Woodlings draw near!

We played the necessary five games, and then played four more for extra credit, and then didn't score three of them, so I guess we're submitting six scores overall?

The Dead Account by Bez: 9
And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One by B.J. Best: 9
Weird Grief by Bez: 7
extraordinary_fandoms.exe by Storysinger: 6
Finding Light by Abigail Jazwiec: 5
This Won't Make You Happy by Mike Gillis: 4

Infinite Adventure by A. Scotts: Not scored/submitted. It's less a standalone game and more something one plays for about five minutes and then plays And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One.
My Gender Is a Fish by Carter Gwertzman: Not scored/submitted. In our opinion, not long or interactive enough to really qualify as an IFComp game.
You Are SpamZapper 3.1 by Leon Arnott: Not scored/submitted. This one partly our fault; this game is well over two hours long (it says one and a half hours on the IFComp ballot page but that's... not correct) and we lost track of time and missed the two hour cutoff, thus making us unable to judge it fairly.

After having to skip IFComp 2020 due to personal life matters/mental health being... well... 2020, it feels good to have done it this year. We played some really good games that we're happy to recommend others play as well. IFComp is back and it feels good.

At a score of 9 apiece, we have a tie for our top-rated games this year. Of the two, I would say that The Dead Account has a more engrossing and emotional story, while And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One has better gameplay. The Dead Account is our favorite between the two, but not by such a large margin that they get different point totals.

Anyway, this was a blast, and we hope to do it again next year.

Wrapping up the last few extra credit entries from IFComp 2021, after already having hit the "anyone can be a judge but play and score at least five of them" threshold. Which is fortunate, because I actually don't think we're going to score this one. I mean, we played it, and we're writing this review right now, but I just don't think there's enough here to qualify as an IntFic game.

My Gender Is a Fish by Carter Gwertzman is a short Twine narrative. You ventured into some kind of fey forest and the magpies stole your gender identity. Now you must construct a new one. As you walk through the woods, you go through a few rounds of seeing one of two sights to choose between, both of which invite some gender-related musings. (Is your gender an eagle, flashy and majestic but performative, or a fish, quiet and plain but practical?) After a few rounds of such choices, the story concludes.

It's a neat narrative. It has some intriguing and well-written thoughts. It's worth experiencing. I like it and I'm glad we played it. Alas, it's short, not really interactive, and we just don't consider it enough of a game to qualify for IFComp. Rather than bringing out the dreaded 1 rating for something we actually liked, I think we're just going to pretend we officially never played this and just not submit a score.

Unofficially, though? It's good. It took me longer to write this than it will take you to play it, and the writing is pretty, so like... why not, right? It's a little after-dinner mint of a "game" but it's nice. It's neat.

IFComp 2021 continues. This is our fifth played and reviewed entry. The rules for IFComp judges are that anyone can jump in and play and review as many games as they want (and more people should--a lot of these are really neat and thought provoking, and there are far more games here than we will be able to cover) so long as 1) you give each game a 1-10 score that more or less follows the spirit of their guidelines, and 2) you play and review at least five games. Therefore, we could just come up with some numbers for the five we've played so far and, oh, hey, we successfully IFComped this year, hooray. I do think we might stick around for a couple more bonus picks, though, as there were more in the pile that looked intriguing. No reason to stop if we're still having fun.

extraordinary_fandoms.exe by Storysinger (aka TheStorysinger or Storysinger Presents) continues our recent trend of sticking with this family of game developers. You know Bez, author of The Dead Account and Weird Grief (both of which we just reviewed?) Storysinger is his sister, and it turns out she also has a thing or two to say about viewing difficult and emotional real-life situations through the lens of online fandoms and the support of the friends and loved ones that one finds within them.

There are two main differences here. The first is that instead of furries, this game has a fandom for "C-Project," a fictional anime... idol group? I guess like Vocaloid personas without the software? It's a very clear knockoff of B-PROJECT, which is a real thing that we have never heard of before, so this game has already taught us something new (namely, that this is a thing, that exists.) I guess this is what we get for musing about what The Dead Account must feel like to someone who isn't a furry like we are; we have zero connection to the B-PROJECT fandom, and when the dialogue started reading like we'd accidentally joined Twitter k-pop stan Discord, we just kind of... smiled politely and took their word for it. It mostly makes sense in context, which is something we have to mention and credit; the dialogue is written well enough that it's accessible even to someone like us without the relevant context, and that is a good feat of writing for which we are grateful.

