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Tag Archives: if comp
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 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
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
These Heterogenous Tasks 