The members of the Hidden Gems Of Poetry Group are close. Even the move from internet forum to web server can't break their bond. But heartbreaking news could mean the end of things as they know it.

A short game made for SeedComp 2023. The writing is by Naomi Norbez, and the game was programmed by Josh Grams.

Please note that Hidden Gems, Hidden Secrets contains discussion of sexual harassment/coercion, and people in positions of power taking advantage of their place.

Hidden Gems, Hidden Secrets

Dogs Can Speak English

hadopelagic false light / pain is a language that you speak well enough

Gutless

It's the end of the world and everyone's handling it in their own way. A game about running, family, and death.

Chase the Sun

It's bleak out there. No one would blame you for turning away.

Glimmer

The sky is grey. The sun is setting. You’ve never been a believer in ghosts, but they still want to tell you all their secrets as you wander their graveyard.

Become a ghost therapist as you explore a graveyard at night.

Graveyard Strolls

Sometimes people give pieces of themselves away.
Sometimes they give too much and who they are wears thin.
They become an absence. A hole in the world.
And a terrible Light shines through.

The Absence of Miriam Lane

The only thing Bell Park likes more than a mystery is solving it on her own. But when a time-travelling 12-year-old version of herself lands face-down on her rented co-working desk, she'll have no choice but to take the displaced kid detective along on her latest case.
Follow the trail of a missing heterosexual on the strange streets of Toronto! Investigate a quirky cast of drag kings, chicken wing enthusiasts, and women in elaborate cat make-up! Thrill in the pervasive ennui of your early twenties! Struggle to remember where your preteen self was at with the whole being gay thing!
Will Adult Bell make peace with the figurative and literal ghosts of her past? Can Kid Bell navigate the uncanny world of the 2020s and find her way back home? How's the chicken in that creepy basement food court? These questions and more will be answered in THE GROWN-UP DETECTIVE AGENCY.

The Grown-Up Detective Agency

Survive as a monster that has taken up residence underneath a bridge, interact with strangers who pass over your bridge and see if you can not only survive the encounters, but create a home for yourself.

Under the Bridge

You are a Psychic Brand Ambassador for Schtupmeister Beer. Listen to the thoughts of customers at the local Applebee's and convince them to try your syrupy ale. But will being in these peoples' heads convince you to get involved in their lives?

Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee's

A visual novel about talking to cute girls during the nuclear holocaust.

The Bombs Have Been Dropped, I am Listening to Steely Dan and Wearing Cheap Sunglasses.

A curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt.

Isaiah 24:4-6

As you watch TV, an odd commercial comes on, and it really speaks to you. Like, directly. This game was made for O2A2VNJam 2022!

Cultivating Happiness

An absurdist typing game where you write out randomly generated emails in an effort to reach the peak.

Mondays: A Sisyphean Typing Game

“We Are Not All Alone Unhappy” is a short interactive narrative piece made in Twine which interrogates the idea of the Shakespearean happy ending. It asks players to create a pairing between two characters who received canonically unhappy endings in Shakespeare’s plays.

We Are Not All Alone Unhappy

Welcome to this first installment of Ditch Whit, which is running Shield's executive office OS, hosted on a server in the Good Hope mansion.

A browser game containing additional lore and context for players who have completed NORCO.

Ditch Whit #1: Shield Night

The year is 1999. The place is Godfield, Louisiana: the tech capital of the world, where the sky bleeds acid and the mud boils in the bayou. It’s time for your state-mandated digital therapy.

Computerfriend is a text-based interactive fiction game by Kit Riemer. 20-60 minute playtime, 6 endings.

Computerfriend

Eat, swear & try to take over the neighbourhood.

Crow Quest

A short game about Melbourne, urban legends, tunnels and the workers that dig them... and what lies underground.

Cycle

Hot Wet

Stairdown

The world might be crumbling underneath your feet, but you've still got to feed yourself somehow. Make a delivery, flirt with a catgirl, Stick It To The Man.

Catgirl Truckers

Thanks for applying to the Authenticity Assessment Department.

We wish you luck on your upcoming examination!

You will need it.

Assessment Examination

Two bastards beat the shit out of each other and kiss kiss fall in love. Or maybe not.

Feverfew

Strings/Threads/Burdens is a game about being suspended in place by tension. It is a game about releasing that tension and what happens next. It could very well be a game about you. You are free.

Strings/Threads/Burdens

> the heating again?

Year 3174 aboard The Adamant Gambit.

Welcome to the Adamant Maintenance Monitoring Terminal

A science fiction horror game about a space mission and its fallout, told in an epistolary hypertext format.

SSSM: In the Shadow of Jupiter

nothing is inviolate. and that which is sacrosanct gets fucked. fuck god, kill heaven, marry boyfriend. in that order.

