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Anyone judging? Any particular favorites out of what you've played so far? I don't have a ton of free time right now, but I figure I can get through some short choice-based entries.

Lost Coastlines.

We have a thread (which I should probably update again some day). https://chooseyourstory.com/forums/creative-corner/message/29222

I concur - though beta testing it may have made me a little bit biased, LC is amazingly expansive and replayable.

But if you want to you can end it in like five minutes with no penalty, so it's still really short. Technically.

And, on the plus side, you'll most likely end with a positive score from your starting pleasance (unlike some of my longer playthroughs).

Thanks for the rec! I did notice it while skimming through the descriptions, but likely would have skipped it due to it being a parser game. Which I am bad at, but we'll see!

https://ifcomp.org/ballot/

Three days left for judging. Those of you who already played Lost Coastlines only have to spend a few minutes with four other games to vote. (There are several that can be clicked through in 15 minutes or less. )

On it!

On it!

On it!

Did it!

Good job!

(I see mizal already gave you your commendation.)

But some remarkable work.

I'm reading through Admiration Point and I like it because you play a Mormon housewife that has a daughter but is attracted to some guy at work. I'm not sure if it'll let me cuck my husband or not yet. Because I'm trying to choose wisely atm.

Oh, this is so dumb! You couldn’t fuck the guy!

Anti-Romance.

It has to be the new gayest thing I've ever had the misfortune of encountering.

Well Mormons generally fail at everything due to their inherent faggotry.

I liked how the very tempted to cheat Mormon wife protagonist had a very"woe is me!" mindset in the story. Like, there's a scene in which you can choose to pray to love your family more so you don't cheat. But even when you want to cheat the guy like pushes you away. And you can tell the husband like, yeah, "I want to fuck this guy at my job!" and he doesn't even care. 

Mormon and Depressed

I will try and get to it in the next couple of days.  Should be able to do something.

I hope I wasn't too late on voting. Only just got around to it.

Just a reminder that you do not have to finish a game to vote on them. DBDN went through some terribly unneeded suffering due to not realizing this.

He reports that most of the games he's tried so far are terrible and "worse than what Paradox would make" so you guys are really missing out.

I completed my civic duty and voted.

According to the rules you have to spend two hours with a game or something.

Must I really?

The one I'm playing right now is not making for a fun two hours.

No, read it again, that's a maximum of two hours. There is no minimum and it's all on an honor system anyway. You should make a "good faith effort" to experience the game, but it's pretty evident within ten minutes if something sucks or is just not for you, and many of them can be completely finished in that time.

Nice! I'll save Coastlines for last, then.

It better be good and the best one, or I'll be upset.

Judges must base their judgment of each game on at MOST the first two hours of play. If a judge is still playing a game at the end of a cumulative two hours of playing time and wishes to continue playing it, the judge must rate the game and not change that rating later before continuing play. Authors may write a game of any length they desire, but should keep this rule in mind when determining the length of their entry.

Emphasis mine. Breathtakingly retarded (and badly phrased) rule here which has been training authors for over 20 years to create bite sized "experiences" instead of real games.

The explanation is indeed quite unwieldy in a sense.

There was one with a bunch of drawings like a visual novel. I liked that one. I rated it higher. I never knew the world of interactive fiction was so vast. 

I want @ISentinelPenguinI to play this one and share his thoughts: https://2690.play.ifcomp.org/content/HOURS.html

The miserable lack of bushido on display is insulting to not just the entire culture, but the human spirit. Even the motherfuckers of Old Japan who struggled with nihilism never manifested it with cringy strawman "hurr royalty" nonsense. You can tell whoever this "soldier" is is an unbased peasant, because real samurai motherfuckers had an entirely alien relationship to death. The protagonist of this story would have been considered the most snivelling babydick to have ever wasted air. To them, death was actually sort of inconsequential to the meaning and affirmation of having lived. The Hagakure is full of fuckin wildly based statements about how clarity and determination of purpose is the highest virtue, and you can be a fuckin force of nature.

