Though he was born in Kensington, he has relatives who live near the famous botanic gardens, so that when people first meet him they often ask “Are you one of the Kew Cumberbatches?”

In school he took to teasing his friends that their births were so unexpected that they had been delivered while waiting for the taxi to take them to the hospital. Eventually one of his friends angrily retorted, “I wasn’t born in a queue, Cumberbatch!”

His wife, the former Nina Quincy, has angrily rejected the characterization of her as hapless and forlorn during the early days of her marriage. She says, “I wasn’t poor Nina Q. Cumberbatch!”

This seems like the sort of thought I should tweet to people, if I tweeted.

*That may be a feature, not a bug. That’s also when I’ll get to play Braid, I think.

I wrote this in under three hours, so it can be considered a belated Ectocomp entry; my actual belated Ectocomp entry went way over budget and may not show up for a while. Mirthful Messiahs. is massively unfair, though it’s also small enough that you may hit on the solution anyway. Everyone whose game I complained about can have their revenge on this! But seriously, I think it’s kind of funny.

If you need a hint, go here.

(I don’t want to say “pass the Bechdel test” or “fail the Bechdel test” here, because I don’t want people to feel that their work is being judged. For me, the illuminating thing is how rarely the Bechdel test applies across a body of work, not whether it applies or doesn’t in one particular small work. So I’ll say “Bechdelian” or “non-Bechdelian.”)

Anyway, my memories may be hazy, but here’s the works that I recall as unambiguously Bechdelian:

Six
It
The Play (Henrietta and Erica talk about the dress, in many playthroughs)
How Suzy Got Her Powers
Awake the Mighty Dread (I think the little-girl PC can talk to a robot queen or something; I couldn’t get much of a handle on this game)

There are some works that explicitly let you choose your protagonists’ gender, and are Bechdelian if you choose to play as a woman:

The Hours
A Comedy of Error Messages (I think; I didn’t play very much after the update that introduced gender selection)

There are some works where the PC’s gender isn’t specified, which would be Bechdelian if the PC is a woman:
Calm
The Ship of Whimsy
maaaaayyybe Playing Games (some members of the gaming club may be women, but the main NPC is definitely male)

There are some that probably fall into that category, but where I got a fairly strong vibe that the PC is male:
Keepsake
Kerkerkruip
Taco Fiction
Beet the Devil

Yow. That’s not very Bechdelian, I think. I get the sense that last year’s Comp was more Bechdelian, and it certainly had more games by women (“Pam Comfite” is a man, so there are only four five games that I know to be by women in this comp). Disclaimer: There were a few games I didn’t play, my memories may not be entirely accurate (for instance, it’s possible that there’s a conversation between female bureaucratic demons in Beet the Devil), and some of my judgments about PC gender may reflect my own stereotypes and preconceptions.

In case you’re wondering about the gender-reversed version, I count at least ten games that definitely had conversations between men; all the ones listed above as conditional on the PC’s gender had conversations with male NPCs, and there are some others with a PC of unspecified gender that had conversations with male NPCs but not with female NPCs (for instance, Andromeda Awakening and Escape from Santaland).

[UPDATE: On second or third thought, this year wasn't much worse than the previous two, I don't think. It might just seem that way because the only two games where interaction between definitely female characters was really the focus were about little kids, and also had very similar scenarios. Last year The Blind House stuck out as a game that was about the relationship between two women, but there may not have been that many more Bechdelian games; though there are a lot of games from last year that I haven't played.]

Last reviews: Taco Fiction, Cursed, and Ted Paladin and the Case of the Abandoned House.

Taco Fiction. Down on your luck, you decide to rob a taqueria, but things quickly get wacky. A comic crime caper that’s actually funny, with at least one nicely drawn NPC; it deserved to win.

I had two beefs though, both to do with my not getting the best ending. The first is that late in the game there’s a timed puzzle that locks you out of a decent ending if you don’t solve it. The timer is extremely generous, but I wasn’t sure what my objective was (I think if you enter the room earlier you get a clue about it, but I did not do that). Also the key to the puzzle was that you have to examine a large flat object in the middle of the room, thus learning there’s a bunch of stuff sitting on it that wasn’t mentioned in the room description. Now, not examining it was dumb, but this is the sort of thing that The Hours deservedly got dinged for, and there it was an obstacle to progress rather than a timed puzzle that locked you out of a win. (For The Hours and this kind of puzzle, see the Escape from Santaland review, and more in the Beet the Devil review.)

But really, it was eminently fair. The problem was that my playthrough of the game up to that point had been so goofy that I wasn’t expecting that I could get into an unwinnable situation. I won’t list all the goofy things I did, because they’re spoily, but trust me: they were goofy. (Well, one, in rot13: V uvtu svirq fuvegyrff jbys znfx qhqr.) Sam suggested that this was because I was playing as a Standard Adventure Game Protagonist rather than playing along with the tension that the author created, but I must demur; so much goofy stuff is implemented that goofing around is playing along with the author. The cops are Bob and Rae! This is much more Dortmunder than Pulp Fiction and Dortmunder… well, usually goes home empty-handed. Still, maybe instead of a timer the threat could trigger when the puzzle gets solved, or you could start the game by asking “Would you like to enter Wimp Mode, for sissy boys who hate losing endings?” I’d say yes.

The other problem is that the really good ending didn’t seem to be attainable. Having done what I thought I needed to do, the relevant conversation menu didn’t change. I think this must have been a bug introduced in a revision (David Fletcher was the only other reviewer who mentioned this problem), but boo. [UPDATE: This is apparently wrong. To motivate the PC to attain the best ending, you have to do some stuff that I had done in my first playthrough but not in my second. This is fair play; it means PC knowledge doesn't carry over between playthroughs, which is reasonable. I think there is a slight problem with inadequate feedback for failed attempts. Spoilery details below the spoiler space.] The conversation system was unusually prolix here; there were a few options that were unlocked when you had certain items, and it would’ve been more efficient to let SHOW ITEM TO NPC trigger those conversations directly instead of going through the menu. (Other, minor issues: There’s a point where someone tells you to take a coathanger, but the message for taking it suggests that you’ve stolen it. Also, I had to try about twenty syntaxes to pay for my ice cream.)

But all this is nitpicky; it’s a very funny and well implemented game that does a good job of pointing you along, with generally extremely fair puzzles. And it’s funny.