Sacrosanct

Adventure waits for you in a procedurally generated Archipelago! Discover strange new lands. Make a fortune from trading. Swing a Really Big Sword at a dragon. Fight wild beasts – or turn them into your allies. Meet the puffins (if you're really lucky). With dozens of possible enemies, quests, and items, no two visits to the Archipelago are the same.

4x4 Archipelago

It is the year 201X, and the Nebulaverse fandom is on fire. You are a teen online, and your safe place is about to be torn apart.

A Paradox Between Worlds

You haven't been over since she told you a month ago that she was moving to some small town in Wisconsin. But Riley is here, and the computer is here, and that's what matters for now. "Have you played the game yet?"

"You told me to wait to play it with you about a billion times," she says.

A work of interactive fiction by B.J. Best.

And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One

Six bees. Five bags of groceries. A four-pound dumbbell. Three sailboats. One twin.

Sting is a puzzleless parser memoir about ordinary days and unexpected interruptions.

Sting

The sky is dark. It is a time of mystery, change and struggle. It is a time of opportunity.

In this asymmetric, two-player piece of interactive fiction, you and your partner each take on the role of a leader of a great nation on the last night of a war. A war one side did not even know it was fighting. Will you play as the general of the King’s army, riding north to retake the lands that rebelled against the royal line hundreds of years ago? Or will you play the Dictator of the Republic, who finds herself abandoned in a city wholly unprepared for war, now apparently only able to decide what her last few hours will look like in the city that she loves?

Both have little doubt that the city of Alexisgrad will fall tonight. The question that both must ask is how it will fall.

The Last Night of Alexisgrad

“You? Win the Libonotus Cup?” Sammy scoffs. “I'd be impressed if your ship even makes it to the starting line tomorrow morning, let alone Portobello.”

“Aye,” you say, “me ship may have taken a beating in that last raid, but I'll bet ye 500 doubloons I can still beat you to the finish line!”

You'd better get to it, the race starts at dawn and your ship isn't exactly seaworthy at the moment.

The Libonotus Cup

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving…

Come home to Goldengrove, a beautiful old house haunted by a lost soul. Uncover the secrets of your tormented past in a tale of unrequited love, jealousy, violence, betrayal, and vengeance.

"What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed" is a puzzle-driven, parser-based gothic horror story with a unique command set.

What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed

Esthiru, a 24-year-old truck driver, is waiting for their friend Aston to arrive so they can play fighting games. But what waits for them is more than that.

Aston May Die is a piece of yuri interactive fiction about being in love with someone that is dying and about not caring about that, living in the moment.

Aston May Die

Lunar-meteorologist-cum-conman Cyan wakes up tied to a chair with a strange woman monologuing at him. What went wrong?

A linear ditherpunk visual novel.

Paradigmfetish

An interactive zine constructed of multiple digital collages and soundscapes. It is interested in exploring the impacts of being "born saved", of having Christianity be chosen for you before you even had a choice, and the experience of having been shaped by Christian ideologies.

A God Who Lives in Your Head

Null Event is an 18+ smutgame set in a cyberpunk world with a mystery to solve, and a load of kinks to explore.

The Cygnet Building is finding it's dronified personnel going mysteriously missing, and they need someone to look into it. That's where Synesthesia comes in.

Null Event

Solve a murder in a near future world by diving into the Wikipedia of that world.

Have you ever lost yourself in a Wikipedia rabbit hole? Imagine doing that for the Wikipedia of the year 2049. This is Neurocracy, an interactive narrative experience that offers an anthology of compelling sci-fi stories inside and between the hyperlinked articles of an online encyclopedia. It is both a single-player alternate reality game and an epistolary hypertext novel, opening with a high-profile assassination that you must investigate and solve.

Playing out entirely on a website with no download required, Neurocracy invites you to go it alone or join forces with others to piece together what has happened, and what is happening, in the world of 2049. Using the narrative power of your imagination, chase implications and interpretations by reading between the lines and arranging a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Find clues, draw connections, compare notes, and ultimately solve a murder.

Neurocracy

Trailer

"Magic comes with a price. But on your birthday, all your expenses are paid. Welcome to Grooverland."

Grooverland is a large parser game that takes over two hours to complete. It is based on the works of author and programmer Chandler Groover, although it does not require previous knowledge of his games to play.

Grooverland

genderfelt is a short interactive zine, in which you read the blog of young person called Anon, going through the process of discovering himself. It focuses on the issue of transmedicalism, and how one can help to pull their peers away from a harmful ideology.

Genderfelt

A twine game about a tired, closeted office worker's struggles with sexuality and lucid nightmares.