"Even if a samurai’s head were to be suddenly cut off, he should still be able to perform one more action with certainty. With martial valor in his life; if he can make himself to be like a revengeful ghost and show great determination, though his head be cut off, he should not die."

Hold on, it's not actually japanese. There's shit like longswords and generic taverns and magic circles and whatever in this story. Is this badly explained worldbuilding, garbage history, or just a bad allegory? Either way it reads like Gay and Depressed but from the perspective of that one D&D character that the least showered kid made in every party in the 2000s.

Hold on, what the fuck time period is this

I have literally no sense of place, style, or aesthetic, this is like somebody dumped a mixture of taco, teriyaki, and eggnog spices into an oatmeal. Why did you make me read this? I feel like I just somehow read an angsty teenage fart. Reading this gave me pinkeye.

I get the sense that the protagonist of this game has not meditated on being torn apart by spears and rifles, being thrown into a great fire, committing seppuku at the death of his master, even when his mind is at peace; he definitely does not consider himself to be dead. 

Yeah sorry for subjecting you to that, as soon as I started reading the most powerful impression I had a wondering what sort of glorious Sent rant it might inspire. And only you could articulate the growing confusion and rage I was feeling as it continued.

I didn't manage to finish it either, a link that you apparently need to progress disappears after you pick a wrong one and go back, and the coding around the whole auction segment before that seems janky.

I regret the curiosity that led me to click that link. I have gained both Fury and Madness.

The "15 minutes or less" Twine category is a scary place I'm morbidly compelled to visit every year.

Well, I have voted. Now nobody can say that I do not do my part for things other than this site.

Good work, have some more red letters.

I usually try to play at least a dozen games, but I've been busy dealing with a bad breakup. I'll try Lost Coastlines while waiting to see the top ten though.

That was a fast edit.

My condolences on the female troubles, and just message me if you have questions about LC.

And I guess I really should get around to updating my thread...

I was hoping to play a couple more <15s, (SOME of them have to be good, dammit!) but didn't get the chance yesterday. Will see how scoring shakes out.

Lost Coastlines was delightful, but a little rough around the edges. I'm sure the dev time was SUBSTANTIAL, but I think it still needed more time in the oven. Mizal, you were a playtester, do you know if the dev is still looking for feedback, or if they consider the game done and shipped at this point?

Other than that, the only game I played that I'd actually recommend is Prism. The discovery of which was worth the price of admission, i.e., reading multiple terrible <15s. Prism is filed as 1 hour, although I think my playthrough exceeded that. Highly recommended, regardless.

Did anyone find any other gems in this year's heap of coal?

Nice. I'll finish my current playthrough before I email him. Thanks.

And I'm sorry the game hasn't been more well-received, it really is charming. Even if I didn't get to pet any of the inhabitants of The City of Cats... despite losing my ship to a bug (well, a bug and some poor strategizing thereafter), my major complaint is all of the wonderful descriptions of the variously strange inhabitants of various locations... or more specifically, that those often evocative and intriguing descriptions have exactly zero bearing on the encounters you get from choosing to VISIT THE LOCALS in any given location.

I realize it would be a fuckton of work to have separate encounter tables for each type of "locals," but as-is, I feel like I'm being baited by delicious aromas of different sweet and savory delights, and then fed oatmeal every time. But possibly I just got unusually interesting "locals" flavor text, and unusually bland encounters... clearly I should play for a few more hours to obtain a larger sample set. ^_^

Winners are up! Pleased to see that Prism made it into the top ten. I hadn't played anything else IN the top ten, and a lot of it looks interesting, so that's cool.

Sorry to see that Lost Coastlines didn't do better. (Tied for 28th, for those not perusing the list)

Also, apparently there are worse games than HOURS, at 65th out of 70.

Hours piss me off almost as much as hexagons

https://xyzzyawards.org/

If any of you want an easy way to browse some decent games from 2021, the XYZZY awards for the best of that year are open until December 3rd. All of these were nominated by somebody abs there's several categories to assign them too.

If you go through the list, you'll see there's some familiar CYS games in there too, so thanks whoever did that.