#intfic

[chromathesia]

a piece of interactive fiction about a plague and its vector.

i wrote a twine game in around two and a half days :) it's not the most polished thing in the world and it looks insane on mobile but we trek on

[kudakii]

looks like they could kill you, is a cinnamon roll vs looks like a cinnamon roll, would kill you (please don’t mess with the second children of westerlin and zaledo, they could tag team and bulldoze you to another continent) 

(i love javi so dearly. they’re so cute truly my everything. mwah mwah @ javi. somehow my mc ended up getting super close to javi... they’re besties now <3)

[adz]

Repeat the Ending by Drew Cook (Gold Machine)

Explore a "critical edition" of a 1996 Inform 5 game about loss, magic, and the second law of thermodynamics.

Drew Cook's brilliant Repeat the Ending has swept the 2023 IFDB awards, tying for Outstanding Game and winning Author's Choice, Outstanding Debut, and numerous other categories. Do yourself a favor and dive into this intelligent, beautiful, and deeply rewarding game.

[ode-to-odes]

IFComp 2024 Reviews: Traffic by D. S. Yu

It's that time of year again! I'll be crossposting these reviews on intfiction.net, where you can find reviews by many other interactive fiction freaks such as myself, links to the comp website, and other such information. Onto the review.

I'll put this all under the cut because it's... very long, but please be aware that there are spoilers in the technical section!

Time played: About an hour Completion: 2 out of maybe 3 endings? I got to the normal ending, a bit of a silly ending, and I know there’s a third ending that has a bit more substance, but I was satisfied with the run I had. Could be more “try it and find out” endings than the one I found, but I have no clue.

TLDR; Conceptually, I like this game a lot, but there were a few things that prevented me from enjoying the gameplay experience as much as I could have. Solid entry.

The writing: No noticeable typos or grammar errors, and the writing style is consistent, with some great touches of deadpan humor which I found entertaining. The characters were distinct enough to not be flat, even with the limited descriptions and interactions there are.

The gameplay: I love a time loop when done well, and I think the ability to change the timeline by switching perspectives is a really great way to keep the game engaging and interesting. I also enjoyed the variety of different puzzles – some based on interaction with others, some with the environment. It’s a small game, so there’s not very many, but none of them felt like reskinned versions of each other, which I appreciated.

The technical: I struggled a lot with interactions with other people. Different authors and engines do dialogue in many different ways, without an ABOUT or a HELP menu to explain how to talk to people or ask people things, I found myself blindly trying dialogue options, mostly to no avail. You can talk to people directly with the “person, verb” structure, or you can ask someone for something, but only rarely about anything, which I found unusual – an explanation of this early on would have gone a long way to alleviating some of the frustration I had. The biggest problem I had was similar to the verb-guessing issue, but which probably would have made the game impossible for me to finish without the walkthrough; there are some objects which aren’t mentioned in the text (that I could find) but are required. This was most evident to me with the taxi, which I hadn’t seen in the text at all, but which was necessary to examine in order to continue. Examining the street it was on yielded no description beyond the direction the traffic was going, and I never would have known to look at it. This is also applicable to the traffic puzzle, which was particularly aggravating to me for being much simpler than I thought it was. I’d go so far as to say it’s a bit misleading. I’ll spoiler this one for anyone who doesn’t want to see the solution: If you ask John about the panel, he explains how it works, and says you need to input the correct number to fix the traffic lights. The solution to this is to unscrew the panel (which has no mention of being screwed in) with a screwdriver you get from John (who doesn’t appear to have anything on him except a clipboard). The solution is NOT to do the math required to algebraically find the correct number needed (which is very possible, and requires only addition and subtraction). I chose the algebra on my first time around. Frustratingly, when you correctly solve this puzzle via screwdriver method and press a button to set the number, it gives a number which is different from the one you get when you do the math. I understand that this might be a serious case of me paying way too much attention to one thing, but I think given that the actual solution to the puzzle is much less obvious than the one which requires the player to do algebra with a pen and paper, it might as well have been a puzzle with two different ways to get to the same solution. If the number provided in the game matched the one you get with the correct math, this wouldn’t have been nearly as annoying to me, but the in-game math being wrong in conjunction with the puzzle having completely unmentioned components drove me kind of bonkers.

Misc notes: Don’t sell yourself short! Saying things like “this game is unlikely to change your life in any meaningful way” in the description of the game won’t do you any favors in convincing people to play it. It’s a well-written game, and only a few edits short of being something really polished. You should be proud of it. Plus, when combined with the depressing attitude of the main character, the game starts to feel a little too dreary, in my opinion. Despite my algebra rant, I did like this game a lot, and I’m really glad it was the first entry I tried this year! It’s setting a good bar for the rest of the parser games.

[loressa]

Been learning how to make images look more snazzy as I poke away at the update to Starcrossed!

Expanding out dialogue so you'll learn a story about each character as you get to know them, and the exploration sections will have puzzles!

Check out the original jam game version of this game, bugs and all, here:

Starcrossed by Loressa, katescapedsgn, Mitchell R. R. Akhurst, Yazorius

A text-focused choice-based detective game in a mystical setting.

[manonamora-if]

Participate in the 2023 Interactive Fiction Top 50!

Interactive Fiction Top 50 In 2011, 2015, and 2019, I organised a vote for the Interactive Fiction Top 50: 2011 thread, results (forum),

Another neat thing happening in the IF space! Voting for the best IF of all time!

[ectafoole]

I'm really sorry for like-spamming you just now 😅 I came across Bloom not long after its completion. I was a young trans boy who'd always been sure of his identity, but it was the most comforting thing in the world to me. It still is - I go back through it several times a year, when my dysphoria rises up and I begin to feel trapped. Despite several years of following your content, it only occurred to me today to see whether you were on Tumblr. I was overjoyed to find that you were! Thank you 💕

so i failed to check my asks for several years running

and wow

thank you anon <3 i hope you see that i saw this and it made me happy. I love that an old partly-done project could serve you emotionally for years. It makes me happy

[adz]

DOL-OS by manonamora

Inside ancien ruins, you find an old computer...

just finished this remarkable game by my friend Manon (@manonamora-if). as much a marvel of creative styling and game design as it is thoughtfully and brilliantly written. please check it out if it interests you; it's playable in French and English.