Here’s something I’d like to try: announce that I’m going to play and comment on a specific IF game, and invite all of you to join in. Not Club Floyd style, by playing it live together, but just each of us playing the game when it’s convenient for us, knowing that other people are doing so as well and we’ll be able to talk about it and exchange hints if it turns out to be difficult. It should be fun. It should lead to some good topics here. And it should be a good way of getting ourselves to play more IF! (I don’t know about you, but often I find myself choosing the path of least resistance and playing some less demanding but also less fulfilling type of game.)
I’m planning to choose all kinds of games: recent and old, puzzlefests and puzzleless, hard and easy, well-known and obscure, commercial and free, parser-based and link-based, games I’ve never played and games I want to revisit. Of course, I’m only going to choose games that for one reason or another I think will be worth playing; also, only games that you can easily obtain.
Let’s see whether this works! For this first instalment, I invite all of you to play Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish Out of Me by Mike Sousa and Jon Ingold from 2002. It’s a TADS 2 game, and since it was entered in the IF Comp, it should be pretty short. (I’ll probably choose a bigger game for instalment #2.)
The game placed second in the IF Comp 2002 and was nominated for four XYZZY awards, so it should be well worth playing. Also, the title makes one curious.
I haven’t played it yet, will do so within the next few days. If you play it earlier, please post whatever you wish! Review, analysis, question, hint request… as far as I’m concerned, anything goes. (If we ever come around to a big puzzlefest, we’ll probably want a separate hint thread, but I’m not expecting that to be necessary here.)