Interactive fiction, narrative in games, and so on| Zarf Updates
Here's a bit of trivia from the Infocom source code collection. All modern parser-IF tools let you type X as an abbreviation for EXAMINE. It's such a familiar shortcut that we forget that most Infocom games didn't work that way. Back when we ...| Zarf Updates
Caves of Qud just won the Hugo Award for Best Game or Interactive Work. This is extremely awesome. I was pushing for a "Best Game" category ten years ago. Here's my list of suggested nominees which a 2015 award might have gone to, if there was ...| Zarf Updates
I have been playing weird games that are little. I mean, short. One evening, two evenings tops. Maximum weirdness density. (Twist ending: one of the games listed here is not short. Read on to find out which one! Spoiler: it's the last one. I ...| Zarf Updates
I went to the Seattle Worldcon and I had a good time. (Some Worldcons take on a unique name. The last one I went to, in Montreal, was Anticipation. The 2001 Worldcon in Philadelphia was called the Millennium Philcon and I went purely because ...| Zarf Updates
Mysterium was in Atlanta this year. I didn't attend but I followed (some of) the streams. You can catch up on their Twitch channel; videos will be moved to Youtube once they're edited. This was not, sadly, a news-heavy year. This is because ...| Zarf Updates
Here's a story I heard last night about 3D printing. (I'm not in the 3D-printing scene. I know people who are, though. And it's an interesting story, what the hell. If I can blog about dirty sea shanties, I can blog about the additive manufacturing ...| Zarf Updates
We talk about story characters who are "genre-aware" or "genre-savvy". Although it's more like trope-savvy, right? The horror movie protagonist who gets off the property rather than smooching someone in a dark cellar. The manor-house murderer ...| Zarf Updates
I'm going to the World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle! And speaking! It's the first Worldcon I've attended since 2009 (Montreal). After the Hadean Lands kickstarter, I figured I should spend my travel budget on game dev conferences rather ...| Zarf Updates
Hadean Lands is on sale as part of the Boston-Based Indies bundle on Steam. That's a 15% discount for five titles: Hadean Lands (me!) Monster Loves You Too! (Dejobaan) MewnBase (Cairn4) Million Monster Militia (Space Capsule) Loki's Revenge ...| Zarf Updates
Here's a new toy: a Discord bot that plays IF games. Say you've got a group of people who want to play an IF game together. You'd log into the IFTF Discord and go to the #zarfbot-9000 channel. (That's where the bot is currently running.) Type ...| Zarf Updates
We have wrapped NarraScope 2025! It went great. Everybody loved it, on-site attendees and remote folks. Hybrid conferences are hard, my friend. This is our third hybrid conference -- but really this is the first time we got a grip on the problem. ...| Zarf Updates
A couple of months ago, I wrote: [...] It may become impossible to launch a new programming language. No corpus of training data in the coding AI assistant; new developers don't want to use it because their assistant can't offer help; no critical ...| Zarf Updates
A quick reminder: today is is the last day to register for NarraScope 2025 if you want to attend in person. (Remote attendance will be open until June 18th.) If you want the conference rate at the University City Study hotel, you need to grab ...| Zarf Updates
It happened that I was looking back on my old game reviews, and I hit a link to a game web site, and the site was gone. Not a shock. Web sites vanish. It made me sad, though. I like those single-game, single-message web sites! I doubt anybody ...| Zarf Updates
Worldcon is the apex annual convention for a certain stratum of science fiction fandom. My stratum, to be precise. It's also the conference whose members vote the annual Hugo Awards. Sadly, Worldcon the conference is becoming less notable than ...| Zarf Updates
A few days ago, Kate Willaert wrote: As much as I love the word "Metroidvania," I dislike people calling these games Metroidbrainias because it makes it sound like their root is in Metroid games when they're just standard Adventure games in ...| Zarf Updates
When Apple shipped the first ARM ("Apple Silicon") Macs, they came with Rosetta 2: a tool which allowed existing Intel apps to run on ARM. One day, Rosetta 2 will go away, and Intel apps will die. (Just like 32-bit apps died in 2019.) When? ...| Zarf Updates
Dustborn is a queer punk-band secret-agent road trip with campfire singalongs plus beating up fascist cops with an electric baseball bat. What else is there to say? C'mon. About twenty years ago, a mysterious Broadcast freaked out most of North ...| Zarf Updates
Layoffs at a game studio aren't news any more, but I guess I'm on this beat. If nothing else, this blog has a longer searchable history of Cyan history than Cyan does. Yesterday Cyan posted one of those all-too-familiar dark-mode press releases: ...| Zarf Updates
Interactive fiction, narrative in games, and so on| Zarf Updates
No particular category here. Some narrative, some puzzle, some of both. Open Roads Animal Well Pilgrims Isles of Sea and Sky Harold Halibut Open Roads by Open Roads Team -- game site A walking (and driving, but you're a passenger) simulator ...| Zarf Updates
Finally, my IGF top favorites. At this point I have entirely departed the realm of objective, considered judgement. These are the games which made me cackle with glee -- in my head at least. Immortality NORCO Tunic (Necessary footnote: I was ...| Zarf Updates
And now, IGF finalists that I didn't get into. This is tricky to introduce. I'm not saying these games were bad. I'm not even saying that I had a bad time playing them. Rather, these are games that are aimed at an audience which isn't quite ...| Zarf Updates
Interactive fiction, narrative in games, and so on| Zarf Updates
Interactive fiction, narrative in games, and so on| Zarf Updates
Interactive fiction, narrative in games, and so on| Zarf Updates
