"A Party To Murder" takes on the tricky task of a murder mystery and falls a bit short. That's not surprising though, as I feel that mysteries are one of the more difficult realms of IF to create. The game starts off with a long cut scene involving numerous pauses and conversation that you can't control. It's a bit long and frustrating to sit through more than once.

From there, you move on to the actual party, where you interact with multiple guests and the furnishings of the house. It starts off well enough, but then devolves into a morass of confusion as you try to figure out what in the heck to do next. There's a hidden piece of evidence you find and according to the walkthrough, if you examine too closely at the wrong time, you can't win the game. Then there's the bizarre final puzzle, where the only way to get the information you need from an NPC is to perform a completely unrelated series of actions. Mind you, there is no basis at all for believing that doing so will produce ANY kind of result. This puzzle is a good example of a "guess what the author is thinking", especially considering that when I examined the items involved, the game's reply was that they "don't interest me."

Then there were the other technical problems I encountered. An attempt to examine a woman led to this helpful disambiguation message: "Which woman. The woman or the woman?" My attempt to "ask billy about the piece of paper" netted me the response: "You can't talk to that."

At least the guests were interesting. For example, the couple making out in the laundry room make their way into the girl's bedroom for a little privacy. Interrupting them may be rude, but damn is it funny.

Too bad scenes like that couldn't carry the rest of the game. A good mystery is a very formidable beast to create and while I can see that a lot of effort was put into "A Party To Murder", the author should have taken a longer look at the game overall before releasing it.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

A very successful piece of interactive fiction. "Another Earth, Another Sky" picks up where "Earth and Sky" left off, except that now you play the brother, where before you played the sis. Using glulx, it now includes graphics and sound effects where appropriate. Mainly, these are used for comic book-style "KAPOW!" captions in all of their big, block letter glory. After all, you do play a super hero.

It's hard to find anything to nitpick with this game. Writing was well done, and the dialog, while sparse, actually let you make a few game-altering choices. Well, to some degree, anyway. (In the original "Earth and Sky", it didn't really matter what dialog choice you picked, as the outcome was the same.) Probably the best thing about the puzzles was that they didn't feel contrived at all. They felt like they actually fit in with the story and setting. Most were of reasonable difficulty, and I did have to consult hints for one of them. So they weren't too easy and they weren't too hard. The result is a pretty solid piece of IF.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"Augustine" is a fairly linear, puzzleless work of IF, but does a reasonable job of hiding it. This is mainly by letting the player wander about the city, which is, on its surface, an interesting place to explore. I just wish that the game had included scenery objects to provide some depth to the setting.

The good: the story picked me up and carried me along. The similarities to "Highlander" didn't bother me, and I took the author's explanation at face value. For a linear game, "Augustine" is unusually long, but this is only because the author included so much of a fleshed-out story, not because you find yourself stuck at any point.

The bad: A few typos here and there. There was a single unnamed room on the ship. The flashbacks suffered from occasional flip-flops in verb tense. In my view, its single biggest flaw was the vast amounts of text in the prologue and other various cut scenes. I can understand not wanting to turn all of these into interactive segments, though, since there felt like there was already so much to the story as it is.

The result: Even though puzzleless IF isn't really my thing, I enjoyed "Augustine". I would recommend it, with only the caveat that it is heavy on reading and light on interaction.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

What could have been a decent superhero game was plagued by a shallow plot, bad spelling, terse descriptions, a terribly limited vocabulary, and inconsistencies throughout the game. This was the first Quest game I played, and even though I downloaded the most recent version of the Quest player, "Blade Sentinel" still told me that it was out of date and some things might not work properly. Was this why the entire experience was basically fighting the game itself? The game seemed to recognize a dozen verbs at most, and bringing up the help didn't give any clues as to what they might be. My final decision to quit the game came as I faced off against a cyborg and couldn't for the life of me figure out what I could do next. Everything I tried met with the same confusion from Quest. And without a walkthrough, that's the point where I called it quits.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

Since I was a beta-tester for this game, I did not score or review it.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

While the premise of "Coffee Quest" is fun in a light and playful way, I found the game to be inconsistent as well as plagued by a number of small bugs and textual missteps. "The basket is a cool metal cylinder design, a bit like the one in Ditch Day Drifter, but more space age looking." Having never playing DDD, that description really doesn't mean much to me, though I knew it wasn't really important considering it was just a wastebasket. There was an instance where even though examining a flyer and reading a flyer gave you almost the identical information, reading it increased your score, while examining it did not.

