The 2017 Spring Thing* Festival of Interactive Fiction * or Fall Fooferal, for our Southern Hemisphere Friends

Playing the Games

How to Play Parser IF

Spring Thing features all kinds of text games, but two of the major divisions are between what are sometimes called choiced-based games (where you interact by clicking links) and parser-based games (where you interact by typing commands). To those unfamiliar with the parser, it can seem confusing or intimidating. Here are some resources for getting started: Emily Short's Welcome to Interactive Fiction overview (8-page PDF)

A handy reference card (created by Andrew Plotkin and Lea Albaugh)

You might also try a game written specifically to help newcomers get used to parsers, such as The Dreamhold (iOS version) or Bronze. To play some parser IF offline, the downloaded story file needs to be opened with a program called an interpreter, much like a .doc file needs Microsoft Word to open. Clicking on the story format (next to the download link) will take you to instructions for finding the right interpreter to play a particular game.

In the Main Festival

Play Back Then: A Story Driven By Memories Back Then Janelynn Camingue Memories can be precious or terrible things to have. They can awaken at any moment, whether in a dream or staring out the window in solitude. This game is fictional.

Play The Bony King of Nowhere Luke A. Jones This is a relaxed small(ish) text adventure in the classic parser style (but with a much wider vocabulary), and also with a modest attempt at humour! After growing up with text adventures in the 80's, I wanted to make the kind of game that I would have enjoyed playing.

Play A short RPG where almost everyone is a playable character. The First Quest Matthew Mayr (with some help from Mike Bryant) A young child who desperately wants to be a hero is given a magical artifact allowing them to be anyone they want to be, literally. They use this power to try and make a name for them self as they embark on a whimsical journey. This is my first foray in the world of writing and storytelling. As you can tell, I may have gotten bogged down in the scope and process of things, but I learned a lot. Enjoy!

Play A Fly On The Wall Peregrine Wade Across the city, strange events are taking place. But you are nothing more than a fly on the wall... or are you?

Play Get Seen Tonight Hannah Powell-Smith A cop falls for her torch singer informant. What's gone wrong tonight? This game was inspired by a number of songs by Dessa, notably Dixon's Girl and Alibi.



Many thanks to Irina Goodwin for the cover art, and to Suzan Bator, Enrico Cioni, Eleanor Hingley, and Fay Ikin for testing.

Play GNOEM Joyce Lin & Matthew Reed You are a college student trying to study for finals when a gnome with big dreams recruits you to solve his problems, whisking you away to a magical place with eccentric characters. A whimsical game made for class and for fun

Play Guttersnipe: Carnival of Regrets Bitter Karella Guttersnipe: Carnival of Regrets is a humorously grotesque (or grotesquely humorous) game about a circa 1929 street urchin and her pet sewer rat trying to survive a trip through a dark carnival full of sin, secrets, and murderous clowns. I'm obsessed with 1920s street urchins, awful monsters, and low brow grand guignol comedy. This game unites all three of my passions, so I hope you enjoy it too!

Play Happy Pony Valley Riding School Lynda Clark Just because these ponies can talk, doesn't mean they have anything to say to you... I usually work in ChoiceScript and this was my attempt at modelling a simpler version of a CS 'relationship system' in Twine, with varying degrees of success.

Play If You're Here Serene Sherman When a romance starts to blacken, is it your place to intervene? Lindy navigates her tense relationship with her stepbrother and her strong friendship with her teammate as she watches their relationship grow more and more messy. Words hold a power I greatly respect: the power over one's emotions. A well-told story can tug at the heartstrings, tickle the funny bone, or simply grip a reader so tightly in their investment in the characters. Thus I've always thought stories are a powerful tool for exploring the shadows of human nature as well as the challenging issues of society - or challenging society itself. I wanted to tell a small story about something important, and if it could bring something new or something hopeful to the mind of one person, then it did all I could ask for.

Play Ishmael Jordan Magnuson A short game about displacement.

Play Niney Daniel Spitz Explore the nature of relationships and identity on a weird train. We all ask ourselves, "Who am I?" One of the ways we try to answer this question is by examining the effects we have on other people. We look at our social interactions, our relationships, to assure ourselves that we are smart, we are good, we are loved. What if these fleeting interactions were all we had? Who would that make us? What would we make of ourselves?



