27th Annual Text Adventure Competition Won By Game About - Text Adventures

DevNull127 writes: Saturday afternoon, 91 geeks huddled around a Twitch stream to hear the winners announced for the 27th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. This year's competition attracted 71 entries, and $10,396 was raised for a cash-prize fund (which is divided among all the game authors whose entries ranked in the top two-thirds, with the first-place finisher receiving a prize in the hundreds of dollars and the last entry in the top two-thirds receiving $10). But there's also a long list of fun non-cash prizes available in a "prize pool," and starting with the author of the first-place game, authors take their turn choosing. (Prizes included everything from 0.055 in Ethereum cryptocurrency to the conversion of your text adventure into a professionally-produced audiobook.) After a six-week period where the general public played and voted on the 71 games, the first-place winner was chosen. It had a strange title - "And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One." Its welcome screen jokingly promises "the latest in ASCII graphic technology to occasionally write high-res, text-based images directly onto a screen that is eighty characters wide or more..." In this text adventure game you play a teenager who starts out....playing a text adventure game (called "THE GLUTTONOUS ELF: Adventure #1"), with the game itself ultimately offering a kind of meta-commentary on the world of text adventures over the years. Perhaps not surprisingly, this game also won a second award - the contest's special prize for the entry most-liked by the other game author's who'd entered this year's competition. This year's runner-up was "Dr Horror's House of Terror". It's not to be confused with the Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing movie with a similar name - except perhaps with some playful and intentional overlap which becomes apparent as the game progresses. And a splendid time was had by all.

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