H
MASTEMA
H C
E K
D E
TEMPTRESS
V C
MILLIONAIRE
L M
I finally caught up with her as the in-game clock struck midnight. Just afterward, I wrote:
There’s no way Nightfall won’t take first. It’s finally Eric Eve’s year — for he’s finally written a truly classic game. You dive into a deserted city, nonetheless alive with sounds and possibility, littered with epigrammatic clues, holding in its many shadows the ghosts of your shared history. The game suspends so much of the grunt work of exploration, remembers so well what you’ve seen and done, that it almost solves itself, only asking you, at the end, to recognize the solution.
Any game that can successfully map the player’s ignorance to some aspect of the player character — here, his infatuation — deserves attention. I may have been wrong about first place, but Nightfall remains my favorite.
Here are some micro-reviews of a few other entries:
Piracy comes together where most games crumble. Ignore the space pirates and the pedestrian writing and the post-prologue overload, and concentrate on the mission: you have to move through a giant machine, setting it up for the big explosion. The missing link between ’80s sci-fi text adventures and Delightful Wallpaper?
Snack Time: The formula in Child’s Play not to your liking? Too much gristle in Lost Pig? Here, try this.
Despite the off-putting ABOUT text, I made a sincere effort to get into Berrost’s Challenge. I drew a good map, made notes about conspicuous obstacles and potentially useful items, and kept the clues in mind. I felt I was doing the game a great kindness by not rejecting it out of hand, and was repaid in kind for my condescension: killed, eaten, crushed, poisoned, and pulped again by its collection of hazards.
Trein’s plot, puzzles, setting, and characters are cliched to the max, but I give it credit for actually having plot, puzzles, setting, and characters.
Channel Surfing: Would-be media commentary that paints as grim a picture of current IF.