gwelks: Nigel Jayne's Interactive Fiction Site

Reading Room

You settle into a large comfortable chair in front of a fireplace. Sunshine pours in through a window behind you. A butler carrying a silver tray walks over to you, and you pull an electronic device from the reflecting metal. Jeeves, for that is what you have christened the smartly-dressed man, explains how this interactive fiction (IF) can be played.

The parser-based interactive fiction was created with Inform. To play works like these, you need a program called an interpreter. Games in Z-code (with the .z* extension) can be played with Windows Frotz or Zoom for Mac OS, which is also available for UNIX. Android owners can use Text Fiction or Son of Hunky Punk, while iPhone owners can use iPhone Frotz. Games in an alternate Inform format, Glulx, can be played with the Lectrote app (for MacOS, Windows, or Linux) or the Windows Glulxe and WinGit interpreters. Filfre (Windows) and Gargoyle (Windows and MacOS) play both formats. You can also play Z-code and Glulx in your browser, with Javascript enabled.

For screen reader users, many interpreters (e.g., WinGlulxe and WinFrotz) have a text-to-speech setting in the Options menu item. A more flexible way to read the screen using JAWS is to play in JAWS mode (with num lock off, press the minus sign, upper right, on the number pad).

Squiffy. games are hypertext and play in any web browser.

You turn on the electronic device and read the screen.

A fly with large orange eyes watches a room from on a wall in a high corner. The title is printed along the top.

A Fly on the Wall, or An Appositional Eye (Release 1)

The Harrison Mansion is closing after 45 years of delighting its visitors with collections of the weird and recreations of the macabre. The night before, the Fortean Society of New England gathers within its walls to celebrate its history and investigate its reputation as a real house of horrors. You volunteer to take a shift in the Fly eye, a room with five monitors that watch the most haunted corners within the house. You can't watch all five simultaneously, though, so what exactly will you see?

The Gaia's Web cover is a ghostly white web in the dark of night. The title is printed in white along the top.

Gaia's Web (Release 1)

Correcting bugs in video games wasn't supposed to be like this. Then again, S.hip of Theseus isn't a typical game. As a titan, you maintain the real-world experience of the game players. When you lose contact with one of them, the fix isn't a bit of code. It's real. And the problem is much more dangerous than you ever expected. Gaia's Web puts a different spin on the conspiracy established in a fictional game, S.hip of Theseus, and prepares you for S.hip's official sequel, Re.constructing the Ship of Theseus. The secret is out; it's up to you to uncover it.

The Sequitur cover shows a quotation in white letters with gold trim superimposed over the contours of an office etched in black. The quotation opens in the top left of the page with an ellipsis. The word 'Sequitur' follows in the center of the cover, and the quotation closes with another ellipsis in the bottom right.

Sequitur (Release 3)

The only person who can explain what happened in a long-forgotten house with four dead people inside is comatose and clinging to her life in hospital. Detective Stephen Cochone of the New Orleans Police Department needs to accurately reconstruct the chain of events by sequencing the video footage, sound recordings, and other vestiges of activity found at the site, leading him to a conclusion that could protect the lives of millions.

Torchlight flickers in the tunnel leading west to the antechamnber and beyond are the IF console, the helm of a spaceship prepared to take you to IF worlds created by other authors, and the ShuffleComp Arena, an event for music-inspired IF. A tunnel also winds north to Nigel's office, where you think you can see a mailbox.

A Fly on the Wall, or An Appositional Eye has been added (April 7, 2017).