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They call you Harbinger.

You are a Keeper, a sworn protector of the Realm, mutated by necromancy to keep the monsters that plague the land in check. But you are no ordinary Keeper. You are the most powerful Keeper of your generation. A genetic anomaly: the only living Keeper to survive the mutation with a positive blood type. You possess the physical might of a mutant and the forbidden spell-casting of a mage.

Keeper’s Vigil is 33% off until June 11th!

Now, a new terror has risen. An experiment to resurrect the extinct Elves has failed, unleashing a horde of “Abominations.” They are twisted and infectious creatures that are overrunning the Middle Realm.

Keeper’s Vigil is a 193,000-word interactive dark fantasy novel by Lota Labs. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

As the Abominations claw at the gates of the Inner Realm, you must uncover the conspiracy within your own Order. Traitors seek to bring back the ancient Elves to fight an even greater threat: the Anunnaki. But the price of resurrection may be the death of humanity.

Will you rely on your steel, your wits, or your forbidden magic? Every time you use your necromancy, your mutation advances. If you embrace your power too fully, you may lose your humanity forever and become the very monster from which you were sworn to protect the Realm.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bisexual.
• Romance a rival: Woo the compassionate Royal Heir, the fiery Rebel Leader, or your former best friend, whom you believed to be dead years ago.
• Master the Mutation: Utilize your corrupted blood to unleash devastating and supreme magic, or seek a cure to restore your humanity before you transform into a beast.
• Choose your Faction: Align with the strict Order, the freedom-fighting Rebels, or enter the Lusus Naturae tournament to earn the loyalty of the Beast Clan.
• Define your Legacy: Will you block out the sun to intimidate the Regent, sacrifice a limb to survive, or ascend to godhood to stop an interdimensional invasion?
• Investigate the Outbreak: Use your perception and necromancy to track the source of the Abominations before the Inner Realm falls.

The Anunnaki are gaining entry. The portal is opening. Will you be the Realm’s savior—or its end?

Lota Labs developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

It has been a pretty long time since there was a post here but some incredible work by Huw Williams has promoted me to dust off the old email account and share the following. Huw relates the following:

Recently an old box of assorted floppy disks auctioned off at eBay revealed a hidden treasure: three previously unknown Eamon adventures that had eluded the clubs and the official catalog for nearly 45 years! The unearthed adventures are titled Castle Danger, The Jester's Court, and The Trapster's Maze.

(Continued from my previous post.)

I’ve got most of the map laid out, and things are open enough that I’m not really “stuck” but I wanted to report in anyway.

Story from the later version of The Coveted Mirror, via the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

To clear one thing up right away, regarding the mirror pieces: you don’t pick up the ones you find. You instead just see them and remember their shape, and trying to pick one up mentions a “protection spell” (I’ve only found one of them so far, but it clearly is consistent across the game). This at least partly explains the setup: Voar doesn’t need to be near the mirror shards to use them, isn’t worried about sabotage, and probably doesn’t even know seeing what they look like would be necessary information to find the fifth missing shard (given he hasn’t been able to locate it).

I also think the original wizard is still alive, despite the original manual indicating he wasn’t. There’s also reference to a Queen so maybe that’s who Voar pushed out?

No invisibility spell yet. That would be lovely to find.

The player starts “locked” in the first floor of the castle in the Dungeon (not really that well locked), can travel to a second floor, can leave to go into a town, and a little past. There is a timer on each trip out of the starting room. After the timer runs out, you get teleported back to the start, and lose any items you are carrying to a holding room on the second floor.

You can bribe the guard that checks the room for extra time. This required first having the bribe — there’s a necklace you can find early that works — and then typing WAIT while hanging in the Dungeon. Then you hand the item over and the guard gives you extra time.

I’m honestly not fully sure on the formula here, but I think the more valuable an object you give, the more extra time you have. It may be possible to not bother at all with this mechanic but since getting deep into (and past) the town does take a decent chunk of clock, it may instead be impossible to win without resorting to at least a little bribery.

Red spaces are spots you get caught. Yellow spaces are places you land from trapdoors (more on that shortly).

I incidentally say (GUARD) for all the red rooms but some of them are courtiers or other hangers-on of the evil Voar as opposed to proper guards. Any run-in will send you to Voar then back to the Dungeon (and one of your 25 times you can get into trouble gets used up).

From the Dungeon you can just move a bed to sneak your way out (through a dark room that I later managed to light up). Going south leads to a staircase, going up then leads to a mysterious locked door (and that necklace that helps with bribery).

One element to highlight (as touched upon in my last post) is that text is extraordinarily sparse and sometimes doesn’t try to describe the room at all (as in the above scene). The game is dependent on you looking at the picture and figuring out not just what to interact with but what nouns to use. Here “door” and “necklace” aren’t that hard to come up with, but later there are multiple items in a scene where I had to guess if the game would let me pick up something in particular.

I incidentally have no idea yet how to unlock the door. You can ignore it for now and go south or east, which leads to a maze which takes up the second floor of the castle.

The “twisty maze” aspect isn’t done in a classical Crowther/Woods sense, but rather in having trap doors which will shoot you back to the first floor.

These trap doors correspond exactly with the yellow rooms from the earlier map. This can be helpful as a way of jumping past the rooms you can get caught in. Before trying that, I should also point out:

a.) Going E-S-E-E-N-N-W-W from the necklace drops you in Voar’s treasure room; if you get scooped up back to the Dungeon while holding items, this is where they go. Unfortunately, that’s a lot of steps to start a run, so that already runs a fair amount of the hourglass out; I think the game intends you to time things out, storing items safely so you don’t have to deal with this.

You can hit ENTER on its own like a Sierra game to switch to text mode; if there’s items here they’ll be listed before the short description.

b.) One of the pieces of the Coveted Mirror is in the maze.

This is the first mention of the Peak of Shards. Metacommentary is an odd place to be introducing lore.

Dropping into trapdoors, you can make it into a kitchen…

Despite lots of visuals going on, the only thing I could find to do was GET FISH.

…and also a Great Hall.

This seems like a good moment to remind you that many of the scenes are animated; in this case the dog’s tail moves. I haven’t been able to interact with it but I assume some kind of food or bone would be appreciated.

The Great Hall is connected up with Voar’s throne room if you feel like getting yourself caught directly, and two rooms which have a random chance of encounters. This mechanic shows up much more in the town, but I’ll mention now there are a fair number of rooms where you may or may not meet a character.

South of the dog is the jester.

TALK gets this response. I think I know what the jester wants, just I haven’t managed the logistics yet of shuttling the item over here. It wasn’t clear to me right away that this was even an item request, I thought for a while maybe OFFER HELP or the like would work, but conversation seems limited to TALK in each location it can happen.

East of the dog is a bard (which, again, shows up at random — the hall may be empty).

Doing TALK here gets the response:

SO MUNJISTAN & HIS SILENT FRIEND FARED LONG AGO TO THE MOUNTAIN BEND. IF YE ASPIRE TO ASCEND, WAIT WITH THE RING AT THE DARK FOREST’S END.

I don’t think any further puzzle is here (although if a music sheet shows up it would be worth taking to the bard). North is where Voar is hanging, and to the east is a room with nice art and not much description.

Just a general fact about the keep, rather than trying to describe the room (and making clear the broom is takeable).

Time for an escape! Fortunately back at the staircase you can just go south, and there’s a window you can open.

The random mention of the Queen. I hope I’ve made clear why the confusing lore like this can be frustrating in an adventure game; is there a Queen that’s alive we are trying to find? If so, that means some artifact that seems like it belongs to the Queen might be an aid in finding her. Maybe she’s in the tower past the locked door?

To the east of the “main entrance” you pass by is a “good place to hide loot”; I haven’t experimented with if there really is a problem dropping objects in random places and you have to be strategic to avoid things being yoinked.

You see this as walking away from the castle and towards the town.

Here’s my map of the town:

There’s a lot of content, and I’ll mostly take it north to south. At the far north there is a tree where going UP lets you climb and find an AX.

It’s not clear these are climbable trees. Fortunately I was obsessively trying N/S/E/W/U/D in every room.

If you try to take the AXE the game suggests you use AX instead. I find it fascinating when the game clearly understands your meaning but tries to force your typing in a particular way instead rather than just recognizing the alternate spelling method.

The next east-west row has a tavern on the far west, where you get something stolen when you enter. I haven’t noodled here at all nor worked out if the game is softlocked once an item is stolen.

There’s a gate where “Starina” (optional encounter) tells you IN THEE LIES THE HOPE OF ALL STARBURY. GREAT HOPE MAKES THEE GREAT! and I’m again wondering what the biographical context of our main character is, and if it matters for any puzzles.

Past Starina to the east is an astrologer, who is pining after a fortune-teller, and the fortune-teller right next to him.

We’ll be back here later with the crystal ball she wants.

Going back to Starina and heading south, there’s a blacksmith (who needs something to help with his fire) and a hovel.

South even further is a “town square” with multiple possible encounters, including “Granny Garbled-Marbles” who lets you know a candlestick of hers was stolen by an Abbott.

To the east is a church, with Brother James (and the aforementioned candlestick) and the Abbott’s room.

If you try to read the book, the Abbott appears and throws you out.

To the west is a glassblower place, where you can find a crystal ball. This is the ball you need to take to the fortune teller (mind you, the fortune teller seemed to indicate she had lost her ball and you’re finding it … this seems like you’re getting a new ball?) When trying to GET BALL the glass-blower first quizzes you on what a picture is, showing it piece by piece; you need type MERMAID and you can go ahead.

Just to jump ahead a bit, if you take the crystal ball back to the fortune-teller, you get told about a magical vase:

Was the scene necessary to win, or will you find the vase anyway even if you don’t hear about it first?

Resuming our north-south walk, on one side is an alchemist.

He needs the candlestick. I’ll do that whole sequence in a moment.

Across from the alchemist is a bakery, where the person inside needs an ingredient for chocolate “moose”.

Reaching the outskirts of town, there’s a path passing by a pig, chicken, and goose (at various moments, their appearance is random); there’s also a horseshoe lying around which I believe is the lucky item the jester wants.

Further on is a shop where you can “appraise” items. It will determine which items are considered valuable as bribes (this is quite directly given in the text — something is listed as valuable or not “TO GUARDS”).

Also, there’s someone sewing with a cat.

There’s still more map south past the town, but I’m just going to highlight a couple things. First of all, you can find a joust minigame. You are informed you need to win four times in a row. You can move a shield and a lance independently, and it is possible to win, lose, or tie at any clash. I don’t know what you get if you win.

(The game also keeps track of your hourglass time and you will get booted back to the Dungeon once time is up.)

Similarly, you can also find a fishing minigame nearby. Again, I’m not sure what the reward is, although I found this easier than the jousting. Again, hourglass time will pass as you fish, so it is possible to lose by getting booted back to the Dungeon.

This and the other minigame show our avatar!

Finally, there’s a stockade just outside of town. If you talk with the criminal within, they let you know they have a lockpick out next to the tavern. You’ve actually seen the lockpick!

That little dot and line in the bottom right is the lockpick! (This, plus the minigames, plus the emphasis on parsing the world visually rather than reading text, plus the people appearing at random, make me think of later Sierra games.) You can just GET LOCKPICK, even if you hadn’t heard about it previously from the criminal.

With the man free, head over to the church, and he’ll cause the Father to chase him so you can grab the candlestick. You can then take the candlestick over to the alchemist who will take some of the metal for alchemy (not the whole thing) and he’ll give you his bellows. You can then take the bellows over to the blacksmith who will trade you his shovel for the bellows. I have yet to be able to dig anything up with the shovel.

