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Category Archives: cyoa
IF Comp 2021: Goat Game
Goat Game is a tightly-crafted piece about complicity and corporate careers, the difficulty of effecting change, and how this intersects with how you relate to people. The characters are all anthropomorphic goats. There isn’t really any reason for or against … Continue reading
IF Comp 2021: The Last Night of Alexisgrad
The Last Night of Alexisgrad is a choice-based game for two players. This is an unusual but venerable format – the first I’m aware of is the Duel Master series, first published 1986, which were sold as boxed sets of … Continue reading
Posted in cyoa, interactive fiction, review
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IF Comp 2021: The Mermaids of Ganymede
This game is not in any way a reference to Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan; rather, it’s a straightforward space-adventure story that has, y’know, actual space mermaids in it. It’s divided into chapters; each chapter takes place in a different … Continue reading
Posted in cyoa, interactive fiction, review
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The ‘semiosis’ part
In its initial development, before I showed it to anybody at all, Scents & Semiosis was really just a pretty text-generating toy. I make a lot of cool text-gen toys, and I wanted this to be a bit more than that, … Continue reading
Posted in cyoa, parser-based
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Scents & Semiosis
I made a game. It’s called Scents & Semiosis. It’s a piece of interactive fiction about perfume, memory, and the process of assigning or re-evaluating personal symbolic associations with things: semiosis, the creation of meaning. I’ve been working on it … Continue reading
Posted in cyoa, interactive fiction
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IF Comp 2019: The good people
The good people (Pseudavid, Twine) is a piece of horror, or of horrific magic realism. A couple, Alice and Daniel, take their first holiday together; they are from different cultures, and the relationship is coming under its first real strain. They … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: Black Sheep
Black Sheep (Nic Barkdull and Matt Borgard, Twine) is a cyberpunk mystery. Your father – head of a Singularity-focused corporation with a cult following – has died, and your sister has been kidnapped. The protagonist, Irene, is (despite a fake-out … 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: 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: 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?
These Heterogenous Tasks 