More assorted comments on games! Some of these were honorable mentions for the Narrative award; some were listed in other categories; some were games that just struck me as particularly nifty in some way. (See Monday's post for the six ...| Zarf Updates
Interactive fiction, narrative in games, and so on| Zarf Updates
Recent puzzle fun. Cipher Zero Coupling Monument Valley 3 (See also Occlude from a couple of weeks ago.) Cipher Zero by Zapdot -- game site A Witness-like which starts out in nonogram (paint-by-number) territory and then gets more complicated. ...| Zarf Updates
We learned yesterday that we lost game designer Kory Heath. Sad news—my dear friend and collaborator, Kory Heath, after enduring years of chronic pain and depression, ended his life. He was a genius, also funny, kind, patient. I'm so grateful ...| Zarf Updates
No particular theme this time. Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals A Long Journey to an Uncertain End Can of Wormholes Viewfinder Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals by Night School -- game site I loved Oxenfree. A gang of raw-nerved teens caught up in a haunted-radio ...| Zarf Updates
We come to the end of my IGF review posts: the games that made me stand up and say "Holy zorch, you did not just do that!" Because, let's be clear, they just did that. As I said at the beginning, this is not the same as being my "favorite game ...| Zarf Updates
It's unfair to describe Occlude as "Solitaire... but eeevil!" But it's also funny so I will. No, no, let's start over. Someone has constructed a ritual which allows you to change the past. One could use it to, oh, for example, obviate the sin ...| Zarf Updates
Home from NarraScope! Here's what I've played this month. The Operator Dungeons of Hinterburg TRON: Catalyst The Operator by Bureau 81 -- game site A shortish narrative game which falls somewhere between the "hacker game" and "bureaucrat ...| Zarf Updates
We all know that the Web is currently under attack by AI companies trying to turn scraped data into venture capital. I'd link to the early article I saw sounding the alarm, but I can't find it because there are hundreds of search hits on "ai ...| Zarf Updates
Here's a bunch of reviews that have accumulated! Gotta push them out before the stack falls over. There's no common theme here except I played them all since GDC. South of Midnight Old Skies The Horror at Highrook Lab Rat South of Midnight ...| Zarf Updates
A few weeks ago, Guillaume Lethuillier posted "The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst": Upon reflection, Myst has long been more analogous to a graph than a traditional linear game, owing to the relative freedom it affords players. This ...| Zarf Updates
A many years ago, the IF Archive existed, and it was an FTP site. It lived at ftp.gmd.de. That was a long time ago. (1992, but who's counting.) Slightly less long ago, the World Wide Web existed, and I said "I bet there could be a web mirror ...| Zarf Updates
This morning, Cyan updated Myst (the 2020 release) to include the Age of Rime. This is a free update on Steam (Mac/Win) and Quest; the Xbox update is in progress. Do I need to say more than that? Sure, why not. Context is life. Rime originally ...| Zarf Updates
Marissa Marcel, the hottest young Hollywood star of 1969, made just three cursed movies -- and then disappeared. None of the movies were ever released. But you've found the raw footage... as a disorganized pile of clips. Crank up your old Moviola ...| Zarf Updates
The Indie Games Festival nominees are now posted. The IGF is a showcase of indie games which exists as part of GDC (March, San Francisco, expensive). This year I was invited to be on the jury for Excellence in Narrative (along with Emily Short ...| Zarf Updates
I twooted about Type Help (William Rous), a new deduction-type game which is so full of awesome surprises that it's hard to review! I have finished "Type Help", a database-style thinky narrative game which I can't think of anything to say ...| Zarf Updates
In October I wrote: This leaves me with two big IFTF roles: Treasurer and IF Archive lead. I'm happy with the IF Archive job; I figure I'll hold onto that for a while. But it's getting to be time to hand off the Treasurer job. I've been doing ...| Zarf Updates
Here's a little something I've been working on: The Visible Zorker! This screenshot has spoilers for Zork 1. This whole project is spoilers for Zork 1. That's the point. Really, go give it a shot. It's a toy. You can read the rest of this ...| Zarf Updates
I beta-tested, so take this as a promo rather than a full review. Roottrees! They're back! And more hand-drawn than ever! This isn't the hand-drawn part. If you haven't played The Roottrees Are Dead, now's the time to jump in. One of the ...| Zarf Updates
I imagine you think of this as just an annual news post. "Hey, here's some Myst news that isn't a kickstarter!" But we really do get together once a year and have a weekend of community love. I don't go to every Mysterium, but this year is the ...| Zarf Updates
I've played through Heaven's Vault twice now. At the end of the first run, I had this distinct thought which I had never put into words before. I wrote: What's the word for when you finish a story, and now you can really start to discover ...| Zarf Updates
A bit of a mix here. These aren't classic adventure games, but they're not the abstracted explorations that I call "story devices" either. I'd say the common strain is the old Flash adventure genre -- the weird little narrative worlds like Submachine. ...| Zarf Updates
The IGF finalists have just been announced. Usually this happens in January, so that the winners can be revealed at GDC. Guess what, this year is different! Again! But here we are. Last year, I wrote: 2019 was a heck of a game year, folks. ...| Zarf Updates
You may remember I was pretty sour about Cyan's lack of Riven news this summer. The shoe has dropped: Riven. Officially in development at Cyan. FAQ: https://bit.ly/MainFAQ --@cyanworlds, Oct 31 2022 (I said I was quitting Twitter, not that ...| Zarf Updates