That’s mostly it for this update, but one more thing: I was captured with all the aforementioned items, retrieved them, dropped down the trapdoor to the magician room, and then lit the candle using the fire at the flask. I could then open the cupboard and go in where it was dark, finding an item.

Just to recap the obstacles remaining, I need to deal with

a.) the jester (just need to get the horseshoe over, most likely)

b.) the locked door

c.) the various people in the halls (likely need the invisibility spell, likely meaning I need to find a witch)

d.) the people at the tavern (and the cryptic mention of sign language)

e.) the astrologer who pines after the fortune teller

This might just be for color, but maybe you give a flower or something along those lines.

f.) the Abbott and the book

g.) the “moose” ingredient

h.) something at the sewing shop (nothing seems to be requested?)

i.) winning the joust

j.) winning the fishing

k.) some exploration past the town which I’ll save for a different post

l.) probably at least one thing I’m missing because of the random appearance of characters and also the fact exits aren’t mentioned, so I have to test N/S/E/W/U/D in every room and I likely missed one by accident

I haven’t had a game split in this many directions in a while. The time-limit part is interesting in keeping each expedition “directed” (for example, jousting and fishing take enough time that they likely each need their own individual journey, without any extra stops). I certainly don’t need any hints or suggestions yet, so please save those for if I later get stuck.

I posted a couple of weeks ago about Infocom tie-in novels, with a bit of a digression on the work of George Alec Effinger. It turns out that I have a response from Effinger to relay!

Not a response to my 2026 post, obviously. Effinger passed away in 2002. But his books were mentioned on Usenet in 1997. It was a thread about the "Groundhog Day" trope, which brought up Effinger's books The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time. (The first Effinger that I read, as it happens.)

Anyhow, someone made a rather dismissive comment to the effect of "...before Mr. Effinger ran out of ideas and was reduced to writing things like 'The Zork Chronicles'." And guess who showed up to riposte?

I regret to say that I had also posted to that thread -- agreeing with the original poster. Although, in my defense, I added that I was a Glorian of the Knowledge fan. Still, embarrassing. And not just because I totally forgot that this exchange happened! Thirty years ago. Yikes.

You can read Effinger's entire post here. If Google Search goes ass-up, as it keeps threatening to, you can also find the post archived in this Usenet thread collection (unzip, search the text file raif970828).

However, I need to quote more of Effinger's post. It gives valuable context for those days of 1989 or so. And, well, it trashes a lot of the assumptions I made in my earlier tie-in post. Further embarrassment! At least I tried to label all my assumptions as assumptions.

I wrote that Effinger might have written The Zork Chronicles "as an on-ramp to the videogame industry". Turns out I had it backwards:

That bit shows up another of my mistakes. I asserted that Effinger was not a gamer or a computer nerd. I was going off this interview, recorded in 2020. There, Mike Legg says that Effinger "...didn’t have a PC, he didn’t have a word processor; at least I don’t think he had." Oops on both of us.

Jumping back, and relevant to the topic of my original post, Byron Preiss:

Preiss was referred to as a "book packager" in this 2019 article. It's good to see the use of the term validated.

I do get to correct Mr. Effinger in turn on one trivial point: The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time were published in paperback editions -- in the UK. I only know this because I picked up a second-hand copy. (Possibly at the Toronto Worldcon of 2003.)

Effinger goes on to defend the practice of writing licensed works, and to deny that they're inherently crap. He is polite but clearly annoyed that he has to do this. I won't quote because we've hopefully grown out of making such attacks.

On to more interesting details:

The legal situation is mentioned in Effinger's Wikipedia entry: a medical bankruptcy which could have stripped him of his ownership of his own work. Happily, that didn't happen. He went on to publish those two sequels, A Fire in the Sun (1989) and The Exile Kiss (1991), to acclaim.

But what about that game "Aeon"?

ÆON, an ambitious sci-fi RPG, was released by White Wolf Publishing in late 1997. They promptly got slapped with a lawsuit from MTV's animated show Æon Flux. One hasty press release later, the game was retitled Trinity.

RPGs aren't my field, so I won't try to summarize the history of Trinity or Effinger's connection to it. It seems to still be in print (now from Onyx Path). Hopefully Effinger got his promised royalties.

One can peek at the original Æon/Trinity rulebook. (A true monument to the '90s trend of hyper-greeblied page layouts!) The book opens with the promised Effinger short story. It's titled "The Honored Dead"; it's literally the first twenty pages of the rulebook, before the table of contents.

...I just sat down and read it. It's a decent bit of sci-fi thriller. Tough Guy and Mysterious Lady smuggle some valuable biotech across the Alps. Which cup is the Maltese Falcon cryovial under? It's got character backstory and an intro to some big-shots of the Æon setting. (As promised, their names appear in the background material of the rest of the sourcebook.) What it doesn't do is give a sense of the setting as a whole. There's supposed to be aliens, space colonies, a world reshaped by psi-wars. What we see is a few miles of Switzerland. Fine for a story, questionable for an RPG intro.

Also, as I said, I prefer the whimsical Effinger. White Wolf hired the gritty one.

But what about those novels? Sadly, they never appeared. Wikis mention the titles as Æon 1: Dawn and Æon 2: Meridian -- both cancelled in 1998. Effinger says they "happened", which sounds like manuscripts got written. If so, they presumably got stuffed in a drawer and remained there until his death.

Of course, I've gotten myself into trouble with assumptions before...

I should note that the Onyx Path Æon page lists stories titled Dawn and Meridian. However, if you click through, they're shown as novellas (not novels), written in 2021 by Lauren Roy and Chris Allen respectively. Written from scratch from the original 1997 outlines? Or just borrowing the titles? I have no idea.

Well, that's all I've got on this particular path. My very belated thanks to Mr. Effinger for dropping in on our discussion, and my very belated apologies for my mostly-dismissive attitude back then.

Although... Huh. One of the designers of Trinity, after Andrew Bates, is a guy named Richard Dansky.... who's giving a talk at NarraScope in less than two weeks. Maybe I'll corner him and ask him about Effinger.

The text of Infocom’s Hollywood Hijinx

Paratext and Worldbuilding

The pack-ins for Hollywood Hijinx include an issue of Tinsel World magazine, a leter from the protagonist’s Aunt Hildegard, and a postcard from Uncle Buddy. It’s a likable assortment. The copy protection doesn’t disrupt the reading experience, and the documents effectively evoke the mood of a b-movie about b-movies.

The pleasantly ludicrous magazine features black and white photographs and parodic advertisements. In one passage, it advises readers that “Dill pickles can add years to your life!” Elsewhere, in an article titled “Gerbil Terrorizes Gramps,” we read that “the crazed rodent sprang out and began racing wildly around the house, clawing and biting at curtains and furniture and severely maiming Mr. Veldran’s pet lizard.”

“Dill pickles can add years to your life!”

These are garnishes to the practical purpose of the magazine, as the current issue observes the recent passing of Aunt Hildegard and remembers her collaborator Buddy Burbank. Her passing is the inciting incident of Hollywood Hijinx. Her will (and Buddy’s before her) states that her entire and substantial estate will go to their favorite niece or nephew (the game never assigns a gender to the protagonist) if they can complete a treasure hunt in twelve hours. Other nieces and nephews will get their own chances, should the protagonist fail.

The magazine fills in details of the world and contextualizes Hollywood Hijinx‘s protagonist. It reviews—humorously—Buddy’s career as a studio owner and b-movie auteur. His body of work includes films like The Seven Dwarves Do Dallas and Buck Palace, the Fighting Mailman. We learn about the marriage between Buddy and “Hildy,” as well as their close relationships with their nieces and nephews.

Hollywood Hijinx is the very rare Infocom game that makes a substantial investment in the backstory of its protagonist. Many Infocom characters have undeveloped backgrounds, as this series demonstrates. Moonmist‘s detective is a “famous” sleuth, for example, but we are arguably meant to fill in the blanks with whatever we know about Nancy Drew. The precocious inventor of Seastalker doesn’t have a story so much as they do a resume. Only Infidel makes this kind of commitment to background and character, and, as we will see, the playable game itself performs even more of this work.

Hollywood Hijinx is the very rare Infocom game that makes a substantial investment in the backstory of its protagonist.

Both the postcard and letter illuminate the relationships between the main character, Hildy, and Buddy. Both are addressed to the protagonist, and their authors obviously care for our avatar. The postcard consists of a rather ridiculous series of heroic couplets exhorting the player to learn from the examples set by characters in Buddy’s films. It additionally serves as copy protection, and those clues blend in well with the poem it contains.

The letter from Hildegard provides the main dramatic question of Hollywood Hijinx. It establishes the stakes, that of a treasure hunt in which the rewards are all-or-nothing. The letter further details the goal and rules of the hunt. Hildy’s voice is distinct and gives insight into who she was and how she feels about the protagonist.

Considering the thing in total, it is clear that the paratext of Hollywood Hijinx is excellent because every element extends our understanding of the game’s world both in terms of history and geography. I have always said that the best feelies are essential to the text of their games, though few cases truly achieve this ideal. While I always suggest that players read all Infocom pack-ins, I do so here with extra emphasis.

The Treasure Hunt

Despite—or because of—the frontloaded vividness of its setting, Hollywood Hijinx sometimes feels like a loose bag of puzzles. That isn’t necessarily a problem. The wacky nature of the house and its former inhabitants mandate a certain level of incoherence. Critiques of mimetic infidelity neither can nor should apply here. If we find ourselves moving from computer punch cards to fireproof matches to an automaton “atomic chihuahua,” so be it!

The wacky nature of the house and its former inhabitants mandate a certain level of incoherence.

My critique of the puzzles is that they don’t all lean into the zaniness enough. While the casual relationships between puzzle elements feel fitting, as a player I would have enjoyed more puzzles embracing the wacky nature of Buddy’s career. That’s what makes the atomic chihuahua puzzle stand out as the game’s best: we are, for a moment, inhabiting a world of Buddy’s imagining.

>east
The Atomic Chihuahua, in its best prehistoric prance, moves further east, then comes to a stop.

The Atomic Chihuahua continues to take hits from the tiny tanks. The planes, only a block away, begin firing as they move within range. As bullets pierce the dazed dog's scales he pauses momentarily, remembering his younger days with Xavier Cugat.

>push black
The Atomic Chihuahua lifts its hind leg and, just as you thought this game was going to become even more base, stomps its clawed foot down on one of the tiny tanks, crushing it.

The Atomic Chihuahua continues to take hits from the tiny tank. The planes, spewing bullet-shaped death, reach the radioactive reptile and begin circling around it. The Atomic Chihuahua takes two rounds in the throat and gasps. (Two rounds to you and me, but that's 14 rounds to little scale-face!)

The scene, we realize, is a riff on old Godzilla films.

Compare this to a more generic widget puzzle that could easily appear in any game.

>south
Closet
You're in a small closet. Mounted at an angle on the back wall of the closet are three coat pegs. To the left of the first peg there is a hole the size of a peg. To the right of the third peg there is a peg which has been sawed-off, flush with the wall. The door to the north is open.

>push first peg
You pull the peg down to a horizontal position.

As you release the peg, it pops back into its original 45-degree position. The closet begins to shake and rattle a bit as the door swings shut. You feel your stomach rising to your throat as the closet moves down, then stops.

Elsewhere, a genuinely unpleasant hedge maze puzzle, which could easily be dropped via helicopter into countless other games, will likely frustrate and annoy many. Procrastinators will be rewarded by a map that can only be constructed later in the game.

