Michael S. Gentry 1998
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 5/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Interpreter

This inheritence came as a surprise: Even your husband Michael had never heard of these distant relatives of his before. Now, the last of the family Verlac has died and Michael is the only remaining heir of the nice estate in the small New England town of Anchorhead. Since this goes along well with his teaching job, you two decide to move there.

Cameron Wilkin 1999
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 2/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Interpreter

"Ignorance is bliss", people say. Know those clichéd fantasy settings in which a knight in shining armour slashes his way through hordes of 'monsters', although the whole time, you have this nagging question in the back of your head how this guy is exactly 'good' and how his victims are 'evil'? Then Bliss might be for you. On the surface, the game is exactly what we all despise: Your alter ego, the hero, has been captured by the Orcish army of an evil magician. Now, he has to escape from the dungeon and finally kill the evil guy's dragon. The whole journey being a violent killing spree. However, the evil wizard has apparantely put a curse on your head as sometimes, reality just seems to fade away...

Anssi Raisanen 2001
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 3/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Interpreter

It's every player's nightmare: An aspiring IF author (to make matters worse, one who is related to you) asks you to beta test his game. This can be fun, but if the game is really, really bad and if you can't really tell that to the person in question, things get ugly. Bugged is about you playing your cousin's first attempt at writing a game, and not only is it a completely linear set of boring rooms, located in a castle of a bog-standard fantasy kingdom, but pretty much everything imaginable went wrong technically - the game is bugged to the extreme. Most of the puzzle solutions don't work as expected and imagined by the author. So you have to find ways around those bugs. I.e. you exploit other bugs in order to progress.

Lea Albaugh 2009
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Interpreter

Although the annual IF competition is a great event, there is one big problem: Usually, the number of seriously buggy and broken entries is high. That leads to many reviewers' threshold for believing a game to be broken to be very low. Which means that sometimes, a game will be considered broken which really isn't. A trap which Byzantine Perspective fell into until word got around that what it made appear broken was in fact a big puzzle. In the end, the game placed in midfield, but it was a lot more popular with the other authors (who, by definition, are probably willing to put more trust into a fellow author's work), taking third place in the so-called Miss Congeniality contest (voted by the authors).

Matt Wigdahl 2009
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 3/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Interpreter

There's probably not much to do living on some asteroid in deep space. Grounded in Space's protagonist, a teenage boy, decided to spend his time building a rocket. Anxious to test it, he takes it outside and... it destroys his mother's garden! To finally learn some responsibility, learn about the hardship of life and learn to appreciate hard work, he is sent out to a mining belt in a spaceship - all on his own. The journey is supposed to be automated, so our hero has some time to read and familiarize himself with the basics of space mining. Things take a nasty turn soon enough, though, when he encounters pirates and a damsel in distress...

Ben Vegiard 2009
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Interpreter

Sometimes, it's best to let a game's author to use his own words to describe his game: "Interface was conceived in about 1984 by a 14 year-old boy who wanted desperately to work for Infocom. [...] That boy grew up to be me. [...] To be true to my childhood delusions of grandeur, I have coded up the game as an exercise in 'what would it have been like' and to surprise a few fellow-gamer friends of mine. [...] Thus, you find before you a throw-back/relic delivered with care. While I don't pretend this to be a work of art, I do feel it's an honest attempt of which my 14 year-old version of me would have approved; warts, plot holes, and all. I hope the 1984 version of you, if applicable, enjoys as well." If that isn't the kind of game this site was made for...

Michael S. Gentry 1998
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Interpreter

Little Blue Men starts out as any regular office comedy: The neurotic protagonist is stuck in his dead-end job which consists of picking up paperwork from the in-tray, stamping it and putting it in the out-tray. Understandable that he hates his job, his workplace, his co-workers and his boss. Dilbert and Brazil are just two of the obvious influences here. However, there is another level to the game... and for those patient enough to play it to the very end, yet another surprise is waiting.

Nate Cull 2000
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Interpreter

To this day Edgar Allen Poe's most widely recognized work, the poem The Raven doesn't exactly allow for easy adaption into other media. Which didn't stop various attempts, most notably the 1935 movie starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, which is a creepy piece of work on its own right, but bears little resemblance to Poe's poem other than the title and the 1963 film starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and (again!) Boris Karloff, which is just a painfully unfunny comedy which, again, throws Poe overboard within the first five minutes.

R. Noyes 1996
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 2/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Interpreter

Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die (PUTPBAD for short) is one of the most infamous pieces of self-referential interactive fiction ever. The game only has one location, one object and one puzzle. You start the game in a non-descript town square in a non-descript New England town with no idea who you are or why you're there. A phone booth sits in the centre of the town square, mocking you with its presence. If you pick it up, the game warns you, you'll die.

Andrew Plotkin 2000
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 3/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Interpreter

It's the night before you're leaving for your vacation. You can't sleep, so you think you might as well get the things on your todo list done before your taxi arrives. Not that your single room apartment allows for much varied action. A futon, a desk with a computer, a kitchen-like corner, a shower, a sink, a toilet - that's it. However, things are starting to shift, change and everything generally gets weird soon enough.