Fantasy Cascade: Episode 1 - Overspill

The iCarly RPG is an interactive fiction game based on the Nickelodeon show iCarly! Kind of.

Help Carly Shay survive the ups and downs of high school, from math tests to encounters with ancient deities, in time for Spencer’s spaghetti tacos.

The iCarly RPG

A 7k word Twine game about working retail and dealing with magic managers who hate each other. So, a normal shift.

Witches and Stitches

Jogo Satanista para Praticar o Mal is a visual novel that tells the story of creating a website for your friend.

Jogo Satanista para Praticar o Mal

Experience a great journey with famous poet Dante and his super "reliable" narrator Virgil.

A Hell of a Journey

There's something about yourself that you can't live with. Some part you think abhorrent, to be hidden away from sight.

It's not a good absence.

You've told yourself you feel better. But you don't really believe that, do you?

-

WINTER is an interactive fiction about sex, trans insecurity, and a girl with a skull for a face.

Winter

Explore a mysterious graveyard and its secrets before your time runs out. But be wary — not everything is as it seems.

More Bones Than You Can Count

A young woman from a small fishing village goes missing. Days later agents of an unknown organization find her, take her to a secret location. The young woman saw something she shouldn't have and now something else sees through her.

It needs to be found, isolated, and exorcised.

You're the only one who can do it.

What Happened in Addison's Grotto

Flight 155's landing gear has jammed and it's stuck in limbo, burning fuel ahead of an emergency landing. As flight attendant Evie, you can learn about your passengers, and about yourself, as you ease their fears during the crisis.

The Attendant

In a world of arcane mysteries, a young doctor's apprentice unravels a conspiracy most grim.

The Weight of a Soul is a mystery-horror interactive novel inspired by IF classics like Blue Lacuna and Anchorhead.

The Weight of a Soul

Welcome to the Excalibur Wiki. This fan-run encyclopedia preserves the details of an obscure science fantasy television series from the 1970s. Though much of its footage was lost, a group of dedicated fans still have strong memories of the show — as well as unique theories, occasional arguments, and lingering questions.

Excalibur is a hypertext-based interactive fiction piece written and developed by J.J. Guest and G.C. Baccaris, with contributions from co-creator Duncan Bowsman and others.

Excalibur

You are a secret agent. It’s the end of the world. You are cursed. You came here to rescue your partner, but the mission has taken a turn for the weird. Parody spy thriller.

Fish & Dagger

Navigate fraught social situations by day and pull off heists by night as Lady Thalia, the not-actually-aristocratic thief bent on making a mockery of British high society.

Lady Thalia and the Seraskier Sapphires

The other magical girls left. A magical girl leaves her purple rival behind.

Rainbow Heart Farewell

You are Mo, the cat! Be cute, listen to and advise your friends, and knock some plants over if you feel like it.

Violeta

An adaptation of the M.R. James ghost story, "An Evening's Entertainment", for the Gaming Like It's 1925 jam.

An Evening's Entertainment

A short pixel adventure about dreams, crushes, and moving on.

I Had Another Dream About You Last Night

A small interactive fiction about the day of a writer, their routine, their work, their fears, and anxieties...

A Day in the Life of a Writer

So, Agent! Are you a bad enough Trusted Internet Investigator to conduct a "Knock-and-Talk" with ███████ (henceforth known as "The Subject")?

The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove

Set in an otherworldly tailor shop, Casey's just there for an interview for an interest blog she runs. Pretty soon she finds herself wrapped up in something she'd never asked for.

Clothing & Alterations

Earth Year 2952: the corsair crew of the Oblivion spaceship gets attacked by some mysterious kidnappers, but they leave behind the Captain, Ivory Joyner, who is determined to take them back; in the meantime, her Second in Command, Nathaniel Shada, is making up a plan to get everyone back on the Oblivion. Will the two of them succeed?

Fight // Flight is a short interactive novel divided in 6 chapters, with two POVs.

Fight // Flight

An interactive story about gay teens falling in love on a boat by Brendan Patrick Hennessy, with art by Beck Kubrick.

Boat Prom

Get yourself into and out of another fine mess! Win glory, renown, and much-needed money through cunning schemes that will seem like good ideas at the time.

Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale

ALL @ ONCE is a twine based interactive novel. Take the role of Wyatt Reynolds, your average everyday black teen in the small lake-centered town of Primwood a town where the world is quiet and the mornings are hazed. Where Devils walk the street with pockets full of spice. This young man whose life blinked by without a second thought becomes something more when his mind takes on something new. When the thoughts in his head aren't his own and the reality of reading people's minds comes into play.

All @ Once

Wander through a surreal digital landscape, meet exciting internet personalities and help them to reconcile how their digital lives intersect with their personal lives. How you respond to their posts influences the choices that these characters will make.