Most of the rest of the nitpicks I encountered were visual errors, such as extra spaces or newlines between words and punctuation. Probably the most amusing was when I examined a sofa and was presented with "The sofa is fashioned from the best leatherette money can buy. The dormant form of a security guard occupies most of its length!There's nothing on the sofa."

Still, it wouldn't be fair to present only the minor negatives of the game. It was still pretty fun, and the author was not afraid to use his imagination. Attempting to wear all the items in your possession ("WEAR ALL") presented a litany of humorous responses for each piece of inventory. ("roll of toilet paper: No, you went to the Christmas do as a mummy last year. Shame it wasn't fancy dress though.")

The puzzles were generally pretty straightforward, except for the final one which involved having to open an umbrella, even though the game was extremely vague about where the sprinkler was going off. Though it was supposed to be pouring water in the board room, the room desc never said anything about it when you got in there. I found this game to be overall a good attempt, though in desperate need of some general play-testing and lots of editing.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"Color and Number" is what happens when an engineer makes games. The puzzles, while generally logical and requiring deep thought, felt jarringly contrived and out of place. Each one is basically a logic puzzle of sorts, from the base 5 number system of made up nomenclature, to the urns and beads and the final puzzle of beads and dials.

The overall impression is that the author started out with a number of "clever" puzzles and threw together a game to include them. Most of the puzzles I thought lacked enough of a decent foundation of information needed to solving them. Even after using the hint system and walkthrough, I asked myself "How was anyone supposed to deduce THAT?" on several of the puzzles.

The game itself had a very loose and informal writing style in places, something I've never enjoyed in interactive fiction. So that's a personal bias, I admit. I played it only on Linux, where all dialog lacked quotation marks of any kind, greatly reducing readability. In the end, I had a lot of trouble reconciling the idea of a religious cult with the hoard of engineering riddles with no point other than to serve as bottlenecks.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

In this game, you play a youth sentenced to life without parole for buying a lollipop with a fake dollar bill. Your goal as a convicted candy counterfeiter is to escape from prison, your "Concrete Paradise". It's not hard to see that this game doesn't exactly take itself seriously. But it doesn't succeed in silliness either, especially when you have to kill a guard to escape and the game notes afterward, "You almost feel sorry for him, because you know he has a wife and kids." I think the author should have been more consistent in the direction he wanted to take this game, and the lack of a uniform tone was probably one of the reasons I found this game so disappointing. The game suffers only a few technical gaffes, one of them being a magic word randomly not working for me, and "get in raft" working where "enter raft" failed (though this can be attributed to TADS rather than the author).

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"Constraints" certainly is well-written. It's also the least interactive piece of interactive fiction I've ever played. Games like "Photopia" are very linear and present few choices, but this game goes well beyond that. For most of it, you can't make any choices because it is more a literary exercise than anything else. The first two portions of it, in fact, have you playing an inanimate object, so you can imagine just how much freedom you have. The third part only pretends to give you choices, since no matter what you do, the game informs you it was wrong. The only choice, perversely, is to do nothing. That's not to say I had a bad time playing. It was captivating for its brief length, with an absorbing narrative and stimulating responses to attempted actions. Its tone of hopelessness and futility were a little disconcerting though, and it's only good for a brief distraction. An enjoyable experience, but not the best game of the competition by a long shot.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"Eric's Gift". It's hard to figure out what exactly I want to say about this game. It's a pretty linear IF short story where the only "puzzle" is to examine every minute detail and ask people about them. When I finally finished it, I had to go back and re-read the beginning to fully understand what had transpired. Well, that's not entirely accurate, since I don't fully understand everything. This game leaves you wondering, which may have been the author's intent. Why is it that I had to tell Eric the background if it was his gift? What started the fire? Was that Cappella in the painting leaving the burning building... with grief but no panic? This game made me think more than any other of the competition, and yet it also left me vaguely unsettled and a little unsatisfied. It truly was an imaginative piece of work, and I felt very torn about how to score it.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

