Everybody Dies, Jim Munroe - the obvious choice for the theory-oriented, dedicated-newschool crowd, which tends to have a stronger showing in the XYZZYs relative to the Comp.
Gun Mute, C. E. J. Pacian - the only non-Comp game to really draw a lot of attention this year; the only game nominated for anything that wasn't released for a comp. Fun, well-written, of theoretical interest.
Nightfall, Eric Eve - a big exploration game, which are much-loved but come along quite rarely.
Piracy 2.0, Sean Huxter - the outsider, I think. Weak writing, fun puzzle structure.
Violet, Jeremy Freese - a game that nobody seemed to dislike and a lot of people really loved. Has to be the favourite.

I am a dreadful contrarian, I confess, so I have been thinking very hard about Gun Mute and Everybody Dies, but if I'm going to be honest the game that gave me the most enjoyment this year was Violet.

My vote: Violet

The prose here is largely about characterisation and voice. There's a Robb Sherwin-like fondness for awesome vulgar idiom, a good feel for bad grammar. Even when the characterisation prose isn't right up in your face, as with Graham, there's a wealth of subtle little touches. "I'm no pussy, but... seems dangerous." Fairly terse and conversational; these are teenagers in a familiar environment, not aesthetes in a Gothic cathedral.

One big obvious thing about Everybody Dies is what isn't written. Knowing which things not to write is a pretty major writing skill; there are quite a few such elegant cop-outs among this year's selection, but Everybody Dies is the main one where the purpose is to avoid a perilously-easy-to-fuck-up bit of prose. Not writing a surreal sequence about souls intertwined and mysterious transmigrations was a damn fine decision, because in prose it'd be a very tall order.

You shoot Claw-Hand Hank in the face. His head jerks back with a puff of splintered teeth and he collapses into the water trough.

It does a fine job of setting the tone, but, once set, doesn't do a great deal to vary it.

The prose accomplishes its effect without very great verbosity; a paragraph of more than two lines is rare. This is a very fine thing; the conversational aspect would have suffered under more drawn-out prose, it makes play a lot smoother, and it still conveys all the puzzle-pertinent information one might require. Unlike most terse prose, however, the writing's full of an obvious love of language, of getting just the right phrase; and it's writing that rewards the player constantly, that makes the texture of the game a bundle of delights even when its content is sordid and depressing.

Conclusion: I was originally angling for Everybody Dies, but then I replayed Violet, and yeah, you don't really remember it as a prose-oriented game, but the writing is really good.

My vote: Violet

Still making little sense, however, is the protagonist's motivation for staying involved as the plot unravels; why is this small-time public servant reassembling chopped-up bodies? Mind-control of some sort is an obvious reason, but there's scarcely any hint of it; the player's inner world is not revealed much. Similarly, the NPCs are underimplemented to an extent that damages the story. There's clearly something quite good going on in the author's head, but it's not really fully conveyed.

Lots of endings, all of which make narrative sense (though not practical sense, necessarily, unless you grant the mind-control thing).

The story is, however, mostly about survival, which means that the special motivations of the protagonists don't get engaged with it all that solidly. A lot of elements didn't have time to get explored. And the survival thing makes for a dramatic anticlimax at the end, also: life continues to suck, but at least nobody died. It hits the same tone as the protagonists' mundane lives: here is what we have to do just to get by. Oh, certainly it fits the realistic style - it would have rung horribly false if Graham discovered his inner sticktoitiveness and Ranni and Lisa fell into each other's arms - but I still felt as if I needed a bit more of a final note. But I guess, to some extent, that's the point: the characters are all kind of searching for a high note, something that breaks through the grey. And they don't get to have that, because that's life. (Munroe did the same kind of realist okay-I-guess endings in Punk Points.)

I'm particularly fond of the opening scene - it adds immeasurably to the setting and tone, while offering some kind of justification for the game's hard linearity. The ending is a little flat by comparison, but, well, videogame-style endings tend to be; the technique of the drawn-out, World According to Garp-style epilogue is gloriously indulgent for author and audience alike, but it usually doesn't represent the ideal aesthetic decision.