Such puzzles are never bad as puzzles in isolation, and many players will like them quite well, but in many cases we find an out-of-place dryness that falls short of the highs of game and feelies alike.

The most notable feature of the game’s text is a recurring emphasis on the protagonist’s history with the house, Buddy, and Hildy. A later essay will discuss this element in depth, but for now I call attention to Hollywood Hijinx‘s remarkable commitment to worldbuilding and character development. The practice dovetails incredibly well with the feelies themselves. Some—myself included—might overlook this practice because of the unsubtle silliness of the work, but Hollywood Hijinx makes novel moves in terms of craft and narrative.

While it will likely retain its reputation as a lesser work, we see here a game that does what other Infocom games have not yet done, and in this, its detractors must concede, Hollywood Hijinx excels.

Next

The Gold Machine treatment of Hollywood Hijinx concludes with a(n) (a)typical treatment of themes, context, and reception. Don’t miss it!

We’ve featured companies here before (like Adventure International and Sierra On-Line) that started their main development in games, with a few extra utilities being sold on the side. When Mark Pelczarski formed Penguin Software, their initial core product was (rather than a game) their Graphics Magician, which held them steady through their early years. However, they eventually became prominent for their adventure games: Transylvania, Crimson Crown, The Coveted Mirror, The Quest, and their re-published version of Oo-Topos (originally without graphics at all). Considered across multiple platforms, the adventure games are what sold the best for Penguin, but it took The Graphics Magician existing in the first place for those games to appear.

Back of the Graphics Magician box, via eBay.

Their first adventure game, Transylvania, came to them essentially by accident and didn’t originally have graphics. They got the author (Antonio Antiochia) an early copy of Graphics Magician to make it a flagship product alongside The Graphics Magician.

After The Graphics Magician was published, they got a call from a programmer named Eagle Berns at Stanford. Burns had been there as a programmer since 1959 (and their IBM 650), overlapping with the early computer science great Donald Knuth. Close to when he started his Apple II journey (1980) he worked some on LaTeX (one of Knuth’s projects) as well as Foreign language processing at Stanford.

Importantly for us, he decided to pivot to personal computers and specifically the Apple II, and using The Graphics Magician he had written a game using the tool with Michael Kosaka. (Michael Kosaka only has a small part to play in today’s game, but as an aside: of the people I mention today, he had the deepest involvement with later games, working on Skate or Die, Madden NFL ’94, and an unreleased Sonic game for 32X which would require a several-thousand word essay to adequately explain.) Quoting Pelczarski on Burns:

A great, creative person, he went on to make his mark at Apple Computer (on the Macintosh team), Micro Focus, and Oracle. But first and foremost he turned into a good friend who also happened to write, with Michael Kosaka, the first game with Graphics Magician: Pie Man. The game was loosely based on an I Love Lucy skit, with pies coming rapidly off a conveyor belt while you try to put whipped cream and a cherry on top and put the pie in a rack, while avoiding grease spots and obstacles. (Remember that these were the days when state of the art was Break-Out, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man.) A non-violent game with a bit of personality was very unique and new.

The non-violent part is worth highlighting; Scott Scram started writing games for Penguin with Crime Wave, and wanted to follow up with something “completely non-violent”; Mark Pelczarski suggested porting Pie Man to Atari.

People who play violent games excessively may do so for psychological reasons. Perhaps they seek a jolt of self-medicating adrenaline, or they need to feel powerful in the game world as opposed to feeling powerless in their real lives … I enjoyed porting the game, and it turned out well with the use of some Atari additions such as a 4 part musical soundtrack.

Unfortunately, the world was not ready to give up the really cool violent games that were coming out at about that time, and the game did not sell well. But, the popularity of Tetris, solitaire and others prove that there is a market for non-violent games and puzzles.

A video of some of the Atari version below:

Eagle Berns followed up Pie Man with an adventure game, The Coveted Mirror, working with his friend Holly Thomason (and a small contribution from Michael Kosaka, which I’ll highlight when I eventually reach that part of the game).

From the back of the later printing of the game using an updated engine, although supposedly it loses some minigames.

The story is set in the “Faraway Land of Starbury” where “people were happy and life was good”. However, there was a “villian” named Voar with a “heart of black poison” who sought to rule the kingdom as his own; however, he was stopped by the Wizard Munjistan who had a magical Mirror who could see all “troublemakers” who would cause destruction to the land. One night, Voar entered the realm of the wizard in a forest and tried to steal the mirror, but it broke into five pieces, and he was only able to steal away with four (how it got to the mirror in the first place without being spotted is unclear).

Thus it befell that with most of the pieces, Voar’s power waxed and overshadowed that of Munjistan’s. However, without all the shards of the Mirror, Voar’s power was yet incomplete. Munjistan knew he had very little time to secure the last piece against Voar’s craving, so he desperately searched his magic books for a spell to save Starbury. Alas, to no avail! The best he could find was one which required he hide the piece and wait for a champion born beneath future stars. If the champion is pure of heart and bests Voar in the race for the piece, the evil one’s power will be shattered.

Voar in the meantime learned to wield the other four pieces in order to spy on citizens and send people to the dungeons, but he could not find the fifth piece. The wizard managed to disguise himself as a court magician to stay close to Voar but has since passed away. This is where you come in. You (no biographical background) have been captured by Voar, and the action starts in the throne room.

The title screen animates the mirror shattering.

The essential gimmick of the game is that you’re a prisoner and get started by being sent into a dungeon, but it isn’t hard to escape; however, Voar “can generally find you easily with his mirror pieces” meaning you aren’t really free. A “prison guard” will “check on you regularly but you may find a way to cope with that.” Additionally there’s a time limit (given by the sands) where the guard will return to check on you.

Whilst you are doing all this, your job is to find various mirror pieces and assemble them into a rectangle.

This is all summarized directly from the manual and I admit I haven’t been this baffled by the premise of a game in a while.

a.) If the mirror let the wizard watch for trouble, how did Voar get close enough to steal it?

b.) Who was ruling over the kingdom before Voar? The Wizard? Maybe it was some sort of collective and the wizard was just keeping the peace? Is the wizard’s disguise going to be an important detail later, even though the wizard is now dead?

c.) If we’re aiming to find the fifth mirror piece, but Voar can always just watch what we’re doing, couldn’t he watch us going for the fifth mirror piece and stopping it?

d.) But if Voar has the mirror pieces, how are we able to find them around the castle? How are we able to keep them given the whole process of getting tossed into the dungeon?

e.) If we’re under surveillance, why is there a regular guard appearing with a timer? Why doesn’t the guard immediately know when we’ve escaped?

I ended up checking the later (1986) version of the game which has its own story book, and at least one of the holes gets filled up: Voar starts a crime wave in order to distract the Wizard, which is why he’s able to sneak to the location of the mirror. One other slight change: the wizard shares the secret of the fifth shard’s hiding place with “one other soul”.

This still doesn’t address how we are picking up mirror pieces despite Voar tracking us, or the setup behind the guard regularly appearing. With most media I am pretty tolerant of “plot holes” as simply things a story hasn’t bothered to explain but likely has some explanation; unfortunately with an adventure the interpretation of the plot can be important in puzzle-solving so I find the confusion more of a problem.

The king’s face is incidentally animated. Many scenes are, and it adds a feeling of polish to the game that makes it seem more like later-Apple-II graphics rather than depths-of-early-Sierra. (You can also contrast with The Hobbit. That game was made by four computer scientists with interests in systems and languages; this game was made by two people — with minor help from a third — that were more graphics-oriented.)

No matter what action you do (at least any action I could find) there’s the response…

I’LL HAVE THEE BEATEN FOR THY INSOLENCE
OFF TO THE TOWER!
(THAT’S 01 I’LL ONLY ALLOW IT 25 TIMES.)

…and then you appear in the dungeon. (The first immediate issue with the plot being sketchy rises up right here: are we supposed to do something at the king? Or was getting thrown into the dungeon just a “cutscene” so to speak?)

There is no more text than what you see (“YOU ARE IN THE DANK, DESOLATE, PRISONER TOWER.”) The game expects you to see items and refer to them by name from the picture, not from the text. It took me a while to realize the item to the right is a PITCHER (not a JUG) and even when I realized it the game told me that it’s just scenery when I tried to pick it up.

You can move the bed to find a hole, then GO HOLE into darkness.

Going west from here leads to the magician’s room with “mysterious odds & ends”, except all that’s visible is a flask which is too hot to touch and some books.

You can’t take the books (“THEY’RE NOT YOURS TO TAKE”) but you can READ BOOK, find a diary of the magician, and read multiple pages which give hints.

IF THAT OLD WITCH DOESN’T GIVE ME HER INVISIBILITY SPELL SOON, I’LL CHANGE HER INTO A STARBURY STRAWBERRY.

I thought the wizard was supposed to be the good guy?

I WONDER IF VOAR KNOWS BORIS LETS THE PRISONERS ROAM IF THEY OFFER HIM THE RIGHT THINGS!

I’m wondering if this means you leave a present in the room that the guard finds while you’re out. Otherwise there isn’t a reason for a gift (if you’re physically there, nothing bad happens).

BORIS KEEPS CLOSE WATCH ON THAT HOURGLASS, BUT SOMETIMES HE FALLS ASLEEP & PRISONERS GET EXTRA TIME.

IF BORIS WAKES TO FIND THEIR TIME IS UP BUT THEY’RE NOT BACK IN PRISON, HE REPORTS THEM TO VOAR.

SO VOAR USES THE MAGIC MIRROR TO WHISK THEM BACK & GLADLY PUTS THEIR BOOTY IN HIS TREASURE ROOM.

I’m guessing this is the sort of game where you can simply avoid this happening, but we have had some games where you have to hit the fail-state at least once (including how you need to have the pirate steal your treasure in Crowther/Woods before the pirate chest shows up).

BUT EVEN VOAR CANNOT SEE BEYOND THE IMPENETRABLE MIST.

Is this another way to hide from getting teleported away, or just a hint where the fifth mirror piece is?

I’m still trying to get a hang of the game’s norms (which seem to vary quite a bit from what we’ve had here before) so I’ll try to get a fair chunk of the map made before reporting in next time.

Happy Pride! Choice of Games is proud to be gender-inclusive and LGBTQ+-affirming all year round, but during the month of June, we’re featuring writers whose work connects especially closely with those themes.

Today we’re sitting down with Nebula award winner Natalia Theodoridou, author of Rent-A-Vice, An Odyssey: Echoes of War, Vampire: the Masquerade–Sins of the Sires, and Restore, Reflect, Retry.

First, congratulations on being a Nebula finalist again! This time it’s for your debut novel Sour Cherry, which takes on the Bluebeard legend: a story with toxic masculinity, gendered power dynamics, and abusive relationships running through it. There’s also a fascinating theme of silence and namelessness in your adaptation. Can you tell us more about how you wove those themes in with the gender dynamics?

Thank you so much! It’s always so weird to be upbeat about the reception of this dark, dark book, but I’m really touched and humbled that it seems to be resonating with readers. Much of the violence in Sour Cherry is male violence, but my hope was to capture some of the complexity of gender dynamics beyond a clear-cut “men have power and are bad, women have no power and are silent victims.” The patriarchy hurts us all; having the range of the stories your mouth can speak and your mind can conceive reduced down to this single story is a kind of silencing. It is a kind of violence.

