One of the joys of having a flat tag list instead of a hierarchy is that every now and then you get totally unexpected combinations: “dutch” and “interactive fiction”, for instance.

Congratulations to Victor Gijsbers, whose “De Baron/The Baron” won this year’s Spring Thing (original text Dutch, also with his English translation). You can download the Z-code from the Spring Thing page; if you’re new to IF, you’ll need to grab an interpreter to make it go. (The Spring Thing is a smaller but arguably tougher competition than the IFComp. Its winning entry is pretty much guaranteed worth checking out. [Update below, suggesting you skip this one.])

I’ll be sure to post a review when I’ve played “De Baron”. Until then, here’s Victor’s own description, from a call for beta-testers:

“De baron” is geen klassieke text-adventure, en bevat bijvoorbeeld geen enkele puzzel. Wat het wel is is een interactief verhaal, waarbij die interactiviteit dus ook echt belangrijk is. (Er is niet maar 1 mogelijk verloop van het verhaal; in tegendeel.) Daarnaast is het verhaal vrij duister, dus als je alleen van romantische komedies houdt moet je het misschien ook niet spelen.

In the spirit of bilingualism, here’s my rough translation of the above:

“The Baron” is not a classic text adventure, and contains for example no puzzles at all. It is, however, an interactive story, in which the interactivity plays an important part. (There is not only 1 possible storyline; rather to the contrary.) The story is pretty dark, so if you only enjoy romantic comedies you should perhaps not play it.

Update: I can’t recommend it. It’s a serious attempt at investing IF with emotional weight and significance, but the medium is working against it all the way, making it disturbing for all the wrong reasons. And although it’s clearly not the author’s intention, I think these problems trivialise the very issues that he’s trying to address. Perhaps I’ll try to write more about this later, this is already a third draft and I’m still not totally satisfied.

Update 2: I’ve had a very interesting email conversation with Victor. It seems some of my negative reaction is based on playing this too much as traditional IF, while he’s trying for a very different type of experience (based on the Narrativist style of RPG design/play). I stand by my claim that it didn’t entirely work, but my call about the issues being trivialised by the implementation was based on a misunderstanding.