Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Cryptophasia, by L. Starr Voronoi

But still, it is soothing. Like every good Practictioner, she has a calming demeanor, but also a clinical, almost bureaucratic patience in her videos, as if she knows you have all the time in the world. You don’t, but it can feel that way in hyperspace, alone, on a baker-ship.

Your head tingles.

Baked goods, space travel, and ASMR videos. I have no idea why it works, but it does. Unlike Mirrorwife I don’t want to see more of the world (there are horrible, horrible things hinted at) but for a brief time I felt the tangible mystery of another universe.

Flotsam and Driftwood, by Conrad Elton

Another is telling you “That’s not the way, lad. You’re supposed to give up your habits. Even eating. You don’t have to eat, here.”

The puzzles are a bit finicky but solvable. There’s some intriguing aspects to the plot (see quote above) but the writing could use more depth; I needed a better sense of the characters to get invested so the conclusion didn’t have as much payoff as it could have.

Look Around the Corner, by Robert Whitlock

The light is emanating from a giant eye, the eye of Enki, from Ki-En-Gir, the land of the lords of brightness. The eye is a disc of smaller eyes, and each smaller eye is itself a disc of smaller eyes, and so on, until you can make out the smallest quantic layer of eyes. They look back at you, unblinking.

This is a small time-loop story. Remember to pay attention.

Bound, by Starfinger X

At that point you see the ring still on your littlest finger for safekeeping.

Better not forget about this, you think.

You’ve got 160 minutes to get a stuck ring off your finger. This is essentially an optimization puzzle where you have to replay once you find out where the useful objects are located.

There’s a nice map and inventory but I feel this is a case where the hypertext interface is holding things back. I went through a variant of the “lawnmower conversation syndrome” where I clicked through everything just because I could.