XYZZY Awards

I held off reviewing Lost Pig here because I beta-tested it, and I tend to feel some attachment to games I test.

Now that it's won first place in last year's annual IF Competition, though, and taken home the Best Individual PC, Best Individual NPC, Best Writing, and Best Game XYZZYs for 2007, and earned rave reviews from as far afield as the Onion AV Club, I think I can safely say it's not just my own affectionate beta-tester's bias at work: this is a fantastic game.

Some games become so canonical in game design discussion that it's easy to remember just the groundbreaking things about them, and forget a lot of the nuances of how they play and why they work.

In the world of interactive fiction, Rameses is one of those games. It was released as part of the annual IF Competition in 2000, got a respectable 13th place out of 53, and showed a wide standard deviation on votes: some people loved it, while others thought it was a depressing imposter in a competition for fun things. One person recently described it to me as the work of IF he hates most in the world. Ever since, Rameses has starred in rec.arts.int-fiction discussions about well-characterized protagonists, about the player's complicity in action, about whether it's possible to have a good game in which the player has no significant agency, about interactive narrative as a way to explore the constraints imposed on a fictional character.

The Baron is a provocation, both in form and in content: in form, because it requires the player to choose not only actions but also an ethical philosophy; in content, because it asks what moral options remain for a person who recognizes himself as monstrous.

The design uses -- and takes full advantage of -- the text adventure format. Many parsed commands are followed by a multiple-choice question, asking us why we've made the choice we made. The motivation then colors the description that follows. Killing a small animal out of sadism is shown as a very different from killing it as an act of mercy.

Anchorhead is a rare achievement in interactive fiction, a well-designed puzzle-rich game that nonetheless leaves you mostly remembering the story.

Michael Gentry's game is based on the locations and ideas of H. P. Lovecraft, but the result has its own unique vision and integrity.

Lock & Key is a tower defense game. With only one attacker wave. And it's in text.

The premise is that you're a dungeon designer, the one who lays out the arrangement of traps to keep in the extra-specially-dangerous prisoners. You've got a grid of rooms in which you can place these traps, and a limited budget to spend. When you're done, you're taken aside to a guard room with the King to watch as Boldo -- a kind of Tarzan figure gleaming with oiled muscles -- does his best to break out. If he fails, you win. If not, you get to watch Boldo defeating all the traps you so carefully laid out -- and the consequences for you are disastrous. Time to play again.

An old school text adventure dressed up with hundreds of period photographs and other images, 1893: A World's Fair Mystery takes place at the Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in that year, the last and greatest of the 19th century's World Fairs. Coupling a well-researched and evocative depiction of the Exposition with interesting puzzles and a mystery to solve, 1893 proves there's life in the text adventure yet. Both fans of the genre and those interested in Chicago's history will enjoy it greatly.