Text adventures, interactive fiction if you will, does not have to look plain. I know, it’s the words and, in certain cases, the puzzles that count, but it really can’t hurt if a texty game looks as lovely as Code 7 and its intelligent, elegant interface do.

Admittedly, the excellent voice acting on offer does also help quite a bit, but I would never dream of demanding such bells and whistles. I’m merely content with appreciating them when available; they give a cinematic flair to the proceedings. Even more so when supporting sci-fi horror offering Code 7 establish its atmosphere and very successful horror vibe.

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Count on Jonas Kyratzes to play with the tropes detailed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and deliver a brilliant Twine-powered text adventure that simultaneously examines traditional heroic literature values and revels in retelling the classic save-the-world fantasy tale. With The Matter of the Great Red Dragon taking place in the Land of Dreams one can also expect a subtle yet incredibly novel critique of modern societies too. Also a bit of well-placed humour.

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From the moment you open your in-game eyes in Lightyear by Jim Bruges, to find yourself inside a manned space telescope crafted by text and choices and bits of Twine, you’ll also start to wonder whether this is a horror game, a technological thriller, an attempt to simulate living in space, or a story about loss and loneliness.

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When a procedural generation jam happens, one can expect to play with all sorts of appropriately generated and clever things, though rarely with a text adventure of sorts. Procedurally mixing words and actions in a coherent way is after all an extremely difficult problem and that’s why, wisely, Infini-Quest aims for silliness over storytelling.

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Very few games attempt to convey the complete and utter terror of war, to avoid any sort of jingoism, and to still create a sense of desperate excitement. Even fewer succeed. Hill 160, rather impressively, is one of the latter. What’s more, as one 2014’s more traditional IFComp entries, it accomplishes that using nothing more than text.

Glorious, evocative text that paints an atmosphere of complete dread.

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O, glorious IFComp. The interactive fiction competition has been running since 1995 and at times during those 19 years has felt like the last stalwart keeping the community ticking over. Now the genre is more healthy than its been in a long time, and voting for this year’s entries has just begun. Would you like to be Galileo’s assistant and sneak his banned book out of the country for him? Would you like to play a “randomized fantasy begging sim”? Would you like to be an interstellar diplomat trying to satisfy the snooty etiquette of a blob-alien?

This is a lot of free games to play from a lot of talented writers and designers.

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