Tag Archives: 2021 IF Competition

Game Review: AardVarK Versus The Hype (2021, Truthcraze)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

AardVarK versus The Hype is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

This year is 1997 and the students at the local high school have been transformed into blood-coughing, murderous zombies by the Hype, a new soft drink.  It’s up to the members of the world’s great garage band, AardVarK, to defeat the Hype but doing so is going to involve solving some puzzles and spendng a lot of time at a convenience store.

This is an intentionally strange game and it takes a while to get used to the format but I dug it.  There are four members of AardVarK and, throughout the game, you switch back and forth from which member of the band you’re playing.  Sometimes, it can be difficult to keep track of which band member you are but I still appreciated the game’s ambition.  This might be the first true enemble Interactive Fiction game that I’ve ever played.

The story is full of goofy, self-referential humor.  Imagine if Kevin Smith wrote an IF game and you might have some idea of this game’s skewed perspective.  It’s a fun game, though, full of odd dialogue and strange scenes.  Some of the puzzles do have weird, out-there solutions but fortunately, the game comes with a HINT section that will help you out.  The best thing to do with a game like this is to just type whatever pops into your head and see what happens.  The joy here is from the journey and seeing just how weird things can get!

Play AardVark Versus The Hype.

Game Review: And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One (2021, BJ Best)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One is one of the best text adventure games that I’ve ever played and since the joy of discovery is one of the best things about this game, I don’t want to spoil too much of it in this review.  In this game, the time is the distant past.  You are Emerson and you’re fourteen years old.  Your best friend is a girl named Riley.  Riley will soon be moving all the way to Wisconsin.  As the game begins, you bicylce over to her house.  As it rains outside, you two play the games on her computer.

Will you try to beat Infinite Adventure, a series of seemingly simple games where you have to solve puzzles to advance to the next adventure?  Will you once again play the Wizardry knock-off, the one where you kills monsters and find junk?  Will you try out the educational game that Riley’s mother is testing?  Or will you get really brave and risk the sordid world of strip poker?  It sounds simple but there’s a catch.  All of the games are connected and your future and Riley’s future will be determined by the decisions you make.

This is an ingeniously clever game and it will spark nostalgia for the days when everyone owned a bulky personal computer and crude graphics were the only thing that was needed to spark a player’s imagination.  But it’s also a game about friendship, love, and growing up. It’s also not an unnecessarily difficult game and your patience will be rewarded.  I got one of the good endings and I’ve never felt happier about how an IF game ended.  The film is full of great characters, from Riley to the people who you meet while playing the games on Riley’s computer.  I can’t wait to play this one again and see what I may have missed the first time around.

Play And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One.

Game Review: Closure (2021, Sarah Willson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Closure is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

In Closure, you play the best friend of Kira. Kira has just broken up with her longtime boyfriend. Because she wants to find, for sentimental reasons, a photograph that was taken of the two of them during happier times, she breaks into his dorm room to search for it. When she can’t find it, she texts you. She sends you a description of the dorm room and asks you for advice. You can text back with command like “search the desk,” “look in the closet,” and “leave the room.”

The last command is one that I sent a few times because I’m not a teenage girl and I guess I had the stereotypical male response to Kira’s problem. Sad over a breakup in college? Leave the dorm room, suppress all of your emotions and your feelings, drink until you pass out, wake up with a monster hangover, keeping going out and turning off every girl you meet by constantly talking about your ex, and, after everyone finally tells you that they’re getting sick of hearing about it, move on with your life. That worked in college (or, at least, everyone always pretended that it worked in college) but it wouldn’t make for a very good or emotionally rewarding IF game.

Closure, however, is a good IF game. Once I accepted that I wasn’t going to be able to talk Kira into leaving the dorm room, I helped her investigate and solve the mystery of why her boyfriend had dumped her. At first, I thought the texting approach would make for an awkward game but it actually ended up working pretty well and the game ends with a good message about moving on and yes, closure. It also ends with a suggestion of things that you could tell Kira to try the next time that you play the game. This is a simple but rewarding game, one that can be played more than once.

Play Closure.

Game Review: You Are SpamZapper 3.1 (2021, Leon Arnott)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

You Are Spam Zapper 3.1 is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

Sometimes you play a game and it totally takes you by surprise. That’s what You Are Spam Zapper 3.1 did to me.

This Twine game takes place in the early 2000s. You are Spam Zapper 3.1. Your job is zap spam emails and keep them from getting into your human’s email inbox. Sometimes, the job is easy. Many of the emails are obviously fake and it’s easy to know that they should be zapped. Sometimes, it’s more difficult. Do you zap all of the ads or just some? What do you do when humans use weird symbols in their emails? Is it an emoji or is it a virus?

When I started playing, I thought the entire game was just going be reading email that were meant to parody the type of junk that we all used to get back in the early days of the the new century and laughing at how the internet used to be. There is a lot of that in the game but, as you read the emails, another story develops about your human and their friends and their attempts to communicate in a world that’s becoming depersonalized by technology. Do you get involved in your human’s life and with the lives of their friends? Do you reach out to the other plug-ins, who all have their job to do whenever the human turns on their computer? Or do you just do your job and zap anything that looks suspicious?

You Are Spam Blocker 3.1 is a memorable mix of comedy and drama that will take most players by surprise.

Play You Are Spam Blocker 3.1.

Game Review: This Won’t Make You Happy (2021, Mike Gillis)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

This Won’t Make You Happy is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

You are standing outside the Caves of Despair and you’re feeling sad. Maybe it’s not a good idea to go into the Caves of Despair, then. Maybe you should stand outside and check your phone. Take a look at Twitter. Check out your dating apps. Play a game … you know something? Caves of Despair are looking pretty damn good right now.

Inside the Caves of Despair, there are gems! That shouldn’t come as a surprise to any Interactive Fiction veteran. How many games have we played where we were supposed to be happy just because we found a gem or a diamond in some musty old cave? This Won’t Make You Happy is one of the few games with the courage to directly address the absurdity of wasting your imaginary life on not only gems but also protecting them from obnoxious gnomes.

This Won’t Make You Happy is a meta game that comments on the shallowness of hunting for gems and paying attention to a narrator. It’s the type of game that will probably annoy people searching for a more traditional IF adventure but I liked it because it addressed several issues that I always wondered about whenever I played any of these games. For instance, who is the narrator and why are we following his orders? It’s a quick game and there’s enough funny moments that it’s worth replaying.

Play This Won’t Make You Happy.

Game Review: The Waiting Room (2021, Billy Krolick)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The Waiting Room is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

In The Waiting Room, you have just been hired work at a nursing home. From the minute you show up for your first day, it seems like something is off. The lights keep flickering. A patient named Ethel says she needs help but your co-worker, Austin, orders you to ignore her. The night nurse, Maria, refuses to go in the back hallway. The patients all say that the nursing home is haunted by shadow people, waiting to abduct the dying.

Can you solve the mystery? That’s up to you. One of the things that I like about The Waiting Room is that it actually is a work of interactive fiction. The choicse that you make actually do effect the direction of the story. How the game ends will depend on how brave or cowardly you decide to be. Will you be a compassionate caregiver or will you be cruel and self-centered? The choice is yours but there are consequences for each choice.

The Waiting Room is a well written twine game. (If you’ve never played a twine game, they’re like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, just with more options and details.) There have been a lot of good IF gams about haunted house and the atmospheric The Waiting Room brings to mind some of the best of them while also establishing its own identity. There are a few puzzles to be solved but they’re not extremely difficult. Instead, the emphasis is just on making the right decisions when it comes to dealing with both the living and the dead.

Play the Waiting Room.