Winners of the 2022 IFComp

FOLLOW THE TRAIL of a missing heterosexual on the strange streets of Toronto! Investigate a QUIRKY CAST of drag kings, chicken wing enthusiasts, and women in elaborate cat make-up! Thrill in the PERVASIVE ENNUI of your early twenties! Struggle to remember where your preteen self was at with the whole BEING GAY THING!

Will Adult Bell make peace with the figurative and literal ghosts of her past? Can Kid Bell navigate the uncanny world of the 2020s and find her way back home? How's the chicken in that creepy basement food court? These questions and more will be answered in THE GROWN-UP DETECTIVE AGENCY.

From the author of BIRDLAND, KNOWN UNKNOWNS, and BOAT PROM. Featuring art by Beck Kubrick.

Sometimes they give too much and who they are wears thin.

They become an absence. A hole in the world.

And a terrible Light shines through.

Explore the ship, solve puzzles, uncover mysteries, and befriend an AI who probably isn't trying to kill you.

One murder.

And a mystery as old as mankind.

You are a medieval investigator sent back in time to learn the secrets behind mankind's first murder. Using an alchemy system, observation, and your wits, you must discover the untold truth about Cain and Abel.

Dynamic fiction, story-based, heavy themes.

It's not going to be easy. "The Only Possible Prom Dress" is a parser-based puzzle-fest in the classic mode, packed with chatty characters and unlikely perplexities. For best results, the cross-platform QTads interpreter is strongly recommended.

Inspired by a dream to take action to save her seriously ill brother, Princess Imelda must escape the palace and embark on a quest of danger and discovery that will be the making of a queen. Will the Princess be diplomatic or devious, kind or ruthless? Will she succeed or fail? Her fate – and the fate of the kingdom she will one day rule over as Queen – is in your hands.

The Princess of Vestria is a consequence-heavy fantasy adventure.

Given a scrap of power, how do you reinvent yourself, your relationship to the city, its people? Will it allow you to maintain a companionship based on mutual struggle?

And, beneath it all, from where do the canals in this desert flow?

Notes:

You'll likely want to play online rather than download. If you’d like to explore alternate endings, it is recommended that you save when you reach the Waterworks Hub.

You’ll have to forgive me the grungy-90s-album-cover art. The intended artist was experiencing some life circumstances!

And for your listening pleasure, here is a selection of sounds which kept me typing:   https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0kUtdRfDPcGgf7QkKdqJqj?si=xCM49LqZSKmT2vgAJnFhLA

The Signs of the Sojourner Soundtrack

GoGo Penguin's A Humdrum Star

Portico Quartet's Monument

Ben Lukas Boysen's Mirage

Deep gratitude to my playtesters! Credits included at Prism's end.

You're a new contestant on the hit reality dating show Passion in Paradise, where you can be who you want and date who you want. There's only one problem. Shortly after the season starts, you discover there's an uninvited guest on the island: a killer who stalks you and the others in a plastic Barbie mask. Who will live and who will die? That's up to you and the choices you make. Will you play the role of traditional Final "Girl" or show us something new entirely?

The Thirty Nine Steps is a thriller, based on the novel by John Buchan, with original music.

Okay Sam, time to go through the usual checklist: Clothes? Phone? Keys? Wallet? Mask? Now where could you have left those...

Explore 20 different endings in this poignant and humorous adventure through the mundane!

The Alchemist is a large text-only interactive fiction fantasy game, very much in the 'old-school' style. It was written from the ground up for the PC using qBasic64, and has a comprehensive and powerful parser. Included in the game are detailed HELP instructions.

Also included are in-game hints, accessed by the command HINT.

CHASE THE SUN is a game about running, family, and death. It features topics that may be considered surreal, unsettling, or upsetting to some.

Today you have what looks a routine mission. That is, until disaster strikes. Then it's all hands on deck (that's precisely two hands) to save the ship and yourself!

Follow Cannelé and Nomnom, a duo of disastrous detectives on their chaotic investigation to solve those three mysteries: 1. Who are you? 2. What's your magical ability? And 3. Who erased your memories?

CONTROLS: Spacebar to advance text / Mouse controls for links and using the conspiracy board

But your passion for the work is waning, and you're struggling to hit your targets. Can you recruit enough members before the end of your shift? Or will your fallible human body get the better of you?

A short workplace simulator about knocking doors, slacking off, and falling out of love with a movement.

> RECORD all your secrets

> ANSWER all your questions

> RENOUNCE all your possessions

> WAKE UP...

