Nineteen reviews down!

Just reviewed my 19th game, which puts me a third of the way through the 2016 interactive fiction competition. Not sure what to play next. Any recommendations?

The God Device (review)

"The God Device" is a point and click story written by Andy Joel for the 2016 interactive fiction competition. The story is a pulp sci-fi action yarn about an average Jane who obtains a mysterious device from a stranger during a Trolley accident on another planet. Some powerful beings are after the device, which keeps Jane on the run, but thankfully she has enough time to put the thing in her storage locker, enjoy a drink at the bar, and flirt with some dude who turned out to be another bad agent.

The writing offered enough suspense to keep me going to three different sub-optimal endings (My top score was 8 out of 10, meaning I was near the end.) But it needs further editing. Dialogue feels contrived. Sentence structure is awkward. Lots of choice points makes this fun. Continued revisions would make it better.

"You are standing in a cave" (review)

"You are standing in a cave" is a z-code game written by Caroline Berg for the 2016 interactive fiction competition.

The blurb says:
... you do not know how you got here. The last thing you remember is going out to eat at a fancy restaurant. Perhaps you were drugged. Perhaps you had a bad case of food poisoning and wandered off, feverish, into the outskirts of town. Whatever the case may be, you are here now. Wherever here is. And you want to leave.

IF games about caves and amnesiacs have been out of vogue for so long now, I figured this would either be a joke entry or some post-modern take on the genre. But after playing it for a bit I decided this is a sincere, but flawed, piece of fan fiction doing its best to celebrate the magical underground empires of yesteryear.

The sense of magic is there in the writing, but the implementation is weak. "Examine me" gives a default response. "About", "help", "hints" and "credits" all go unimplemented. I scored a few "points" and examined a few things, which kept me motivated for a while. But I was frustrated by a slew of parser issues, and some straight up programming bugs. Had there been a walk-through available on-line, I might have continued. But this isn't something I want to download onto my computer.

Parser Fiction is Not Dead Yet! (Review of "Color the Truth")

Was it only three days ago I forecast the death of parser fiction? Like all similar predictions which came before it, mine was made prematurely.

"Color the Truth" is a Glulx game written by mathbrush for the 2016 interactive fiction competition. I was familiar with "mathbrush" as the author of last year's "Ether" I liked Ether, but it was more of an art-piece than a conventional story. "Color the Truth" has a more narrative style, but capitalizes on some truly innovative extensions to the standard model of Inform.

I won't give anything away, because the blurb tells you exactly what this is. You are the detective assigned to investigate the murder of radio personality Rosalita Morales.

A good mystery is one of the most difficult forms of genre fiction to write, because they involve so many plot twists. The author must weave together lies and truth and peel them back in a sequence which allows the reader to solve the mystery at precisely the same moment as the protagonist. "Color the Truth" achieves exactly that. This is as good as any IF mystery I've ever played.

The game also features a novel mechanism for interrogating suspects, and a novel way of relaying the story with multiple cut-scenes from different perspectives. A most impressive programming effort and grand story-telling achievement. You must play this.

Rite of Passage (review)

"Rite of Passage" is a Twine game written by Arno von Borries for the 2016 interactive fiction competition. The blurb says 

"A comedy in four parts about exciting games of instinct and wits, set in childhood. Not necessarily for children."

Should get the award for the most misleading blurb. This is not a comedy.

The Death of Parser Fiction? (a review of several ifcomp games)

Further down I review three parser games from this year's interactive fiction competition:
"Zigamus: Zombies at Vigamus" by Marco Vallarino
"Steam and Sacrilege" by Phil McGrail
"Theatre People" by Michael Kielstra

The 2016 Interactive Fiction Competition has more games than ever (58?). But of these, surprisingly few are parser based games. I count 6 in Z-code, 11 in glulx, and this year only 1 TADS game. That's a total of only 18 parser games, fewer than were entered in 1996, the second year of the competition. Of course this isn't a rigorous analysis. There may be some home-brew parser games I haven't counted. The lines of what constitute a "parser" are kind of blurry. "Mirror and Queen" (Chandler Groover) allows open input and recognizes a huge vocabulary of topics, but doesn't "parse" actions. "Inside the Facility" (Arthur DiBianca) is a z-code game with such a highly constrained list of actions that it has its own unique play dynamic. On the other hand, "Detectiveland" (Robin Johnson) features such exceptional world modeling that it feels like a classic parser game even though "Detectiveland" is actually point and click.

I wouldn't be the first to predict the demise of parser fiction. Pundits were saying that in 1992. Then the following year Graham Nelson released Inform and launched a new age for interactive fiction. I may be wrong now...I haven't played them all, and I've already overlooked "Fair" which actually was quite good ("Fair" published in Glulx by Hanon Ondricek for this year's comp).

Here I plan to discuss three parser games which succeed and fail for different reasons.

Inside the Facility (review)

"Inside the Facility" is a parser game written by Arthur DiBianca for the 2016 interactive fiction competition. The blurb says:

"Your friend Mike thinks no one can infiltrate THE FACILITY, but you're going to prove him wrong."

The cover art is a crayon drawing of an Erlenmeyer flask with pink bubbles rising to the surface.

A map is available, but it's just a Cartesian grid of rooms which I should use to construct my own map during the game. Back in the heyday of parser fiction I could construct maps on the back of an old phone bill or a used napkin, so I should be well prepared.

I imagine this is going to be a light puzzler. We'll see after the break....