Also, checking an unrelated Twitter feed revealed that Mr. Veeder is a Homestuck fan, so he might enjoy my new tiny game, and also, do you remember the song with initials UU that showed up on some album and caused everyone to speculate wildly about the Ophiuchus troll a year before that troll appeared in the strip? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Umbral Ultimatum. It was mentioned on Homestuck’s TV Tropes page sometime back before it got split into eleventy billion subpages, but damned if I’m going to search in there to try to find it. (Predictably enough, half an hour was spent looking at TVTropes in the middle of that sentence.)

Cursed: This is another big huge ambitious one; I think I finished maybe a third of one of the paths in my two hours. Because there are three paths; at the beginning you can choose one of three animals to be transformed into, and which one you choose presumably affects a lot of the puzzles.

There are some problems with the story here. Part of it, as everyone has observed, is that there are too many damn words. It opens with a frog-march through several locations, which in itself is not a bad idea, since it’ll help you to have a sense of the layout of those rooms. But the frogmarch is accompanied by an immense quantity of agonized interior monologue. I do not exaggerate when I say that it would work better if there were one-tenth as much prose here.

Aside from the story, there’s some innovation in the gameplay. One conversation scene, while it still has too many words, does a nice job of bolding the potential topics so you know what you can talk about; it’s just obtrusive enough. In the main part of the game your animal senses give you a sort of remote sensing capacity, where the very unfamiliarity of the senses justifies the way the game withholds information from you. There’s a particularly nice bit where your senses get overloaded and you have to navigate your way through a series of commands. The puzzles tend toward the timed death, which is generally justified (I hammered “undo” a lot); the only time this aspect annoyed me was one time when I was being chased and there was only one direction I could run without being killed. There was an in-game justification for it, but it would’ve worked just as well to let me run around being chased until I found the right room. As it is, the try-die-undo cycle sent me to the walkthrough.

The real flaw in the gameplay, though, is the occasional guess-the-verb puzzle. Early on there’s one badly underclued puzzle, and later (about where I finished) there’s a really bad one wrapped in a timed death. This is one of those things where you have to examine several layers of things before you find the right object; but in this case, none of the verbs you’d been able to use on any other object did anything. I thin you had to use a specific verb that I don’t know that I’ve used in any other IF (wait, I did, in Duel in the Snow, where it was also a rather annoying verb guess). Details under the spoiler space. And the hints made it worse; when you make the player page unlock several layers of hints one by one, the last hint should ALWAYS give the exact command needed to solve the puzzle. Here, having figure out that I needed to do something useful to a certain object, I wound up with a final hint that told me “Here’s this object. Perhaps you should do something useful to it?” And so to the walkthrough. Grrrr. (I did like having the hints run in a separate game file.)

A couple of weird messages that certainly weren’t intentional showed up, but that might just be ADRIFT interpreter issues (I played in Gargoyle). That was a minor issue, though. It’s an interesting and ambitious game, but it could use more polish in the puzzles and a lot of editing on the prose in the story-heavy parts. This character might help, with her topiary skill. Cut, cut, cut, prune!

Ted Paladin and the Case of the Abandoned House. We close with the Game of Ridiculous Interpreter Issues; only a new release of Gargoyle toward the end of the Comp let me play this. And it turns out to be… rather good. Also short, so I came in under two hours even counting the time I spent trying to get the old version of Gargoyle to run it. Anyway, it’s a little puzzle box, with three basic puzzles, but they’re not your ordinary find-the-key business. Each puzzle messes with IF conventions in some ways; the first room has a missing room description, the second has obscured object descriptions (this is basically a bunch of cryptic crossword clues), the third does something clever that I won’t describe here. I quite enjoyed it and only had to hit the hints for one puzzle in the second room (though some of them require some specific cultural knowledge). But, though I wouldn’t wish it much longer, I wish the third puzzle had been more developed. It had the potential to be something great, a puzzle with consistent logic that required some mind-bending solutions; but it was far too short in itself. I’d like to see a more worked-out version.

A gripe or two: One of the puzzles seems to rest on a false belief about colors (though it wasn’t hard to trial-and-error past it), and another on an incorrect interpretation of “two whole tones” — though there may not have been a better way to phrase that. Still, on the level of implementation it worked very well, and it was a nice short game to finish the comp on.

So, congratulations to all the authors! I hope to see lots of post-comp releases, since almost everything can use a little polish one way or another.
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Taco Fiction: [UPDATED!] The best ending comes when you find the incriminating evidence that will allow Zuleika to bring down the conspiracy against her. In order to be motivated to do this, apparently, you have to talk to Zuleika enough to learn that her business has been suffering due to what you later find out to be a conspiracy, and also to generally make friends with her. On my first playthrough I did this, in fact I spent a lot of time talking to Zuleika and went back to tell her about every new thing I discovered, so on the second playthrough I was still motivated to help her. But the PC wasn’t, because the second time around I hadn’t done anything special to make friends with her.

I think there’s a little bit of a problem with an absence of feedback here, stemming from the menu-based conversation system. When a conversation menu item fails to show up, that in itself doesn’t tell you why it failed to show up. Whereas an action can be blocked in a way that tells you why it’s blocked. If “show x to zuleika” were generally implemented as a shortcut to the relevant conversation option, then showing her the incriminating evidence could be blocked with the message that you don’t particularly know her and don’t want to give her evidence that you just committed a burglary. For that matter, when you do know her and have heard about the conspiracy against her, but haven’t found the evidence, you could tell her about it and be told that she couldn’t do anything without hard evidence. On the other hand, this could undermine the ease-of-use of the conversation system; it would be bad if it turned into an ask/tell-based topic guessathon. There would be a lot of topics that could be brought up.

Cursed: The guess-the-verb puzzle that got me was in the wagon (playing as the rat) where you had to “shake bolts” twice. “Turn bolts,” “chew bolts,” “push bolts,” “pull bolts” all gave perfectly useless default error messages. This is the sort of thing that really needs to be better hinted — ideally, doing anything to the bolts would help, since it’s just a matter of banging them till they give way.

In this post: Reviews of Tenth Plague, Six, and Cana According to Micah.

Tenth Plague. A short game, and none would have wished it longer, which in this case isn’t an insult. You are placed in the incorporeal shoes of an aspect of Death, inflicting the Tenth Plague on the biblical Egyptians. The Tenth Plague, as you may remember, is the slaying of the firstborn. Spoiler: Slaying the firstborn of an entire nation is an awful thing to do, even if the leaders of that nation are arguably doing awful things themselves.

