This was my first time reviewing IF Comp games. I’m happy that anyone can do it and I’d like to thank the community for giving me a nice welcome and tips on IF MUD although I’d never participated before. Typically I am more on the sidelines with this community.
I’m couching my roundup statement less about the games and more as a personal thing: I learned from this comp that I am not apparently very good at puzzles, particularly of the word-based variety. I have little to no problem with math puzzles but teasers and word puzzles froze me up a lot during this competition.
A few spoilers below this cut:
I tried to avoid reading reviews of games until after playing them, but I was actually reading basically all the reviews because I found them so interesting, and that’s what made me want to write my own in the first place. So I was spoiled for a rather small amount of things but generally did my best not to spoil things.
I do tend to resort to walkthroughs when frustrated, but I think that’s normal when you only have two hours to see the game and are afraid you’ll get stuck solving something. The Grand Quest was an example of this: getting stuck right away, in the first room, with no hint system and the fact that I seem to be bad at word puzzles, meant I was either just going to stand there in the first room forever or open the walkthrough.
I do like games with multiple endings, but I find that is true in video games as well, especially if the game makes it less of a pain to see alternate endings or makes the choices distinctly different. (I don’t, for example, feel charmed enough by Fable 2 to go through it again just to see what happens if I make one different choice at the very end, but I was this “charmed” by Silent Hill 2 because of how clever its system for getting new endings is.)
I started to get irritated with dream sequences by the end of the comp.
I discovered from reading reviews that I probably should’ve taken another look at the Ascot because it had a Double Secret Probation ending. After messing around with it for a while today I finally figured that out, and it was pretty cute. However since I rated it as average before I bet it will ding it a bit in the comp that many reviewers didn’t find the double secret probation ending until it was too late.
Also, I’m apparently the only reviewer that got max points in Interface. I have no idea why since it seemed that I just did everything required to finish the game. I went back and replayed it the same way from scratch and took a log of it, and I still got 90/90. It’s not the garage door, either. If I use the garage door I get 95/90 according to the scoreboard.
I’m proud that I played all the games and I had fun. And apparently now I have a blank space on IF Wiki. I should fill that with… something, preferably some kind of work, that I have done, which I should do.
However right now I’m focusing a bit on 3D modeling, and if you made it this far down the review just know that I’m working on a 3D tribute to Dragon Quest which I hope to have done before Christmas or so. Writing, reviewing, programming, modeling, sometimes I do too much to focus!
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