Losing one’s name is a kind of silencing, too. People caught in webs of oppression can lose their names in so many ways: by not having their true names accepted; by having names palatable to authority or cultural lines imposed on them; by having their names struck from the record of history; by becoming known not by the individuality of a name but by a function—a Cook, a Shopkeeper, a Nurse. At the same time, there can be power found in that flattening; names can be shackles, too, and sometimes, when people shed them, they are finally free to sit in the power of their voice (think Anonymous, who was, as Virginia Woolf would have it, a woman). Namelessness can also birth a kind of solidarity: we can become one in our namelessness and so, like the chorus of ghosts in Sour Cherry, negate silence.

Turning to last year’s Nebula win, A Death in Hyperspace: you were one of a large team of authors on that. How did you find working in a large group? What distinctive elements did a team effort bring to this project?

It was delightful. I’m constantly amazed by how differently people can come at the same creative question, and I think the project was so much fun because of the diversity of voices and approaches that were woven through it. This is also what made the characters feel and sound so authentically different. I particularly loved (and this is where Stewart C Baker’s genius clearly shone through, because he was the one who made the project cohere) the way the creative process of putting the project together as a puzzle—each of us writing for one character and slotting clues into someone else’s piece—mirrored the playing of the game-puzzle for the reader. In a sense, writing the game and playing the game are the same process, except in reverse.

Of all your many short stories, the one I just have to ask about is “Cursed Moon Queers”, which first posits a queer colony on the moon and then asks “What if those TikTok witches who cursed the moon actually had an effect?” What was it about that pop culture moment that sparked your imagination?

(I mean, are we sure they didn’t? Look at the state of things.)

It’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly what it was that did it because there are always so many disparate elements that come together for me to make a story; it’s never just one thing. But I guess it was something about the anxiety and pain behind an idea like cursing the moon. To me, it speaks to the desperation of the most powerless. A struggle to claim some agency, impossibly, when everything feels out of control. Except it’s usually other marginalised folks who feel the consequences of grand-scale things first. So the story was in a sense saying, okay guys, you’ve done it; now what? What exactly did you hope to accomplish? As if we weren’t all cursed enough already.

We’re asking all of our authors this: How has your representation of LGBTQ+ themes in your writing evolved over the course of your career?

I used to be very anxious about representing LGBTQ+ themes and characters because I worried I would inadvertently cause offence, say the wrong thing, fail to include absolutely every queer point of view, and end up hurting my community. Now, more than a decade later, I know this is not only an impossible task, but the wrong task altogether. LGBTQ+ people are not a monolith, and we do not agree on everything (maybe even most things). Nor should we want to. I have no intention of flattening us all into an inert, non-threatening, smooth mass. I think it’s healthy to disagree, and it’s desirable to have loudly different opinions on things, including on what constitutes harm. Writing defensively to avoid what I imagine might cause someone discomfort simply results in writing inauthentically and not saying much. Now I aim to write truthfully and courageously about things that matter to me. Of course not everything will land with everyone, and their response will be their response, just as my thinking is my thinking. I cannot claim to represent anyone but myself, my context, and my own understanding of things. Or actually, my current understanding of things. I hope that my understanding has and will keep evolving; I hope to keep changing my mind, or to keep being able to. Of course I have made mistakes, and I will make more. Failing and failing again is the only way to grow. Mistakes are how we learn. All I hope is that, when I make my next one, it will be in a space and time where we can afford to listen to each other. Listening when you’re in pain is the hardest thing. But we can work at it. Like Kai Cheng Thom said, I hope we choose love, you know? And that we keep choosing it.

Finally: how are you celebrating Pride this year?

By surviving in the face of blatant, widespread, normalised transphobia.

Pride isn’t just for a month! All year, we work to bring you games that offer a diverse and expansive view of love, family, and identity. But we’ll take any excuse to celebrate, and so we’re putting games on sale every week of June that showcase and explore that diversity, and we’re featuring interviews with the authors of those games.

These four Choice of Games titles by Natalia Theodoridou are up to 40% off until June 8th!

Vampire: The Masquerade—Sins of the Sires — In this elegy of blood, Athens is burning!
An Odyssey: Echoes of War — Fight Poseidon’s wrath to reclaim the throne!
Rent-A-Vice — What doesn’t kill you…kills someone else.
Restore, Reflect, Retry — This haunted game remembers you. Play again?

Creating or specifying custom adjectives.

using adjectives to describe the worlds of our games

adjectives in general.

In everyday spoken English, we use adjectives to describe and specify nouns. We might refer to a tall building or a lovely song. A bird might be blue or black. Adjectives are frequently discussed in Inform’s Standard rules, and why wouldn’t they? If we are programming with natural language, it only makes sense that we will sometimes need to characterize the things populating the worlds we make.

The use of the word “adjective” in the Inform documentation is not always technical. Here is its first use, which reasonably assumes that we know what the English word “adjective”means:

WI §3.6 Either/or properties

Some containers, like bottles, can be opened: others, like buckets, cannot. If they can be opened, then sometimes they will be open, and sometimes closed. These are examples of properties, which can change during play. The following source sets some properties:

```
The cardboard box is a closed container. The glass bottle is a transparent open container. The box is fixed in place and openable.
```

There are only four different properties referred to here. Closed means not open, and vice versa, so these two adjectives both refer to the same property. (As might be expected, when a container is open, one can see inside and place things within, or take them out.) The glass bottle and the box being containers is a matter of their kinds, which is something fundamental and immutable, so "container" does not count as a property.

This is not a technical usage of the term “adjective.” Rather, we see here that properties (a technical term) can be used as adjectives within our phrases and sentences. For instance, a box with the open property can be identified as such:

if the box [a thing] is open
...
if there is an open box [a kind] in the location
...
repeat with B running through open boxes [a kind]

The designation an open box (used as a kind) is what Inform calls a “description of values.” While this terminology might seem confusing at first, it is straightforward enough.

• “description” = described by an adjective
• “values” = while we might initially think of values as abstractions, kinds of things (in this case, boxes) are values, too.

defining new adjectives

Creating a property is one way to make adjectives that we can use in our code.

a thing can be red or blue.
...
a thing can be red.

In both cases, Inform will assign all things a default property. This will always be the second value (if no second value is stated, the assumed second is, for instance, “not red” or the absence of red).

after examining the box:
	now the box is red;

In other words, creating a property has implications for all things of the world, and that property can be assigned (or not) by default or else by specific code.

Sometimes, it will be desirable—perhaps very desirable—to let inform decide whether or not an adjective applies to something. Things that are carried by the player—not stowed in a bag, mind you, but carried “bare-handed,” so to speak, can be referred to with the adjective carried. Under the hood, the adjective carried is not assigned in the way that red (above) is. Instead, it is derived from a relation.

From the Standard Rules:

The verb to carry means the carrying relation.

We don’t need to be experts in relations to take advantage of this. We can make sentences straight away. For instance:

lab is a room.

the player carries the wallet.

instead of jumping:
	if the player carries the wallet, say "The player carries the wallet!";
	if the player is carrying the wallet, say "The player is carrying the wallet!";
	if the wallet is carried by the player, say "The wallet is carried by the player!";

This yields

>jump
The player carries the wallet!
The player is carrying the wallet!
The wallet is carried by the player!

That’s all quite handy, and, once we’re used to working with relations, we can write such sentences with ease. However, Inform offers ways for us to write other phrases and conditions based on these relationships. Using “definitions,” we can craft adjectives to use in our phrases and sentences. Again, from the Standard Rules:

Definition: a thing is carried if the player is carrying it.

Initially, the significance might not be clear, as there doesn’t seem to be meaningful difference between phrases like these:

if the player carries the frob
...
if the frob is a carried thing

In fact, the one with the adjective seems to be the more awkward of the two. Let’s try again.

repeat with T running through things:
	if the player carries T:
...
repeat with T running through carried things:

In that case, the second one requires less typing and is more readable, too.

after stumbling:
	try dropping a random carried thing;

We need not limit ourselves to relations, though. We can devise custom adjectives based on any number of considerations.

a diving board has a number called height.

definition: a diving board is high if the height of it is greater than 10;

Definitions always begin with “definition:” What immediately follows is our adjective (“high”). Next comes a condition. Note that we can use “it” freely here; Inform knows that we refer to the thing defined.

We can use it straight away. Perhaps our protagonist is afraid of heights:

does the player mean climbing a high diving board:
	it is very unlikely;

or

before climbing a high diving board:
	say "Gathering your courage, you make your way up the tall, narrow laddder.""

Sometimes, we might incorporate both an affirmative and negative adjective in our definition.

definition: a diving board is high rather low than if the height of it is greater than 10;

Using the “rather than” construction allows us to name a second, opposing adjective.

At least, sometimes we can. Some definitions are too complex to allow a negative counterpart in-line. Consider this familiar-looking construction:

definition: a person is frightened if:
	if it is on a high diving board, decide yes;
  decide no;

In such cases, we might want to define the negative ourselves using the definition we just made.

definition: a person is sanguine if:
	if a person is frightened, decide no;
decide yes;

If you read last week’s post, then you’ve likely noticed how similar this practice looks to a phrase defining a new condition. Both push toward a yes or no question: the conditions have been met, or they haven’t. The board is high, or it isn’t. The main difference comes down to application: defined conditions can be used broadly to talk about just about anything. The condition is whatever we name it. Defining an adjective, on the other hand, modifies something more specific. “definition: a frob is…” can only compile if there is someplace within our code a frob to describe.

Perhaps we need a list of things the player left in the opening section of the game.

lab is a room.
	
starting area is a region.
the point of origin is in starting area.

the widget is in the point of origin.
the frob is in the point of origin.

definition: a thing is left behind if it is in the starting area and the player is not in the starting area.

after jumping:
	say "You have left behind the [the list of left behind things].";

In this case, a left behind thing is anything that is in the starting area when the player is not. However, we may have been a little too loose with our definition. Let’s make sure we aren’t talking about scenery, since players can’t bring that with them:

definition: a thing is left behind if it is not scenery and it is in the starting area and the player is not in the starting area.

alernately:

definition: a thing is left behind:
	if it is scenery, decide no;
	if the player is in the starting area, decide no;
	decide yes;

There! Applying the scenery adjective gives us the specificity we need. If we wished to only include things the player has carried, we could specify “handled” instead.

These most recent examples are computed. This is an important distinction! We never need to tell Inform that the frob is left behind, because it can work that out based on the definition we have provided. This differs from the adjectives we’ve discussed in the past: those are assigned via either defaults or else more specific code.

In both cases, though, we are using adjectives to designate something in the world of our game, and, like phrases defining new conditions, adjectives can empower us to write more effective and readable code.

Further reading: WI 11. Phrases

Welcome to June. The latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Deadline!

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

Deadline was Infocom's first non-Zork game, and they pulled out all the stops to make it feel like a new and different thing. Which made my job a lot more interesting!

For a start, Deadline's "feelies" were absolutely integral. When I bought Zork 2 and Zork 3, back in the day, I was basically able to throw the manual aside and jump straight into the game. (I'd already learned how the parser worked, and what else was there?) But Deadline came with a full police dossier introducing the murder scene: the coroner's report, interviews with the suspects, a little envelope containing a "sample" of the pills that did for Mr. Robner.

Visible Deadline wouldn't make sense without these documents. So I've included images in the "Feelies" tab. These are scanned directly from the copy of Deadline that I played as a kid! Except that my pills have crumbled to moldy crud over the decades.

I've posted the original, high-resolution images from this scan session on the Internet Archive. I'm not the first person to do this, of course; here's a set of scans from the Atari Deadline package. However, that's missing the interviews, and also I was able to do full 600dpi scans. So now you have both.