Except for a few minor bugs, "Evacuate" was a fairly solid game that I found to be reminiscent of the Infocom games of yore, especially "Planetfall". I found the writing and puzzles both to be of very high quality, and the game itself to be very enjoyable. The only issues I found were missing responses to fooling around with a rug, and a scope problem with one item, though neither of these bugs negatively affected the gameplay in any way. The one mark against it is the maze which, though an interesting job in dynamically random exits, was somewhat frustrating to navigate because of the very way the exits change randomly each time you enter a room.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"Fort Aegea" pits you against a big nasty dragon in a setting that obviously encompasses more than just this game. Even without the prequel in the ABOUT message (The Jewel of Knowledge), it is obvious just from the level of detail given to the history of the druids, the world, and the maps provided. The manner in which the author divides up the game into four separate quadrants gives a pleasant illusion of choice in what is otherwise a game of bottleneck after bottleneck as you scramble to escape the flying reptile. There are two distinct endings, and unfortunately the obvious one is the least satisfactory of the two. It also involves an oddly preachy ending that was mystifying in the context of only this single game. Perhaps if I'd played "The Jewel of Knowledge", I might have been able to appreciate its message as appropriate, but as it was, I found it a little bizarre. It was still an enjoyable game overall and I hope to try the other two games of this trilogy.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

There's only so much retro I can handle. I was not interested in playing a game written in Basic for DOS. I did not play this game and so I did not score or review it.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

What happens when you mix the sim game "Afterlife" with IF? You get "Hell: A Comedy of Errors". It certainly has an unusual premise. In fact while playing it, I felt more like I was back in one of my old MUSHes ("multi-user shared hallucination", an online text-based role playing game more or less like a MUD) then a text adventure, because I was digging out rooms and creating objects to place in them. Only in this case, I was in Hell and doing all this to punish the naughty naughty souls I was to receive.

Despite being a unique piece of IF, I found that the actual gameplay failed to live up to its potential. My first attempt started out slow, picked up, and then fizzled out. My choice of gems (for building rooms) disappeared, and there were several gems I couldn't buy due to apparent parser problems. Buying the gems was a blind man's game. There wasn't any information about them that I could find. You only found out what kind of rooms they created afterwards.

Once you start buying rooms and placing tortures and dropping souls, the game kind of lacks direction. The instructions say that you may need to customize tortures to particular souls, but doesn't explain how to do that other than random guessing, i.e. trial and error. After trying out various combinations at random, I finally squeezed out every bit of penance from the souls and won the game. In fact, I didn't even need to buy any of the tortures it listed, I simply used rooms and helpers. While this game could have been a lot better, it seemed a bit rushed and unfinished.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

Nearly all science fiction IF games take place in the distant future with vasts leaps in technological advancement. "Identity Thief" on the other hand, takes place in a Neuromancer/Deus Ex-like cyberpunk setting. As the main character, you come equipped with several cybernetic enhancements. But then, so do others.

