Tag Archives: Interactive Fiction

Horror Game Review: 331 Oakmont Drive (Yunakitty, Choose Your Story)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Before I review this game, I have to give a shout-out to the community at Choose Your  Story.  I play a lot of online interactive fiction games and I spend time on a lot of different gaming sites.  Some of them are good.  Most of them are not.  However, the games at Choose Your Story have been consistently good and enjoyable to play and read.  The games follow the Choose Your Own Adventure format and it’s obvious that most of the writers put a good deal of effort into their stories.  The community, as well, seems to offer up constructive criticism and really, the entire site feels like an antidote to all of the terrible things that you usually come across online.  Whenever I play some overly long Twine game that was written by someone who clearly gave more thought to their background music than to actually coming up with a decent storyline, it makes me appreciate the work being done at Choose Your Story.

As for 331 Oakmont Drive, it’s an enjoyable horror storygame that is perfect for the Halloween season.  You are a college student who, along with your friend Sophie, makes extra money cleaning other people’s houses.  You have been hired to clean 331 Oakmont Drive but you have a bad feeling about the place as soon as you arrive.  Do you stay in the house and do the job (you do need the money) or do you immediately try to leave?  Either choice will take you on a different journey through 331 Oakmont Drive.  This game has several endings.  Some are happy, most are not.  With many rooms to explore (and try to escape) and many macabre fates possibly waiting, this is one of those games that can be played over and over again.  The game is entertaining, it’s well-written, and some thought was actually put into the story.  It’s a game that will get you in the mood for the Halloween season.

Play 331 Oakmont Drive here!

Game Review: American Outlaws: The Dillinger Gang (2017, by Will 1 1)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The time is the Great Depression and you are a lawyer who has had a terrible run of luck.  You’ve lost your money, your home, and your wife.  Sent to prison for a pretty crime, you befriend the legendary outlaw John Dillinger.  When you are both released on the same day, it’s time to get back to doing what Dillinger does best, robbing banks.

American Outlaws: The Dillinger Game is a choose-your-own-adventure style game, in which you are a member of Dillinger’s gang and an associate of outlaws like Baby Face Nelson, Red Hamilton, and Homer van Meter.  The choices start out simple.  Do you accompany Dillinger on his latest robbery?  Do you head to Indiana with Dillinger or do you instead decide to join Baby Face Nelson’s gang?  The choices start to get more difficult.  Do you run when the cops show up?  Do you fight with the cops?  When a member of the gang orders you to shoot someone, do you do it?  The game keeps a running tally of the number of gunfights you’ve taken part in, the number of people you’ve injured, the number that you’ve killed, the number of banks you’ve robbed, and the amount of money you’ve made.  Depending on the decisions you make, it’s totally possible to make it all the way through this game and retire without having killed or even injured someone.  It’s also possible to be such a viscous outlaw that even Baby Face Nelson wouldn’t mess with you.  The longer your play, the more money you can potentially make but the more money you make, the more likely it is that you’ll commit a crime that will make it impossible for you to safely retire.  You could end up the last member of the Dillinger Gang.  You could also just as easily end up getting taken down by the FBI.

It helps to know the history of the Dillinger gang.  That saved my life at least once.  In fact, it’s really not difficult to survive the game.  The sensible decisions are there and easy to make.  But why be sensible when you’re hanging out with John Dillinger and there’s more and more money to be made?

This is a good game because every choice really does effect what happens to your bank robber.  There are no throw-away choices and who your outlaw turns out to be really does depend on the decisions that you make.  Because there are so many different outcomes, this is a fast-paced game can be played again and again.

Play American Outlaws: The Dillinger Gang.

Game Review: Get There On Time! (2024, Leticia Fox)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

You’re awake!  Your day has just begun!  Can you get there on time!?

Get There On Time! is a game that I think everyone can relate to.  Each day, you wake up.  You are determined to get there on time.  Where is there?  It doesn’t matter.  You just have to get there on time.  Can you do it?

Get There On Time! is short and simple.  It’s a game in that you are given a selection of options but, just as in real life, some times it doesn’t matter how many options you are given.  This really is more of an existential joke than a traditional game, with each choice leading to the inevitable punchline.  But it’s a joke that everyone can relate to.

Click here to play Get There On Time!

Game Review: Re-Election Campaign (2024, by Orange)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Re-Election Campaign is a Choose Your Own Adventure-style work of Interactive Fiction.  You are Jesse Jordan, the mayor of Cougar Valley, Washington.  You have been mayor for the last four years and you’re planning on being mayor for the next four and for a long time after that.