This is a game with a definite point to make, and it’s well done, with a commentary mode that’s worth unlocking. And some people, understandably, felt it difficult to play through in the way that the author surely intended. But it didn’t have that impact on me. Part of it is that the polemic is heavy-handed. That spoiler in the previous paragraph? It’s not really a spoiler. Now, you could argue that nuance is simply not appropriate for this story, and you may well have a point, but from a theological standpoint I’m not sure that this connects squarely with any of the intended targets; Jews devote a fair amount of discussion to the way that our celebration of our liberation should be diminished by the Egyptians’ suffering (and most of us aren’t Biblical literalists anyway), and Christians tend to view Jesus as overriding many of the awful things that the Old Testament God did, I think.

The bigger problem for me is the abstraction. As an incorporeal-except-when-you-need-it embodiment of death, the PC is hard to identify with, and that makes me feel detached from its atrocities. Sentencing Mr. Liddell freaked me out because I can put myself in the shoes of a father who sees his child’s stroller slip into a river, and who is driven to distraction by a screaming child, etc. It’s me in those shoes, doing the [thing that I didn't want to do in that game]. Here I’m more willing simply to do what it takes to finish.

All this is arguing with the content of the game, because it does what it needs to to make me think about the content. So, worth playing; a little too His-Dark-Materials preachy for me, but that’s not the worst thing I can say.

Six. Not so much wholesale killing in this game. The other Australian hide-and-seek game, in some ways incredibly ambitious and unambitious at the same time. It has a lot of sound and art and a fair amount of gameplay innovation, but it also doesn’t (I think) aspire to be more than a hide and seek tip simulator that kids can get into. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

You have to go around and tag (or “tip”) your friends on your birthday. Some of them are easy to catch, some require a little work, though nothing too extreme. There’s some great pictures, a lot of sound, the park in which it’s set is captured nicely, and after you win as one twin you unlock the game from the other’s perspective. The NPCs are reasonably automonous and I think randomized from play to play. It’s incredibly polished, and there’s no way not to recommend it.

There were some things I wanted more from, though. On the first playthrough there are some things that are there to lock you out of areas you can play in as the other character, and I wanted to be able to do more with them. The concept limits the complexity of puzzles, which leads to a certain lack of variety in the puzzles (though there’s more variety than you might think); in particular, one puzzle seems to be the same in both playthroughs, except with an added “you can lose right away” aspect the second time which isn’t so satisfying. And I’d wished that it was more possible to figure out the patterns for the pirate duel; perhaps it was, but what I wound up doing was going through many try-die-undo cycles until I found something that worked. I didn’t feel as though the effects of my actions were predictable; I’d have enjoyed it more if there’d been more of a pattern to the combat, as in Backup, and if losing meant trying again until you figured out the pattern (perhaps by randomizing things within certain parameters, so you couldn’t just memorize a sequence of moves).

This is related to a problem I had with the characterization there. Marion is a bigger child who you can’t tag unless she lets you, so she challenges you to a duel and says that if you lose you have to lose the whole game. If I were six, I’d think that was completely Not Fair. Who says she gets to spoil my birthday just because she’s bigger? It’d be nicer if she let you try again until you beat here, and I think would work better in gameplay terms.

Obviously I’m not entirely the target audience here. Some folks have said this would be a good introductory game for kids, but I’m not entirely sure about that. It is a truth universally acknowledged in children’s and young adult books that your protagonist should be older than your target audience (no doubt there’s an exception when your protagonist is your target audience), but anyone who’s much younger than the PCs here will probably be too young to read well enough to play this kind of game.

Cana according to Micah. A retelling of Jesus’s water into wine miracle. Finally I have sympathy for everyone complaining about the baseball IFs, because I have the sense that a lot of this would be much more logical if I knew the Bible story. I mean, I know the general outline — Jesus turned water into wine — but I don’t get that thrill of recognition when I encounter a Bible character. It’s like, in the Dark Knight, I’m sure as soon as Harvey Dent showed up many people were all like “Aha! Let’s see the story of how he turns into Two-Face!” but that was a total surprise to me. He could have been a new character for the movie like Rachel Dawes, for all I knew. (My students were stunned by my ignorance here. They thought it was exactly the sort of thing I would know.)

Related to this, I’m not sure that I solved a single puzzle here without the hints. Some of this was dopiness — I managed not to find some locations — some of this was probably down to somewhat obscure puzzles, but some of it was certainly that I didn’t know what was supposed to happen next, or what the critical characteristic of NPC X was. But it was a fine experience anyway. It’s often quite funny, the hint system was smooth enough that it was painless to consult it every other turn, and most important, there’s a vivid cast.

Technically, it was excellent, though putting the cover on the well didn’t seem to do anything. Under it all there was a bit of a moral choice, but the right thing to do seemed pretty obvious. (Well, in one case it probably wasn’t obvious how to avoid doing the wrong thing, but that wasn’t a problem for someone who was already reading the clues.) At one point a dilemma involving Anna is supposed to be heightened because Anna is annoying, but I thought she was perfectly charming even aside from the fact that she helps me solve puzzles. [UPDATE: I did get a little bored with the messages she produces as she follows you around; there are about six of them, which is a lot to write, but I still saw them on the order of a dozen times each. In general, I think colorful repeating messages like that should only show up every few times something happens, if it happens a lot.] There was sometimes an interaction issue in that it wasn’t clear exactly what telling someone about something would do — something of an occupational hazard in ask-tell conversation systems where you’re trying to accomplish specific effects. Still, an excellent overall game if you don’t mind using the hints a lot. (But if you get the ending with the joke about the cookies, isn’t that a little blasphemous?)
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Six: I spent a while trying to chase the kid in the Spiderman suit through the spiderweb so I could trap him in the gazebo. It seemed like those two things should’ve gone together.

My base line is that a solid, substantial game that I generally enjoyed playing and that sent me to the hints a few times gets a 7. As Sam and I said, there doesn’t seem to be any clear front-runner this year; I thought a lot of the games were either very short or hugely ambitious but flawed. Anyway, scores and mostly spoiler-free explanations below the jump; full reviews here for elaboration on what I’m talking about.

A word on the two-hour time limit. Unlike the other year that I thoroughly played the comp, this year a lot a lot of the games were long enough that I couldn’t finish them within two hours, or even close. I don’t time my playing (partly because I tend to play for a few minutes, leave the game open, do something else, come back for a few minutes), but I made a good-faith effort to discount everything that happened in my playthrough after around two hours of play. Some of those are noted below. If a game gets me to play for two hours, that’s generally something of an accomplishment.