On the technical side, Deadline made an enormous leap: all of the game's NPCs were autonomous agents. Over the game's twelve-hour timeline, each character moved around the mansion on their own schedule. They could also react to your investigation. Certain questions or revelations would send characters running off to confer, conspire, destroy evidence, or (in the worst case) commit another murder. (When will these people learn that crime never pays?)

All of this required a pile of brand-new NPC navigation code. I've exhibited this in two ways:

• The "Schedule" tab shows each character's current movement goal, as well as the daily schedule for the whole crew. It's a pretty complicated system. I've included a full explanation as I understand it.
• The "Map" tab shows NPC routing paths and sightlines. The blue paths are internal tables which allow a character to move to a desired destination. The pink lines allow you to see a character in adjacent rooms down the hall.

(The routing logic is referred to as the "T system" in the source code, after the transit system that serves Boston and Cambridge. Infocom will always have its home-town in-jokes.)

Other than that stuff, this game runs pretty much like the previous Visible Infocom titles. Objects, functions, global variables, verb grammar. Enjoy browsing!

I guess I should also note that Deadline has not been licensed as open source by Microsoft. So I am somewhat jumping the gun by taking the Visible Zorker to this milestone. But it's where I started, and it's what I said I would do. So we're doing it. I don't really expect problems; we're all fans here.

More readings on Deadline:

• The Digital Antiquarian
• Drew Cook
• Jason Dyer

Upcoming work:

Visible Starcross will be the next public release on July 1st.

Patreon supporters got access to Visible Starcross a month ago, and Visible Suspended today.

Speaking of which, here's my recreation of the Suspended map. And my high-res scans of the original map and manual.

I've decided not to skip June after all. NarraScope is coming in on schedule; it hasn't required the last-minute burst of emergency work that I feared. So the monthly releases will remain on track. I'll tackle the next early-access game, The Witness, as soon as the conference wraps up. Patreon supporters will see it on July 1st.

See you next month!

A musical city, a record store, and a 90s soundtrack album! Okay, and a Lovecraftian adventure game.

• Phonopolis
• Wax Heads
• Mixtape
• Call of the Elder Gods

Now that I think about it, the Lovecraftian adventure has a puzzle where you control alien technology through musical resonance. See. It all fits.

Phonopolis

• by Amanita Design -- game site

An adorable animated puzzle-adventure game about a city ruled by sound.

I almost said "tiny adventure game", because of course Amanita games are tiny. It's part of their charm, right? But in fact Phonopolis is pretty substantial. I mean, it's not gigantic, but it's comparable to Keeper or Mind Diver (to name two games which I played recently and didn't call "small").

I'd say Phonopolis leans more towards the "puzzlebox" side of the genre than to puzzle games per se. The aesthetic is machinery that you don't know how it works. You play with the controls until you've done the right thing. Very often that's "make the machine explode messily and satisfyingly all over the place." Then you encounter a new weird machine.

I'm not saying it's not puzzly. You definitely have to pay attention to the game's reactions, think about where you're going, and put together consequences in the right order. And there are some mechanical puzzles that would be entirely at home in Riven. It's a mix.

What I'm saying is that (a) if you feel stuck, it's because you haven't played around enough to see everything the machine can do. And (b) fairly often, when you discover the new thing it can do, it will complete the puzzle right there and leave you saying "Hey, what did I just do? Why did that explode succeed?"

Usually that's a bad reaction! You always want to understand the puzzle after you solve it. But in Phonopolis it didn't bother me. The fun is exploring all the weird little animations and reactions. If a scene wraps up unexpectedly, so what -- you get new toys to play with. Win!

The toys are all modeled and hand-painted before being animated. It's a different style than Harold Halibut -- krunkier, in a word -- but watching everything move is a joy. And everything moves. The main menu rattles as you move the mouse and collapses in a heap when you quit. It's all like that. Wonderful.

Wax Heads

• by Patattie Games -- game site

An adorable deduction-ish cartoon game about working in an indie record shop somewhere in Middle England. A customer comes into the shop and tells you what they're looking for, and then you flip through the stock and give them what they want. Or what they need -- not always the same thing.

This isn't a iron-brained deduction game like Golden Idol. Really, it's lighter than Strange Antiquities was, and that wasn't particularly heavy. But it's not simplistic either. You'll find you need to think all over the record shop: sleeve art, reviewer comments, social media, the indie zine shelf. You wind up absorbing the backstory of several local bands, and then that turns out to matter.

(The riffs on band and performer archetypes were all dead-on. They weren't send-ups of specific names like in Birch Tree Theater, but they're still recognizable. I laughed.)

In the end, it wasn't even about the puzzles. I was there for the character stories. Wax Heads is staffed by a coterie of queer nerds and alt-music-heads. They are all beautiful and I love them. The owner is an (equally great) cranky old lady, a refugee from a burned-out-not-faded-away 80s rock band. That turns out to matter too.

I could have done without the Spotify subplot (on-the-nose but too easy a target). But the big finale show brought an unwonted tear to my eye. A bit of Stray Gods-style dynamic musicologue, even, just to cement the game's place in my heart.

Mixtape

• by Beethoven & Dinosaur -- game site

A reprise of 1990s high-school life as perceived through Stacey Rockford's headphones.

Just like Bloom and Rage, and for that matter The Artful Escape, this is set in an era that I never visited, with a musical idiom that I don't know a thing about. I have never inhabited a world where "Wanna go sit under the power lines and get blackout drunk?" was a question that people asked. But now I have some idea what it was like.

Our protagonists are a tide-locked trio of extremely different teens: the music devotee, the rebellious coddled kid, the stoner artiste. Not that they're limited to those cliches. The joy of the game is seeing their future selves flicker through the self-centered adolescent burn.

Rockford, as she tells the camera up front, is on a beeline to New York to transform her musical hyper-consciousness into a career as a hotshot music producer. Her friends are not entirely keen on being thus ditched. But they are entirely united on the need to find some alcohol to bring to Camille Cole's illicit summer beach party. Can't roll up without booze, man.

The game is -- yes -- a mix: a series of vignettes, each with its mood, mechanics, and (of course) soundtrack. (Rockford introduces each track to the viewer with the elan of a born radio-host-to-be.) Just like in Artful Escape, the music underpins your acrobatics and puts you in the groove. But where Artful Escape had a single move -- the high-flying guitar riff -- Mixtape gives you everything from nighttime sneaking to a lazy day skipping stones to a furious rampage. You're never doing the same thing twice.

Really, Mixtape is the same plan as What Remains of Edith Finch. (Did I really never review that one?) Except instead of recounting generations of Finches, the scenes recount a single (triple) high-school existence, disordered, in flashback. Even the "present" scenes are rendered in the exaggerated colors of memory; surely this is Rockford's adult reflection how How It Was. Kids on skateboards, outrunning cops and their onrushing future.

The art is stylized and generally great. (Photorealism has been ruined, it just means slop now.) I admit that I'm getting tired of the low-frame-rate stop-motion effect. "Animation on twos" made me look smart the first time I mentioned it, but I can't keep doing that, can I? Anyhow I think this one is on threes. Just jerky. However, the portrayal of the glow in a Sharper Image plasma sphere was dead on, and I have to admit that's what counts.

Usually when people refer to a game as "cinematic", they mean that the game knows the camera can move around during cut-scenes. Mixtape is cinematic in that it's keenly interested in what the camera is showing you. And how, and what the soundtrack (of course) does alongside. I can't remember the last time a game made me laugh at a camera cut and Mixtape does it twice. Okay, now it's Virginia, except instead of Twin Peaks it's doing a 90s music-nerd Sixteen Candles.

(Non-romantic candles. Crushes lurk, unvoiced as deep-sea magma, but this is not a kissing game.) (When you get to the kissing scene you'll see what I mean.)

Anyway: I laughed, I cheered, I gasped. I pushed the buttons and did all the things. I made a horrified noise when Rockford said Brazil was the best movie of the 80s and her friends hadn't seen it. That much was true to my life. As for the rest, it's still palpably awesome. Go play it.

I don't think anybody names a year beyond "the 90s". Since this is my schtick, I choose to believe that it's 1995, and the planned summer road trip (of course there's a road trip) will pick up two teenage hitchhikers in Northern California. And then, you know, whatever happened to Kat.

Call of the Elder Gods

• by Out of the Blue Games -- game site

A followup to Call of the Sea, a Lovecraftian puzzle adventure that I quite enjoyed. Sea wasn't the deepest-rooted exploration of cosmic-horror-minus-the-horror, but it landed the vibe. I enjoyed Elder Gods too. It introduces two new viewpoint characters, both connected to the previous story, and sends them off to explore a mysterious jungle island, overwrought cultic basements, an alien city lost to the depths of time. And more!

Early on, Game 2 lets you choose which of Game 1's major endings you got... or prefer. The story proceeds from either starting point. It's ballsy way to avoid the classic Soul Reaver fumble. Norah, the protagonist of Sea, is absent either way (for different reasons). But she is still palpably present, both as backstory and as the offscreen narrator.

Mind you, she narrates the game with an ironic tone which I found a bit distracting. I kept expecting her to refer to the current protagonist as "Stanley". Maybe that's just me.

As with the previous game, the puzzles are numerous but consistently light-weight. They're meant to pace the story, not deadlock you. On the other hand, a lot of the story they're pacing is that you explore a place in search of the clues you need to solve the puzzle. (And absorb story background along with the clues.) So, a collectathon, when it comes down to the foundation.

This lands a bit off-key sometimes. In several scenes, you reach a "Leave or continue exploring?" choice. This sort of winking fourth-wall break usually indicates a story's finale. I don't expect to see it at the end of a scene. Here it doesn't mean "Finish your side quests", because this game has no side quests. It's a bare admission that they couldn't work all the background info into the story progression. They've just scattered it around the room. If you don't read it all before you leave, tough.

(The Invincible did something like this. But that had multiple story threads, past and present, so it felt okay to focus on some of them and not bother journal-scraping for the others. Elder Gods isn't as successful; you really do want to read everything.)

And the story? Not as satisfying as Sea. Pretty good though.

I think Harry and Evie were less palpably connected to cosmic strangeness. They had both been touched by weird stuff, but their real involvement was second-hand. (Harry's wife, Evie's father.) Their stories didn't have the element of cosmic self-discovery that gave Norah's story in Sea its kick.

Still, there's plenty of weird stuff, rooted in Lovecraft's mythos but building in interesting directions. And plenty of ambivalence in the ending. In Sea I was committed to one interpretation of Norah's story; the ending choice was an easy one. Elder Gods, in contrast, gave me pause. And then, once I chose, it didn't try very hard to reassure me that I'd chosen correctly. A happy ending, to be sure, but just that little bit too pat.

Maybe a trace of cosmic horror after all. But only if you want to see it.

Content warning: literal Nazis. I am not 100% off games where you take down Nazis. (Obviously!) But I don't need a lot more Nazi imagery in my life. Times being what they are. ("...Indifferent.")

I’ve finished the game, and you’ll need to have read my previous three posts to understand this one.

Rendition of Sapas Mons on Venus, a volcano 400 km across and 1.5 km high, using coloration from Venera missions. Via NASA.

Last time I was thinking about the bug I had run across with the rod becoming two rods when entering the pool.

