IF

The Shadow in the Cathedral is a member of a supposedly extinct species, the commercial interactive fiction game. It's the second work out by Textfyre, and was designed by Ian Finley and written by Jon Ingold -- both well-known in the hobbyist community for diverse, gripping, and sometimes disturbing work, though Finley's last notable game came out back in 2000.

Disclaimer: this one isn't a review, but rather some designer's notes on Alabaster, a new interactive fiction project.

For a couple of years now I've been working on a tool to make it easier for me -- and other IF authors who use Inform -- to construct compelling conversations that don't feel like clippings from the Dialogue Tree.

Here are some things I hate about typical dialogue trees:

There's an ongoing discussion in the interactive fiction community about whether or not we're well-served by our traditional reliance on second person present-tense narration -- the kind of thing that works for

You are standing in a damp cave.

or

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

...but not so much for

You feel overwhelmed by existential angst and break down weeping.

MS Paint Adventures is not a game. Except that it is a game, absolutely.

The current game in progress is Problem Sleuth, but two previous games have been completed, and are archived. If you check out the first page of Problem Sleuth, you'll see a crudely-drawn private eye standing in his apartment, with the canonical things present you might expect to see if this were a graphic adventure -- a gun, a desk, a phone, a wall safe, a door from the office. Below is a blinking > cursor, which you might reasonably think is an invitation for you to type in text. It isn't.

Everybody Dies is a short, sharp interactive story -- with illustrations. It's got lots going for it, and it just took third place in the yearly interactive fiction competition. You should definitely play. But what I want to talk about here is its departure from the usual form.

Fate is interactive fiction by Victor Gijsbers, the author of the rather disquieting The Baron. Gijsbers is very interested in play (either in computer games or in role-playing games) that challenges the moral decision-making of the player, often by setting a series of difficult choices related to the same theme. In The Baron, this was about how a person should behave when he finds himself to be something monstrous. In Fate, the questions are about what you (as an expectant mother) are willing to sacrifice to save yourself and your unborn child.