The Imaginary Engine Review

Home is not an Enclosure - A Reflection The polluted island setting of 24 Killers is an effective microcosm for what the interrelationship of home and community could be like. The driver for this speculation is the game's absurdism.

@phoenixwritesdown.bsky.social reflects on @stopcar.ing's 24 Killers piece and how the game exemplifies home as a concept that cannot be claimed or contained.

//TIER Report 001 This is the first entry in a new (free) series at TIER.

//TIER Report is a new series at our humble website where we talk casually and share future plans. Within are our conclusions from the recent reader survey!

The Punctum in LAKE Adventure and Mystery in the Digital Age The interactive fiction game LAKE Adventure, by B.J. Best, is something that must be found and figured out, as well as played.

Librarian and researcher Talita Valle delves into "the rolling stacks of digital archives" and offers a nuanced analysis of B.J. Best's LAKE Adventure. They remind us of the importance of paratexts and Barthes' concept of the indexicality of a cultural object of expression, such as the IF.

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Also, if you'd like a more direct link to the survey, here it is: tier-review.limesurvey.net/374493?lang=...

2025 Reader Survey We've prepared this small survey to poll you on the last year and a half of TIER.

Would you like to give us feedback on our last year and half? This reader's survey should take around five minutes to complete and should help us determine the future of our humble publication.

We appreciate you and could not do this work without you.

Thank you for your consideration.

THE WORLD IS NOT MY HOME As someone who has moved around a lot, across different states and even countries, I long for the stability of home, a house to call my own. Political and economic situations have dashed my dreams, or...

@stopcar.ing kicked off our last issue debut of the year with a piece on 24 Killers and what home really is. She effortlessly captures the strange, funny yet bittersweet themes of the game and its eclectic yet personal tone as well.

IF's Retrofuturist Roots Amping up retro technological friction encourages the player to decipher an IF game's interface as if it is an alien device with its own "emotional language".

@phoenixsimms.bsky.social reflects on why there was an increasing emphasis in the 2010s on IF storytelling via interfaces like desktops and apps.

“The world is sick and ugly” The limitations of Interactive Fiction provide a unique avenue for horror. Text based games cannot replicate the kind of tension that many survival horror games thrive in. The possibilities for emerg...

For our IF issue, Mazen Haggag explores the tortured logics of Horse Master and how the game creates terror out of a lack of agency.

Game Poems, Doors to IF of the Moment A digital poem that features both text and interactivity is a type of “Interactive Fiction” in the traditional sense.

For our next contribution to our IF issue, @coledone.com joins to talk about interlinked form and the fundamental poetry of text games.

A Conversation with Nathalie Lawhead Nathalie Lawhead joined us on Zoom to talk about their work, interactive fiction, internet subcultures, social media and lots more.

We interviewed @alienmelon.bsky.social and discussed text games, Interactive Fiction, social media, tech fascism, and lots more.

My Waltz into the IFComp Just a month before I entered it, I had no idea what the IFComp was.  The year was 2017. I was dealing with a triple-whammy spring season: I broke up with my long-term partner, lost my cat to kidney ...

For our second contribution, Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough reflects on their first entry into IFComp, the joys and problems of insular art cultures, and the boundaries of interactive fiction.

Repeat the Ending: Where Do Personal Games Go? If anything, outsider art exists because our expectations of art are not at all inclusive. We don't need excuses like historical significance to justify the existence of personal games like Repeat th...

For the first essay in our Interactive Fiction issue, @highimpactsex.bsky.social writes about the shrinking available space for personal art through the metafiction of Repeat the Ending.

Repeat the Ending: Where Do Personal Games Go? If anything, outsider art exists because our expectations of art are not at all inclusive. We don't need excuses like historical significance to justify the existence of personal games like Repeat th...

For the first entry in our Interactive Fiction @highimpactsex.bsky.social writes about the shrinking margins where personal art can flourish through the metafiction of Repeat The Ending.