Despite the glitch here, some further mucking about confirmed the rod is the only item that this happens with, and the special coding indicates that it is meant as a puzzle to get the rod into the cave. (This type of logic I’ve called “structural solving”, although there’s two kinds. One is where there are restrictions based on the structure of the game that force certain things to be true, like an exit closing off meaning a puzzle behind the exit has to be solved first. The other is the “author suggestive” kind where they put work to incorporate some element to the map or plot sequence which doesn’t make sense unless it gets used in a certain way. The first type of solving is almost ironclad, the second relies on the author not leaving any loose pieces. Here, Leduc wouldn’t special-code the rod getting foiled by the dense pool unless the rod needed to get by.)

I realized I hadn’t tried xenoshifting and putting the rod into the hole at the ledge both in the same saved game, so I went ahead and tried it: start with the regular space suit and the boots, wear them both, take the rod to the ledge, PUT ROD / IN HOLE, go back in the ship, dump the boots and suit (you don’t need them any more the rest of the game), xenoshift, then go past the pool into the cave.

Oho! So I was in the same situation as before (nitrogen stream, cube) except with the rod. Given it could extend for very long I tried various ways of dropping it and applying CROSS ROD. Unfortunately, the parser hard-code interprets that as CROSS STREAM without the player attempting to use the rod as a plank. (The game never describes if the rod is thick or thin, so I don’t know how reasonable an ask this was anyway.)

The extreme restriction here — for structural solving reasons, the obstacle has to be the stream, and the rod has to be important somehow — led me to tread through the entire verb list but still no luck. However, that doesn’t mean every verb is accounted for! (Especially in a game with REPROGRAM.)

Fiddling with the 11 foot pole, I suddenly recalled a very different game, Terminal City. The developer Powerhoof (who recently published The Drifter, one of the best adventure games I’ve played in the last few years) made as a gamejam project an endless runner that’s also a Sierra-style adventure game, and it’s as harebrained as that sounds.

As part of Terminal City, I remembered a particular moment where you need to take a long pole and type VAULT. Well, it is a particularly long pole in Epic Hero 3:

This is a rare verb. We had it in Earthquake San Francisco 1906, but I can’t come up with any other games in the Project that have used the actual verb VAULT. I found out after the fact both CROSS and JUMP work, but you have to be holding the long pole (and the game makes you have some intentionality since you have to TWIST RIGHT three times to get it at the correct size).

The creature attack is the worst part of the design. It merely happens at random: it’s just like the vampire which can follow you all the way to the sunlight in Epic Hero 2 and not be affected. My first two times through it attacked right away, so I thought I was supposed to be solving some sort of puzzle, but no: you’re just supposed to do things quickly and ignore it.

You are in a subterranean cavern.
Objects you can see are: Narrow crevice ■ Large reptilian creature ■ Wide Stream ■

Regarding the narrow crevice, the idea is to widen the crevice so you can pass through (the creature won’t stop you). I didn’t know that at the time so I first was thinking about fighting the creature off. I didn’t have anything that suggested violence other than the bomb, so I dropped it, vaulted back, and used THINK to set it off. (The only catch is, as I pointed out last time, the rod needs to be set to 12 inches to be used as a relay. So you need to TWIST LEFT twice to restore the rod to a short size, do the explosion, then TWIST RIGHT twice to get back to vaulting size.)

Fortunately, this accidentally wanders into the solution of expanding the crevice to a “wide crevice” you can enter, and the creature doesn’t stop you if you saunter on by.

Past the room is the last room of the game, a silvery mist room with an alien. Remember earlier the alien had said they wanted to ask a question.

You are in a greyish coloured nest.
Objects you can see are: Alien
Possible exits: EAST⠤

Alien says “ZRVZYWQ AVZTRXHG”

Unfortunately, the alien speaks alienese, and if you don’t respond correctly here, you will get blasted.

Alien raises its hand and
fires a strange weapon at you !!

This final(-ish) puzzle required a lateral mental leap. Remember the rod has multiple functions: in its smallest size, it can fit into the small hole, in its largest size, it can be used as a pole vault, and at 12 inches specifically, it works as a “relay” for the bomb. I realized it might help communicate with the alien, so I tried all the sizes before hitting a result.

The egg from the previous room, the red furry cube, and the triangle all appear to be alive (when applying EXAMINE). But which one is sentient? Hiking everything back to the lab and turning back to human, I did SCAN on all three of the items.

It took a little parser struggle after to work out what the game intended with storing the triangle in life support. Dropping or placing gets special parser treatment here to be interpreted as the item being put into the right place, and PUT doesn’t work.

There was one last catch: I somehow messed up getting the Identi-Comp set correctly on my transformation back to human, and the pad wasn’t recognizing my touch. This made me wonder if possibly I could do a City of Alzan style ending.

I dropped everything, switched back to alien in the medi-unit, held my breath, and made a beeline for the main control room. Then I pressed the red button to take off, whilst HOLD BREATH was still in effect.

I had a save state and it would have only taken two minutes to fix the computer, but I wanted to see if this would work. City of Alzan let you leave the city with a deadly disease still in effect but win anyway.

This game unfortunately did follow the pattern of increased difficulty pushing against the technical capabilities of the author, specifically here the capabilities of the parser (especially the weirdness of PUT being inconsistent, and the two part PUT ROD / IN HOLE applying itself to the rod even if you try to PUT some other item). However, the game still handled the various conditions far more skillfully than your average text adventure author of this time; Leduc deserves to be known at least as much as Brian Howarth.

The reason for obscurity, other than the first three games being trapped on TRS-80, is that his remaining games ended up on the ultra-obscure Colour Genie. Leduc’s Colour Genie club was nearly the only reason for activity in the UK at all on the system, so the games he wrote were restricted to a very small crowd. Which is exciting, in that we may have some gems coming up that hardly anyone knows about! However, we’re going to take a breather from Leduc for a while, as we have coming up: The Coveted Mirror, for the Apple II.

And since I have an excuse to drop this here, a screenshot from The Drifter, which I highly recommend. It includes a puzzle late in the game where you have to put all the pieces together into one action and the entire meaning of what’s been going on shifts.

(Continued from my previous posts on the game.)

I was trying to push to the end, but I still must be missing something fundamental. At the least, I can say (checking the list of rooms in the machine code) that there isn’t much more for me to explore; this is intended to be a “tight” game like Savage Island Part 2, and the way the alien-transformation works makes me think the author even had Savage Island Part 2 specifically in mind.

True color picture of Venus, from Reddit.

Progress hinged on two relatively obscure parser actions (one is from Savage Island and I really should have thought of it, I needed spoilers from Alastair). First off, the Identi-Comp.

What will you do now? EXAMINE COMPUTER
Notice on Identi-Comp: “Speak Clearly”

You
see numbers 1 and 2
A switch is set to
1
What will you do now? TO TWO
Okay

What I was missing (sleuthed out by Rob) is the verb REPROGRAM works on the system.

What will you do now? REPROGRAM COMPUTER
Identi-Comp: “Reprogramming commences after
second medical
usage”

The one-or-two part is setting whether the “reprogramming” happens after one or two medical uses (I’ll explain what that means shortly). I’m still not sure what “speak clearly” is all about; that may be the fundamental thing that’s keeping me from winning the game.

It’s a bit of an exhausting moment not only because this is the first time the verb has shown up anywhere, but it’s unclear what action the player is even doing. There was a moment in Seiko’s Adventure where you needed to “close hatch” while looking at a lot of buttons, essentially jumping over the first-layer interaction (which buttons are getting pushed, exactly) straight to the second-layer interaction (the hatch gets closed). Most classic text adventures stick with first-layer interaction and will come up with interfaces with five buttons that all happen to coincidentally be different colors to facilitate this; in Epic Hero 3, to launch the spaceship back off the planet you merely press a red button, as opposed to typing LAUNCH SHIP and letting the avatar in the world figure it out.

Just a reminder the Identi-Comp is in the central hub room on the ship, a fact that will be important later.

So what, exactly, is the avatar doing when the player types REPROGRAM COMPUTER? How do we even know (from the minimal description we get) that it’s got enough available parts to do that? I admit I visualized it smaller-scale with just the one-two switch, and was instead focused on potentially breaking the system open to fiddle with some wires. (For all I know, maybe that really is what the player-avatar is doing! Or maybe the “reprogram” action is actually a command spoken out loud?)

The second obscure command — the one from Savage Island — is HOLD BREATH. Back at the medical unit, you can transform yourself into an alien (made clear by the fact your space suit no longer fits based on your shape). Unfortunately, this means you breathe Venus-atmosphere but not ship-atmosphere, so opening the unit kills you.

With HOLD BREATH, you can safely hit the button.

There’s no apparent way to unhold, just after enough time your face will start to “turn red” and after “Gasp!” you’ll start breathing again. In alien form, you should be on the planet when this happens.

One last catch before going there! If you haven’t gone through the Identi-Comp reprogramming, specifically with the setting on TWO, then you will no longer be able to operate the door in alien form.

You are in a Medical and Genetic Engineering compartment.
Objects you can see are: Auto-Surg Unit ■ Scanner ■ Brown Pad ■ Closed Brown Hatch ■ Life Support ■

What will you do now? PUSH BROWN
Okay
Nothing happens

I think pressing the orange button and closing the unit counts as one medical operation, and pressing the black button to convert counts as the second; once we are xenoshifted, the ship changes the controls to allow us to use them in our new (non-described) form.

Non-described protagonists are nearly 100% the norm for this era, but it’s absolutely fascinating to have this then extend to where we clearly aren’t “ourselves”. Do we have tentacles? Multiple eyes? A large hump on our back used for breathing? This is not purely theoretical since it extends to our body’s capabilities in the world (for example, it wouldn’t immediately occur to me that we still have the kind of body where holding our breath makes sense). Neither the suit nor the boots fit anymore, although the headband does still fit and work.

One small … step? … tentacle glide? … for xenokind.

This shows holding breath from opening the medical unit, all the way to getting on the planet and walking to the pool/statue, where “Gasp!” shows when we need to take a breath.

No running out of suit air at least! We can still go over to the alien statue and SHAKE HAND to get a message, although we need to be wearing the headband to do so (this is true in either human or xeno form).

“Enter my domain. I have a question for you.”

We are now dense enough to go in the pool, HOLD BREATH, and DIVE DOWN (my problem before was not putting DOWN there, this is not nearly as smooth a parser experience as Epic Hero 2).

The purple plants glow and you need them in your inventory before going into the hole, leading to a small new area.

It took me a few beats to realize that the hole beneath the pool liquid does not lead to more liquid, but rather is an “open air” (in terms of alien atmosphere) room. There are circumstances where the tunnel winds in a way that this makes sense, but I was visualizing something entirely different at first.

That is, it’s fine if we run out of breath here and “gasp”. HOLD BREATH needs to happen again before going west (which leads back to the pool).

To the north is a stream which is smoky (it turns out to be liquid nitrogen) and a furry red block, which “contains something alive”.

You can break the block, resulting in just “red bits”. It doesn’t count as sentient though; if you take it back to the lab, and SCAN BLOCK (another new thing I discovered) the game informs you of this, meaning it isn’t our ultimate goal. I would expect that given this particular path hasn’t used either the explosive or the weird ledge found by jumping with boots.

I’ve tried taking the thought bomb into the hole and placing it either at the stalagtites or the nitrogen stream, but in both cases there’s a “crater” and no other result. The funny side result is I had the 12-inch rod with me, and when trying to dive it “floated up” and turned into a 9 inch rod and a 12 inch rod.