The suggestive style that works so well for the setting is less effective storywise; there's just a little too much there for the Mythic Western (or Mythic Postapocalyptic) trope to work, and not really enough for anybody to have a character arc or anything. We get a few scraps of backstory, but not really any more than would be implied by genre anyway.

And I don't really think that story was a major goal of the piece; it's a rail-FPS, for christ's sake. "Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?" [153,749 bullets later] "Yes" is not much of a narrative;* indeed, many's the decent action game undercut by a preponderance of turgid cutscenes for the sake of a superfluous plot. The principle of just having enough plot to keep the game moving serves Gun Mute well, overall; but something's still sacrificed.

There's a pretty strong pacing problem; the game's quite long and doesn't have a great many twists, and most people are going to have the ending figured out by halfway through. You know she did it, and you know why she did it, but you have to keep on going. And - well, hm. Characterisation is a problem for the plot. Emma never quite clicks as a character, and since the plot relies very heavily on her being A Big Deal, this has fairly serious ramifications for the story.

There are an appropriate number of endings; some feel right and some don't. (Killing Emma is a particularly odd-feeling ending.)

The ending is... mrf. Not as satisfying as it should be. The stalky twist is pretty off-putting, and... well, the vibe I got throughout the game was one of the protagonist being ordered around by Violet for their own good. And so at the end I'd have liked some kind of hope that this wouldn't be the main basis of their future relationship, or some inversion, or something... but instead what I get is mostly stuff that confirms that. Violet jerks the PC around and they take it. The PC goes off to live a more Violet-oriented life. So, well, after being rather charmed by Violet for most of the game, the tone seemed to abruptly shift under my feet. Conclusion:

My vote: Everybody Dies

The approach here is evocative, exaggerated childlike minimalism; implementation and detail is not deep. An ambiguity is intentionally cultivated as to whether the setting is 1930s central Europe or modern America. There is a major, conscious step away from the IF convention that physical descriptions are necessary; in a standard IF game you might see a physical description with personal associations woven into it, or a physical description paragraph followed by a personal association paragraph, but Shoes is entirely about the associations. This gives the setting a very childlike sense of bewilderment, disorientation and non-control; the world is not something to be logically comprehended and shaped, but a source of dreamlike threatening mystery.

What will you do? open wardrobe
When you asked Mother why you had to empty the wardrobe, she said "They want us to move."

I don't love this setting, but it does interesting things, and I suspect that this is a game that will age well.

Setting in the close sense, the detail of the immediate, simulated world, is not richly detailed, and rightly so; dense detail would have slowed the pace down, and pace is a good deal of what makes Gun Mute work. It feels a touch sparse, perhaps, but there aren't any egregious omissions; it's more that only things that are directly relevant get mentioned. The descriptive prose is mixed; at times it's strikingly effective, at times a little more list-of-objects clunky.

You've lived in this city all your life, but now you may be the last man left here.

The problem that Nightfall has is that it's set up very clearly as a generic city. It's described in competent but flat prose, has few or no distinctive features, and . The main things that distinguish it from the Generic IF Cityscape are that it's English, and actively rather than passively deserted.

The PC also tends toward the generic, and hence can't lend much personality to the city: while he's familiar with recent local history, for instance, it's mostly the sort of local history that would be true of any English town. I suppose that the mere fact of Englishness might add some interest to non-English readers, but it's really hard to feel much emotional connection to the city; I would not weep if it burned.

You could make an argument, perhaps, that there's a subtext about the growing homogenisation of urban Britain, and that this paucity is reflected in the protagonist's bland, dissatisfied character - this is an argument that could equally be made about a thousand poorly-implemented suburban-American settings, without very much justice, but there's quite a lot in the text to back this up:

The supermarket occupies the entire corner on which it stands, and was seemingly designed by an architect desperate to win the International Bland Building of the Millennium contest.

The map is large and well-organised. IF players generally enjoy the texture of exploring big maps - and there just aren't that many big-map games being finished. It also has some very considerate tools to make navigating that map more efficient; this hurries the pace up, blurring the backdrop so that the details matter less. This given, I don't think that the relatively shallow depth of the setting is that much of a problem for the game as a whole; deep detail could easily make the pace grind to a halt. The problem is more to do with the flavour of what's there; the setting serves the gameplay aims very well, and does a good job on tone, but just isn't all that interesting in its own right. And, given the premise, it needs to be.