The real point of this game, though, is its second main difference: instead of a death in the community, this game's difficult subject matter behind the fandom is that our focal character is in a horrifically abusive and unsafe household, and the friends they make in that server are concerned and trying to help them find a way out. Chat sessions alternate between the team excitedly working on several revisions of their C-Project fansite and DMing our focal character to ask if they're okay.

Of the siblings' games, I would put this one in the same pile as Weird Grief for much the same reasons. Both are very compelling and authentic stories, with this raw and soul-baring feeling to them that makes us feel grateful to each author for sharing their respective experiences. We recommend both to anyone who's even vaguely curious about either (and who can handle the subject matter, of course.) Neither are... the most game games we have ever played. We spoke about this in our Weird Grief review, but strange_fandoms.exe might just be even less interactive than Weird Grief. It has enough "choices" that it technically qualifies as IF, but a large number of them are so meaningless (for example, choosing "Hi!" versus "Hello!" when the player first joins the server) that putting them in there to make this a valid IFComp game feels kind of like using a large font and triple-spacing to get one's essay past the required page count threshold. We'll allow it, but mostly because we really liked this story and found it worth experiencing, and we wish nothing but the best for this author. (Both these authors.) We have to note that it's kind of stretching the definition of the competition, though, even while we sing its praises and remain grateful that it was submitted.

We liked this one and will score it (and Weird Grief) appropriately; don't worry. We may just need to find another one of those straight up puzzle-solving parser adventure after this, is all, just so we can chase the experience down with something less iffy and more IFfy. (Hmm. Perhaps we shouldn't have done Finding Light first.)

IFComp 2021 continues.

So hey, did you know that Telegram messenger has a non-removable dead man's switch that auto-deletes your account if you haven't logged on in X time, presumably to free up space on their servers? You can push back the length of time before it activates in your account settings (I believe the longest you can give it is one year) but you can't disable it entirely.

The Dead Account by Bez is a multiple choice Twine game set up to look like the interface of "Hivekind," a fictitious chat app. Plot beats are played out by reading user bios, reading and reviewing previous flagged messages, and confirming details with users in a group chat. You are a Hivekind employee and moderator, and they just put out a policy update that states deceased users are to have their accounts closed. Unlike Telegram, Hivekind believes in that human touch, so your job is to review messages flagged by the system indicating this user might be deceased, confirm this information with their contacts if so, and then pull the plug on the account yourself. Or you can try to resist with as much wiggle room as you're allowed (but no promises.)

Also, this game was written by a furry, and furries are heavily referenced within (account profile pictures, messages about suiting and attending cons, etc.) so the Telegram connection becomes that much stronger.

So this game hits like an absolute train. Granted, the subject matter is very close and personal to us, to the point that the Hivekind account pages and chatrooms feel authentic and incredibly well put together (the author uses Twine to absolute perfection and the framing greatly enhances the story) so maybe this wouldn't be as heavy if we weren't a part of the scene. Or maybe it would? Death and grief are universal feelings, I suppose, even if the details with which the game paints a picture of these people, not as names on a screen or characters in a story but as people, draw largely from our subculture. I guess that the question of how much this game affects non-furries will be up to the non-furry reviewers to decide; all we can say on our end is oof.

This game does such a good job humanizing (or badgerizing as the case may be) its deceased account that we're mourning him now. On one hand, that's a sign of a well-written story, and is to be commended. On the other, I'm sad now and I need to go sit in a corner and be sad for a while.

... Give your Telegram (or Discord or whatever) friends a hug and tell them you love them. And maybe download local copies of your chat history from time to time.

OH HECK IT'S OCTOBER, and you know what that means: spooky season IFComp is once again upon us. I always somehow forget until it's here and then respond with a last minute scramble, but hey! At least we're doing them this year.

So, it's been a while because we skipped 2020 because 2020 was a little too... 2020. If you forgot (or are new to our Dreamwidth since 2019), IFComp is an annual interactive fiction contest (you know--Infocom-like text parser adventures, multiple choice Twine games, etc.) where all of this year's entries are made available to the general public around October and early November, and anyone who's interested is invited to play them and submit scores on a 1-10 scale based on their scoring guidelines. The general rule is that if one is playing and judging games then they should do at least five, though it can be any number one wishes so long as it's at least five or above. Again, we didn't participate in 2020 because mluh, but you can see our 2018 scores here and our 2019 scores here.