Games are listed in order of their score; games with the same score are not listed in any particular order.

PataNoir: 9. A great gameplay idea, lots of puzzles, the writing isn’t absolutely top-notch and some of the puzzles are a bit confusing which keeps it from a 10. The most confusing puzzles came after the two-hour limit.

The Play: 8. An excellent choice-based game with a good mechanism and with some things to say. Again, the writing is good but not enough to put in the top bracket; if Christine Love had written it it’d probably be a 10. (Well, that’s true of anything.) As Carl observed, the slapstick doesn’t really work in the medium; slapstick can work in IF (more in my Death of Schlig review) but this particular slapstick doesn’t have the “a bunch of little disasters piling up on the player” mechanism that makes that go. The author has other things to do.

The Hours: 8. I’m not sure I can justify this vote, but this may have been the playthrough I enjoyed most. The forward momentum of the play was enough to take me past its polish issues, and as I said that was part of the charm for me. Still probably should be a 7, but I’m rounding up because no one else seemed to like it. (Also, Carl says that your seemingly inconsequential dialogue choices affect the ending, which is kind of innovative and done subtly enough that I didn’t notice it.)

Cana according to Micah: 8. Makes it for the great atmosphere and the NPCs. And the hint system; most of the puzzles seemed pretty much unsolvable to me (I’m going to have to think about whether there’s a single one I solved on my own), although that may be partly because of my unfamiliarity with the details of the Bible story. But I enjoyed playing through with the hints.

Taco Fiction: 8. Funny and engaging. Basically starts off with a 9, gets two points docked for a timed puzzle that wound up being out of sync with the spirit of the playthrough, gets a point back for implementing a hilarious action (though that was part of the reason that I didn’t expect the timed puzzle to bite me). Would probably lose something more for the best ending either being completely bugged or inadequately clued and hinted, but I found that out after more than two hours. [UPDATE: I am informed that the ending is working as intended, but that setting it up requires doing some stuff that I had done in my first playthrough but not my second, which provides the PC with the necessary motivation. Apologies, Mr. Veeder! More details in the updated review. This doesn't affect the score I wish I'd given, since as I said I didn't take it into account in my original score.]

Cold Iron: 7. The best of the short games. I’m going to guess Eric Eve as the author (though the college whose members he thanks isn’t at Oxford — yes, I looked it up).

Sentencing Mr Liddell: 7. The game I’m most conflicted about. Hugely ambitious, a lot of emotional power if most of it’s unpleasant, but some polish issues and some incomprehensible puzzles take it back to a 7.

The Binary: 7. A solid puzzler implemented as a choice-based narrative, with a little more going on besides. I should play the other game in this series, too.

Escape from Santaland: 7. Another solid puzzler, well-written and with a lot of stuff implemented. The room-to-interesting-stuff ratio is pretty high, but basically a 7 through and through.

Beet the Devil: 7. Another paradigmatic 7, one per deadly sin. Some of the puzzles seem perfect to me, some make no sense to me, you’ll probably have a different set. A couple of issues (man do I hate unwinnable states) might push this below Escape from Santaland, but the puppy and the distinctive voice push it back up, and we’d be talking about shades of 7 anyway. Having the walkthrough easily accessible in-game helped, and the linear order was also a good idea (if I have to solve every single puzzle anyway, you may as well have me focus on one at a time).

It: 7. Slight but solid, and some interesting things with multiple endings.

Six: 7. Much more substantial, and all the bells and whistles should perhaps push it up to an 8, but in the end the gameplay wasn’t involving enough for me to rank it higher. I realize that this is partly because it’s for kids, but I reserve the right to judge it as a non-kid. I’d like to combine it with It to get the Australian hide-and-seek game of my dreams, which is a dream I didn’t know I had.

Ted Paladin And The Case Of The Abandoned House: 6. A self-conscious, fourth-wall breaking puzzle box, and the puzzles are clever, but I wish there’d been more to them — especially the last one, which could’ve been a spectacular tour de force but which was basically a proof of concept. Also one of the puzzles was mistakenly clued, although in a way that didn’t waste too much time.

Last Day of Summer: 6. The second-best of the short games. Not as evocative as Cold Iron, for me.

Keepsake: 6. Might also be the second-best of the short games. I liked the idea, not sure it would be possible to develop it into more than a sketch, a sketch is what it is.

Calm: 6. Should be utterly awesome after a leisurely revision. For now, various polish issues keep it below 7 level (am I illegitimately docking it for the game-breaking bug I encountered after more than two hours?) Also, Yoon is right: Don’t insult the player in the hint file.

Tenth Plague: 6. Short, kind of massively unsubtle with a moral message that perhaps doesn’t need to be delivered, didn’t involve me emotionally in the way it ought to have for reasons that will be explained in my review. But solid and well put together. Might just be not to my taste.

Blind: 5. My review of this was probably too mean; despite a couple unclued interactions it does work as a puzzle game, and apparently there are mutliple ways through in a way that might be interesting. I still don’t think the author has really inhabited the perspective of a blind person or a woman, and that’s a problem in this game, but that aside there’s nothing much wrong with it.

Playing Games: 5. This game is there. What writing there is is fine, I enjoyed playing through it, but it’s almost aggressively insubstantial.

How Suzy Got Her Powers: 5. Short! Contains dubious fire safety lessons, I suspect.

The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M: 5. Objectively may be better than this, but got knocked down to a 6 for annoying gameplay that made me unable to get very far into it in two hours, and then another point off for the factual distortions that I discuss in my review.

The Guardian: 5. Another short one. Mostly about moving through large spaces and reading descriptions. The writing is decent but perhaps needs to be awesomer to sustain it, especially given the vagueness of the plot. (See Cold Iron for how adding more detail to both those things can get you two more points.)

Cursed: 5. Hugely ambitious, another one I got about halfway through in two hours. As many others have observed, there’s far too much prose, but some neat puzzles (more when I review it), and the dialogue section at least helps you through it by bolding the topics. But in the end, the verb-guessing (on timed puzzles!) makes it too hard to play. Also, the hints were sometimes actively unhelpful; I would be in a situation where I knew I needed to do X to Y but couldn’t guess the verb, and would dutifully page through the hints, which would would end “Maybe you should do X to Y” and ho for the walkthrough.

The Ship of Whimsy: 4. So, so slight. Docked a point for the obnoxious ending.

