Text Adventure

Shade is one of those classics that get recommended anytime anyone recommends any IF to newcomers: it's brief, disquieting, ambiguous, memorable without being especially difficult. It offers an interaction style too guided and fluid to be called "puzzly", and which probably belongs in some other category. It threatens one's ideas of the relationship between the player and the protagonist. It has entered the canon, as far as interactive fiction has one.

Common Ground is about perceptions and misunderstandings: the player experiences a set of events from the perspective of three protagonists. Their respective ideas of what is going on (and why) dovetail together in sometimes-surprising ways, and the result is a story about communication and expectation in an ordinary family.

Adventure games may struggle with many aspects of static fiction -- plot, characterization, pacing -- but they nail setting. The place is, after all, right there for the player to explore, with all its atmosphere and complexity, and a half-decent designer can set in layer on layer of subtle clues about how this strange world works. Not every player will be equally interested in all of it, but the mechanisms of exploration serve to dole out exposition in tolerably-sized pieces, and let players discover the aspects of the game world that they're most interested in.

Necrotic Drift is one of my favorite games to bring out whenever discussing the relationship between player and protagonist.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I've been flamed just for saying that before, because someone found the opening sequence so unpleasant as to be angry I had caused him to have any contact with the game at all.

So consider yourself warned: this game includes heaping helpings of profanity; copious references to drug use, sexuality, and violence; misogynistic and otherwise seriously unenlightened characters; and at least one grotesque misapplication of every secretion the human body can produce. There's an artistic purpose to it all, but I wouldn't want anyone thinking this was a good game to introduce to their Sunday school class.

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Slouching Towards Bedlam is a great game, without being a perfect one. It has some rough spots in the implementation; there are moments when key characters could be more fully developed. But polish isn't everything. The production values here are good enough to support the game's main concept, and that concept is enough to make it worth playing and replaying.

Slouching begins at a Victorian lunatic asylum. The setting is steampunk-Lovecraftian, and the first few puzzles are fairly research and discovery puzzles. Expect to spend some time manipulating the mechanical filing system at the asylum. At the beginning, things seem to be strange in a familiar way.

Aisle is a one-turn game. Play a turn, and the game ends.

Restart. Try something else. The game ends again.

This isn't a case where working out just the right single move will win, either. (For that, try Andrew Pontious' brilliant but difficult Rematch.) No, Aisle is partly about exploration -- an astonishing number of commands are implemented, ranging well outside the usual set of interactive fiction commands -- and partly about assembling the story that you're interested in.

Each ending tells another piece of story about an event in your past. Some of the fragments work together. Some conflict with one another.

The Act of Misdirection is a short horror story. There are some interactions that might be called puzzles, but they don't feel like it -- at least, not in the conventional sense. Instead, the interaction feels like an improv routine, in which the game hints gently (and then more explicitly) at the player's role, and the player performs on cue.

I held off reviewing Lost Pig here because I beta-tested it, and I tend to feel some attachment to games I test.

Now that it's won first place in last year's annual IF Competition, though, and taken home the Best Individual PC, Best Individual NPC, Best Writing, and Best Game XYZZYs for 2007, and earned rave reviews from as far afield as the Onion AV Club, I think I can safely say it's not just my own affectionate beta-tester's bias at work: this is a fantastic game.

9:05 is a tiny game, and everyone interested in interactive fiction should play it at least once.

This is true of most of Adam Cadre's IF work, actually: he is interested in the formal limits of interactive fiction design, and that means that even his smallest and least-known work tends to force the player to reassess what games can do.

But to say much more than that about this game would be to spoil the experience -- try it and you'll see.

One of the more encouraging developments in interactive fiction is the development of distinct genres special to the medium -- not genres based on book-selling categories like "fantasy" and "mystery", but genres that are about interaction. The gradual development of these is, I think, a sign of the medium maturing; of authors beginning to see how specific interaction patterns are useful for specific kinds of storytelling; of players recognizing those patterns as interesting.

C. E. J. Pacian's Gun Mute belongs to the genre of combat-puzzle IF.