Much of this is improved on by the feelies, which weren't included with the comp release (although they were linked to); playing this with the map and the schematic would be a great deal easier. The schematic does considerably more descriptive work than the in-game text.

I think that fundamentally, there's a big desire in the IF community for a canonical Great Space Opera Game, and... well, lots of folks have done parts of a good space opera, but mostly there have been a lot of uninspired failures. The setting issues in Piracy 2.0 are suggestive of why this is: it takes time to build up a strong sense of an sf/f world, and it's easy to drop back onto stock genre elements. Piracy does little to evoke anything different and intriguing from its Benign Interplanetary Government and its Noble Space Military, or explore why pirates are pirates, or do anything very much to make its world more than a backdrop for laser explosions. At the same time, though, it makes a pretty good stab at the sense of broad, adventurous possiblity that makes the genre work.

Violet employs the claustrophobic effect of one-room games to good effect. The protagonist is stuck in this room which is uncomfortably saturated with associations of their own inadequacy. Virtually every feature of it connects either to this or to Violet's general awesomeness. Desperation doesn't work if it's optional, so this contributes heavily to the game's emotional tone. The world starts out interestingly busy, and closes down around you as increasingly more puzzles are solved. (There game world works as a neat little encapsulation of what a relationship with Violet is like, I suppose; full of strange, distracting shininess, continually giving the player quirky gifts.)

My vote: Gun Mute

The puzzle structure is fairly flexible, in that you don't have to solve everything to win. A slight problem, perhaps, is that the puzzle structure feels crueller than it actually is; H.R.'s item-trading suggests that items are valuable and will need to be hoarded for later use, but most escapes use up an item or two. I fully expected to be shafted by this later on in the game.

They also rely heavily and effectively on videogame assumptions - of course you shoot the robot in the glowing red eye, of course you work out your enemy's attack pattern and exploit it.

There is an attempt at slowly increased difficulty, which is sort of mixed; the final puzzle, the obvious Boss Fight, is certainly the most intricate, and the first fight is obviously the most straightforward, but the difficulty of IF puzzles is not really amenable to straightforward ranking.

On the other hand, not all of this is as serious as it looks; I never died from cold or pirate-shootings, radiation sickness cures itself if you just get out of the radiation, and most of the puzzles are quite straightforward once you get the basic idea. You can put yourself in plenty of irreversible situations that require you to restore. But most things you try will work, after a fashion. Many games which require you to get a bunch of factors to coincide are quite resistant to solution; you have to get almost everything right to win. Piracy 2.0 lets you win quite easily, in a quite wide variety of ways, but there's quite a lot of range in between the optimal solution and a minimal winning one. One of the things I'm really noticing, in doing this, is the distinction between games where you're told what to do and games where you work out what to do; it's a paradox that's similar to ones encountered in roleplaying, where the GM wants the players to take a particular course but also wants them to do so on their own initiative. "Here's your next objective! Do it this way!" stops the player floundering, but disengages them; and this, this here, is a really good way to avoid that. More, please.

Expectations have a lot to do with the experience. Because Piracy has the texture of a tough-puzzle old-school game that kills you at the slightest provocation and requires a Varicella-like orchestration of events to win, so it's quite refreshing when your first serious, planned attempt succeeds.

It's not perfectly flexible, by any means. In one playthrough I escaped in the bridge and recorded the log onto the white datacube, but forgot to remove it from the slot in the bridge console; you'd have thought that that would turn up pretty quickly in an investigation, but it only counts if it's in your inventory, apparently. The puzzles are kind of undermined in places by a requirement for very specific parsing.

That said, Violet's puzzles are not particularly fun to solve in of themselves; they're fun insofar as they accomplish characterisation. The ways in which you are thwarted are as fun as the ways in which you succeed.

My personal preference tends to be for puzzles that produce distinctive gameplay; things like Savoir Faire where your default way of approaching a puzzle interestingly different from the standard IF approach, the player is able to get an intuitive feeling for this, and that feeling contributes to the game's literary elements. Gun Mute accomplishes the first two parts of this better than any other game this year, I think, although all the nominees are honestly pretty good; Violet blows the field away on the third point. I'm kind of inclined to go for Gun Mute, on the basis that the third point strays off into Writing territory.