I'm interested in using the parser in less corporeal ways. Language is this rich thing that can tersely express notions that no other medium can. Aspects of the mind, intentions, metaphors. Niney is my first IF, and my first attempt at exploring this territory of possibilities. It's idiosyncratic, rough around the edges, a bit repetitive, but I'm proud of it. I think it introduces an interesting parser-based mechanic, and does its best to develop that and show what it can do.

Play You have made it off the shore into the water, onto this tiny boat. This raft is not big enough for all the passengers, nor, you fear, strong enough to make the journey. The waters are inviting and seductively deadly. You are lowest of the low in the age of nation states but citizen number one of the globe: a refugee. Refugee Mark C. Marino Nine refugees embark on an odyssey aboard a raft, exchanging tales of jealous gods and proxy wars while trying to reach safety. The global political forces are playing out in a contemporary battle with ancient echoes. Refugees, the victims of the gods' proxy war, may seem to be in the lowest state of the Earth, but their saga is epic. In this piece, I'm meditating on this global allegory through ancient iconography, asking players to take one of nine iconic positions in the fundamental crisis of our global moment.

Download Ted Strikes Back Anssi Raisanen You're Ted Paladin, text adventure hero, and it's the first day of your summer holiday! However, your arch enemy has other plans for you.

In the Back Garden

Back Garden games do not take part in ribbons or prize nominations, and can be more experimental or excerpts from unreleased games (which are highlighted in yellow).

Play Balefires Burning Cassandra Wolf Share the story of 15-year-old Tansy, who is on the verge of becoming an adult and a witch. In an isolated community where magic is an everyday occurrence and otherworldly beings walk the woods, you face challenges and learn to cope with your newly-awakened visionary senses. This is the first chapter of a novel written with interactive elements, where you (the first person narrator) choose your reactions to the events of the story.

Play A backwards adventure into being pushed around less. Buck the Past Andrew Schultz A game with word puzzles and weird items and, eventually, self-actualization. While this is in the spirit of Problems Compound and Slicker City, there's no reason you have to play either to appreciate this.

Play The Master waits atop the mountain. Enlightened Master Ben Kidwell and Maevele Straw Years of questing have brought you to the mountain where you will find the Enlightened Master.

Play Glulx Play Squiffy A Fly On The Wall, or An Appositional Eye Nigel Jayne The Harrison Mansion is closing after 45 years of delighting its visitors with collections of the weird and recreations of the macabre. The night before, the Fortean Society of New England gathers in the haunt to celebrate its history and investigate its reputation as a real house of horrors. You volunteer to take a shift in the Fly eye, a room with five monitors that watch the most haunted corners within the house. You can't watch all five simultaneously, though, so what exactly will you see? The author has provided two versions of this game: the Glulx parser-based version, and the Squiffy link-based one.

Play left/right chandler groover pick one

Play Not Quite a Sunset -

a hypertext opera Kyle Rowan On an orbital space station in a distant star system, Dr. Sara Reyes leads a small team tasked with surveying a planet for potential settlement. A science-fiction story set to an original musical score. 'Not Quite a Sunset' began as my dissertation project, investigating how a listener might be able to influence the plot (and by extension the music) of an opera through their choices. Hypertext seemed a natural medium to facilitate the choices of an individual listener, and the resulting piece is essentially a story with a soundtrack. Because every passage is set against and often timed to coordinate with music, headphones are recommended. This version for the 2017 Spring Thing Festival is a preview of the first two chapters; the full piece will be released in Summer 2017.

Play ...the shadows were long in the hour of night, and in the darkness you couldn't see... The Weight of a Soul Chin Kee Yong In a world of arcane mysteries, a young doctor's apprentice unravels a conspiracy most grim. This is a mystery/suspense parser game inspired by the likes of Anchorhead and Fallen London. It isn't currently finished, but there's a solid vertical slice of finished content that takes close to 2 hours to complete. Please enjoy.



Content warning: This story features graphic imagery and morbid themes.



Known bug: After examining some dead bodies with the endoscope, you can't exit the endoscopy by typing >out as intended. You can work around this by attempting any action "out of endoscopy," such as >jump or >inventory, which will automatically pull you out of it.

Platform Instructions

Prize Ribbons