A place to put my stuff
This short work is implemented in twine and is more something that you play with than play. There is no narrative thread. Unless I am missing something, this really is a list (partial) of things about which the author is grateful.
Continue reading “Review: a partial list of things for which i am grateful”
In my post about first impressions of games based on the IF listing and their cover art and blurbs, I criticized a few of the entries for lack of detail, but have since become aware that some of these entries are ports of games developed by Chinese authors. As far as I know, this is the first time these games have made their appearance in IFcomp, and I want to welcome them and thank them for making the effort. Still, I hope that in future IFcomps they submit some sort of blurb for the listing page, because that would improve their chances in the competition and also increase the chances that their games will get played and judged.
The first of these games that I played was “The Fifth Sunday”, which does not have religious significance as I had speculated, but relates to a month with five weeks. On that last week in this particular April, the main character is invited to a week-long party, which turns into a setting for serial murders. Finding the murderer is the goal of the game, but I won’t say in this review who the murderer is, so it’s safe to keep reading.
Make a note: today, for the first time, I got through an entire game by Andrew Schultz, more or less on my own. I’ve played many of Andrew’s wordplay games, and I have always had a hard time getting on the same wavelength, but in this game, the logical seemed to flow naturally once I caught onto the general scheme.
[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]
I haven’t done online reviews for IFcomp since 2013, but this year I will give it a try.
Let me start with first impressions of the 2017 IFcomp entries based on nothing beyond the list provided on the contest website. For each entry, this list provides a cover image, blurb, content warnings, and a download link. For each, I tried to glean what I could from this sparse information. Based entirely on my own speculation and without having seen anything of the games themselves, I also made a [perhaps wildly inaccurate] prediction for each entry. I make no claim that these predictions will have anything to do with the actual games, but by sheer numbers, I hope I’m on the mark with a few of them.
I mostly did this for my own amusement, and should point out that when I started I didn’t really appreciate how very many entries IFcomp received this year. This is probably TLDR; for most folks, so feel free to skip around to any entries that interest you. The order of listing is based on my personal shuffle, and will be the order that I follow for subsequent reviews, except where noted.