My vote: Gun Mute

This is not always a very convincing field, because one strong NPC is no small accomplishment, and a whole cast of them is positively herculean. There are usually one or two games nominated by merit of a) containing an NPC and b) not being awful.

But the most important characterisation aspect is the question of what's going on with April and the protagonist. Is her breathless waifery a front, meaning that the PC is a clueless mark? Is she intended as an actual waif and the PC as a creepy, desperate older man? (Seriously, who under the age of forty wears Hawaiian shirts?) Is this intended as a genuinely sweet girl-boy story? None of this is really made clear - in the same way that it's never made quite clear whether the cheesy prose ("Ah, April in Paris! The first day of your dream vacation has arrived") is meant to be a satire on the protagonist. A better game could have developed this confusion into actual narrative tension - who's getting used here? if she's lying, how much? is there somehow genuine romance going on despite this?

Honestly, I was pretty convinced that she had to be a scammer; how else to account for lines like this?

"You must lead such an interesting life," she says. "I hope you'll tell me all about a whole bunch of stuff later."

Honestly, I'm reading a lot into not very much here. April herself is strangely incidental to the game. For most of it she sits there inertly while the PC runs around solving puzzles to serve her needs. She occasionally points out the next puzzle before lapsing into unresponsiveness.

April is very good-looking, but a little unkempt, and her face has a haunted look.

The characterisation is further confused by the needs of the puzzle-structure: April is reluctant to tell her sad tale on a public street, but is perfectly amenable to doing so five feet away in an open-air cafe. Is she meant to be scamming the player, or is this just a broad hint at the next game objective? From the ending I have to assume the latter; that is, April was intended as even duller than she actually is.

The secondary NPCs, while all unexceptional renderings of Stock Types, at least fulfil their cliched roles; even if you discount the fruitless confusion over whether she's scamming you or not, April just isn't convincing as a Quest Object Girlfriend.

Patrick is a racist psycho and the primary antagonist. As such, he's not very complicated, but his intense, vicious nastiness is a fairly rare thing in IF. Generally, you don't encounter seriously unpleasant characters in IF unless they're rendered safer by comedy or melodrama. But his unpleasantness renders him opaque; he's the least comprehensible, the most two-dimensional of the significant characters.

Tim, on the other hand, is a small-time coward of a racist:

"OK, Ranni, let's see what you got hiding... yeah, the neighbourhood, the neighbourhood's really changed," Tim laments, opening Ranni's locker.

As with Violet herself, they are both kept tidily out of the player's range of interaction. You overhear fragments of their dialogue, and Julia interferes with a puzzle or two. This is a mixed blessing; they can't be bulked out by interaction, but this means that there's nothing particularly broken or awkward about them.

Julia is an effective antagonist. As I previously mentioned, she generates a very powerful sense of frustration in both the protagonist and the narrator, contributing significantly to PC-player identification. An antagonist who merely presents a problem is not nearly as hateworthy as one who actively works to frustrate the player's aims. As far as characterisation goes, Julia is very clearly a Type, but not a reductionist portrayal thereof:

"It's not so much that I'm double jointed as just very determined."

Oh, and NPCs in this game have histories. Entertaining, illuminating histories.

The protagonist can't talk, so interaction with the NPCs is relatively restricted. Mostly, they're trying to shoot you, and you're trying to shoot them, although you can give them non-verbal cues. You can't exactly delve deep into their inner lives, but - well, Gun Mute relies heavily on not spelling everything out, vaguely implying a lot of backstory and setting. It's an approach that I'm generally fond of, and it feels particularly appropriate for a Western-styled hero. And many of the characters hook into that; okay, Vicious Sue and Claw-Hand Whoever are clearly just Setting-Appropriate Mooks, and the brain-in-a-vat woman and the cyborg preacher are pretty much one-gag wonders, but otherwise, y'know, you feel that there's stuff going on with these characters other than what's shown, which is a Good Sign. And then there's the gloriously named Rowdy Juanita:

Originally intended as a utilitarian synthetic wife for lonely wasteland farmers, Juanita is half farm machine, half sexbot. Her figure has curvy, art deco proportions, while her four hydraulic arms can plough a whole field in minutes.