Though the intro is long (you can skip it if you want), the game starts out strong. Your little endeavor hasn't turned out quite as expected, and you need to make some important decisions quickly. From there the game offers a very well written and absorbing story. For the most part, the puzzles were decent. However, the advancement of the main plot requires performing some truly bizarre actions and asking just the right questions of an NPC, and so I had to rely on a walkthrough to get all the juicy details. Unfortunately, once you get them, the game is over. I wish that there had been more, since it was just starting to get really interesting at the end. Maybe I'll get lucky and a sequel is in the works.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

Interactive short stories are meant to drawn in the reader, as they make the player an integral part of the drama. "Jane", though, did not quite have that effect on me. If you took "Lifetime: Television for Women" and ran it through some sort of Z-code filter, I think that this game would be the result. In "Jane", you bounce around various bodies, participating in the drama of a physically abusive marriage. You play the husband, the wife, and a friend, all at different times and different locations. The gist of the game is presented through dialog menus, though the choices you make have no real impact on the game's path. This is a truly puzzleless piece of IF. But with the constant shifting of identities and the inability to relate to any of the characters, I found myself unable to get into the drama of it all. The author admits that the purpose of the game was "to sensitize people to the unfortunately all-too-common issue of abuse." However, I didn't find myself any more sensitized to it than before I played.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

I'm lucky. I'm lucky because I am the intended audience of "Janitor". The game is rife with in-jokes about nearly all the Infocom games of old, the ones I know and love. At heart, it is a parody of the classic treasure hunts Zork and Zork 2, though it doesn't stop there.

The game starts with the familiar "*** You have won. ***" that any text adventure player will easily recognize. At that, the work is only starting for you, the janitor. Your job, you soon come to realize, is to pick up after all those rigorous game testers who have already gone through the adventure, solved all the puzzles and collected all the treasures. Figuring this out, what your goal actually is and the point of the mop, are probably the game's only stumbles, as they're not abundantly clear. But in no time I was mopping footprints, resetting puzzles, relocating treasures, and generally returning the game to its original pristine condition.

Or... was I? In an interesting twist, the authors also threw in a murder mystery for us to solve, so now they've tied in the classic Infocom mysteries of Deadline, Witness, and Suspect. "Janitor" isn't exactly easy. Sometimes reverting puzzles back can be nearly as tricky as solving them. The mystery portion is a bit more challenging than the rest of the game, and I did have to resort to the hints on several occasions. But I never felt that any puzzle was unreasonably difficult or any clue was senselessly cryptic. As a result, I scored this as my favorite game of the competition.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

What do you do if you have a single idea for a game and a competition deadline coming up? You go back to the drawing board and wait for next year. Unfortunately, that's not what apparently happened here. Instead, "Koan" is a game with a single "think outside the box" puzzle and nothing else. No story, no plot. And actually, calling it a game is being rather generous. There are nine rooms with items or advice in each, but they don't represent locations; they are nothing more than a skeletal framework of the game. "This is the southwest location in this game" is an example of one of the room descriptions. Mmm, sure gets the imagination going. The "goal" of the game itself is so vague that it left me flabbergasted and annoyed the first time I read it. But, it turns out, that it had to be vague, or risk giving away the "clever" solution to the puzzle. All in all, a very disappointing game. Even solving the riddle doesn't satisfy so much as irritate.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

My first attempts at IF have never been released. Considering how few people use Atari 8-bits nowadays, I don't see it ever happening either. This is good, because first attempts at something are rarely any good. If I ever tried to make a vase on a pottery wheel, you can bet that my first attempt would not go on display in my living room.

This is because as humans, we learn as we go. While our first tries may not be any good, our second or third or fourth might be. "Moonbase" played like a first try at IF. If so, the author shouldn't give up making games, just give it a bit more practice. This game is short, completely uninspired, and contains oodles of mindlessly easy puzzles. So, maybe it's good that it's short. It also contains frequent misspellings, numerous lowercase room names, and inconsistent blank lines and tabs. The author didn't properly identify adjectives for some items, making disambiguation frustrating in some cases. He also felt that a cheeky help message would be more entertaining than actual help:

"General help may be asked for using the HELP command."
>help
I said that help may be asked for... not that it would be forthcoming.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

