Luster
Wander about your hometown looking for rainbow-colored gems. Missed opportunity for Lucky Charms cereal tie-in. There are some interesting puzzles, but it's all badly implemented and I got stuck halfway with no hint on how to continue.
Rating: 2 out of 10.
Beet the Devil
You have to rescue your dog from hell using an inventory of vegetables. It's pretty fun and funny at first, but feels samey after a while. It's also too easy to lose inventory items and make the game unwinnable.
Rating: 6 out of 10.
Vestiges
Sabrina the Teenage Witch gets trapped in the Matrix. Or something. I'll never know for sure because the game is so badly put together that even the walkthrough is useless.
Rating: 2 out of 10.
Fan Interference
A fan attempts to change the infamous outcome of the Chicago Cubs playoffs game. Highly likeable and funny, thick with Cubs lore and culture, but victory is nigh impossible.
Rating: 5 out of 10.
Cursed
As punishment for a murder you didn't commit, you get magically turned into your choice of animal. Three possible paths, but each is unnecessarily long and drawn-out.
Rating: 5 out of 10.
The Guardian
A woman wanders a wasteland while recalling memories of her lover. Part Lifetime, part Hallmark, all beyond my understanding. It's fairly well written and easy to play, but I'm not sure what it's about after going through it three times.
Rating: 5 ouf of 10.
Dead Hotel
Retro horror text adventure with multiple choice quiz interface, sparse writing, and hardly anything to do.
Rating: 2 out of 10.
Last Day of Summer
Brief game about a young farmboy who goes into town to sell cranberries and gets caught in a web of simple puzzles and nonthreatening characters.
Rating: 5 out of 10.
Ted Paladin And The Case Of The Abandoned House
You play a text adventurer (no really) who has to explore a house that's, um, kind of meta. Clever concept and ideas, but some of the puzzle mechanics and solutions don't seem right. I like the ending.
Rating: 5 out of 10
Taco Fiction
Anything with "Taco" in the title gets an automatic recommend from me, plus this is a great heist story with tons to do, funny writing, and rewards for exploration and risk-taking.
Rating: 8 out of 10.
Tenth Plague
Anyone ever told you to "avoid it like the plague?" Well sheesh, how do you think the plague must feel? Now you know. Go around killing the firstborn males in a Biblical setting. It's about as thrilling as being a tax collector. The commentary mode is a lot more interesting than the story.
Rating: 3 out of 10.
Operation Extraction
Web-based game in which you oversee a team of SWAT-type agents who try to rescue someone. Interesting features of switching between agents and stepping forward and backward in the timeline, but the game needs about ten times more work to achieve coherence.
Rating: 2 out of 10.
Calm
You're a scientist researching a widespread plague that kills people who get all emo. (Most people are therefore dead.) Starts with a great premise and promise, but gets killed by parser problems, overuse of humor, and a messy map. It's kind of fun to build up a collection of useless junk, though.
Rating: 5 out of 10.
The Myothian Falcon
You're an old-fashioned private dick in the far future, trying to solve a murder. Unfortunately, you're no Tex Murphy and neither is this game. Okay, it's about as good as
Under a Killing Moon (and has some similar flaws such as being too long and having too many people to talk to). It was nice of the author to include a plot summary.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Blind
You're a blind woman who's been kidnapped and locked up in a strange place. Good idea for a story, but the experience is hardly different from that of a seeing character. (Maybe that's the point.) Unfortunately, blind people don't make up for their disability with large inventory capacity, and that's a problem here among others.
Rating: 3 out of 10.
The Hours
Brisk, fun action thriller that feels a lot like last year's second place winner,
Rogue of the Multiverse. You're a time traveler who screws up a heist at the Library of Alexandria. The convoluted plot has well-defined rules, so as with
Inception, if you feel lost, just go with the flow.
Rating: 7 out of 10.
Six
Aimed at kids, this one has you play hide and seek at a park. Pretty high production values with title graphics, sound clips, and a 22-page PDF manual!
Rating: 6 out of 10.
The Play
Web-based story about the final rehearsal before a play's performance. As the director, you have to make decisions when things go wrong and your unreliable actors screw up. Nice, clean presentation, good writing, fun to go through several times to see the various possibilities.
Rating: 7 out of 10.
Professor Frank
R.E.M. sang that "everyone hates a sad professor," and if there's a sadder professor than a newt biologist who's trapped in a library filled with psychopaths that can only be pacified with Scottish meats, I don't want to know.
