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Comment by olvy0 | Hacker News Reader

Interactive fiction games. I've never been a big gamer (I'm actually in a year-long hiatus from Mass Effect currently...) but I make a point of playing an interactive fiction game every few months. The older one favor logic puzzles sometimes instead of a plot, but the ones listed below do not. They take some getting used to, though.

My favorites in terms of writing: Newish:

  - Spider and Web
  - Babel
  - Photopia
  - Superluminal Vagrant Twin
  - Harmonia
  - The Dreamhold

Oldish:

  - Trinity
  - A Mind Forever Voyaging

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The Internet often makes me feel old, but seeing Photopia called a "newish" game certainly put some spryness in my joints again. It's not that it's not a great game - it is - but even in its medium, I do think it should be called a classic by now. A lot of things have changed since it was released.

Over the last several years of very occasionally playing interactive fiction, I've been particularly impressed by:

- Cactus Blue Motel, by Astrid Dalmady. 2016. A coming-of-age story with a bit of magical realism, written in Twine. Highly accessible, and it takes just minutes to give the game a try: http://astriddalmady.com/cactusblue.html

- Chlorophyll, by Steph Cherrywell. 2015. Also a coming-of-age story, but mostly a rip-roaring scifi adventure. Could well make a good introduction to the more modern views on interactive fiction.

- Coloratura, by Lynnea Glasser. 2013. Carpenterian horror from an unusual perspective. Swept the awards in the IF community when it came out.

- Eat Me, by Chandler Groover. 2017. A twisted fairytale that's thoroughly obsessed with food - the richer and the more varied, the better. A great showing of how much a writer who's willing to go far enough with it can do with prose style.

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