It turns out the thought bomb only blows up if you are wearing the band and holding the rod while in 12 inch form. (Without the rod, the game indicates a “relay” is missing.) The rod only goes in the ledge-hole if you have it in 9 inch form. This weird duplication bug means you can both have the rod deposited in the hole at the ledge and blow something up after, but clearly the intent was to have the rod be inaccessible (meaning the blowing up should happen first). I have not tested every single room but I have tested most rooms, and I’m worried there’s some special way to put the bomb in place that I’m missing (but is special coded for a particular room).

Any suggestions from this point (even guesses) please put in ROT13; I’m still going to try pushing to the end on my own.

On Friday, May 29, 2026, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.

The White Bull (2012) by Jim Aikin

In this mythological game, you play as a young man named Matt. You, your archaeologist girlfriend Julia, her fey-like best friend Fawn, and Fawn’s dirtbag boyfriend Leo came to this remote Mediterranean hunk of bleached rock because Julia hopes to find King Minos’s palace, later called the Labyrinth, here. You just plan to poke about and have a great summer vacation.

This game was an entry in Spring Thing 2012 where it took 2nd place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Adventures of Helpfulman (1999-2000) by Philip Dearmore

In this large but flawed superhero game, you play as Helpfulman, one of Porthaven’s newest heroes. Your girlfriend, Aquagirl, just ditched you at the graduation dinner, and soon, your professor urges you to leap into action. Which heroic deeds will you perform to earn your cape, win back your girl, and save all of Porthaven?

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

The Thief of Woven Woods (2011) by Arielle Shander

In this game, you play as a masked thief waking up in the quiet hours of the morning in your damp wooden crate. You need to get going and steal eight food items, eat them, then nurse your growing children. Soon they will have to learn to be as excellent a thief as you.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The Time Machine v2.0 (2021-2024) by Bill Maya

In this fantasy inspired by H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, it’s 1895. You play as Wells’ friend and attorney, and watch helplessly as Wells is forced into the horse-drawn ambulance on Dr. Humboldt’s orders. Unless you can find evidence that Wells’ fantastic story about time travel is true, he’s doomed to be committed into an insane asylum.

An earlier version of the game was entered in ParserComp 2021 where it took 6th place. This new version was enhanced in various ways and entered into Spring Thing 2024’s Back Garden.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Ransack! (2026) by Charles Moore, Jr.

In this adventure game for beginners, you play as a back-alley amateur archeologist. You even got a fedora like that guy in that movie. Your plan is to find (steal) an emerald skull from a maybe-haunted maybe-booby-trapped maybe-Mayan pyramid, smuggle it out of this stupid country, sell it, and never work again.

This game was written in Dialog and was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam of 2026.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Loadstone (2025) by rosetinted

In this short fantasy, you play as a diplomat visiting the Crystal Valleys, the first of your people to do so. After days of meetings, you’re finally free to explore with both Learis, a guardian of the city, and a very illegal loadstone you acquired. You must get rid of the stone as soon as possible, but it’s cursed: you can’t drop it or put it anywhere or even talk about it.

This game was an entry in SeedComp 2025.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The Missing City Council (2026) by Solarius

In this first-time effort, a severely-underimplemented slice-of-life mystery, you play as someone visiting Loimijoki City Hall, at night, in Finland. Although never stated in the game itself, you’re here to attend a council meeting about zoning. But apart from two taciturn British guards in the basement, the building seems empty. Where is everyone?

This game was entered in Spring Thing’s Main Festival.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

A Potion Labeled ‘Time’ (2020) by Finn Fabish

In this short game, you wake up in an ugly room with no memory how you got there. You have a potion labeled ‘time’ and a watch. The room itself has an ugly door, an ugly key, and an ugly mailbox. Escape this series of meaningless puzzle rooms until you reach the end, then quit.

This game was written in ZIL and was a participant in the unrated Infocom Tribute Jam.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Window Washer (2025) by Galvan

In this short, strange, and disturbing game, you play as a man who wakes up in the middle of the night. Your wife, Melinda, and your daughter, Jess, still sleep, but little details about your high-rise apartment seem off or wrong, somehow. And why is there a window washer on a platform at this time of night?

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

ifs, ands, and otherwises

reintroductions.

Hi all! It’s been a while. At some point, it will probably make sense to work through specific chapters in the documentation. Starting at the beginning would be the most logical approach, so let’s not do that. I’ve been thinking about what Inform calls “phrases” a lot, specifically ones used to create new conditions and adjectives.

using conditions to assess the state of the world.

What are conditions? They are used to form conditional statements. Chances are, we use them all the time. For instance:

if the secret number is five:
...
if the location is the winding staircase:
...
if the player carries the frying pan:
...
if the second noun is scenery:
...
if the turn count is less than 20:

…and so forth. A condition follows the magic words “if,” “when,” “while,” or “unless.” We can specify what code will run based on whether a condition is met or not. Consider the following preamble (the opening line of an Inform rule):

every turn when nothing is on the oaken bench:

We could “tree” things out, so to speak, using a shorter preamble:

every turn:
	if nothing is on the oaken bench:

Another option would be to formulate a negative case:

every turn:
	unless something is on the oaken bench:

What’s the difference? Since performance problems are rare (though we might talk about some common cases someday), it probably won’t matter whether a rule is processed as applicable on every turn (“every turn” preamble) or processed only when conditions are met (“every turn when nothing is on the oaken bench”).

It might matter, though, that Inform processes more specific rules first (the one with the “when” clause) and less specific ones later. By adding conditions to our preambles, we assign rules priority over the ones that don’t.

too many “ands” for my taste.

Wherever we put our conditions, though, we will want to make sure they are readable and applied consistently. Here’s a barely functional project that contains a lot of properties and values.

lab is a room.
closet is a room.

a cat is a kind of animal.

coat is a kind of value.
the coats are orange and black.
a cat has a coat.

a cat can be hungry.
a cat is usually not hungry.

food is a kind of edible thing.

the hat is in lab.
the ball is in lab.
the kibble is food in lab.

the evening jacket is a wearable thing in lab.

Marbles is a female cat in lab.
Carrot is a male cat in lab.
the butler is a male person.

feeding timer is a number that varies.
feeding timer is 20.

every turn when feeding timer is greater than zero:
	decrement feeding timer

With this imagined example, we could write out some pretty complex conditions. Consider:

every turn when food is in the location and the butler wears the evening jacket and feeding timer is less than ten and the player holds the ball and an orange cat is in the location:

under one condition.

This isn’t terribly easy to read, is it? What if we needed to use these same conditions elsewhere? Given the complexity, we might forget an ingredient or get it wrong while retyping it. That makes for two concerns: readability and consistency. To make things easier for ourselves, let’s use a “to decide” phrase to create a single, more readable condition that we could use again and again.

to decide if the very specific conditions are met:
	if food is in the location and the butler wears the evening jacket and feeding timer is less than ten and the player holds the ball and an orange cat is in the location:
		decide yes;

With this custom condition, we can write a much tidier preamble. These two are functionally the same now:

every turn when food is in the location and the butler wears the evening jacket and feeding timer is less than ten and the player holds the ball and an orange cat is in this location:
...
every turn when the very specific conditions are met:

Much better! We could use a different organizational strategy we find it more readable. Choose what works best for you.

to decide if the very specific conditions are met:
	unless food is in the location, decide no;
	unless the butler wears the evening jacket, decide no;
	unless feeding timer is less than ten, decide no;
	unless the player holds the ball, decide no;
	unless an orange cat is in the location, decide no;
	decide yes;

This tactic is referred to in the documentation as defining a new condition by using a “to decide” phrase. Such phrases don’t just apply to things in the world. We can make custom criteria based on numerical calculations, table values, or anything else we can check in code. I’ve talked about this practice before because I use it all the time and I am still discovering new uses for it.

CF https://zedlopez.github.io/i7doc/WI_11.html#section_16

next.

Let’s discuss definitions next, which we can use to create new adjectives.

IFTF’s 2025 transparency report is online, summarizing the organization’s activity over the previous calendar year, including its financial income and outflow.

At the end of 2025, David Cornelson stepped down from the IFTF board of directors. We would like to thank David for his time and service to the organization during his two years on the board. David will continue to support IFTF, along with former members of the board, on the advisory board.

In 2025, as part of our micro-grants program, IFTF funded a project from Grace Benfell, co-editor in chief of The Imaginary Engine Review, which was completed last summer!

TIER defines itself as an online journal of games criticism - but Grace and Phoenix, the editors, have a very specific goal and outlook for it, described in their manifesto. TIER values the margins, the strange, the hobbyist releases, the experimental, the games that don’t get a lot of critical attention. Prior issues each focused on a specific game, such as thecatamites’ “Anthology of the Killer” or randomnine’s “OVERWHELM”; but things got a little different for their latest issue…

See, their initial proposal envisioned three small issues on three IF games; however, the scope shifted into a larger issue that would offer the opportunity to showcase a wider range of perspectives on IF. And it is a large issue with no less than 6 pieces on various aspects of IF. (We get it! There is so much to talk about in IF!) Grace explains that the grant money was very welcome as it allowed them to commission more ambitious and experimental pieces overall. The issue took overall longer than expected, but with an interview, a retrospective, and four critical perspectives on a variety of IF games, there’s a lot for everyone!

You’ll find this issue on TIER’s website, featuring: - a reflection on “Repeat the Ending” (Best in Show at Spring Thing 2023) as a personal game and the vulnerability it entails - an honest retelling of what it was to be a Twine author participating at their first IFComp in 2017 - a shorter piece on game poems, and the exploration of experimental techniques that have long been part (or precursors?) of IF - a lengthy interview with Nathalie Lawhead, touching on the power of text-based games for effective, personal, touching, and plain weird experiences, in an industry that looks more towards sleek polished spectacles, and an angry world that stifles creativity - a great study of “Horse Master” that made me go, “fine, yes, of course I will play Horse Master for the 12th time” - an exploration of retro interfaces featured as literary devices in a few IF games, and what they point to.

We are very happy to have helped bring into the world these very unique and thoughtful pieces of writing! Good games criticism pieces have always been very important to the IF scene, from long rec.arts.int-fiction pieces to SPAG articles, and even to this day articles from The Rosebush, but it can go through periods of lull - it takes thoughfulness, introspection, and the time to sit with a piece. IFTF is proud to continue to support a vibrant, healthy creative scene in this way!

One of the projects in the 2025 class of IFTF grants awardees was led by Katy Naylor from the Voidspace. In Katy’s words, the Voidspace is a cross-disciplinary space to bring together practitioners and explore and promote the overlap between the worlds of IF, indie writing, games, and interactive performance to encourage cross pollination. From our experience, notably at Narrascope, those worlds do have quite a bit of overlap that is always interesting to foster! The proposal sought grant money to support the delivery of several interactive fiction workshops and Twine minijams for newcomers as part of the London Games Festival Fringe in April.

The Voidspace successfully managed to run three IF workshops in April, two in person and one online; although they weren’t formally picked as a side event by the London Games Festival, the workshops ran at the same time period. The Void managed to bring together quite a few people from the literary and the interactive performance worlds that form part of the network that Voidspace has created - most of whom had not run into IF before, but had very relevant skills and an interest from their existing practice. The in-person workshops occurred April 5 at Theatre Deli in London, UK, a theatre community hub that frequently partners with the Voidspace. The first workshop focused on Downpour, a very intuitive and accessible tool for hyperlinks-based games created by V Buckenham, who also ran this workshop; and the second one saw Stanley Baxton (who readers of these pages might know from his 2024 IFComp entry) introduce a group to the tool Videotome. As for the online workshop, on April 15 Mark Ward gave and introduction to Twine.