But first, can you win reelection?  Getting more votes than your friend Bob shouldn’t be a problem.  But what about Marie Eckles, the wealthy reform candidate who keeps highlighting what a terrible mayor you’ve been?  Do you do what you have to do to raise the money to out-advertise her?  Or do you just challenge her to a duel?  Or do you do something that is potentially even worse to secure your victory?

I don’t want to spoil the game but Re-Election Campaign has so many options and so many different outcomes that its one that you really do have to play over and over again to get the full story.  You can either play this quickly for fun (and I enjoyed seeing what would happen whenever I made an obviously bad decision) or you can do a deep dive and discover just how crazy things can get when politics and power are concerned.  I really enjoyed discovering a new aspect of the story every time that I played.  It takes more than a few run-throughs to really discover who Jesse Jordan really is.  Nothing is what it initially seems and I actually was taken by surprise when the truth was eventually revealed.  Well-written and frequently very funny, Re-Election Campaign is one of the best IF games that I’ve played in a while.

Click here to play Re-Election Campaign.

Game Review: Sidetrack (2023, Andi C. Buchanan)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In Sidetrack, you are a teenager who walks the same route to school every day.  Every day, you walk past an abandoned subway station.  Today, though, you see that the station is suddenly open and you decide to explore.  From the first station, you can take the train to as many or as few locations as you want.  Each location has a different feel to it.  The first station that I visited featured people who were made of wood and I had to exchange my money for wooden coins.  Another station was full of friendly spiders while another had biting fish.  Exploring each station brings the chance of finding something that you can use to enhance the experience your experience at another station.  You can visit and re-visit all of the stations as much as you like but when you finally decide to return home, the experience is over.

Designed with Twine and featuring stations that were created by guest authors, Sidetrack is about as pure of an Interactive Fiction experience as you could hope to have.  It’s a story that lasts for as long as you want it to and that goes where you direct it to go.  Well-written and intriguing, this is not a game where you have to worry about getting stuck because you picked the wrong verb or you missed a step in solving an intricate puzzle.  This is a game that you experience like a surreal but unforgettable dream.  Take the journey and see how many stations you can explore.

Play Sidetrack.

Game Review: Amnesia (1986, Electronic Arts)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

You wake up in a hotel room in New York City.  You have no idea how you got there.  You have no idea who you are.  And you have no clothes.

So starts Amnesia, the semi-legendary text adventure game from 1986.  Amnesia was Electronic Arts’s attempt to challenge Infocom’s domination of the text adventure genre.  To write the game, they brought in author Thomas M. Disch.  Disch came up with a twisty and complex story where each choice often led to unexpected tangents.  The game featured a detail recreation of Manhattan, one that you could experience only if you could figure out how to find some clothes and get out of the hotel without getting arrested.  Of course, even after finding something to wear, it’s probable the many players decided to go ahead and marry the mysterious woman who claimed to be the main character’s fiancée.  Those players found themselves suddenly whisked off to an Australian sheep farm, where they lived out their days happy but unsure of who they actually were.  For them, the game ended quickly but without many answers.  Others, however, braved the streets of a virtual Manhattan is search of their identity.

Who are you?  Throughout the game, there are clues but they’re not always easy to find.  There’s a large collection of eccentric and bizarre characters who can help you or hinder you.  You have to avoid the police who want to arrest you and the people who are trying to kill you.  Of course, even if you defeat those assassins, the game also features random encounters with people who will ask you for directions and who will shoot you if you give them the wrong answer.  This feature was actually something that EA added to the game to punish anyone who had borrowed the game disk from a friend.  The game originally came with code wheel that you could use to determine which streets intersected with each other.  If you bought the game, you would be able to give people the proper directions.  If you didn’t buy the game or, if you’re playing the game in 2023 at the Internet archive, you would end up making a random guess and hoping that it didn’t lead to you getting shot by a tourist.

(Fortunately, there’s an online version of the code wheel.)

Even if you die, the game doesn’t necessarily end.  You might find yourself waiting in Purgatory.  After a certain number of turns, Charon might approach and ask if you’ve figured out your name.  If you give him the right name, you can move on.  If you don’t know your name, Charon leaves with a promise that he’ll return in another thousand years.

Amnesia is a challenging game.  It’s also a frequently frustrating game.  Thomas M. Disch was an author and the game reads like a long and dense novel.  There are times when Disch seemed to forget that the point of Interactive Fiction is that the player is supposed to have complete control over their actions.  At the same time, Amnesia’s descriptions are so detailed and many of the events are so unexpected that this is a game that benefits from frequent replaying.  And the game itself is so difficult that when you actually manage to accomplish anything, whether it’s getting out of the hotel or finding a place to sleep or even giving someone the right directions, you feel as if you’re the greatest player alive.

