The Icebound Compendium

Has anyone else here played The Icebound Compendium (Aaron Reed, Jacob Garbe)? (Playable on iPad and desktop, with a physical book and AR component).

I thought it was spectacular, and I’m surprised that I haven’t seen more people talking about it.

I’d love to talk about it. I’d love to play it. But I haven’t an iPad and the AR component is too involved for me at the moment - too much of an investment, time and money. Especially since I don’t imagine I’d need it for anything else.

It’s true that it is an unusually expensive piece of interactive fiction. While the game is technically free, it’s $25 for the book, and then $8 or so for a reliable low-end webcam.

…the book is really pretty, though. And creepy. Even without the associated game.

I am super excited to play it! My partner and I have our copy of the Compendium, and we’ve both read it, but we want to play the simulacrum part together and somehow we keep not having aligned time/energy.

I played it the first time through with my wife. At 2 AM. There was an AR moment when we yelled simultaneously and slammed the book shut, because 2 AM and creepy.

The dog gave us sideeye for waking him up.

Looks really really good… I might just borrow an iPad for playing it! Thank you very much for the recommendation.

My copy of the book only arrived late last week and I haven’t had a chance to settle down with the game yet. I’ve read through the book and I’m keen to play it, though!

I really do recommend playing it. It’s a spectacular and intricate piece of storytelling. There are four essential levels:

Kris Holmquist (the original author), whose history you can reconstruct over time;
KRIS (the AI reconstruction of Kris Holmquist), who you can interact with through dialogue choices in the game;
The Icebound Concordance (the physical book), which develops new meaning when viewed with augmented reality;
and the novel Icebound (the story you are helping KRIS to write), which you put together by choosing symbols from a list to inspire KRIS’s imagination.

A game constructed around just one of these levels could be a valid interactive fiction story. With all four woven together, it’s a masterpiece.

…yeah, I kinda like this game.

It is for some reason not working right on my iPad; I absolutely plan to play and then write about it, but my current plan involves kidnapping Graham’s iPad sometime when he is both a) home and b) not using it. So the opportunity has yet to present itself.

We hit that trouble too, actually - it didn’t work on 2 different iPads I tried it on. Seems very aggressive about ?memory?

It works on mine, which is a 3rd-gen ipad – about the oldest model which runs the current iOS. (A ipad-mini might be older or have less memory.)

I’ve only played a little way in, though.

Which page? I didn’t see anything like that on my play through.

AR view of the page that says “WE WILL FIND IT”.