Death of Schlig: 4. Not actually fun to play. Needed to be fun.

Andromeda Awakening: 3. The ambition and world-building are commendable, but playing it gave me a blinding headache. Much venting in my review.

Awake the Mighty Dread: 3. The polish issues make this pretty much unplayable, since an (apparently) crucial NPC must be reached by interacting with an object that refuses all the obvious ways to interact with it.

Professor Frank: 3. Is genial and up-front about how messy it is, but I can’t actually recommend it.

Vestiges: 1. Problematic in many ways.

Gigantic run-on sentence explaining why some games aren’t rated: I beta-tested Kerkerkruip and Fan Interference, can’t play Dead Hotel on my computer, got booted out of the online server for the Myothian Falcon and never found a block of uninterrupted time to play it all the way through (especially because rumor has it it’s pretty long), had a hang-up on the first turn of online play of Return to Camelot, gave up on Luster after a few turns (“these jewels will bring you fame and fortune” is not a good hook — I do all the work, the PC gets the fame and fortune — also, a typo in your blurb doesn’t inspire confidence), was turned off Fog Convict by the other reviews (I know this is irresponsible), never went back to Operation Extraction after it turned out to be very complicated (but it’s an interesting idea!), and never got back to the revision of the Elfen Maiden after having trouble on my initial playthroughs (kudos for responding to feedback, though the particular revision may have been way too ambitious for an intra-comp update; really I was just hoping for more time for the initial puzzle, which I may have got.)

Here is the list of games, many of which can be played online; for others you’ll need an interpreter (playing offline with an interpreter may improve your experience with some of the off-line playable ones).

If I played a game online, my review will include a link to the online-playable version. I’ll start with mostly spoiler-free discussions, though I will talk about general themes and the like; some spoilers may be rot13ed in the main discussion, but if I extensively discuss something spoily it’ll be at the end of the entry below a spoiler space.

In this grumpy edition: Andromeda Awakening, Death of Schlig, The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M, Professor Frank.

Andromeda Awakening. You’re on your way to give a report about the coming apocalypse when it happens. Then you have to explore the futuristic machinery your society is built on to… well, that would be telling (and I’m not positive I understand). A hugely ambitious work by a newcomer, with tons of backstory and world-building, which makes me feel kind of bad to rant on about how much I didn’t enjoy playing it. But not bad enough to stop me.

There’s apparently a game called +=3, which was designed for two purposes: to frustrate Google searchers and to demonstrate that a logical puzzle can have a solution no one will find. The solution to +=3 involves acting on objects that are obviously there if you think about, but that aren’t mentioned anywhere in the game (unless you specifically look for them). At least one critical puzzle in Andromeda Awakening (described below the spoiler space) was basically a version of +=3, and many others were almost as frustrating.

The prose is a problem here. Not so much the quality of the writing; it is overwrought, and the author is clearly not a native English speaker, but it does attain some striking effects. The problem is that it’s difficult to interact with. In many cases the object you need to do something with is buried in the midst of an enormous chunk of prose, looking like a piece of noninteractive scenery. After all, when you write this much, you can’t implement everything you write about.

I didn’t have as much trouble as Emily did with the first room, because I read the opening text three times and figured out that if it was morning I should be moving away from my house. But the first puzzle sent me to the walkthrough, because I couldn’t figure out which elements of the room description were background and which was the one you needed to interact with. (And the puzzle itself was ridiculous; your train pass has expired, which is a puzzle because the train station apparently doesn’t sell tickets. This society deserved to collapse.) This is what I meant when I said that the descriptions in Calm were brief enough not to bog me down. Or what I didn’t mean, rather.

About that walkthrough: Following it was painful. It’s an undifferentiated stream of commands, which makes it hard to locate the puzzle you’re trying to solve. This is the worst toward the end of the game, when you’re often doing something in one room and then something else twelve rooms away. In itself, that’s bad design; if the player is often typing a dozen directional commands in a row, you need to implement “GO TO [room]” as a way to get from one to the next. But a walkthrough that contains an unadorned string of a dozen directions just isn’t very helpful at telling you where you need to go next, unless you’ve been following the walkthrough religiously enough that you’re in the exact location it expects you to be. So I felt punished for trying to solve the puzzles on my own. And the puzzles themselves were often inadequately clued or even anti-clued; a couple of specific complaints below the spoiler space (including one from very near the end).

So: Author, I admire your vision and your world-building, and hope you keep working. But you should probably cut down on the prose a little, maybe work with a native English speaker, and definitely find some beta testers who will tell you when your puzzles are too damn hard. Maybe try a story-based work? It felt like the world-building was what was really important to you, and you don’t need to make the player guess actions in order to show off your world-building.

Death of Schlig. Zany! Aliens kidnap you and give you prehensile eyeballs. That’s not a spoiler, it’s on the cover and in the blurb.

A couple of people have noted that this game isn’t as funny as it keeps telling you it is, but that’s not its main problem. (There were some good bits: I liked to opening in the deli, and the business with the kittens was funny even as it made me whimper pathetically. Poor kitties.)

One problem is pacing: I count three introductory sequences before the real game starts: The scene in the deli, the alien spaceship, and the operating table. That’s two too many. The scene in the deli is fine, because the required actions are clued, and because there’s a lot of things to interact with; I especially liked the menu board. In the spaceship, if you miss your first chance to do something, then you have to wait several turns for your next chance; and then again; and again; and again. (As you can tell, I didn’t find it obvious.) And then the Puzzle You Must Solve To Advance doesn’t actually have anything to do with the reason you advance. That’s the complaint Emily had against The Hours, but at least there the game rushed you on past the puzzles instead of making you wait around for them. The operating table probably wasn’t meant to be a whole additional sequence, but I didn’t figure out the action you need to advance. I did figure out how to get down from the operating table I was strapped to and wander around the compound for a while before going back, so that really stretched this sequence out. Admittedly, I knew I wasn’t supposed to be doing that, but the game should really have advanced without my taking the Mystery Action.

The other problem is also pacing. If you’re a zany character with a zany superpower, your playing experience should be zany. Zany is the opposite of fiddly. This was fiddly. Like Carl, I found myself trying to execute a long sequence of commands to do what the walkthrough suggested I needed to be doing. But it kept happening that my eyestalk snapped back to my body at an inopportune time. Or the guard who wanders around killing you walked into the room — death is a small setback, and you can see him coming, but you can’t do anything about it when he comes. Or I just forgot that when your eye snaps back it doesn’t hold on to its inventory. In the end, maybe I was doing it wrong, but I couldn’t finish in two hours; this with a game that seems to have about five puzzles in the main part.

