IFComp 2025: E Chuchel's A winter morning on the beach
This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2025, the thirty-first annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 85 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of October for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!
As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair. And also because, by this point, I'm familiar with it, and it feels like a comfortable rating system to me.
This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.
There's not a whole lot of game here: your doctor has told you to get more exercise, so you're trying to work up to ten thousand steps a day. You're on the beach. You can wander north or south along the shoreline, reading the informative signs (a regularly repeating series of eight quotes about the sea, environmentalism, and stewardship). If you walk too much without resting, you'll get a cramp: game over. If you stop and look at things too long instead of getting your exercise, a seagull will crap on you: game over. Once you get your steps in, there's a small vignette where you interact with a mother and her child; if you exhibit generosity, you get a piece of good news on the way back home. If not, you don't. (And by the way, I think an exercise simulator is a really interesting concept to play with.)
So it's a little slice-of-life vignette, implemented decently well, that made me a little nostalgic for my own childhood in a beach town at the rear end of nowhere. I could wish that there had been more variety in the quotes or a bit more evocative effort put into the descriptions, but it does what it says it does. It's an exercise simulator with a pretty background, competent descriptions, and some thoughtful quotes, plus smoothly implemented mechanics.
(My rating: 5/10. Perhaps quixotically, I drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)