Or at least you do until the next puzzle comes along.

Play Amnesia.

Game Review: Europop Vampire (2021, Chris Chinchilla)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

You’re a vampire so get out there and party!

That is pretty much the plot of this short Twine game.  You are given the option of deciding what type of vampire you are (Are you a Nosferatu or a Twilight or a Gothic Vampire?) and you’re also allowed to decide just how exactly you want to spend your evening.  Do you want to hit the clubs or would you rather spend your night singing karaoke?  It’s up to you.

This game feels like it may have been abandoned why it was still being developed but what there is of it is enjoyable.  The game at least has a sense of humor.  There’s even an ending where the game says that you’re obviously looking for something darker than this game is prepared to offer up.  Not much happens in this game but a few of the jokes did make me laugh.  After you’ve played as many overlong, overly serious Twine games as I have, it’s hard not to appreciate something as unpretentious as Europop Vampire.

Play Europop Vampire.

Horror Game Review: Power, MT (2017, Phil Strahl)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

You were just a traveler, passing through Power, Montana, when your car broke down.  Temporarily stranded, you were thankful when a local farmer offered to let you stay in his guest room for the night.  But then something terrible descends upon Power and you find yourself running through the town, fearful for your life.

The objective of Power, MT is straight-forward.  Make your way through town and hopefully, find some sort of protection before you are captured by the strange, apparently supernatural storm that is pursuing you.  To be able to do this, though, you’re going to need the flashlight on your phone to see where you are going.  And, with each turn, that flashlight drains your battery and leaves you that much close to being plunged into a darkness from which there is no escape.  It’s a simple and relatable premise.  Who hasn’t hit the panic button while searching for a place to recharge their phone?  The game is well-written and there are a lot of places to explore, even if there’s not always a lot of time to reach them.  Power, MT captures the feeling of running for your life.  It’s a challenging game (so be prepared to die a few times while figure it out) but it’s also not impossible to win.

Play Power, MT

Game Review: The Twine Fishing Simulator (2022, maxine sophia wolff)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The Twine Fishing Simulator starts out like an old school fishing simulator.  At first, everything about it, from the font to the simple directions, reminded me of the type of clunky but addictive text games that I used to play back in the early 90s.  Back then, we didn’t need a lot of fancy graphics or even much descriptive text.  We just needed our imagination.

You are fishing.  You start at the Lake.  If you catch enough different types of fish, new locations will be opened.  Each new location gets bigger and there are new fish to catch at each place.  There are also various rewards that you can get after you catch certain fish.  There are NPCs who you can talk to.  You can ask them questions about fishing.  Some of them offer hints.  Some offer side quests.  Some ruminate on the nature of existence.

The further you get into the game, the stranger it gets.  This is not a typical fishing simulator.  It’s not just about catching the fish.  It’s about why you’re catching the fish and why you’re moving from one location to another.  It starts out as nostalgic fun and then gets increasingly surreal as the game progresses.  I can’t reveal too much about it without spoiling the game’s puzzles but it’s ultimately one gigantic mindscrew disguised as a fishing simulator, and an entertaining one at that.  Anyone can write a strange game but it takes talent and imagination to write a strange game that, like this one, is worth playing and even replaying.

It was only after I finished the game that I realized that I could have just stayed at the Lake and kept fishing.

Play The Twin Fishing Simulator.

Horror Game Review: Zombie Blast 2023 (2022, Sam Ursu)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 2023 and the zombie apocalypse has begun.  First, you parents were killed.  Then, your spouse was killed.  All you have left is your baby and you are going to do whatever you need to do to protect the last remaining member of your family.

Zombie Blast 2023 starts out simply enough.  You are in a house with four room.  The baby is in one of the rooms.  (The room changes each time that you play.)  You have an axe.  You have a shotgun that carries a limited amount of shells.  You have a limited amount of energy and, if you don’t stop to rest occasionally, you’ll weaken and maybe even find yourself incapable of moving.  You also have to find time to eat.  Your number one objective is to protect the baby from the zombie horde that is approaching the house.  Whenever a zombie gets in the house, you have to kill it before it reaches the baby’s room.  As the game progresses, you can level up and become a better zombie killer but, at the same time, the number of zombies will also increase.

Zombie Blast 2023 is an addictive work of interactive fiction.  I played it several times, trying out different strategies and seeing how long I could last before I was “overwhelmed.”  As you level up and as the zombies become more aggressive it becomes a real challenge to try to make sure that you’re in the right place to kill them before they manage to get into whichever room the baby is in.  Can you make it through to the morning?  It’s not as easy you might think.

Play Zombie Blast 2023.