A banner for the website The Imaginary Engine Review. It shows a text map from the application Twine with the words "August 2025 - Interactive Fiction." The logo for the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation is also displayed.

Thanks to a grant from the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, we are doing an mega-issue on the interactive fiction of the 2010s! This will be the first of many themed issues to come...

Killing Interactive Art…and Loving It! At its core, AOTK has an anti-establishment philosophy, much like the avant garde. Especially with its penchant for remixing, and therefore subverting, bourgeois expectations of art objects and texts....

@phoenixsimms.bsky.social likens thecatamites creative mode and visual culture to Dada and the avant garde movement.

Every Second is a Narrow Gate Any place humans have lived in for sufficiently long is haunted.

@gracemachine.bsky.social divines the haunting nature of Anthology of the Killer's settings. She also compares and contrasts the game collection's notion of history against the film Tár and personal memory.

Laughing at the absurd, the ugly, and the awful An Adult Swim game for a more overtly bleak era, using cartoon violence, the surreal, and the absurd to satirize life after the End of History.

For our first essay on Anthology of the Killer @phantomcobra.bsky.social explores its ancestral ties to adult cartoons like Home Movies.

An Interview With SEQUENCEBREAK// Curator Nilson Carroll SEQUENCEBREAK// is an in-person exhibit of "artist's games," showing until June 28, 2025 at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. It includes work by Stephen Gillmurphy (thecatamites, th...

Kicking off our issue on Anthology of the Killer with something a little different.

A banner featuring the character BB from the indie game Anthology of the Killer. White text over the image reads "May 2025 - Anthology of the Killer".

Coming soon...

Conversations About Curation And The Future Of Games Crit (reflecting on this year’s A MAZE) – The Candybox Blog

i published a post about conversations i had at A MAZE, on an important topic…
Conversations About Curation And The Future Of Games Crit:
www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/con...
"The future is something wildly different. One that will function outside of these outdated norms and compromised values."

Consigning Meaning to the Void Lovely Lady RPG's strongest narrative exists in the concept of the void, but the game's self-aware tone often sells itself short.

Phoenix Simms analyzes how the irreverent tone of Lovely Lady RPG often undermines its potential as a queer anti-capitalist narrative.

Difference Is Resonance Even when Lovely Lady RPG strains toward complexity, it cannot leave its clichés behind.

We are launching our issue on Lovely Lady RPG with Grace Benfell on science fiction, memes, and idealized selves.

A red and blue image of a rat with the text "February 2025 - Lovely Lady RPG"

Coming soon...

Inscrutable Desires, or, The Heart Wants What It Wants Hey, player. Sometimes, I struggle to understand which world is real.What is a lie? What is the now? Where are the boundaries? Is this a dream? Is this real? Is this my world? What would be best? Mayb...

lotus digs through Heisei Pistol Show's messy and fulfilling resonances, in relation to trauma, transness, and simple human frailty.

Also we are now @tier-review.com!

What You Got Under Your Skirt Will Make Them Pay For The Things That They Did It is that tender gap, between what is known and what is, between what is felt and what is real, that Heisei explores so vividly.

Our editor @gracemachine.bsky.social wrote about Heisei Pistol Show's ever-shifting selves and why sometimes men are women.

Putting the finishing touches on our last two essays on Heisei Pistol Show and hard at work on our next issue. Hoping to have a more consistent schedule in the new year, but also we take this at the pace we can so we can keep it going. 🖤🙏💪

Parun's Quilt—Poems in the Patchwork Collage of RPG Maker "It hurts so much, but this is all for you I write a letter to you in my red blood" - Translation of lyrics to "Fushigi Na Shiawase" (Mysterious Happiness) by NejiP feat. Hatsune Miku - From the soun...

In the next entry in our Heisei Pistol Show issue, ludzu wrote about Parun as a collage artist and RPG maker as a patchwork canvas.

Also also! We have goals now! Things we could do with more subscriptions like book reviews, poetry submissions, and just more money for everyone who makes TIER happen.