This isn't the first game about game authoring (is that a "meta-game"?), and I'm sure it won't be the last. I found this one interesting in that it was not only about the thought process before a game is created, but also included the puzzle frameworks intended for that game. Of course, you could always say that it's a cheap cop out from actually making the game conceptualized... I just didn't get that impression when I played. It made nice use of Greek myths, which I used to study intently years back. It also included cats, an animal I have daily exposure to. I found the puzzles to be only a little more than basic, though they were generally satisfactory. The biggest complaints I've heard about the game involved one particularly bizarre piece of electronics that I was fortunately able to solve fairly quickly through some lucky fiddling.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

As a whole, "Not Much Time" was a decently written game with okay puzzles, but just seemed to lack any real "oomph" to me. The puzzle solving felt very mechanical, as did the search for the variety of ingredients needed to win the game. My only serious issue with the game was in the the bedroom. Searching the pillow turned up nothing, looking in the pillow was fruitless, but searching the pillow case revealed a hidden journal. Other than that, I found the game technically well done.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"Out of the Study" is the first one-room game I've played. The good news is that I found it well written, with both a good atmosphere and nice descriptions. The bad news is that the main and final puzzle stumped me, and there was no walkthrough or hint system that I could find. I couldn't figure out how I was supposed a guess a five digit code, when the clues I collected gave my 7 possible number segments to build it from. Maybe the tips were there in the room and I just couldn't see them. Still, the frustration factor of fruitlessly trying combination after combination soured me a little on this game, thus its lower score.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"Photograph" is one of this year's interactive short stories, not so much a game as it is a linear narrative with little to do with puzzles or problem solving. Not that "Photograph" lacks any puzzles, as it does have at least one point where you can get stuck if you don't figure out the right thing to do (i.e. at the store).

I see IF of this type (heavy on "fiction", light on "interactive") as a method of drawing the reader/player more into the story than you can with traditional "static" fiction. In this regard, I thought "Photograph" succeeded very well. We are presented with a sad tale of regret through flashback episodes that are triggered by various stimuli encountered throughout the game. I found it particularly touching and poignant, and even now I experience a touch of melancholy when I think back on its tale of lost love and "What if?" (No pun intended.) The ending is rather bittersweet, and definitely leaves you thinking. Though this type of IF is not really my cup of tea, "Photograph" did manage to touch me, which I imagine was the author's intent all along. If so, a job well done.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"Ramon and Jonathan" is an odd piece of work. It is very brief, confusing, and not at all satisfying. Winning the game comes down to a round of "guess the question", but still didn't leave me feeling that I accomplished anything. The game doesn't seem to flow, and the walkthrough has you performing actions that frankly baffled me. People are trying to force open the gate, and if I do so too soon, two men dressed in black enter the hall and "proceed to do you something very unpleasant." And who are they? Apparently they're police from Earth. However, if I wait a bit and blow open the gate under the cover of smoke, those men haven't even entered the cage yet! The author should have given this game a lot more thought, and laid down some more clear motivation for the characters. As it is, it's a confusing tangle that isn't worth trying to play without the walkthrough.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

I found myself wishing that "Rent-A-Spy" had only been a little better. It had potential, it's just that I felt it lacked any real spark that could have turned an okay game into a really good one. The game plot was a little hard to swallow... I'm on a mission vital to the protection of humanity, and I'm dropped off in the woods with no equipment whatsoever, not even a nail file? Err, okay. The descriptions were a lot more basic and sparse than I care for, leaving one with a sterile and clinical impression throughout the game. One puzzle in particular left my guessing for verb and syntax ("throw wire over detector"), but otherwise the puzzles were pretty well done. The safe cracking, in particular, was an imaginative piece of work, and I did have to rely on the walkthrough for that one. Conclusion: a decent game that could be better.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

I wish I could figure out this game. Is "Scary House Amulet!" a parody, comically tragic, or is it really as bad as it seems? Unfortunately, I couldn't determine, and so I raised its score a little bit (especially after playing some of the other offerings of this year). I mean, the name itself is the first clue to its cheesiness, but then I thought the same of "Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish Out of Me!" The intro is equally... odd.

