Reviewing some IFComp Games, Part 1 of ???
Games reviewed (or marked DNP) so far: 6
Games DNP'd: 2
Current best-in-show: The Witch Girls, by Amy Stevens
Yes, I know I said I wasn't going to be participating. I'm still not sure I'll submit a ballot, due to the problems with what that entails when you're not really able to 'good faith' review a subset of entries.
Ultimately though, having participated in interactive fiction events in the past, including the IFComp itself, I know that the main thing most authors really want is just attention and feedback; getting people to read their work, talk about it, and give it a reaction. And I know that it's ultimately not fair to the authors who did put forth a good-faith effort to ignore their games entirely just because some subset of submissions used LLMs.
So, I'm going to be posting reviews. There's a lot of entries so I don't know how far I'll be getting into it, but I'll be making an effort to cover a good chunk of games over the coming three weeks, time permitting.
My approach to reviewing these entries is as such: IFComp asks that you spend 'no more than two hours' on each one. I reserve the right to spend way, way less time if I decide I've seen enough (which is the case with one of the entries here). I might write longer or shorter reviews depending on how much I have to say about a piece.
I will try not to be overly mean but I may be pretty negative about some entries; ultimately IFComp is a competition that attracts a wide range of experience levels and final quality in entries, and ultimately I am myself fairly opinionated and might find something that others think is charming to be actually quite grating.
I am using the IFComp website's own 'personal shuffle' feature to play the entries in a randomized order, so I'm not curating or picking which entries I'll play. I will note entries that I skipped due to their use of generative AI, but not review or rate them.
I will not be publishing my ratings because I intend to normalize them before submitting a ballot (to comply with comp rules this also implies that I won't be playing past that two hour mark even if I happen to like one of the longer games).
Also, as you can see from the top of this post, I will keep track of who my current 'comp winner' is; ie, the game I reviewed that I think is the best out of games I've reviewed. I think this is a nice way of highlighting games that maybe won't get as much attention in the churn of a huge event like IFComp. I expect it to change a few times over the competition, but we'll see how soon I run into something that's clearly head and shoulders above the rest.
With that out of the way, here's the first six games I've played:
The Olive Tree, by Francesco Giovannangelo
I feel like I have to preface this by saying that the actions of the Israeli state in Palestine are a genocide and that I support Palestinian liberation, and I don't think it's inherently wrong to tackle such a serious subject in an IFComp entry. There's always something of a challenge in critiquing or addressing this type of art, not really because the subject matter itself is delicate but because we tend to expect good art to have something to say, to be novel or surprising, or to have remarkable depth. But if you apply those standards to a piece like this, it feels a little off.
This piece doesn't really go very far beyond the basic statement that a genocide is taking place; it's descriptive more than anything. But shouldn't that be enough?
Taken as a piece of fiction I don't think there's very much here, to be quite honest. This is very short and simple; you play as an olive tree, so as you might imagine your set of verbs is very limited: pretty much just 'absorb water', 'grow more leaves' and 'bloom flowers'.
Play is periodically interrupted by brief vignettes about the history of the tree itself. This is a game about the nakba and subsequent Palestinian genocide, and three generations of Palestinians caring for and living with the olive tree, until both the family and the tree itself are destroyed by the encroachment of an Israeli settlement.
This description makes it sound honestly like more than it is; this entry is very slight, there's almost no story, the story barely integrates to what the player is doing, and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of variation possible.
Mechanically, as far as I can tell, this game is about doing the right order of operations (absorbing water, light, blooming, and growing) to maximize the olive yield of the tree, which is if anything kind of an odd mechanical conceit to hang on a piece of interactive fiction about an ongoing genocide driven by settler colonialism. For me this is one of those cases where the author wants to say something about something that is legitimately important but doesn't really have the craft skill or the knowledge to do so as an effective piece of art.
The Island of Rhynin, by Ilias Seferiadis
Did not play; generative AI was used for cover art.
valley of glass, by Devan Wardrop-Saxton
A parser game with a fairytale theme. The only story details I was able to glean is that the valley of glass seems to be literally made of glass, and the player character is in some kind of servitude to a blacksmith.
