Five Novel Games From IF Comp 2023

Interactive fiction never dies

Once upon a time, before graphics, video games were purely text-based affairs. The game would describe your environment and you would choose how to navigate that space by typing in commands using your keyboard. The effect was not unlike reading a novel in which you could control the action. For years, these “Interactive Fiction” (IF) games grew, developing their own tropes and styles of play, and showing a general population the power of the then-new personal computer.

Once PCs became capable of graphics, text-based games quickly faded out of popular view, but they never really died completely. Instead, they continued to evolve in the shadows. Over the years, the term interactive fiction has grown to encompass a broad spectrum of genres and sub-genres, but all IF games have one thing in common: they all use text as their primary form of interaction.

Zork (1981), one of the first popular text-based video games

The Interactive Fiction Competition, or IF Comp for short, has been running since 1995, keeping the IF tradition alive. Every year, dozens of entrants submit their work — ranging from short experiments to hours-long adventures rivaling their graphical counterparts in both depth and complexity. The IF community is small, but full of very enthusiastic and creative individuals who both cherish the history of the medium and want to see it grow.

This year marks the 29th year of IF Comp, which is run by the Interactive Fiction Technology Institute. 75 games have been submitted, spanning over 90 hours of playable content. Players who try five or more games are able to vote for their favorites, with winners being awarded prizes provided by generous donors.

As a lover of interactive fiction, I have selected five IF games from this year’s competition that caught my eye and may serve as an introduction for new players.

Despite the simplicity of the medium, playing IF can be weirdly complicated. There are many different programs for making IF games, some of which require installing extra software to even play. For these recommendations, I made sure to select games that are playable in-browser, to make getting them running painless. If you like what you see and end up playing more than five games, feel free to vote in this year’s competition before November 15th!

(For each title, I have included the authors’ name, the program the game was made in, and the game’s average playtime)

1) Lunium

Ben Jackson | Twine | 1 hr

Lunium is an interactive fiction escape room. A murderer is on the loose, and you must figure out who they are before they claim another victim. The only problem is you just woke up in a dark room, chained to the wall.

Lunium is a solid escape room experience, full of puzzles that are just challenging enough to make you feel smart, without being horribly frustrating. It is delightful to see a genre that started in the video game space and became popular in the physical space return to its video game roots. Escape rooms are a strange trans-media experience that straddle the digital and analog spaces like few others. Lunium is so grounded that you could probably recreate its puzzles in real life with little difficulty.

The author, Ben Jackson, also released his first IF game earlier this year during the Spring Thing, the second biggest IF competition of the year. He wrote The Kuolema, an excellent IF adventure game built entirely in Google Forms. Despite being brand-new to the medium, Ben does some fantastic work, and his games are both engaging and fun.

Lunium presents a great escape room, a solid piece of IF, and a decent mystery all in one package. It is well worth the single hour it takes to complete.

(Note: Both Lunium and The Kuolema utilize AI-generated art, which may be a point of contention. For what it is worth, neither game is a commercial product, and therefore do not profit from potentially stolen art assets.)

2) Fix Your Mother’s Printer

Geoffrey Golden

| Ink | 30m

Geoffrey Golden is the author of the Adventure Snack newsletter, which delivers bite-sized IF games to your inbox twice a month. He does IF a great service by consistently making it accessible to and enjoyable for modern audiences. If you are hungry for more IF after trying some of these games, I highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter.

Fix Your Mother’s Printer is Geoffrey’s longest IF game yet, and displays the goofy sense of humor he has become known for. The game is exactly what it says on the tin. Your mother has a very important presentation on topiary that she needs to print out, but her printer is not working. You must help her, via video call, locate the source of the problem and fix it. Along the way, you learn a little about yourself (you’re kind of an asshole), your mother, and your family history.

It is a lighthearted story with a few surprisingly tender moments tucked in-between the tedious moments of tech service. It is a thoroughly charming game with a mostly linear story, but a wide set of choices for you to explore (You can even blow off your mom completely, but is that really how she raised you?). If you’re looking for a simple, relatable game, than Fix Your Mother’s Printer is a great choice.

3) Escape Your Psychosis

Georg Buchrucker | PDF | 15m

Breaking the mold a little, Escape Your Psychosis is more a choose-your-own-adventure-like gamebook than IF, though the distinction is pretty negligible. The game is fully playable on your computer by clicking the links in the PDF file itself, which does make it indistinguishable from other hyper-link based games on this list.

Escape Your Psychosis takes a lighthearted look at a serious topic, giving you a tiny glimpse into the mind of someone having a psychotic episode. As you are experiencing your particular episode, you get to choose how you deal with it and whether or not you seek help. There are two endings, with all other responses resulting in an endless loop that you must break out of.

Some of the hyperlinks in the PDF are broken, and the game is translated from German, so the quality of the game is a little rough. Despite that, it does manage to entertain while addressing an important issue, which is enough to deserve recognition, in my book.

4) Xanthippe's Last Night with Socrates

Victor Gijsbers | Ink | 30m

Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates sees you in the role of Socrates’ titular wife on the night before her husband is to be executed. Your mission is to spend one last passionate night with your condemned husband. There is just one problem: the aging philosopher is not in the mood.

What follows is a very realistic conversation between a woman and her husband as the two talk about their relationship and reminisce on their married life. There is plenty of humor as the two match wits, and many references to the life and philosophies of Socrates for those who know.

You have the choice of how to respond to certain parts of the conversation, though your decisions will not have a drastic effect on the story. Socrates is going to die in the morning, and no amount of talking is going to change that.

Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates is perhaps one of the best and most mature bits of writing in the competition. It is a moving, surprisingly lighthearted story about the woes and weals of married life, with plenty to recommend it.

5) Codename Obscura

Mika Kujala | Web/ZX Spectrum | 1hr

Codename Obscura is the most old-school IF title on this list. It is so old-school, in fact, that its creator, Mika Kujala, originally made it for the ZX Spectrum back in 1987. They have since updated it, and are re-releasing on the web, with a planned ZX Spectrum version to be released at some later time.

Unlike the other games on this list (but like many other games in the comp), Codename Obscura is a parser game, which means that you interact with it by typing commands on your keyboard. Like many parser games, the hard part is learning which commands the game recognizes (the “HELP” command is your best friend), but once you have learned the game’s syntax, navigating it is fairly simple.

The game sees you taking on the role of a secret agent, undercover in an Italian village and tasked with retrieving a diamond from a rich Count with nefarious plans.

The game suffers from the problems of most parser games, in that I needed to break out a walk-through to get through some tricky spots. A few puzzles are a little obtuse, and the parser is not always great at recognizing commands. For example, you may “pat” a cat, but you may not “pet” it. Likewise, you can buy a man a “beer,” but you cannot simply buy him a “drink.” Sticking points like this make it difficult to know when you are on the wrong track, or are simply being blocked by the game’s specific vocabulary.

Despite these hiccups, Codename Obscura is actually a really solid adventure game once you get your footing. There is lots to explore, most of the puzzles are challenging but solvable, and the story is fun and engaging in a very James Bond sort of way. If you want to wade a little further into the ocean of classic IF, then Codename Obscura is not a bad place to get your feet wet.

Next Time…

Five more great finds from the IF Comp!