Interactive fiction, narrative in games, and so on
Two articles have popped up in the wake of Cyan's fandom-rattling pitch reel for Anglerfish. To recap from last week: Anglerfish was the Myst-universe project that Cyan started prototyping in 2024. They teased it as "PREFALL" because it was ...
August brings us Suspended, Michael Berlyn's cryogenic nightmare. As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. Suspended surely had the most inspired package concept of Infocom's early ...
The rest of my 2026 Mysterium report. (See part 1 for the Cyan news.) All the videos are currently available on Mysterium's Twitch channel. They will be archived on their Youtube channel pretty soon. Documentary Update Philip Shane gave his ...
Another Mysterium has arrived and then faded silently away. Or, I suppose, faded away with its characteristic reverb-y "vrrrwww-WONK-wonk-wonk" noise. This year's event was in Portland, Oregon. I did not attend in person; cross-country travel ...
I'm embarrassed about this one. The Witness will be September's release for the Visible Zorker project, but it's already done for Patreon supporters. So I've scanned my Witness feelies for the app already. (You can see the high-res scans here ...
Here's an interesting bit of game-historic preservation: someone has posted a browser-playable version of Cliff Johnson's epic (and epically-slow-to-release) 2012 puzzle game, The Fool and his Money. Here's the new web site: www.the-fool-and-his-money.com. ...
What a wonderful time to be a puzzle fiend! The Incident at Galley House Dimhaven: The Lost Source (Updated to add: I played a free review copy of Galley House.) The Incident at Galley House by William Rous and Evil Trout -- game site ...
I tried to give this post an eye-catching title like "The Power of Indentation!" But my fingers wouldn't have it. Blame the fingers. I don't know much about the text-editing tools used at Infocom. The Witness source directory includes a tantalizing ...
Borneo, 1941: rich white Brits run the show for tobacco, pearls and the opium trade, while World War Two creeps up around the edges. Who is sneaking onto the Goodwill plantation and why? The Red Pearls of Borneo (Bushmonkey Games) is an interesting ...
As promised, the latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Starcross! "The challenge was issued eons ago, from light-years away." As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. This was ...
I have no hot take, but I did post this last year: Another Valve hardware announcement: the Steam Machine is back. I am immediately and predictably on board for it. -- me, November 2025 So I owe you a followup post, which is, TLDR: "too rich ...
Last month I saw a reference to the "You Cannot Play This TTRPG Jam": This is a game jam for games that do not exist. They won't ever exist. They will never be playable. They will suggest a game, create a space in which it seems like a game ...
Not a Monty Python reference (unless you really want one), but rather: it's still spring (barely) and here's some games that surprised me. They popped up suddenly out of nowhere; I hadn't heard much about them; I enjoyed 'em. (Okay, 7th Guest ...
I posted a couple of weeks ago about Infocom tie-in novels, with a bit of a digression on the work of George Alec Effinger. It turns out that I have a response from Effinger to relay! Not a response to my 2026 post, obviously. Effinger passed ...
Welcome to June. The latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Deadline! "A locked door. A dead man. And 12 hours to solve the murder." As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. Deadline ...
A musical city, a record store, and a 90s soundtrack album! Okay, and a Lovecraftian adventure game. Phonopolis Wax Heads Mixtape Call of the Elder Gods Now that I think about it, the Lovecraftian adventure has a puzzle where you control ...
Last week someone passed around a link to a post: "Classic Zork Novels, Now in E-book Format!" That's right, it's another instalment of "Somehow, obscure Zork media returned"! This time we're stepping out of the digital realm and into the world ...
Titanium Court is a stylized match-3 battle game in which you are possibly kidnapped by fairies. I loved it and I didn't like it. I mean, I didn't like playing it. I loved the game. It's doing two things. (Two big things. An infinite number ...
"What is the first computer game that you played?" One of those social forum threads which is really about reader demographics rather than games. Still, I tried to remember. No, my answer wasn't Adventure. I played Adventure in '79 or so -- ...
A couple of months ago I referred to a quote from Infocom's internal ZIL manual: The other four tokens—ON-GROUND, IN-ROOM, HELD, and CARRIED—are incredibly confusing, and no one really understands them except Stu, so he should probably write ...
The common thread this time is "the id". I don't mean the games are horny; they're not. (Although PSI has "flirt" dialogue options.) I mean somebody wanted a specific thing and made a game that catered to it. You want a style of puzzle that ...
Three months ago, I launched the Visible Zorker Patreon with a promise: fund me and I will create a new Visible Infocom game every month. You did! And now the tree bears fruit. I decided to put the games on a two-month delay, so that Patreon ...
The 2026 Hugo Award finalists are up. Awkward for me: I really like many of the nominees, but I haven't read (seen, played) a majority of any category. So I can't give a useful overview or say that any given work is "best of the year". I'll ...
I know I haven't done a game-review wrap-up since... January? Yikes. And those were mostly reviews I wrote back in the November. (Fall is IGF judging season.) Infocom stuff has taken up most of my free time -- not to mention GDC travel and NarraScope ...
I'm going to tell this one out of order, because it's not April Fool's Day any more. Tara McGrew, the author of the modern ZILF compiler, has released Linchpin, a brand-new implementation of Infocom's "mu machine". That's the virtual machine ...