I only played 15 minutes of this as I wasn't really able to make meaningful progress. This game overall doesn't set up its scenario very well for the player; you have no clear goal or even means to progress the game. There's no meaningful paratext that I could find (ABOUT and HINT don't output anything, eg). This game doesn't even list exits in room descriptions, forcing you to navigate by guessing directions. All that I could determine is that EAST and WEST led to one-time flashback vignettes and that SOUTH then IN led to a game over.
I'm not sure if this is the intended ending; if it is, this piece is extremely extremely short, and basically doesn't stand on its own without knowing the original folk tale it's based on.
Writing-wise, the little material I was able to see was pretty unremarkable; there are some sentences with that 'scratchy' quality of writing that's a little off from how things should normally be phrased but not enough to feel stylistic, as exemplified by the very first sentence:
It is early spring in the valley of glass, the first of the seven years you promised to the village blacksmith.
I don't even know how to characterize that comma, but I know I don't like it.
Dead Sea, by Binggang Zhuo
Did not play; generative AI was used for cover art.
Anne of Green Cables, by Brett Witty
This one made me question how soon I'm allowed to stop playing a game and rate it. Is halfway through the first paragraph too soon?
This is billed as a 'a cyberpunk reimagining of L.M. Montgomery's beloved story of friendship and creative rebellion'. It opens on what is indeed the first few paragraphs of Anne of Green Gables – I had to look up the text because I've not read it – but rewritten to replace all the pastoral detail with cyberpunk detail. This has the side effect of rendering the text very nearly incomprehensible, from the very first sentence.
Here's the opening line of the actual Anne of Green Gables:
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place...
Here's how this is rendered in Anne of Green Cables:
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just at the junction where the Avonlea main road dipped down under the highways towards the flats of the vertical farms, fringed with thick data cables whose root source was known to be the old Cuthbert place...
I am not sure how data cables can 'fringe' something, to be honest. This goes on for many more paragraphs. The text is absolutely insensate to tone or themes:
Her feed hummed that one afternoon in early June. News of the latest warm war between the corpos streamed through a window: Mirai-Gaia Solutions were bought out by Strata and liquidated as quickly as the network could bear. This pleased Thomas Lynde — a meek little man whom Avonlea people called "Rachel Lynde's husband" — who bought ample turnip seed at prices that could only be relayed in hushed tones for his rooftop garden overlooking the village.
Shame all those people died when a tech conglomerate used a tactical nuke on Edmonton. Care for a turnip?
This could be funny, if it were condensed and actually rewritten into something that flows on the page, but because it tries to keep so much of the structure of the original novel (down to individual sentences) while replacing all the things it references, it gives a reading experience not unlike trying to eat chunky chicken soup through your sinus passage. It's absolutely overstuffed with sci-fi conceits; every drooping willow tree or babbling brook from the original novel has been Night Citified, meaning that the text is introducing these ideas with the rapidity with which the original text mentions mundane concepts like Sunday schools and quilts.
The Witch Girls, by Amy Stevens
I think (don't hold me to this) that my practice with how many games I talk about in one post is that I'll play entries until I play something I can say positive things about, so this one lands right on schedule. This is a short horror story about two teen girls growing up in rural Scotland in 2005 using witchcraft they barely understand to summon themselves a couple of boyfriends. Youthful hijinks ensue.
I like the well-observed social realist take on a teenage story here, which is evidently drawn from authentic experiences growing up in that time and place but is mixed with confident, straightforward-but-still-evocative horror writing. Structurally this is a pretty confident piece too; the author calls out otome games as an inspiration, and it indeed is structured like one – with different 'routes' for different love interests. Except it's about which dead-eyed otherworldly entity you summoned from the beyond to be your boyfriend.
Most of the interaction here can be split into two types of agency. One is more about affect, which really suits this type of teenage story – when you're trapped in the social panopticon that is high school, every action is read as a performance, and the 'how' of doing things is as important as the 'what' and why.
The other is about expressing the viewpoint character's desires, which then in turn comes back to haunt her. Again, a very fitting way to use interactivity in a horror story.
Overall I think this is a pretty effective piece that shows a good amount of confidence with Twine as a medium, which is fairly impressive for what seems to be this author's first effort. It is my current best in show.
As always, you can 'comment' by emailing me at askdarchid [at] pm.me.