The annual Interactive Fiction Competition, edition the 16th, has been underway for nearly a month, but vacation and classes and, well, let’s face it, life in general, have delayed my chance to download and start evaluating the 25 (26?) new games to emerge upon the IF scene. Fortunately, the past week has given me a brief respite, and I’ve started checking out the entries.

Although I have played and judged the competition in previous years, I have never written down my thoughts about my experience. I’m hoping that by announcing in this very post that I will, indeed, review the games that I play1, that I will actually take some time and effort to contribute to the game reviews already available, most of them very insightful and informative, and some not-so-much. I will aspire mine to be the former, with one post per review when time permits.2

In the meantime, I’ll simply say that out of the half-dozen games that I have played, only one has stood out among the others:  The Warbler’s Nest by Jason McIntosh3. It’s well-written and well-crafted, which–for those interested in how I “rate” a game– are my two main criteria for what constitutes a good, and therefore fun, piece of IF. In a nutshell, “well-written” refers to the literary aspects of the game, and “well-crafted” refers to the technical implementation. You might wonder if there can be a difference, but trust me, you can have a beautifully written piece of IF that is horribly bug-ridden; and you can have a technically elegant game that is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors. I have seen and played both. And within each year’s competition, you can usually find games that span all corners of my particular reviewer’s matrix.

Quite honestly, I’m not certain what to attain publishing reviews. Certainly not fame or glory. But perhaps by studying the games of others, I will be better prepared when I gather up both the time and courage to submit a game of my own.

  1. Some of them? Hopefully all of them? ↩
  2. No guarantees on any of this, I’m sad to say. ↩
  3. Full disclosure. I am a personal acquaintance of the author, but I’m recommending his game because it is good, not because I know him ↩