Had I played this game in Linux, I would have missed the bold text which Linux Frotz doesn't seem to render. However, WinFrotz showed it in all its strangeness. Again... was this intentionally ludicrous? Either way, the game lost points big time for its annoying maze with 6 or 7 word long descriptions. Overall... I just don't know what to make of this game. It's just too weird. It seems like a parody of sorts, with lines like:

The spider is between you and the bible! The creature says, "Hey that's my bible!" and adds, "Spiders can be religious too, you know!"

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A game of flashbacks, "Screen" recounts the memories recalled during a visit to the player's childhood home. While the beginning (rather long) flashbacks evoke a feeling of innocence and sweetness, the rest of the game rather disappoints in comparison. The first thing you might encounter is the standard message the game gives you if you can't travel in a requested direction while outside: "You'd miss out on all the good stuff if you went that way." This should have been reserved for legitimate paths that the game wanted to bar, but instead its shown for every direction when you're outside the house.

The puzzles seem to be hit and miss. Primarily, they're all in encountered in two sets of "flashbacks" that you gain while fiddling with the old television set. The first flashback, though, doesn't seem to fit in with the story at all. It's jarringly out of place, like a puzzle in search of a game. The second one, the cage, was simply frustrating. None of the actions I chose gave any kind of decent response, even though I considered them to be pretty valid solutions. For example, when I found the scissors:

>x scissors
They're special Caped Crusader scissors. Apparently they can cut anything -- lucky you.

>cut bars
Cutting that up would achieve little.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

If not for "Koan", this would go on my list as the worst game of the competition. In fact, after playing "Terrible Lizards", I reconsidered the low low score I gave "Scary House Amulet", deciding that maybe it wasn't all that bad. Even "Blade Sentinel", though unplayable, wasn't such a painful experience.

It's hard to point to just one thing wrong with "Terrible Lizards". The premise and story aren't all that bad, going back in time to collect dinosaur DNA samples. It's just once the game starts that the problems begin. The author didn't take proper advantage of TADS to enable disambiguation in the very first room. So when you try to examine your bot, you can't unless you leave the room. Several, but not all, of the many many rooms had lower case room names. There was no consistency. Nearly all of the rooms served no purpose other than atmosphere, so there was a measure of frustration as I tromped from room to room, mapping as a necessity, but not finding anything in the least bit interesting. A number of different rooms had descriptions listing exits that did not exist. And though my job was collect DNA samples from specific dinosaurs, there is no actual way to do this.

In fact, this leads to what is unquestionably the game's biggest flaw. "Terrible Lizards" really only has a couple of puzzles, and when you finally win, it's not because you complete your assigned mission. In fact, attempting to fulfill your contract is precisely how you won't win. The ending of this game makes no sense in the context of the story, and I can only figure that the author had to rush to finish in time for the competition.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"The Case of Samuel Gregor" starts with a very long cut-scene intro, meanders into typical IF fare, and then spirals downwards into a confusing jumble. There are a number of separate threads that all contribute to this sense of bewilderment. The mix of German and English wasn't completely disabling; it was just a bit frustrating and certainly didn't lend itself to clarity. Numerous technical problems drove away any semblance of immersion. The black hole pockets of the trench coat never let you retrieve anything you put in them. This would have been okay if the coat hadn't been the only solution to the game's inventory limit. In one room, I tried to "examine all" and, after the two Inform errors appeared, I was greeted with, "You see nothing special about the nothing." The description of the small key read: "It is nondescript, except that it it nondescript." Uhm, right. Trying to go in an invalid direction got me, "Dear colleague, going that direction would take you out of this story!" Actually, no, it would have taken me into a wall.

But even without these technical glitches, the basic premise of the plot was baffling. I got the sense that there was much more to the story than the game let on and there didn't seem to be any way to figure out what that was. My actions were continually restricted without any explanation as to why. And halfway through the game, I switch identities... without even knowing it! This game doesn't just break mimesis, it grinds it into a fine powder and scatters the particles to the four winds.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"The Granite Book" is quite a surreal experience. Though I'm sure its writing style won't appeal to everyone, I greatly enjoyed its wonderful imagery and bizarre narration. So much is left unexplained, and so many questions are left unanswered. Instead, the imagination takes over. Where am I? Who am I? Why does the game refer to me as "we"? Ahh, must be royalty.

