Spring Thing - Wetlands

Alright, after some helpful hints by some readers I decided to forge ahead and plow through the first entry early! The first game of the competition is Wetlands by Clara Raubertas. Unlike the IF Comp I'm writing this preliminary passage after playing through the game. I say that I "plowed" through this, but frankly it was more like playing morsel sized bites of it. I'd play it for a while and then put it down and do something else and then wander back to it. I really had to focus and force myself to work on it to completion. Not that it wasn't interesting, per se, but it didn't exactly have what I'd call narrative thrust, and no that's not a special term used by writers of erotica.

Final Verdict : Fun atmosphere and generally pleasant puzzles balance out nebulous storytelling.

But of course you crazy kids want to hear more than that, dotcha! Well you can read spoilers to your hearts content, AFTER THE JUMP!!

Looking at the Spring Thing

The great thing about IF? The graphics.

So... there are a few IF competitions throughout the year. There's the generically titled "IF Comp" which begins mid-fall but the other "big" competition is the "Spring Thing". There are several differences between these two competitions. For one, the annual IF Comp gets much more attention (at least from outside the IF community) and it gets a ton more entrants. I'm fairy certain these two facts are correlated. But more importantly, the fall IF Comp is more for medium sized works of IF, whereas the Spring Thing has no such limitations and is thus implicitly if not explicitly for longer form games. The only problem is that is takes a TON of time to write one good medium sized game. Last year they didn't even have a Spring Thing because not enough people entered (i.e. I don't think there was any). This year, there was a substantial uptick with it looks like six entrants.