August 2019 Table of Contents

Intrigue! Banter! The promise of danger around every corner!

These things—along with memorable characters and unusual settings—are some of the things that always make me stay up late reading.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the two games in this month’s issue also have these things in common. In Eleanor Hingley’s “A Tragedy of Manners,” you’re thrown into the perilous atmosphere of a dinner party on the private planet of Lord Cephus Alikarn, the brother of the Emprex of the Luminous Empyrean. In “War is a Mazed Garden” by Nin Harris, you must escape from the Governor’s lush—and deadly—garden maze in time to let your fellow insurrectionists inside.

Will you tarry in a floating gazebo? Make a faux pas with your dinner fork? Tease secrets from a mechanical bird? Make friends or enemies? Play on and find out!

Our issue cover art, “Peer Pressure” by Laura De Stefani, is an apt imagining of a perilous dinner party setting, and rounding out our issue are essays on how actions define humanity in games and outside them (by Sharang Biswas), twenty top pieces of IF (by Anya Johanna deNiro), and how dialogue interacts with player choice (by Bruno Dias).

Hard to believe, but it’s already August! What does the rest of the year have in store?

We received over 30 submissions during our June/July window, and are processing those now. Coming up in our October issue, we’ll have a new piece of interactive fiction by Charity Porpentine that’s set in the world of “With Those We Love Alive,” and our second annual game jam is starting in November. Keep an eye out!