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Category Archives: interactive fiction
IF Comp 2022: The Thirty Nine Steps
It’s once again IF Comp season; I’ll be doing some reviews. (Disclosure: I’m married to the lead organiser of the competition.) This is Graham Walmsey’s adaptation of Buchan’s much-adapted novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, a mystery thriller of a man accidentally … Continue reading
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
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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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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: 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
These Heterogenous Tasks 