All that said, we begin 2021's IFComp reviews with Finding Light by Abigail Jazwiec.

You are a human's assigned guardian familiar, but you and your human have been separated after some evil raiders attacked the two of you and made off with your human. It is now up to you to find and rescue him. This is a fairly standard text parser text adventure game, structurally. You look at your surroundings, take everything the game allows you to, use items to solve puzzles, etc. It is possible to die, but not possible to softlock the game (to our knowledge.) With the medieval fantasy setting, this feels something like "what if one of the earlier and shorter King's Quest games were IntFic (but without the Sierra-ing.)"

The gimmick this game has that makes it clever is that you can shift at will between human and fox forms, each of whom have certain things they can and cannot do. You'll need to be a fox to spot scent trails, but you'll need to be a human to open anything that requires opposable thumbs, and so on. The puzzles are mostly fine. The way certain characters express their problems in the form of "Oh, if only I had SPECIFIC ITEM, then I surely would be able to part with my OTHER ITEM YOU PROBABLY NEED LATER" can be somewhat blatant and gratuitous, but... let's face it; this is IntFic. If that were a problem, then we would be in the wrong genre, given how universal that approach is.

Still, I guess that leads us to our main thesis, here, which is that this game doesn't do much to stand out. It's good. It's very good, in fact! If you're here to romp around a text parser adventure for a while, this is capable, well-made, well-written, well-designed, and absolutely will scratch that itch. It just... you know. The IFComp guidelines reserve the higher scores (especially 10) for games that are groundbreaking, which this absolutely is not. In fact, I would even go as far as to call this game standard in its execution; the closest thing it has to a unique stand-out gimmick is the human/fox shapeshifting, and even that feels in execution like the equivalent of a "wear the spare uniform to be able to talk to the guards" puzzle with some extra flavor text. (Oh, there's a "wear the spare uniform to be able to talk to the guards" puzzle, too, by the way.)

Which, again, none of this is a knock! It knows exactly the kind of game it is and it delivers a satisfactory IF experience. It's. You know. It's fine. It's an IF game. It's a good IF game.

Five games have been vanquished, and so IFComp 2019 comes to a close. All that remains is to give them number scores, provide some closing thoughts about IFComp itself this year, and submit everything. We still have a couple weeks to play an extra game or two for extra credit, but I'm confident calling this this "Final IFComp scores 2019" post because if we play more, I'll just go back and edit them into this one.

Please refer back to last year's scores to put this year's in perspective. I stand by almost all of them except that, in hindsight and as they've aged and such, I wish to retroactively bump Animalia up from a 9 to a perfect 10. Otherwise, I feel comfortable putting all of those against these.

Thus, in the context of how everything compares to last year and to the overall judging guidelines, I am scoring this year's games as follows:

Pas De Deux by Linus Åkesson: 8
(LATE EXTRA CREDIT EDIT) Out by Viktor Sobol: 6
Skies Above by Arthur DiBianca: 6
Remedial Witchcraft by dgtziea: 5
Abandon Them by Alan Beyersdorf: 4
The Milgram Parable by Peter Eastman: 3

This means that Pas De Deux is about on the same level as Re: Dragon and just barely shy of Basilica de Sangre, Skies Above is about on the same level as that stealth parody dumb-on-purpose edutainment game I embarrassingly fell for and thought was real and earnestly defended anyway, my least favorite game of last year matches up with Abandon Them this year, and The Milgram Parable is (barely, by one point) the new official worst IFComp game I have ever played.

Honestly, all of these factoids scan. So yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right.

So.

IFComp.

Whew.

This year was... a bit draining, on all of us. Last year, xyzzysqrl, swordianmaster, and Sara and I all got through at least five each, and we all had at least a fair amount of enthusiasm for the better ones in our respective piles. Animalia was a genuine delight, but honestly, Instruction Set was the only game from last year I didn't enjoy overall (and even that was an "I like the idea" effort weighed down by flaws.) IFComp was fun and we were greatly looking forward to having more fun this year.