(For a *slightly* less surreal mapping experience, improved fonts, and a manual, download the game)

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The great elvish city of Wild Idyll disappeared when our grandparents were still young, and all of the elves along with it. We each know dozens of stories about this near-mythical place, and hundreds more about the near-immortals who built it; but who can say what is true about a place that barely exists in memory?

Then I met the last person to have lived in Wild Idyll.

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A choice-based story about telling stories, leaving cities, and cities leaving us.

Lucid is a surreal adventure game in which the player explores a city at night, struggling to overcome bad memories and outrun the darkness. Break free from the nightmare, or stumble through the streets forever.

Enjoy a delightfully short action-comedy featuring quirky characters, a robust >HINT system, tropical hideouts, and intense fights with kung-fu llamas.

Thanks to G. Deyke for playtesting!

Contains violence, sex and drug use, all involving colourful candy characters.

- Story Mode with 6 endings, 3 difficulty levels for the drink mixing and randomly generated paths. - Arcade Mode with 3 game type (Endless, Perfection and Timed) where you can just mix drinks. You can play with either a mouse or a keyboard (links are keybinded). Recommended to clear your cache before playing.

Contains brief strong language and some mature themes.

Become a ghost therapist as you explore a graveyard at night.

Probe into the psyche of a frightened young woman in an experimental psychological horror game built around conversation. (not scary)

However, there is a way to survive. I taught you this incantation when I got into your head. Now it's time to take a deep breath and say it. Even I can't tell you what awaits us in the mind chambers, for every witch has a different path.

When my daughter turned thirteen, I made a scavenger hunt to her last Christmas present using a Marauder’s Map of our house. Use the map to find the clues and discover how to piece them together to find her present.

Just arrived, however, you saw a great shape in motion obscuring the sky: an alien spaceship!

Extraterrestrials have started pouring in by the thousands on the streets of the city, spreading panic.

However, since magic was primarily perceived as bad, witches were hunted for many-many years...

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Acknowledgements for testing go to: Saranya Balasubramanian, Victor Casañas

in between the lies, baggage, and still-open wounds, is she still worth fighting for?

it's up to you to find out.

Track Listing: 1. The Old World Has Ended - Evanescence 2. From the Ashes I Rise - Pitbull 3. Criminales Enamorados - Shakira 4. Hidin’ in Zona - Macklemore 5. p1r@t3pr0ph3tz - Skrillex feat. Deadmau5 6. HEIST - Daddy Yankee 7. It All Goes Right (Alternately, It All Goes Wrong) - Fall Out Boy 8. How Can a Woman Choose? - Adele 9. Jailbirds - Rihanna feat. Jessie J 10. girls Like me - SOPHIE feat. Janelle Monáe 11. HoleDivers (Spelunking 4U) - David Guetta feat. T-Pain 12. Shake It! - Metro Station 13. LUV/FUK - LMFAO feat. Ke$ha 14. Getting Away With It (What She Don’t Know) - Snoop Dogg 15. I Went to Miami and I Didn’t Even Get a BBL - Cobra Starship 16. Gator $kin - Kreayshawn

You just hope you can find her at the end of this all.

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This is another study in stateful media with an emphasis on narration-based agency. To avoid breaking a reader’s suspension of disbelief, this work eschews story-based agency.

What's this mean for you? An interactive fiction experience that is more "literary" and less "game" made by combining quintessential elements of parser-based, choice-based, chat-based, and templated-based works under a new theory of agency in stateful media.

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Press Z to continue or choose an option.

The image is a pixelated version of https://www.refuges.info/photos_points/1584.jpeg

But in the centuries since, a sinkhole has revealed a new route to his treasure.

You and your adventuring partner have come to The Hidden King’s tomb like many before you, in search of fame and fortune. You stand over the sinkhole, planning your descent.

But you’ve been tricked! Your former friend has pushed you from the precipice into The Hidden King’s Tomb, plotting to take the treasure for himself. Now you must escape the catacombs, or this tomb may become your own

Finally, you get a taste of sweet solitude. Just you, hobbies, and cat cuddles.

Or so you think...

As the days wear on, you start questioning your decision to stay.

Navigate the unending night by dragging interaction icons to highlighted parts of the text.

Find a way out of the loop or choose to fall...fall...fall...

[Content Warnings: Unsettling imagery, surrealism, jumpscares, and minor self-harm (scratching an itch from an unknown source)]

I know you’re probably feeling scared right now. That’s normal. But I want you to know that you have the strength to overcome this. I know you can do it.

Just keep going.

Each scene is described with ascii word art and generous explanations. Hints are available at all stages in the game. The ability to save a game's progress and also to view the character's inventory is also available.

Year: 2022

Genre: Puzzle