Except for how short the game is, the real shame of it is the number of minor bugs that pop up from time to time. For instance, when I tried to lie on the ground, I received "[Much as we wanted to rest, %youm& had no choice but to go on.]" Oops. The other issue gave me difficulty in solving one of the puzzles. There is a stone table that produces a scene of sacrifice when you lie on it. Sitting on it has the same effect, and this is what I originally did. So I told the girl accompanying me to sit on it, and she would not: "[The girl either did not understand our commands, or she would not obey them.]" It turns out that I needed to tell her to lie on it. Sit worked for me, but not for her. Oops.

So what does it all mean? I haven't the faintest idea, and I don't have enough of an imagination to hazard a guess in this case. Does the vellum, with its "semi-circle, open side facing right; two dots; a diagonal line" represent an ambiguous emoticon, sort of a nod and wink from the author? Does it all really matter? In the words of Number Six, "It means... what it is." And that's good enough for me.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"The Moonlit Tower" really impressed me with its wonderfully flowery language, amazing imagery, and non-visual descriptions as well. The puzzles are fairly intriguing as well; a scent of age-old Asian tradition and legend. However, one of the big bottlenecks felt like a guess the verb riddle to me (setting the bones), so I wasn't able to get it without consulting the walkthrough. Except for that, I didn't really have any complaints... apart from how very short the game felt. I think that was probably its biggest flaw (so to speak). Other than that, it was a great surreal IF experience.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

Is it a science-fiction suspense thriller or a dating simulator? Somewhere in between, I'm afraid. The game opens outside of a mall. When I saw this and read that your relationships with various girls would have an impact on the game's ending, I started to really question whether I wanted to play the "The PK Girl". (And I have to admit, the cryptic title had me thinking "Player Killer" from my time on Ultima Online.) However, without too much pause the action starts and from there the game moves along pretty well.

The good news is that you can focus on rescuing the girl and defeating the bad guys without giving a second thought to the "dating simulator" aspect of the game. Although it was an interesting addition, and is sure to promote replayability for some people, it simply didn't appeal to me. I tried going back and wooing Monika, but found that the ending didn't change any. Was it because I couldn't find her stupid hair dryer? I don't know. I also tried getting into Aileen's pan... err, affections, but couldn't quite manage to succeed. I didn't even want to think about the chore of courting all the other girls in the game.

The quality of the work had its good points and bad. I thought that the anime artwork was top notch, so good, in fact, I started to wonder if it was actually original or if it was borrowed from elsewhere. The dialog also seemed very anime, which I don't really mean as a compliment. More precisely, a lot of anime tends toward unrealistically melodramatic conversation and relationships that eventually start to give me a headache. Even as a guy I found some of the conversation to be a bit stereotypical. When I asked why the girls even needed me, the answer I received was, "You don't know much about girls, do you?" The truth is that your presence throughout the entire game is basically pointless. The girls, with their psychokinetic powers, can tackle all the serious trouble without your aid. All you're good for is pushing them on when they start crying.

Still, "The PK Girl" was one of the better games in the competition. With some characters that weren't one-dimensional cardboard cut outs, and a plot that the character can feel they have a bit more control over, I feel this could have scored even higher.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

As a fan of H. P. Lovecraft, the Lovecraftian-style IF really appeals to me, as this game did. It's nowhere near on the scale of Anchorhead or even Theatre. Still, as an IF comp game its size and length are a good fit, and I didn't feel that "The Temple" overall suffered because of it. The author really does a fine job of capturing Lovecraft's literary style and use of grim imagery. Mind you, Lovecraft is not simply about horror, and most of this game doesn't really fit into that category. He has a wealth of stories about dreams and alien landscapes, and this game feels like a mix of the two styles. However, this means that if you don't like Lovecraft, you may not care for this game. The NPC you encounter eventually is a reasonable implementation. Its artificial intelligence is not stellar, but certainly not bad. And the puzzles you encounter don't feel all that out of place, considering Lovecraft's penchant for the bizarre. The game as a whole, I found, was a great experience that I thoroughly enjoyed.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

