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Finally played Slouching Towards Bedlam, the winner of last year's IF Competition. I liked it a lot. While shaky in places, and with some frayed implementation details, it nonetheless kept me rapt for three hours, and then a half-hour more as I tried to find the other endings. (I had to turn to a walkthrough for three of the five.) Not an easy feat for any game! A yummy morsel indeed.

Story: you're a doctor at the titular London sanitarium in a steampunk variant of the mid 19th century, and the inheritor to some, hmm, unusual information. And that's about all I can say. So to speak.

What you do with it is your choice entirely (hence the five different endings), but you'll probably spend most of your playing time figuring out what it all means, which leads to some deliciously dreadful moments of uhhh ohhh. I dearly love games where I find myself entering commands with great trepidation, my excitement to see what happens next mingling with the deepening uncertainty felt through sympathizing with the poor main character. (Actually, I think the last game to succeed at this, for me, was Metal Gear Solid 2. Sometime before it fell on its head and stayed there. Whatevah.)

Only complaint is when the game gets all "cute" about the metacommands, coming up with an in-game reason why your character can save, restore, and so on. I was very unimpressed to see this, and if the game hadn't already hooked me by that point, I would have stopped playing. It turns out that, while it's worked into the story, it isn't at all necessary to it, and could have been dropped entirely. I mean: why not go on to explain why your character also has the uncanny absolute direction sense typical to IF characters? Fooey.

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Related: I have rediscovered Zoom, which lets you play Z-code games (such as Slouching towards Bedlam) on Mac OS X, and it's great. I seem to remember it being cranky and crashy in the past, but those days seem to be behind us now.