding out another plot element.

I really enjoyed Stelzer's Death on the Stormrider in last year's Comp, which was also a murder mystery (though with a very different setup); but this feels like a step forward to me. The game feels more polished; it's easier to get in sync, mentally speaking, with the parser; and the investigation and resolution here feel much more satisfying.

I had a lot of fun with this.

(I also drew a map of the game’s geography as I played; I'm less happy with it than with many of the maps I draw while playing parser IF, in part because this three-dimensional imaginary space was harder to translate to 2D than many others. All in all, the fact that this space was so complex but so easy to learn and navigate is a real sign of the amount of attention paid to the design on this game.)

(This review is based on the updated release of 10 September 2024.)

[golmac]

WIP Wed... er, Friday

>w You cannot know, or even reach the edges of knowing, how long you have been here.

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EVERY TURN WHEN THE PLAYER IS IN PRIMORDIAL DARKNESS: INCREMENT THE COUNT OF TURNS IN THE DARKNESS.

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