I have to admit, the title of this one sure threw me. It seemed so corny that I wasn't expecting this game to be as good as it was. But from the very beginning, the game grabs your attention and doesn't let go. The writing was done amazingly well, being rich and informative while also witty and comedic at times. Some of my favorite responses to absurd commands:

>get wires
Oh, why don't you just walk off with a corpse instead? Besides, it's a bunch of heavy orange metal plates, which aren't exactly portable.

>x catch
Nothing fancy, just a large button that you'd need to jab. You just can't reach it, that's all.

>jump
No, not even if you jump.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"TOOKiE's SONG" felt like a first attempt at IF from an author who has talent and potential, they just need to be refined some. The game started off on the very wrong foot with me when the first puzzle I encountered was the water weird. This little obstacle was lifted almost directly from an old Dungeons & Dragons choose your own adventure book, "Dungeon of Dread". Borrowing ideas is one thing, but this was almost a direct copy. As a result, I think it colored the rest of the game for me. (The author confirmed that this was an unintentional

There were also a number of "huh?" situations... you know, a room or item or occurrence that just makes you stop and go "Huh?" In the starting room, the ceiling was so low that I banged my head into it if I jumped. However, I couldn't grab the keys attached to the ceiling without a ladder. The desc of the "dropping door" reads: 'You can't put your finger on it, but something about the large door in the wall makes you think of it as a "dropping" door. There is a row of colored leaves hanging from the top of the door.' Is there really something that makes me think of it that way, apart from the text saying there is? (The idea was that by "dropping", this was a reference to "fall/autumn".) And when I examine those leaves, the response I get is: 'See the row of icicles text.' No no no, that is very bad. Was it really that hard to make up a description for the leaves? I hadn't even encountered the icicle door yet, which made it all the worse. I'm guessing this was simply an oversight, that the reference to "icicles" text was a "to do" note the author had written to herself.

Eddie's riddle, which I solved on my own, can only be answered a particular way. You'd be surprised how many different ways you can write 10 o'clock AM. I tried "10 am", "10 a.m." and "10:00 a.m." before checking the walkthrough and seeing that the only syntax accepted was "ten a.m.". The egg riddle is so old and overexposed I sighed at finding it in an IF game.

While the game did have its problems, it was still an amusing diversion. I especially enjoyed the alliteration in the full score list. It's too bad that cleverness wasn't consistently evident throughout the whole game.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

"Unraveling God" has a provocative plot involving a mix of science and religion, as well as the self-destructive pursuit of fame above all else. Unfortunately, there were two reasons that the game didn't draw me in. First, the story was incredibly brief, even for a competition entry. This is especially true since it is effectively a very linear puzzleless game. Second, you play the bad guy. You play the fiend who sits back and watches a young man die just so you can take credit for his discovery. The game effectively boils down to the choice at the end, but at that point in the game I just didn't feel pulled into the story enough to really care which one I picked. The fact that it was a no-win situation didn't help matters. Technically, I didn't see any glaring problems with the game, and I think that if the author had maybe fleshed out the story a bit, this game could have earned a higher score.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)

After trying to play this several times, I finally gave up and decided that I wasn't willing to invest the time or effort to really try and get into what was going on. The first section of the game is a meaningless jumble of nonsensical events and commands. Freudian images in a hodge-podge of gibberish. When I finally got through that, I was presented with the irritating Geisha sequence that thought it was some kind of strategy game, not IF. After trying to win that piece several times, I finally gave up and decided I'd leave the rating of this game to someone more willing to put up with its surreal nature.

(View this game on Baf's Guide to IF or The IF Ratings Site)