The walkthrough was much better than in Andromeda Awakening, because it did tell you where you needed to go (in part this was necessary, because at unpredictable times you can be killed and dumped in a particular location). Still, the solution to that puzzle didn’t seem to work from me. Now that I’m thinking about it, maybe I broke it by getting down from the operating table. Oh well.

As you can tell, this game needs more polish — though I’m not going to blame it for printing extra spaces sometimes, because line breaks are impossible to deal with, and the eyeball mechanism obviously took some work. But that’s not the big problem; the big problem is too much fiddly and not enough zany.

[Aside on IF slapstick: A game can be very funny while, and by, constantly frustrating the player, but it needs to be done right. Take Emily Short's "Revenge of the Fussy Table" (an example from the Inform 7 documentation, playable with some tiny modifications by me here). The key, I think, is to introduce more frustrations when you seem to be just at the point of working everything out -- not for nothing does your score start at one below the maximum -- and to have solutions create or reveal new problems. Also to be constantly bombarded with messages about how you're failing, instead of having your careful solution collapse all at once after several turns. What makes this work is the multiple absurdities that have piled up by the time you're juggling your inventory limit, all the furniture is complaining in various ways, and Alison is cheerfully bellowing about your plight. Also, it's short.]

The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M. A polished, well-written, deep game that deals with some serious ethical issues that you usually don’t see in IF. I didn’t like it. A backhanded insult: It reminded me, as it did everyone else, of Tapestry (a game about moral choices in the afterlife), and also reminded me of Losing Your Grip (exploring a giant building full of symbolic represenations of your life and psyche). I didn’t like either of those games either, and will probably never finish them. But they’re usually considered to be IF classics, so I hope the author won’t mind the comparison too much. Still: I have criticisms.

First of all, did I say Death of Schlig was fiddly? This game was fiddlier than a bluegrass festival. There’s a theme of duality, which means that a lot of objects come in pairs, which means I seemed to be disambiguating every other command; if there’s a black tap and a white tap, “x taps” will never work. This gets annoying when you hit a puzzle that requires doing about four actions to two of these things in turn. There’s a pushable ladder which can require two pushes and three up or down commands any time you want to use it. At some point you encounter twelve items, each of which must be examined to yield a difficult-to-spell name, and that name must be typed in order to look it up in a nearby book. “Dr. M” isn’t accepted as a synonym for the title character. Even the hints — which are generally excellent — require diving to the bottom of two separate menus before you get to where you want to go. (I think this comes from an extension that gives you a general introduction to IF in the first menu; I beg you, if you use this extension, give us a command that goes straight to the hint menu.) At some point I began to wonder whether the fiddly interactions was part of the game’s point, like the impossible platforming in Don’t Look Back.

Emily says the game breathes “TRUST ME, TRUST ME.” The confidence of the writing did carry me through the opening, assuring me that it wasn’t an Amnesiac Protagonist wandering in a Featureless Landscape. But I soon lost my faith that the game wasn’t going to try my patience. It’s not just the fiddliness (which I feel moderately ungrateful complaining about, given the technical polish of this game compared to some others). Early on, you drop in on a conversation between two celestial forces, very reminiscent of Tapestry; but in Tapestry I resented having to hang around for a dozen turns while celestial forces polemicized at me, and I don’t like it much more here. Unlike Tapestry, Doctor M lets me move around and even leave the conversation, but there’s not enough to do in the room to justify the number of turns I ultimately have to spend to Hear the Whole Thing.

That’s relatively minor, though. What really did the game in for me was a guess-the-topic puzzle that’s necessary to unlock a major portion of the map. Details under the spoiler space, but you have to ask an NPC about something that’s largely irrelevant to the task you’re trying to accomplish, while the topics that are relevant to that task are unimplemented or yield unhelpful responses. Here the size of the game worked against it for me; though it was apparent where I needed to go (in a general sense), there were enough rooms and topics available that I thought the solution might be somewhere else. If the game had been more constricted, I might have thought of trying every available topic on every NPC sooner. After this puzzle, I found myself hitting the hints even for puzzles I ought to have been able to solve (as well as one or two I oughtn’t). In my allotted two hours, I only really got to the beginning of the flashbacks, but I’m more inclined to blame the game than myself.

[This is part of a more general tension I often find between puzzles and story. Solving puzzles often requires cutting down the possibility space; sometimes the only way a player can progress is to see that there's only one thing to work on, or to try to figure out what to do with the apparent red herring. But telling a good story can mean including lots of things that aren't there for puzzles, which makes it hard to trim the possibility space. Something that's there for backstory can effectively be a red herring in puzzle terms.]

Also: Doctor M is clearly based on a particular real-life figure. Some of the characters in his backstory have names that are nearly identical to characters in Doctor Real-Life’s story. But some details are altered in a way that I think is frankly irresponsible. More below the spoiler space.

Professor Frank. More zaniness! Professor Frank is locked in a library with Dr. Jekyll and a bunch of dangerous Scots who must be placated with Scottish food-like substances, only one of which is haggis. As Sam says, it needs to take its Ritalin. I found it kind of pleasantly goofy, just because it was so open about being a big sloppy mess that I couldn’t hold it against it when things didn’t work as they ought to have. When I got a little bit stuck, I quit with a clear conscience.
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Andromeda Awakening: There’s a point in the game where the only way to progress is by placing a mysterious device on a wall in certain rooms. But the wall isn’t mentioned in the room description. Apparently if you examine the wall, it yields a description that would be helpful, but I didn’t think to examine the wall, because the walls aren’t mentioned in the room description. (The ceiling is mentioned in the room description, and I tried putting the device on the roof, to get the usual failure message.) When you think about it, every room has a wall; but I’m not about to type “x wall” in every room of every game I play.

There’s also a mountain of ice which you’re supposed to climb. If there’s one thing I think of when I see a mountain of ice, it’s “something I can’t climb.” (And the fact that it was ice didn’t have any other gameplay effects, though it was described as jagged and cracked or something like that.) There’s another point where you have to try to get a critical object, but “get doohickey” gives you the response that it’s just out of your reach. You have a longish stick (I think). Is the solution “get doohickey with stick”? No, it’s “get doohickey” again; you try harder and reach it.

And at the very end — after I’d been trying for two hours, which means it doesn’t come off the game’s score, but still — we get this:

>x door
There is no evidence this “door” could be opened. Or even that it’s a door, after all. On it, four small dots draw a perfect line, in its center.