This year was a lot darker. Real life happened and knocked Xyzzy and Sword out of the competition almost entirely (Xyzzy did play one game) and we got some really downbeat draws to start off our end. I started including the chatlogs as we were browsing for our final three to show off the copies of some of the ones we rejected, and while I definitely recall being choosy last year as well, I don't remember there being this much of a sense of "Surely there must be something good in here that can save IFComp."

Fortunately, our increasing choosiness did seem to pay off, and the games did get better as we persevered. In fact, the scores versus the chronological sequence in which we played the original five (3, 4, 5, 6, 8) are in eerily perfect order. Pas De Deux (and later Out in the extra credit round) did save IFComp, and Skies Above and Remedial Witchcraft were at least okay to decent.

So... I don't know. I guess there was a miasma this year after all. Clan Sugardoom has depression, IFComp has depression, maybe it's a miracle that at least one (or two, hi Sara) of us were able to pull even this much good out of it. But with a last second buzzer-beater of a final pull, I do consider this to have been a worthwhile thing to do and an enjoyable experience overall, and I do still look forward to doing this again.

(And, of course, you the reader are welcome to join in as well, if you'd like! Play at least five IF games, do writeups, submit scores, help make Dreamwidth the somehow active mutual gameblogging circle it has become.)

IF is good. IFComp 2019 may or may not be, but I think that's the "2019" at fault more than the "IFComp." Huge thanks to Xyzzy for getting us into this, as always. See you in IFComp 2020! Hopefully everyone is okay by then.

IFComp continues.

Celine & Sara Kalante, [21.10.19 22:36]
" Your plan for a peaceful day out comes to a halt when you see a person selling cats on the pavement. The cats look sick and require immediate veterinarian help! It’s all legal, but it’s also wrong. You must find a way to save the cats.

The game offers three characters to choose from and a total set of 10 endings.

Content warning: Implied animal abuse (nothing explicit); environmental damage

15 minutes or less • Choice-based • Web-based "

JESUS. No.

Celine & Sara Kalante, [21.10.19 22:40]
" Springtime, 1993. Prom night. A lonely road on the way to the big dance. This should be a magical evening, but your date suddenly seems distant and withdrawn. Is it something you said? Or perhaps something more sinister is going on...

Horror • An hour and a half • Parser-based • Glulx (See guide) "

Looking at the banner, this is very obviously a werewolf story. Looking at the "Horror" tag, this is probably not played for "anyway your boyfriend is fuzzy now and that's hot." She should not click the IF game, run away run away run away, full moon is on the sky and we've other games we should play

Celine & Sara Kalante, [21.10.19 22:41]
" Years ago, orphan Henry Smyth was saved off the streets when he was adopted by Katherine Kellner - only to run away a few years later. Now, he’s finally made a decent life for himself. His world is turned upside down when he finds out that Kellner has been arrested on the charge of being a pedophile. This knowledge brings impulsive decisions and repressed memories along with it.

Play as Henry as he struggles to make sense of his past and come to terms with it. Your decisions throughout the story affect Henry’s confidence and morality – choose wisely.

Content warning: This game is intended for mature audiences only. Contains: strong language, violence, mention of child abuse and suicide.

Drama • Half an hour • Choice-based • Web-based "

See if you can spot the exact word where I noped out of this one.

Celine & Sara Kalante, [21.10.19 22:43]
" Play minigames to get your airship flying, tour the skies, and see what mischief is going on up there.

Parser-based • Glulx (See guide) "

There we go. Yes good we'll take it.

And so, IFComp 2019 pick number four is "Skies Above" by Arthur DiBianca. It's the first-ever IFComp game I wrote off without actually finishing it, yet it still somehow managed to be my favorite one of this year so far.

( Away we go! )

IFComp continues.

Full disclosure: I slept very poorly due to absolutely gutting bad dreams last night, and have been groggy and sluggish all day. It's almost dinnertime and I feel like I haven't even woken up and started the day yet, let alone... like... done anything. Xyzzy seems to be a bit out of sorts too, though, so who knows. Maybe there's a kind of general miasma going around my friend circle lately. Or maybe IFComp is just cursed with all-consuming depression this year, since this is my second downer game in a row.

