The top seven games of this IFComp are all exceptionally good games. Two are by well-known authors in the community, and two by first-time IF authors.
Every year, the Interactive Fiction (IF) community has a competition to encourage the production of new IF games. Last year's competition, IFComp 2006, was the twelfth annual competition. Stephen Granade, who has written several games himself, has been running the competitions for eight years now. The competition usually has 30 or so new games of various levels of quality each year. The rules encourage short games by requiring judges to give scores after a maximum of two hours of play. This time limit on gameplay is easier to manage for first-time authors and allow many of the judges to play all of the games submitted if they choose.
While there are always a few games submitted by authors who either don't understand how to make a good game or want to submit bad games deliberately as a joke, the average level of quality of games submitted to the competition has been increasing over the years. The 2006 competition was probably the best competition so far in terms of good games. Here are brief reviews of each of these top seven.
#7. Legion, by Jason Devlin writing as Ian Anderson
Jason Devlin was the winner of the 2005 competition with Vespers and has produced another excellent game for 2006. It is a testament to the overall quality of the 2006 competition that he did not place higher. Legion has a very interesting twist because instead of the usual second-place narrator ("You" see or do things), it has a first-person plural narrator ("We" see or do things). This is not just a gimmick to experiment with the parser, but eventually makes perfect sense in the context of the game. Any further detail would likely spoil the fun. Highly recommended.
#6. Delightful Wallpaper, by Andrew Plotkin writing as Edgar O. Weyrd
Andrew Plotkin has been writing IF for over ten years. He won one of the divisions of the very first IF competition, in 1995, and has periodically entered several competitions since then as well as producing various other pieces of IF. Delightful Wallpaper is not exactly his usual style, but is still a very enjoyable game. It is split into two parts. The first part is really the best part even though the only necessary actions other than picking up one object at the end are movement actions. The main character must make his way through a mansion which opens doors and moves itself in other ways in response to the player's movements. The player must figure out the sequence of movements that will enable him to access every part of the mansion to get to that final object. While the second part is not quite as much fun because it involves more guesswork, it is still very clever because it illustrates multiple slices of time existing at once in different rooms.
#5. Moon-Shaped, by Jason Ermer
Jason Ermer is one of the two first-time IF authors in the top tier this year. His game takes Little Red Riding Hood and another fairy tale and weaves them together into a moonlit journey of discovery. Jason did a very good job of polishing this game beyond expectations. I beta-tested his game in the early stages of production, and when I played the finished competition version, I could not help but be amazed at all the things that had been added.
#4. The Traveling Swordsman, by Mike Snyder writing as Anonymous
Mike Snyder has been writing IF since at least 1993 in QBasic, and he placed fourth in the 2005 competition as well with Distress. The Traveling Swordsman, or TTS, was the only game of this competition written using Hugo. It contains several small episodes that come together to form a whole plot. It also contains one of the most subtle non-player character effects I have ever heard about in interactive fiction, so subtle that many people did not even realize the character had that effect.
#3. The Elysium Enigma, by Eric Eve
Eric Eve has written several games since 2004, when he achieved fifth place in the competition with Square Circle. The Elysium Enigma sets the player as a diplomat sent to investigate a foreign planet. Hostile natives and a hidden spy complicate things very quickly. The NPCs in this game are extremely well-done, with shifting motives and a number of topics to discuss. Many puzzles have multiple solutions, and some puzzles can be bypassed altogether to finish the game with a less-than-complete ending.
#2. The Primrose Path, by Nolan Bonvouloir
Amazingly, this game appears to be the first published game by Nolan Bonvouloir, and it is an extremely good show. My personal favorite of the competition, this game has magic, romance, multiple endings, and (minor spoiler) walking on raindrops! The voice is also first-person singular, another shift from the default. In addition, the player character Matilda is a strong-willed woman who occasionally doesn't quite follow commands given to her. Fascinating game and absolutely recommended.
#1. Floatpoint, by Emily Short
Emily Short is one of the foremost IF writers in the community at the moment. She has written at least fifteen full games in the last seven years, including IFComp entries from at least two other years. Floatpoint is a solid addition to her list as a somewhat short, but intriguing sci-fi political strategy story. The main character is somehow again a diplomat sent to a foreign planet, although the similarity to The Elysium Enigma was apparently quite unintentional. Multiple endings branch off from one central decision point. The planetary culture is quite distinctive and must be learned and approached carefully to make the primary decision of the game. The endings are balanced in such a way that no ending seems quite ideal, however.
For more information on IF competitions or to play any of these games, check out the IFComp itself or Baf's archive.
