An Adventurer's Backyard, by Lyricasylum

This is a short treasure hunt with a few small puzzles. It very much feels like a first effort, and while there's nothing to offend, there also isn't much to inspire. Still, I think we should all have the fun of writing a game like this.

It's also written in ADRIFT, and while I admire Campbell Wild's work on ADRIFT and ADRIFT programmers' focus on just having fun, I'm spoiled by Inform's robustness, and the simplicity of creation doesn't always match up with the simplicity of solving and navigating the parser (e.g. must say OPEN TOP DRAWER and not OPEN TOP.) That happened a bit here. It got in the way of a game that was intended to be just whimsical.

A Long Drink, by Owen Parks

The game was called A Long Drink. And I didn't expect to see the Kool-Aid Man. I expected plot twists, not twisty straws. And a murder, of course. And evidence pointing to the last guy you thought, even after considering the last guy you thought. I knew all about alcohol for its own sake, and what with the title, I hoped there was a little more to it than that. Secretly, I was hoping for gratuitous smoking. Especially indoors. Criminally under-represented these days.

So it began. A mysterious "accident." A woman named Val. A mysterious house. And the host dead upstairs. But I'd seen text adventures like this before. It would have to do something to get me interested.

It was the Trizbort map that did it. I'd never seen so many one-way doors in such a small area before. It looked like the house was a trap, then a bedroom. Perhaps that was where it ended. Not the basement.

Sunburn, by Caelyn Sandel

Sunburn is a brief work about a (likely trans, based on hints) woman who has been locked in an office to die painfully (mentally and physically) in retribution for turning a passive-aggressive "nice guy" down. It has alternate endings, which is a specialty of this author (and something I like to see,) and it fits into a tidy zblorb.

Mean Streets, by BadDog

It's neat to see not just Inform games in the comp. This is an effort from BadDog, who is new on the scene. It's set in Grittyville (Aw, man! Now I should've totally written my introcomp game last year. It was called Grubbyville. I may or may not have to change it now. You snooze, you loose) and advertises itself as a sort of noir adventure.