The protagonist of Ingold's
Fail-Safe (2000) is the only living person on a damaged starship, who makes a distress call and asks for instructions. Commands entered by the player are treated as delivered to him within the story, collapsing the distinction usually made in IF between the
parser/narrator and the player character. Out-of-story actions such as
saving progress are disabled and little text is displayed to the player apart from the survivor's dialogue, features which
Jay Is Games reviewer John Bardinelli praised as contributing to the game's immersiveness. In
All Roads (2001), the narrative viewpoint shifts between a number of characters in
Renaissance Italy, as if a separate entity is controlling each of them in turn. The player is challenged not just to solve character-specific puzzles, but to understand the logic behind the changes of character. The game was the first ever to win both the
Interactive Fiction Competition (taking first place out of fifty-one entries in 2001) and the
XYZZY Award for Best Game. It also received the XYZZY Awards for Best Story and Best Setting. The
Electronic Literature Organization anthologised
All Roads in the first volume of its
Electronic Literature Collection.
Dead Cities (2007) was Ingold's contribution to the "
H. P. Lovecraft Commonplace Book Project", a collection of interactive fiction based on Lovecraft's unpublished notes that was assembled for an exhibition at the
Maison d'Ailleurs in
Yverdon-les-Bains (
Switzerland). It won Best in Show among the three English-language entries. Interactive fiction author
Emily Short wrote a favourable review, calling the game "strange and challenging, evocative and opaque like Lovecraft's own stories". However, Eliza Gauger's review for
Destructoid criticised the parser as inadequate and the writing and pacing as inferior to those of
Ecdysis, another contribution to the Project. In
Make It Good (2009), the player controls a police detective investigating a murder in a house. Reviewers considered that this premise was inspired by Infocom's mysteries such as
Deadline (1982), but that Ingold's detective was distinguished by his moral ambiguity and concealment of information from the player. Emily Short commented that the distancing of the player from the protagonist brought out the "alienation and cynicism of genre noir". Graham Smith felt that it was "probably the best text adventure about being an alcoholic detective" and enjoyed the way the game's complexity make it feel more like a story and less like a puzzle. Ingold was the writer for Textfyre's
The Shadow in the Cathedral (2009), a
steampunk adventure story that was one of the few commercially published interactive fictions of the 2000s. In a column for
GameSetWatch, Emily Short described the game's prose as an important element in its worldbuilding.
All Roads All Roads is a 2001
interactive fiction game by Jon Ingold that placed first at the 2001
Interactive Fiction Competition. It also won the
XYZZY Awards for
Best Game,
Best Setting and
Best Story and was nominated for
Best Individual Puzzle and
Best Writing. The game is story-oriented and features few puzzles, though in a sense is one big puzzle, since the player's goal is to decipher the meaning of the game after completing it. ==Bibliography==