The dots look like tiny holes in the center of the “door”, one above the other in a linear sequence. All the dots are currently off.

>put elektron on door
You link the Elektron to the door of the dome. The display on the device blinks twice: Some text appears on it.

It reads: Geo-gravitational pull. Alert. Peaks at 13.6×10^12 gamma epsilon. Reading off scale. Process terminated. [This is the same response it's always given you.]

>enter hyerotrope
The door of the Hyerotrope opens and lets you in, like a comfortable thalamus.

That’s right; at the end of the game, just before you go through the main door, the game is still telling you that you can’t open it. You just have to walk through. [Pun not intended.] I think the clue is that the lights have gone off — you have to activate four hoojabs, so presumably a light goes off for each one — but I wouldn’t call that clued. (A completely awesome way to troll the player would be if you could’ve walked through the door at the very beginning, making most of the game completely unnecessary. But apparently that’s not the case.)

Doctor M: To unlock the command that lets you into the cellar, you have to ask the devil about the inn, whereupon he will tell you something about using the fireplace to get to the cellar (and some previously useless examinations/searches around the fireplace will become useful). Asking him about the fireplace isn’t implemented. Asking him about the fire is interpreted as asking about himself. Asking him about the cellar isn’t implemented. All this even though he wants you to fix the taps, and has told you that the servant disappeared into the cellar. Shouldn’t he be volunteering information about how to get down there?

On the facts: Doctor M is Jack Kevorkian. The real Dr. Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder for assisting in the suicide of Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old man in the last stages of ALS. Doctor M’s last victim was Thomas York, an 18-year-old with no physical illness at all, as I recall from the game. Doctor M also kills a homeless man with ALS; in the part of the game I played, it wasn’t clear whether John Doe had consented, though Carl finished the game and describes this as “straight-up murder[].” I’m inclined to think Kevorkian was a bad guy, but you ought not to change the facts more than you change the characters’ names. This has the potential to mislead people about what happened in the real world.

Here is the list of games, many of which can be played online; for others you’ll need an interpreter (playing offline with an interpreter may improve your experience with some of the off-line playable ones).

If I played a game online, my review will include a link to the online-playable version. I’ll start with mostly spoiler-free discussions, though I will talk about general themes and the like; some spoilers may be rot13ed in the main discussion, but if I extensively discuss something spoily it’ll be at the end of the entry below a spoiler space.

In this episode: Escape from Santaland, Calm, Beet the Devil, Last Day of Summer, and It. More reviews here.

Escape from Santaland. Lost in the mall at Christmas, your keys stolen by a disgruntled elf, and the only way out is to solve puzzles. This is a solid puzzle game with a lot of polish; I remember that many commands were impressively implemented, though it’s been long enough since I played that I’ve forgotten which ones. It’s very like one of those Flash escape-the-room games; the main puzzle is very much like one of those, particularly in the style of the clues. (Nothing more on that for spoilers’ sake!) It doesn’t really have any ambitions beyond being a humorous and entertaining puzzler (in fact, it’s part of a family puzzle tradition), and that’s fine. On my first playthrough the game tut-tutted at me for walking off with an object that didn’t belong to me, which made me think there was a little moral decision about what to do with the elf, but I don’t think there is.

The only complaints are that the navigation can be a little annoying — it’s not a maze, but it feels maze-like — and that a couple of the puzzles depend overmuch on “examine this to reveal that, then examine that to find the useful object”; there was one of those involving the starting inventory that bugged me. (It may be that this would’ve been fairer if I’d spent more time around those particular things.) “The Hours” had one of those too (described here by Steven Odhner, and I think even the milder version where “x thing” works is annoying); the ones here are more realistic, because the objects in question wouldn’t be visible on a quick glace around, but there are also more things to deal with so it’s more tiring to examine everything. (Though one of two of these puzzles that sent me to the hints was something that appears all the time in escape-the-room games, and I really should’ve solved it; details below the spoiler space.)

Also, it is possible to solve the game without knowing the canonical order of the reindeer; again, details below.

Calm (not played online, because it hung up after setup in Quixe). One of those insanely ambitious games — at the beginning, you choose your character’s starting location and special skill, there’s at least one unusual mechanism (you have a certain stress level, and if it goes too high you die; if it goes too low you have to go to sleep, although maybe that’s a different mechanism). The map is huge, and eventually (on my path it took a while) you encounter some NPCs and may get the chance to change your objective. Many puzzles seem to have multiple solutions, perhaps not all available to all starting roles. It’s not a roguelike-like like Kerkerkruip, though; the map seems to be set, it’s just that what you do in it varies.

As of when I played it, this was definitely a work in progress. You can start in easy mode, but it’s not useful; what it does is blort out a huge stack of possible commands that you could try every turn, most of them not useful. There are some polish issues, like a puzzle where you have to go through the same four actions every time you go through a door, even though they don’t make sense from one side (the authors have informed me that in the new version you only have to do this once). There were some interaction issues (the wrecked cars and their windows required some tortuous syntax-guessing, and there’s an object that requires “open x with y” but says “that’s not something you can open” if you just try “open x”). Also, when I played it, there was a game-wrecking bug where a crucial item didn’t show up even after you’d taken the action that was supposed to do it, and then (while I was trying to implement an alternate solution suggested by the author) the game crashed when I tried “x me” for the first time (possibly an interpreter bug). Those things happened after I’d been playing for two hours, though, so they don’t go in the comp score.

Which is something of a review right there; even though I wasn’t nearly done, I was still playing after two hours. There’s something hypnotic about exploring the environment — appropriate, given the subject matter. Emily complained that the post-apocalyptic setting lacked specificity, but I found it evocative enough; the descriptions were brief enough not to get me bogged down in all the things that were mentioned, but full enough to give me a sense of the world. There are some funny moments; after meeting the first NPCs, my to-do list changed from something like “Find some other people” to “Find some other people who aren’t completely crazy,” and the end of the dialogue with the queen is brilliant. And I solved some problems in a way that made me feel clever. (Some people report dying a lot; it may have helped that my specialty let me avoid overheating. Or maybe I just rock. *sticks out tongue*)

So, medium recommended as is, but I look forward to what it’ll develop into.

