The 2025 Interactive Fiction Competition Is Over
Results have been posted. I've yet to play some of the higher-placing entries (including the winner!) so I might yet talk about some of those here. But I'm making this post to highlight some personal favorites out of the 30 or so games I did play during the judging period.
The Witch Girls (Amy Stevens)
Just a delightfully taut and incredibly well-observed piece of horror. Structurally brilliant, it turns the choose-your-own-boyfriend trope of otome games on its head. I will always go to bat for good horror IF but this is good horror IF that's structurally clever, well-written, and terrifically grounded in real experience. You really owe it to yourself to play it!
Saltwrack (Henry Kay Cecchini)
The doomed-expedition genre has produced a lot of my favorite horror – Roadside Picnic, At the Mountains of Madness, Annihilation, The Terror. This fits squarely in that genre but it's also teeming with novel ideas, a fresh setting, and some really good visceral writing.
IFDB link to play or download the game.
3XXX: Naked Human Bombs (Kastel)
I'm still in love with the first section of this story, which is the kind of satire where almost every sentence made me laugh and/or grimace in equal measure, but the longer I sit with it the more I appreciate the swerves and layers of the rest of the story. This is the kind of weird and brash work that the Comp doesn't always reward with a high rating, but I implore people who read my blog to play this one, as I think the people whom this is for will really appreciate it on a lot of levels.
Also, the survey is up
As promised, the IFComp's organizers have posted their yearly survey now that the judging period is up.
In particular, this survey asks extensively about the Comp's approach towards generative AI, and to handling the fallout from the UK's Online Safety Act[^1]. If you, like me, are a comp judge or participant or just comp-watcher, and you had strong feelings on some of these subjects, I'd encourage you to let the IFTF know, as that's really the one channel they want to centralize their feedback around.