Rating: 3 out of 10.
Cana According To Micah
Presented as a found text about a wedding party in Biblical times, this is a cute and engaging tale that would especially amuse Bible scholars. The solution is so complicated that I was ready to hate the game. But I used the hints to get through it and found it pretty decent if suddenly preachy in the end.
Rating: 6 out of 10.
Fog Convict
Crummy, crummy entry about an escaped murderer that visits your college campus while a thick fog sets in. Lazily programmed and written, utterly confusing to navigate. Made me pine for the
Xen games of earlier IFComps.
Rating: 1 out of 10.
The Binary
You're some kind of dude-outside-time who has to repair the timeline, Bill-Murray-in-
Groundhog-Day style. The story is too cool to explain what it's about, but it's kind of neat to solve.
Rating: 6 out of 10.
How Suzy Got Her Powers
David Whyld has written some real key-pressers (that's my IF equivalent term for "page-turners") in the past, but this superheroine origin story isn't on a par with them.
Rating: 4 out of 10.
The Ship of Whimsy
Brief, easy, imaginative game in which you have to get a crazy fantasy boat ready to sail.
Rating: 5 out of 10
Andromeda Awakening
This seems to be an interesting, if preposterous, sci-fi tale. Unfortunately, the near-UV prose makes it very difficult for me to play the game and take the story seriously.
Rating: 3 out of 10.
A Comedy of Error Messages
What if TRON were a ROMCOM? Use cyberspace to save a geek from a crushing blow to his or her social life. Frankly, the player perspective made me feel confused and uncomfortable, but the game is amusing, clever, and well-written.
Rating: 7 out of 10.
Death of Schlig
An old-fashioned gumshoe gets kidnapped by aliens and undergoes quite a mutation. The mechanics of his newly acquired ability don't quite come together, so the game isn't as fun as it could be. But there's a lot of admirably kooky gags here.
Rating: 5 out of 10.
Kerkerkruip
A roguelike?! Sorta. There's a fixed set of rooms, encounters, and loot, but they're randomly arranged. And the game's playability and cohesiveness are surprising given how bad dungeon crawlers tend to be in IFComp. Roguelike scholars will definitely want to check this one out for its many unique mechanics. Normal people might like it, too.
Rating: 7 out of 10.
Awake the Mighty Dread
Something about dreams, robots, and the unbearable lightness of being gooey. I think I understand the symbolism this time, and there could be a worthy story here (it's incomplete), but I didn't much enjoy trying to read the author's mind.
Rating: 3 out of 10.
Cold Iron
A farmer searches a forest for his prize axe and sees strange things under the trees. Fun to read but way too short, ending right as it seems to be building up to something big. Bears some odd similarities to
Last Day of Summer, almost as if it were meant to be a prequel or companion story.
Rating: 5 out of 10.
Return to Camelot
The highlight of the game is meeting Merlin, that charming old coot. But I then got tired of wandering the big, empty castle, so I quit and read the transcript. It's a fine concept but a long slog.
Rating: 4 out of 10.
Keepsake
You just killed someone and have to get away with it, and that's not even the weird part. After five playthroughs and some time to think about it, I only kind of get it. I think the game missed some chances to be more meaningful. Or maybe I missed the meaning. I'm troubled.
Rating: 6 out of 10.
Playing Games
You go through a trial to get admitted into a secret gaming society! Very annoying and pointless in the short amount of time it takes to complete.
Rating: 2 out of 10.
It
Another hide-and-seek simulator. The girls are more catty this time.
Rating: 4 out of 10.
Escape From Santaland
Harried Christmas shopper gets really, really lost on the way back to the parking lot. Good puzzles and all the grinchy sarcasm you'd expect.
Rating: 6 out of 10
PataNoir
Another private dick story, but in this one, the dick sees typical detective novel metaphors as real objects and uses them to help solve the case. This leads to some very cool moments, but also some odd and unreasonable puzzles.
Rating: 6 out of 10.
Sentencing Mr Liddell
A man's daughter falls into the river, causing the player to drown in surrealism and allegory.
Rating: 1 out of 10.
The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M
A controversial doctor finds himself in the afterlife, and has to root through his past to decide his final destination. Good imagery and decent writing, but the puzzles involve too many repetitive steps, drawing out the game beyond my interest.
Rating: 6 out of 10.
