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Monthly Archives: October 2019
IF Comp 2019: Flight of the CodeMonkeys
Flight of the CodeMonkeys (Mark C. Marino) is a cyberpunk-resistance story rendered in the Jupyter Notebook platform for Python coding. You’re a codemonkey, a peon making edits to obfuscated code that, apparently, runs your dystopian society. You interact by editing snippets … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: Pas de Deux
Pas de Deux (Linus Åkesson, Dialog) is a puzzle about correctly conducting an orchestra. You are the musical director of a community music group in the town of Bournebrook Rill, performing Tchiakovsky’s Pas de deux from the Nutcracker; the orchestra and score … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: Rio Alto: forgotten memories
Rio Alto: forgotten memories (Ambrosio, Unity) is an illustrated adventure game; a disappointed artist retreats to a rural town, where he finds himself entangled in mysteries, secrets and long-harboured resentments. The game opens with a really welcoming piece of UI … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: Saint City Sinners
Saint City Sinners (dgallagher, Twine) is a hardboiled-detective parody, explicitly after the style of Clickhole’s Clickventures series. I know some real good writers who just goddamn love Clickventures. I always felt as though they were fine, but the ratio of wackiness to wittiness didn’t … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: The Shadow Witch
The Shadow Witch (Healy, RPGMaker) is a short game in which you’re a mean witch and go around being a jerk. I really don’t like RPGMaker. I realise, as an appreciator of parser-based IF, that I don’t have too much ground to hate … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: A Blue Like No Other
A Blue Like No Other (Dan Cox, web) is a short piece told through an education game. The idea is that you’re doing digital archaeology on an old piece of unpublished language-teaching software, but All Is Not As It Seems.
IF Comp 2019: The Four Eccentrics
The Four Eccentrics (Mild Cat Bean, Inform) is a surreal fantasy adventure set in a dream city; things have gone awry and the protagonist has to sort them out. It’s a pretty large game, and opens on a large map … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: Valand
Valand (Ann Hugo, Twine) is a young adult fantasy adventure. The protagonist is washed up on a tropical island and finds themselves adopted by witches and also there’s a tiger and a mermaid?
IF Comp 2019: Dull Grey
Dull Grey (Provodnik Games, web) is a choice-based game about restricted choices. The protagonist, Kir, is a youth on the verge of adulthood, living in a remote and frozen region of a vaguely-defined but very Soviet-feeling future society. The time has … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: Slugocalypse
Slugocalypse (Charlotte Blatchford, Twine) is a disaster story told with Twine. The cover pretty much gives you the setup: giant slugs are attacking small-town Britain. (Although that’s a duck, not an untitled goose. It’s a giant duck and you ride it.) The … Continue reading
These Heterogenous Tasks 