IF Comp: Each-uisge and Turandot

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The Interactive Fiction Competition ran from October 1 to November 15, and now that it’s finished and the results have been announced, I thought it might be nice to post on this forum about the two ChoiceScript games among its 82 entries.

First, there’s Each-uisge by Jac Colvin, which placed 28th. It’s a short game – about 30 minutes long – about a teenager and a horse that may or may not be a dangerous and demonic creature. You could technically call it horror, and there are some tense moments, but it’s not very dark or gory. There are several endings, and the game keeps a handy list of achievements for if you want to experience all the paths through the game.

Then, there is my own game Turandot, which placed 2nd. It’s a substantially longer game – about 2 hours – in which you play a young nobleman who falls head over heels in love with a murderous princess. (The story is lightly based on Puccini’s opera Turandot, but you don’t need to know the opera to understand the game.) I should probably stress that this game is not much like a typical CoG game: it’s quite linear, the protagonist cannot be customised, and you might not want to ‘own’ everything that he does – unless you think falling in love with murderous princesses is a good idea! Turandot also comes with content warnings: sex, sexism, abuse, suicide, death, homophobia, xenophobia. It’s certainly not an unrelentingly dark story, far from it, but it does go into some dark places.

I hope you enjoy these new ChoiceScript pieces; and of course, you can also check out the other 80 games in the comp! Some of them are parser-based, which may be a hurdle to some, but there are also many high-ranking choice-based games. In the top 10 of the competition, you’ll find the excellent puzzle game Chuk and the Arena, the very interesting story of a young human in a land of giant insects Heretic’s Hope, the weird sexy murder mystery robotsexpartymurder, the beautiful little horror game Night Guard / Morning Star and a very fun game told entirely in Limericks, Limerick Heist. Have fun!

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Congrats on placing second! That’s awesome! :slight_smile:

I’m definitely going to look at those two games and also robotsexpartymurder because… well, I can’t ignore a title like that.

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Congratulations to both of you!

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Thanks everyone and congratulations @Victor_Gijsbers for his choicescript game about Turandot. 2nd is an amazing achievement in the IFComp, especially this year where there were a huge number of entries (82!) and a really strong field :fireworks:.

As well as checking out our games (Which we’d love, please do and let us know what you think if you like! Links in Victor’s post), I also agree that there were many good ones on the list this year available to play whenever you have some time to spend. (Some of the ones I liked quite a lot actually ended up way back in the field so that’s telling you something about how competative it was this comp I guess.)

Zozzeled won the comp this year and as long as you don’t mind parser I’d check it out. It’s a well written game involving drinking alcohol infused spirits to banish them, and in the end find out why they’re haunting the establishment. Character-locked, female protagonist, dog side kick, 1920’s atmosphere. Chuck and the arena came third and was also a great game for using wits and cunning to solve problems. It’s choice based and you play a relatively weak colour changing alien, who somehow has to work out how to win a gladiator competition in order to get their stolen moon back. I could keep going with the game summaries but I’d end up writing pages and you get the idea :smiley:

The games are mostly up on IFDB and and in the ifarchive. A full list with artwork can be found here IFComp 2019, and you can leave comments and ratings on IFDB if you want to even though the comp itself is now closed. (Authors still read them :slight_smile: )

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