High literature it is not. The characters are comic book over-the-top (and the comic book in question is 2000AD, which earns bonus points as far as I'm concerned). I didn't remember their names, but I damn well remembered the gatling-gun girl and the toxic frog mutant and the cheery android bartender and the girl-drag undertaker. The standout characters aren't quite the ones you'd want, though; the love interest and the main villain feel relatively second-tier. Adequate, but that's about it. The effect is rather like a movie with an excellent supporting cast, but Best NPCs is a supporting-cast kind of award.

Conclusion: It's kind of down to Violet or Gun Mute, I think. Gun Mute has a bigger field, while Violet's characters are deeper; I think what seals it is that Elias and Clayton, who should really be the biggest NPCs in the game, just aren't all that great.

My vote: Violet

The puzzle would be more compelling if Sofia was a bit more deeply written - she's depicted as having shaky language skills to cover up the shallow implementation, but she's still heavily repetitive. It'd also have been nice if the limbs had been a bit more scattered, and if the corpse's behaviour had been modified by which parts in particular had been recovered - I can see a nice potential for trying to communicate with one hand, or a foot. Dumping everything into the coffin at once produced a vast pile of ugly, repetitive output.

As with the rest of the game, it's satisfyingly grotesque, and provides a fairly decent reason why you should run around the map collecting a bunch of hidden objects.

The handling is fairly awkward in places. WEAR TOURNIQUET is a bit of a clumsy way to put it, for instance, but I suppose clumsiness is justified given the severed hand and everything. Putting things into the coffin rather than attaching them to the correct place seems kind of odd. Ultimately, this feels like a puzzle with a great of potential that needs a lot more implementation to be satisfying.

The puzzle relies heavily on genre convention in establishing the player's expectations of interaction. Of course you should be able to shoot through ropes and trip levers with a gunshot; we've seen it on TV. This is a solid thing about Gun Mute's puzzles generally; you don't feel as if you're fighting the system or having to do things in an illogical way because that was the author's Vision.

The puzzles in Violet are strong not so much out of design elegance or high concept, but because a great many logical ways of approaching the problem are anticipated and cruelly, amusingly denied, usually in ways that serve other purposes of the story. It is deeply satisfying for a player to be rewarded for inventiveness, and deeply frustrating to have that inventiveness go unacknowledged.

Julia sliding the key back under the door was probably my favourite moment of the comp. Beautifully timed, infinitely frustrating, a neat little encapsulation of her aims.

Conclusion: Difficult, this one. The standout puzzles are dodgy and the nondodgy puzzles don't stand out. I suppose... of the solidly-implemented puzzles, the internet/key puzzle has more fun moments than the gallows. Admittedly, the gallows is disadvantaged by being the Endboss and needing to be extra-awesome, but... yeah, I'm not going to feel good about this decision whatever I pick.

My vote: Internet / key, Violet

I confess that I started thinking of him as the evolved-for-land version of the Evil Fish. And... even though he threatens to spit acid on your face and watch it dissolve, he still feels kind of like a Disney character.

There follows (optionally) an oddly effective non-conversation; Mute can't talk at all, and Gertrude is terminally shy. So the interaction consists of waiting, and waiting, and waiting some more until she summons up the courage to ask a question. Then you nod. This is about the extent of your interaction with Gertrude. The moment is all about the timing; it works because the awkward pauses are just long enough.

She is written very strongly. She develops somewhat over the course of the game, with the initial bubbly/tough/sympathetic tone gaining a fair degree of subtlety.

Problems? A minority of reviewers mentioned that they found the level of influence Violet had over the protagonist to be kind of creepy. I didn't really get this until the game's conclusion, but... yes, at that point. Regardless of how quirkily cute you are, spying on your SO is creepy, and tricking your SO into thinking that you've left them, as a joke, is manipulative and cruel. Particularly when your SO is as obviously vulnerable as Violet's. All this would be okay - would, in fact, add another dimension to the character - if it felt intentional, but to me it felt like a mishandling, the unforseen consequence of a plot twist.