Beet the Devil. You and an adorable puppy must enter the depths of Hell and go through a linear sequence of puzzles in order to, well, do what it says on the tin. The puzzles usually involve vegetables. A light tone, with a distinctive voice and well-drawn NPCs (they’re one-dimensional incarnations of sin, but they’re well-drawn one-dimensional incarnations of sin). The puzzles are the thing, though, and they usually involve an intuitive leap of some sort, some of which I found natural and delightful (I got the anger puzzle in about three turns) and some of which I didn’t (even after figuring out and performing the solution to the sloth puzzle — with one hint — I didn’t understand why it had worked, and having had it explained to me I’m still not sure I understand it).

More substantive complaints: The first time through I hit an unwinnable situation that I think is a bug (you take an action in room X that should have an effect in room Y, but the effect seemed not to trigger when I wasn’t in room Y. If it’s deliberate, it shouldn’t be). [UPDATE: This was bothersome in part because I had to repeat a long opening sequence, in which you explore a few rooms and examing a whole bunch of things to collect different vegetables. At the end of this sequence there's a warning if you haven't got anything, which led me to expect that I wouldn't be able to get into an unwinnable situation, though I suppose I wouldn't have felt any better about it if there hadn't been a warning.] There’s one puzzle that has the “examine everything” problem I talked about with Escape from Santaland, except less fair; there’s a crucial object in a container, but the container’s contents aren’t described when you open it. And the last puzzle… well, I had happened to see something that gave away the solution in another review, and after you die a couple of times it is clued, but in some ways it’s the apotheosis of “guess the verb.” It makes me feel a little better about a particularly evil puzzle I have planned.

I also have a theological quibble, below the spoiler space.

Last Day of Summer. Short, mostly story-based one, with a couple of puzzles. Probably the second-best short mostly story-based one of the comp, after Cold Iron. Well-written but not as evocative, and the resolution felt a bit too neat, somehow. I like Carl Muckenhoupt’s take, and am interested to hear more about the Dr. Seuss allusions.

It (not playable online). On the surface the less ambitious of the two Australian hide-and-seek games in the comp, but with something of a hidden depth. You and three other girls are playing a game with a definite loser, and the social undercurrents are more important than the game. Worth playing through a couple times (it’s very short) to see what you can do. I played through three times and stopped when I got an ending I liked, though I suspect something interesting happens if you cheat. (Which I almost did accidentally — I didn’t understand how to work the very opening of the game — but I undid when I realized what I’d done.)

It could be cooler if there was more of it, though. The hiding place isn’t randomized, so you don’t have to develop a strategy; trying and dying will tell you where to go. And I think it might be interesting to have the social dynamics be randomized a little, so you have to figure out whether the other girls are being awful, and what to do about it. That might be a much more ambitious programming project, though.

Mostly very smoothly implemented, though the syntax for finishing the hide-and-seek game was hard for me to figure out.
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Escape from Santaland: The hoary escape-the-room chestnut is the one where you take the batteries from the remote and put them in the flashlight. (Though don’t those usually take different sized batteries?) As for the reindeer, there’s a command (probably “turn dial”) that lets you cycle through the canonical reindeer order, so you don’t need to know it yourself.

Beet the Devil: At the end, if you attack the devil, you are flung into Phlegethon for the sin of wrath. But isn’t attacking the devil righteous indignation rather than a sin? In the Inferno, Virgil upbraids Dante for showing compassion to the fortunetellers, and I seem to remember one of them kicking the hell out of one of the damned souls. I was going to put a link to the Dante’s Inferno videogame there, but I just can’t.

My overall impressions:

It seems like a large proportion of the games are either very short or wildly ambitious. Out of thirty-eight games, I think about eight have something like 0-2 puzzles and can be finished pretty comfortably within half an hour (plus two web-based games that are pretty quick to play), and around 8-11 of the rest have heavy symbolism, enormous sprawling worlds, unusual gameplay mechanisms, rafts of fairly detailed NPCs, or some combination thereof. Coincidentally, there are a bunch of games that I didn’t finish in two hours (as well as probably the usual number I didn’t finish in less than two hours).

Related: there are a lot of interesting experiments. There are all sorts of ways in which Calm can be improved (for instance, getting rid of that one game-breaking bug), but I enjoyed it and really want to see the authors keep working on it. I enjoyed The Hours partly because of the ways it lacked polish, but it also did some unusual things with navigation and NPC interaction. And that’s not the end of it. I hope that the new “updates allowed” policy encourages people to keep working on their games after the competition. (And that IFdB does a little more to recognize revisions — I spent a little time playing Snowquest online, thinking, “Hmm, the revised version seems a lot like the old one,” and then I realized that it was the old one. I can has online play links for both versions, plz? — Maybe the issue is that the revised version is zipped and can’t be played online, in which case, don’t do that.)

I have no idea what will win. The last couple of years I think it’s been pretty obvious, what the winner would be, this year there are about five games I could see coming in first. Probably my highest score will go to PataNoir. I guess if I’m going to handicap it I might say PataNoir, The Life and Deaths of Doctor M, The Play, Six; but I could see either of the first two winding up around tenth place.

*Kerkerkruip and Fan Interference. I almost certainly shouldn’t try to judge Kerkerkruip, because I spent way more than two hours playing it during the testing process. Enjoying easy mode? You have my transcript full of comments like “This is too haaaaard!” to thank for that. Fan Interference I did much less testing for, basically playing through a decent part of the first part of the game and including comments that ran to things like “Randall Simon, sausage killer.” In fact I’d like to get to it sometime just to see if the author listened to me and included the bit about Randall Simon and the sausage incident. I don’t see how you have something set in 2003 that mentions Randall Simon and ignores the sausage incident.

**I played Myothian Falcon for about half an hour and was enjoying myself, but then I went to do other things and when I got back Quest’s webplayer had kicked me off. It looks like I can’t play that unless I’m committing an uninterrupted block of time to it, which probably won’t happen by the comp deadline. I had some similar issues getting started with Return to Camelot. Ted Paladin seems to require some more interpreter setup, which I do hope to get around to eventually. I probably could play Cursed on Spatterlight, but it’s last on my list anyway. Yes, I realize that I’m being unfair to non-Inform games here. [UPDATE: I've played Cursed now for pretty close to my allotted two hours, and trying to set up for Ted Paladin totally borked Gargoyle, so unless I go back to A Comedy of Error Messages I think I'm pretty much done with the official playing part of the comp. Cursed was another wildly ambitious one, by the way.] [UPDATE II: The new Gargoyle update -- thanks Ben! -- worked fine with Ted Paladin, so now I've played it and am pretty much done.]