I will try my best to set general feelings of blurf aside and judge this game on its actual merits, because I tend to just copy/paste these reviews into IFComp's actual score submission with minor edits as necessary, and "I'm a mess today so I'm going to dock points because I'm just not feeling this one" isn't exactly fair to the author.

Anyway. Next up we have Abandon Them by Alan Beyersdorf. Its copy:

"What exactly happened during the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel? How do we separate the fantasy of the folklore from the realities of starvation and abandonment?

"While often viewed as a fantasy story, my intention was to view this story from a psychological perspective.

"If you were a character in their story, what sorts of choices would you make?"

( Spoiler cut I guess, though it's one of those less-than-fifteen-minute games and it's very railroaded, so there's almost nothing here to spoil. )

Oops, there are a couple days left to go in IFComp and this one looked really intriguing, so I snuck it in. They said you had to review at least five games, which I did, but they never said it couldn't be one or two more.

Animalia by Ian Michael Waddell is a game about four animals in a Muppet Man stack trying to pass as an ordinary human child on a mission to convince the local human population not to invade your home. You have a choice of three specialists for each of the human suit's four positions, making twelve possible overall party combinations. The game is substantial enough that I wasn't able to squeeze a second run before hitting the two-hour time limit on IFComp judging, so I can't say for certain how I'm writing this how railroaded anything is without actually trying different things. However, at first glance, everything sure looks wide open, with each party member having actual outcome-affecting skills and weaknesses and allegiances with one another.

That's not even getting into the choices and attempts to do things that can succeed or fail throughout the game itself. There are relationships to manage, dangerous rescue missions to undertake, and more. IFComp's page describes it with the keywords "Wacky" and "Half an hour" but I don't think either of these are true. The amount of game in this game is dizzying, and it is stressful due to what I at least perceived on my initial run to be a fairly high difficulty (or at the very least, it is very easy to screw things up horribly) with major consequences for failure.

It's fantastic, though. I'm solidly behind this premise, and after getting my hopes utterly crushed and ground into bad-ending paste at the very last moment (I know someone I'm not choosing next time...) I think I need to come back and try my hand at this again sometime. Surely there must be a way, in the seemingly endless configurations, to make my party slightly less doomed. Maybe when IFComp's over and I'm not having to keep an eye on the clock and worry about scores.

IFComp time once again! This is the fifth and final game. It is worth noting that xyzzysqrl, swordianmaster, and I all played five different IFComp games, and none of us played anything that any of the others had played. That's fifteen unique games! If anyone else is reading this and wants to do IFComp judging (you have until November 15 to submit your scores,) are you going to revisit any of ours, or are you going to try for five more non-overlapping ones to make it 20 overall?

Let's Explore Geography! Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise by Carter Sande is... uh.

Look.

I saw this on this list there, and I figured probably not as many people were going to play it as some of the more eye-catching ones, and I wanted to give it a shot. And goodness knows I play enough weird games. So yeah, sure, what the heck, let's be a Canadian trucker. For edutainment!

You are a commodities trader in Toronto. It's a boring spreadsheet-oriented numbers in an office cubicle job, but one that makes you wealthy enough that "you decide to take a spare $1000000 you have lying around and go trucking" is a reasonable thing that you can feasibly do. And so, one protagonist's midlife crisis becomes a chance to Oregon Trail your way around the Canadian countryside, full of touristy explanations of all the local sights. Your goal is to spend 30 days buying pallets of some particular product in one city, and driving somewhere to sell it for a profit. I recommend playing this with the map and walkthrough which includes a list of what can be bought and sold where. Buying a pallet of whatever your starting city (Toronto) happens to have and taking a complete wild guess where you can go to sell it works about as well in this game as it would in real life.

I'm making this sound like the kind of boring edutainment classroom exercise that makes you wonder why some Canadian teacher wanted to submit this to IFComp, but it does pack a surprising amount of game in here. Bless this game's heart, I actually did find myself having a few "Huh. Neat!" moments as I did the tourist stuff in every town I drove through. Also there's an incredibly weird hidden ending you can get from bringing two seemingly unrelated souvenirs from other cities to THE OBELISK in a third. This lets you drive a phantom ice road that shouldn't be open this time of year to a town that isn't on the map and that might actually be Purgatory, except Wikipedia assures me that it actually exists.

Which, hey. That is a thing I have learned.

Anyway, this was surprisingly neat.