Secondly, there might be some purists who feel uncomfortable awarding Best NPC to an absent character; more significantly to my mind, Violet doesn't really have internal states. You're not actually interacting with her so much as doing stuff while she comments. Certainly, Freese hasn't overcome the vast problems associated with NPC coding so much as elegantly dodged them; but that does not, to my mind, count as a disqualification.

Lastly, for a bunch of people she was Just Too Much. I, uh, not much to argue with there, I guess. I suspect that much of Violet's appeal has to do with being a Geek's Idealised Girlfriend, and if that doesn't cover you then I could see how it might get a just a tiny bit annoying to have her breathing down your neck for the entire game.

Conclusion: yeah, not a strong field, and Violet would be a strong contender even if it wasn't. As it is... well, I like Gertrude, but there really isn't any contest.

My vote: Violet, ditto

I finish my smoke and flick the butt over the edge. I imagine it hitting the river below with a gnarly pssssshhhht.

Ranni and Lisa seem more or less resigned to the fact that, as teenagers in nowheresville, their lives are mostly going to consist of tedium and dealing with idiots, and that the payoff for this is distant and vague. Ranni wants a car, Lisa went to leadership camp; we don't really see what they want to do with these. Graham, on the other hand, isn't happy to settle for indefinite tedium; he'd like to be a person now, and even if he's mostly gleaned that person from Kerrang!, he's not doing a bad job of it. It's made fairly clear that he doesn't have much in the way of prospects without reducing him to Dismissable Loser status. And while he's a jerk, he's not really a nasty jerk; he's fundamentally amiable, nods at strangers, chats to his mother about things he thinks are awesome. There's a fairly strong suggestion that he's pretty lonely - the uncomfortable loneliness of adolescence is a major theme of the piece, which goes some way to explaining how terse and non-chatty the protagonists are to each other.

Another thing about Graham - Ranni and Lisa both get a turn to drive, as it were, but Graham doesn't get a turn to do stuff while Ranni and Lisa are in his head; essentially, he fades off into NPC status. Probably it would have been problematic to find ways to justify Graham walking around industriously accomplishing goals for the good of all; his major action as a PC is undertaken solely to avoid more onerous work.

Gun Mute owes a lot to arcade FPS games, which you'd think would exacerbate the trend - but it also has a very strong affinity to the graphic novel. Which means a very distinctive look for the hero. In this case, gay cowboy cheesecake.

A devilishly handsome cowboy with windswept black hair and roguish stubble. Lean and tall, your tanned body is taut with cool, calculated strength.
You're topless and barefoot, wearing nothing but a pair of dust-caked black jeans and your holster.

In the standard samurai/western setup, the hero's taciturn nature is a Statement: he is dismissive of human connection, emotion, neediness. Mute, on the other hand, is taciturn by no choice of his own, which renders him rather more sympathetic. Other characters express fondness for Mute, and it doesn't seem bizarre. (Gratitude, hero-worship, grudging respect, agape - these are legitimate responses to a Clint cowboy, but fondness? Right out.) It's really quite a clever way to get the stylistic effect, make the hero sympathetic and avoid a proper conversation system.

I mean, barefoot? Way to telegraph vulnerable. Nonetheless. Worked for me.

The usual thread of the plot outlined above, however, is that Mid-Life Crisis Hero is emotionally transformed by the crisis. Joy, pain, life's rich tapestry. David doesn't, as far as can be discerned, do this; he is still emotionally shuttered, nostalgic for what might have been, quietly fearful. Now this is probably a more honest approach than the standard Hollywood arc, on the whole - outside the movies there is no particular guarantee that Adventure is going to turn you into a New Man. But the Hollywood Version is useful for a reason: stories and characters work better with strong emotional arcs. It's easy to feel sorry for David; it's not so easy to like him, or have fun with him. The story is primarily about Emma's tragedy; he is not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.