Katy reports that these workshops were very successful! Not only for the attendees - Katy herself reports that the workshops planted several seeds in her minde, helped her shape her approach to advocating for IF and inspired her to use Videotome for an upcoming piece. This also spurred her to create her own introductory IF workshop aimed specifically at theatre makers, which she ran in September at an experimental theatre festival, using physical materials to replicate Twine-like structures - one attendee even said that this broke her writer’s block!

We’re always excited to help introduce more creators to the world of IF, and it sounds like the cross-pollination aspect of this project made it very successful!

PS: when we asked Katy to describe the overlap between IF and interactive theatre, her response was so insightful that we are copying it here verbatim:

The overlap between IF and theater (particularly immersive and interactive theatre, which is the Voidspace’s core interest) is massive!

Immersive theatre often involves audience interacting with environments that are all around them (i.e. inside a big touch real set - see Punchdrunk for the biggest example), choosing which strands of an atomised story to follow (e.g. following different characters or objects), etc. Interactive theatre takes this a stage further and allows audiences to take a direct part in the action - a sort of live action game but with a tight narrative arc. A balance of choice with controlled impact very similar to IF!

IF is well suited for creating environmental narratives - my workshop focuses on the spatial mechanics of “Howling Dogs” - how the degradation of the core space over time tells a story if its own - and encouraged participants to design a story from an environment first perspective. For those interested in interactive theatre you can use dialogue options and variables to create a story that feels responsive in a similar way.

There is also the element of time - even in a linear piece of IF, you can manipulate the flow of time far more than conventional text - by choosing breaks between passages, expanding links, moderated text etc. You can use these simple tools to give a piece of IF a sense of theatricality - landing the timing of ‘beats’ for flow and emphasis. Add the use of variables to build in a sense of time passing and use of environment and you have what I call ‘4d storytelling’. Which if you think about it, is what theatre is… “[Understudied][https://borntopootle.itch.io/understudied]” is a great example - a piece of IF about theatre that uses variables to introduce time pressure, and text effects and structure to choreograph the timing of ‘beats’. Form and content in unity!”

Thank you so much Katy!

Earlier this month, IFTF was delighted to participate in the GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco. This was our chance to explain what interactive fiction is, does, and can do to the biggest game developer gathering in the world.

We began by rocking the crowds at the Monday night opening event at Oracle Stadium. Several nonprofits and indie collectives had tables up at the concession level. We took the opportunity to soft-launch our GDC-week project: a collaboratively-authored Twine game - the classic “exquisite corpse” reimagined for branching narrative. Everybody who walked by was invited to add a node to the Twine editing screen — without looking at what earlier attendees had added. (Or, at least, not looking much.)

Naturally, the story got pretty chaotic pretty quickly, even on that first night.

Tuesday was a breather, since the festival hall wasn’t open yet. We took in some of the GDC talks and generally sprawled on the lawn in Yerba Buena Gardens. The weather was lovely — particularly for those of us who had flown in from East Coast snowstorms.

On Wednesday, the IFTF booth opened up (along with the IGF pavilion, alt.ctrl.gdc, and the rest of the festival hall). We were located in “GDC Commons,” alongside several other nonprofits and independent organizations. Our space had three tables, so we were able to demo the first day’s worth of Twine contributions while also grabbing people to continue the growth of the Twine map.

It turns out that most passers-by were familiar with Twine — no surprise, since it’s one of the most popular open-source narrative design tools out there. Fewer people realized that a whole educational nonprofit exists to support Twine. IFTF also manages other IF community services like IFComp (the oldest continuously-run game-design competition), IFDB (the definitive database of IF), the IF Archive, the forum and more. Not to mention NarraScope, our cozy little conference dedicated to narrative games. (Coming up this June in Albany!)

IFTF’s third table was dedicated to an older brand of interactive fiction: the Visible Zorker. This is an open-source project which demonstrates Zork, the original 1979 text adventure. The game is rigged to display its own source code as you play, along with all the variables, timers, and other mechanisms that run behind the game’s magic curtain. We at IFTF love this kind of educational project: revealing and making game design accessible to everyone.

GDC’s festival hall runs three days. By Friday afternoon we were tired (but happy) (but definitely tired) and ready to wrap up. The Twine game was a huge success with over 120 contributed passages over the course of the week.

We’re looking forward to next year at GDC in San Francisco. What will we be showing off in 2027? Haven’t the foggiest! We’ve got eleven months to decide, and you have eleven months to anticipate it. We hope to see you there.

To play the IFTF Collaborative Twine Adventure, visit this page!

Another project funded in 2025 as part of our micro-grants program supported Serhii in the development of additional features for his engine Atrament. Here’s an update!

The core concept of Atrament is that, while the Ink scripting language is widely used, it could be further developed into a more full-featured and user-friendly web-based engine that could offer creators a workflow comparable to Twine or ChoiceScript. While the core of the engine already existed prior to applying to a IFTF micro-grant, additional work was needed to push the tool towards greater maturity, ease of use, and functionality. The micro-grant allowed Serhii to work on the following areas: - developing documentation for authors; - developing a “wizard” style command line tool to provide technical scaffolding to users in creating a project and publishing it; - adding features to allow authors to export their games to a desktop OS; - delivering improvements to the debugger and the compiler; - expanding visual capabilities and extending the markup language; - purchase of a domain name for a dedicated website for the project.

Serhii also notably performed some exploratory work around automated game testing and VS Code integration, two very interesting features that are nonetheless not ready for primetime at this point. Still, the project is still under active development, moving from version 2.0 to 2.4.1 in 2025, and Serhii has integrated the feedback from external developers making a first wave of Atrament games, such as Sun Runners, The Loop, and The Corridor. Plus, given by the enthusiastic reaction the engine has met from established authors over at IntFiction, it seems like we can look forward to more Atrament games in the future!

Head on over to Atrament.ink (and the Github page) to learn more about the project, and give it a try! We are thrilled to have supported Serhii in further improving his engine and making it even easier for authors to develop their stories!

In 2025, as part of our micro-grants program, IFTF funded a project from Mark Davis; thanks to the funding, Mark and the team have made very good progress and were able to launch the platform, now called “Moving Literature”!

The project’s ambition was to design a no-code web-based tool for authoring interactive fiction, specifically designed to empower creators through accessible technology and a low barrier of entry, while still offering some nice multimedia options. Mark’s vision was to foster a vibrant community by blending the narrative power of Ink scripts with modern visual elements, such as the integration of images but also of Lottie animations (hence the zoetrope/Muybridge-style logos on the website!), which are triggered within the story through the use of Ink tags. While Mark explains that the technical stack is one he uses in his professional work, this project brings those high-end tools to the hobbyist and experimental IF scene.

The project was able to launch in the fall of 2025 thanks to IFTF’s support, with the launch of two websites: - MovingLiterature.com: The project’s home base, featuring general communications, development blogs, and “getting started” documentation. - MovLit.com: The library and creation space where the “action” happens, allowing for user registration and story creation.

The micro-grant was used to engage a professional graphic designer (who has since joined the team!) and cover hosting costs for the next 3 years, to ensure the project has a stable home for years to come. This supported the team as they focused on carrying the project towards launch, such as building a documentation library, implementing user registration, and building out forums.

We are very happy to have helped bring this new authoring tool into the world! Building new low/no-code options that nonetheless provide engaging capabilities to control or enhance presentation has proven numerous time to be a very effective entry point for newcomers to discover and enjoy IF, and lower the barrier of entry to more stories being created. IFTF is proud to support such projects that push the envelope for web-based interactive storytelling!

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the third round of IFTF microgrants, following the continued success of our 2024 and 2025 programs!

A big thank you to everyone who submitted a grant application late last year; we are thrilled to see continuing interest in the program and more interesting projects for the IF community! Our independent committee of Grant Advisors have carefully reviewed all applications, and have selected four projects that represent the expanding technical and cultural horizons of the medium. Without further ado, here are the grant recipients, class of 2026!

Flatgame making tool - Kate Bagenzo This project aims to simplify the creation of “flatgames”, a genre that has a decade of history, most often associated with allowing players to view and explore an author’s own drawings (often hand-drawn and scanned), collages, music, etc. Most of these games are either coded from scratch or using Unity templates, which doesn’t quite succeed in making game making as easy as possible, as originally intended. Kate will receive $650 to develop a streamlined toolset that lowers the barrier for artists and non-programmers to bring their visual stories into the interactive space.

Пригода: A Ukrainian-language text adventure engine - Andrii “Пригода” (Adventure) is a dedicated parser-based engine focused on the specific needs of the Ukrainian-language IF community. Andrii will receive $600 to support his efforts in developing this localized parser-based text adventure framework that provides useful features for authors in Ukrainian, from synonyms and aliases as in other text adventure engines, to more Ukrainian-specific needs such as streamlining recognition of different cases, prepositions, and forms of commands. This seeks to ensure that authors have the linguistic tools and engine support necessary to create text adventures in Ukrainian, which currently don’t exist!

Twine & the IF Community article - Tabitha O’Connell Twine fundamentally reshaped the landscape of interactive fiction over the last decade; however, there was a period around 2014 where the community debated the increased use of the tool and its impact on the IF scene and IFComp. The strong viewpoints and particular context made this a key moment in the IF community, and while participants can recount part of the story and the IntFiction threads are still up, there is little literature taking a closer look at this episode and contextualizing this event. Tabitha will receive $750 to fund their work in collecting appropriate sources and materials, before writing their deep-dive critical and historical article on the topic, an important chapter for the IF community of broad interest for the history of the medium.

New Standalone Engine Built with Godot for Making Splitscreen Co-Op Interactive Fiction - Abhik Hasnain, Adeline K. Piercy Although there have been a few experiments over the decades, IF usually tends to be single-player, and multiplayer experiences are rare and lack specific tooling to explore this further. Abhik and Adeline, two students at Edmonton’s University of Alberta, propose to build a standalone engine using the Godot framework specifically for co-operative storytelling, focusing on giving creators a powerful tool allowing them to explore building splitscreen, multi-player interactive fiction; they will receive $1,000 to fund their work. This could unlock entirely new possibilities of exploration and experimentation around this relatively new genre of co-op (local or remote) narrative play.

We love this year’s class of projects, as they explore 4 very different directions that touch on innovation, new frontiers, fostering creation, and community history. Looking forward to getting updates on them next year! And congratulations to the recipients!

We want to thank all applicants, as well as our Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to select the projects for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, PB Berge, Rourke Bywater, Liza Daly, Chandler Groover, and Nathanaël Marion!

Twine 2.12.0 released on 10 April 2026. Major highlights in this release include a new way to see tags in the story map, a better tag autocomplete, and native Japanese language support.

Full Notes

New Features Added

• When adding tags, multiple suggestions are now shown when more than one existing one matches what’s been typed.
• A new preference has been added where tags now appear as badges with names on passage cards instead of a thin stripe of color. When this preference is active, all badges are shown on passage cards regardless of whether a color has been assigned to them.
• App Twine has been updated to Electron 41.
• A Japanese localization has been added.

Bugs Fixed

• Long passage names now display with an ellipsis in the title bars of passage editors, instead of the title bar getting taller.
• The start passage on duplicated stories is now set correctly.
• A bug where passage name completions in the passage editor didn’t appear in certain situations has been fixed.
• An unnecessary delay when loading localizations has been fixed.
• The Ukrainian localization has been improved.

Story Format Updates

• Chapbook has been updated to version 2.3.1.

For full details, please refer to the Twinery Reference Guide