Shorts

Fail-safe is a very short SF adventure, containing one big puzzle, some less than stellar (but by no means bad) implementation, and a very brief story. That may not sound like much, and it isn't much. But what makes the piece is how it experiments with the relation between the player and the narrator.

This is not so much a game but rather an interactive joke. Enjoy!

You and your brother’s job — scouring the city’s highest spots for a rare building material in the year 2040 — is already hard enough. Now Anton’s gone and gotten you trapped on a rooftop. Your acrobat bloodline will help you with the deadly heights, and your brain will figure out the genmodded plants — but will you be able to cope with having the most annoying big brother alive?

You are (literally) a star, ready for your first, short visit to Earth, where perhaps you will be able to fulfill one person’s wish, before finally taking your place in the night sky. It’s a sweet story, only made better by the game’s truly beautiful writing, transporting you into a world made magical – if only for a short leap second.

A short game that plays with various levels of simulation and fiction, including the relationship between player and player character in adventure games. Not as abstract as it sounds, though. The main character (an unsuccessful guitarist and programmer) has a definite outlook on life and bad science fiction. The different components of his reality do ultimately cohere, even if it isn't obvious from the outset how. Bizarre and only half serious.

This game is exactly one puzzle--but what a puzzle. If you like your puzzles logical, requiring in principle no more than strict deduction from a complex set of premisses, then you will love this game. Once you've found out how the game world works, there is nothing arbitrary anymore; there are no intuitive leaps, no bizarre associations; you just need to think carefully. The effect is a little like a chess puzzle, where'll you try out some moves, notice what goes wrong, think deep and hard, and finally arrive at the solution.

Christmas Eve! You tell Bob to go home early; tidy up a little, and lock up the office shortly after four. You look on the old brass plate, which still reads “Scrooge & Marley”, probably for the last time.

After visiting the engravers to pick up your package, you spend a few hours simply walking the busy streets, soaking in the happy anticipation all around. Then a simple, but magnificent, dinner at Kettners and a gentle stroll home. Time for bed.

The Prince sits awkwardly on the couch, holding his glass slipper and trying to keep it from crushing. Lucinda and Theodora have the ends of the same couch, and they are taking turns seeing who can bend lowest and show off the most cleavage; while the old lady, in her wing chair, carries on about nonsense...

The Inform 7 examples collectively known as Disenchantment Bay were born of a trip that Emily Short made with Dan Shiovitz to Alaska to visit me and Sam Kabo Ashwell, many years ago. 2004, I believe it was. We chartered a boat from the Yakutat Charter Boat Company to visit Hubbard Glacier, and before heading home we scooped up some bits of glacier ice for the creation of fancy mixed drinks once back on shore.

What should have been a simple task, watching your old flatmate Malcolm get married, becomes an awful lot more complicated when it transpires that Malcolm has disappeared mere hours before the service. You are called in by one of the bride's aunts to sort out the problem. But how can you help? Perhaps the answer to the problem lies somewhere within D'Arcy manor, the bride's family home. The odd characters within may be able to help you. First things first, though - how do you get past the nasty security guard?