David is twenty-eight years old, which seems a little premature for a mid-life crisis; but that's certainly what it feels like. His selection of songs for >SING make him seem positively crusty: Jerusalem, Rule Britannia, Daisy, Daisy... Lily the Pink? Wikipedia informs me that it was British Christmas Number One for 1968. So, David is old-fashioned and patriotic in a quiet, stuffy-nostalgia kind of way. With things like the following, it's the style of the sentiment rather than the content that matters:

You hesitate; throwing things at CCTV cameras is the kind of loutish behaviour you've always disapproved of.

The other thing is that this is very well-trod territory. Lost Pig did a sweet, dumb PC with a very simple understanding of the world; Child's Play did a PC with limited understanding who manipulates unwitting adults; A Day for Soft Food did a pet who manipulates its owner for food. None of these bare facts would be a problem if Hardy was written in a standout way, but... not really.

Conclusion: It's really a choice between Mute and Graham. And Graham has, well, an inner life.

My vote: Graham, Everybody Dies

There are two aspects to this game that are unusual and interesting. The one that's received the most attention is the use of illustrations. There's also the particular way it employs multiple protagonists. First, the illustrations. These are of pretty strong theoretical interest. The key aspect here is that there are sequences which are entirely told through images; these sequences are non-interactive cutscenes and thus not of very much gameplay interest, but they're highly effective as a storytelling device.

The art has precisely the style you'd expect to see in serious alternative comics about the suburban-malaise woes of aimless, unexceptional young North Americans. Even if it accomplished nothing further, this does a ton of heavy lifting work in establishing tone, and does so in a way that fits beautifully in with Munroe's own style. More importantly, some rather difficult transitions are accomplished with no text at all; it's a powerful argument for how IF can employ graphics in ways more significant than auxiliary illustration.

There are three protagonists in the game. Early on, all of them die; for no very clear reason their spirits get entangled and they start inhabiting each others' bodies, simultaeneously, in the recent past. The hook is that if you're controlling one character, you still have access to the knowledge and skills of the other two - if they cooperate. It's a nice little gimmick that lends stylistic coherence to the game's few puzzles, but it's not really all that novel and exciting; and the game is too short for the approach to have much scope. Medium-wise, this feels like a lost opportunity.

Original Sense - well, it's somewhat robust, particularly given that in the three-headed section you can get any player to examine anything, and that there are three different narrative voices in first person to deal with. Even so, a lot of scenery's unimplemented, stuff like that. There's clearly been a ton of work done on it, but...

The Moon Watch uses sound and graphics extensively. It has effective and appropriate 'alone on a space-station' background music. More notably, the frame for the story text is the room you're occupying. The room's somewhat distorted to make this work. The far wall is much too big, and depending on your window size and ratio the walls and floor may look rather stretched. The size at which it looks prettiest really doesn't leave all that much room for text, particularly when examining some objects brings up images in the central window. But it's a highly effective scene-setting technique even when distorted, and one I'd like to see more of. It also makes it far less necessary to type L every now and then to remind yourself of everything in the room. (You still have to pay attention the first time, so that you know what to call the things - that thing that you assume is an airlock is in fact just a blast door; that pedestal is actually a column.)

The image changes according to certain player interactions - opening the airlock, wearing your spacesuit. Rhetorically, the layout places the Ominous Pedestal with the Big Red Button unavoidably in the middle of things.

On the Original Meaning front: though not what I'd call really immaculatey implemented - there is a conversation scene that is really quite fiddly to negotiate, and a lot of synonym trouble - this game deserves a mention for its fine, fine use of default parser response humour. It's a Soviet-incompetence comedy. Thus >Z results in Time passes and the end of capitalism is near, while reference to unrecognised objects produces You can't see any such thing, or it's not really important to achieve true socialism. This warms the cockles of my grouchy pinko heart.

From which perspective, it's a very, very solid piece of work. Bonus points for difficulty, since when the parser's a character then any default response is going to be ugly. One of the nicest aspects of the narration premise is how effectively parser responses are used as pointers or anti-pointers, and serve characterisation and backstory, and do so constantly.

Conclusion: What I'm really deciding on here is whether I vote on grounds of Original Meaning or not. If so, Violet hands down; if not, I'd probably go with Everybody Dies. Urgh. Difficult. I suppose I'll go with the more common use.

My vote: Everybody Dies