IRL: The Game

In this darkly-humorous visual novel adventure, you’ll tackle fiendish puzzles, decide which very curious characters to trust, and compete in a pub quiz where the sudden death round means just that. Will you consign Oswald’s plot to the dustbin of history, or will the past come back to life- in more ways than one?

This is the follow up to The Bunny Hill Horror.

Bunny Hill Horror: Bunny Boiler

Gameplay Video

Cover Me In Leaves is an experimental work of interactive horror fiction, about bright minds, and the end of all things. Fresh out of high school, with no prospects or aspirations, you've remained here in your small town. Everyone you knew and loved has moved on for better things. You're alone. So you get your first tattoo.

And then the trees start calling.

10mg: Cover Me In Leaves

Teaser

You are stranded on an unknown island and you find a mobile phone where strangers, who are more or less attentive, give you advice via instant chat.

Survival Messenger Adventure

Prince Blacktree is dead. All of the other fairy nobles are trying to claim credit. You're a traveling Open Sorcerer, and a convenient neutral party who just wants to get out of Fairyland. 
 
A whodunit where the suspects are clamoring to be accused.

A Murder in Fairyland

An account of the disastrous sidewalk chalk tournament of August 27, 2011.

A Rope of Chalk

Four cardboard boxes stacked in the centre of a bare office. You can't leave til they're all unpacked, and there's an awful lot to unpack here, including emotional baggage, academic misconduct, and a blood feud spanning centuries.

Academic Pursuits (As Opposed to Regular Pursuits)

Victorious at last, you now need to get yourself and your fleet back home. Decide as if it all depends on you, trust as if it all depends on the gods, and you will have an amazing quest...

Amazing Quest

We are haunted by the houses of our childhood. How unfamiliar they are, when we return. Yet you never forget, do you? You never really forget. 
 
A Southern Gothic horror story. Remember, of all the masks we wear, it's the final one that matters.

Babyface

A short story about food, belonging, and seeking home. Text your friend, call your mum, and search for congee on this rainy night.

Congee

Something fishy is happening in the Section B-2 Temple.

Deus Ex Ceviche

You are a young doppelganger, fresh out of School of Humanity, finally realizing your life-long dream to own a human-centric business. You offer a unique service: imitation on demand, living through situations the humans would rather pass on. Embarrassing? Shameful? Boring? You can experience all those feelings on behalf of your clients, while they enjoy their day, unbothered, somewhere far away. 
 
Change into others! Learn the secrets of the City of Sand! Avoid foreclosure!

Doppeljobs

Follow user StaircaseHaven14 on a Neopets-esque site called Ruffians as she faces life's challenges, RPs with her long-distance BFF (or more than BFF?) Bee, and encounters familial hardship, from age 8 to 18.

Lore Distance Relationship

You have many faces. Your form is multiple. You are the cards. Created many years ago, infused with dark magic, you have seen many things. What secrets do you contain? What visions have you conjured up? How will you nudge the hands of fate?

Minor Arcana

You are trying to escape with a mysterious briefcase, but your options are limited.​ Can you survive the chase?

Move On

Isaac Newton receives a mysterious letter inviting him to investigate a new scientific phenomenon.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

The only thing worse than being a village idiot is being an unemployed village idiot. Maybe it’s time to change careers. Maybe it’s time to be a knight.

Stuff of Legend

Housework is only as dull as your imagination. Join Emma, six years old, on a playful adventure of peculiar proportions.

The Impossible Bottle

A millionaire guards a fabulous ruby in her private train car. Countless thieves have failed to steal it. But they weren't the Magpie!

The Magpie Takes the Train

A breath born of boredom rises in the wintry sky. Hooves and bells approach. The school bus is late.

The Pinecone

Although this is an interactive interface, your choices do NOT matter. They really do not. Before you quit, I want you to understand why. I am a believer of absurdity, that our actions in the end have no meaning in the interacting force between humans and universe. Choices lead you to different paths, but in the end, it's to a place where we share the common ground. But hey, life is about enjoying the journey, right? I hope you enjoy the choices being made along the way.

The Place

A hole-based economy and a venison-based diet. You and your dog. And a turnip.

The Turnip

Your commute is simple enough. Or at least, it should be. But today, the entire public transportation system seems to have it out for you - and is it just you, or does the geography keep... shifting?

What the Bus?

This work is a collaboration with GPT-2, a neural network model designed to predict the next word in a block of given text based on its study of eight million web pages. In this application, I input a text file of my own prose from the past twenty years into GPT-2. It then generated new writing in a similar style. I selected, arranged, and lightly edited the resulting output.

You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf

Space Frog! is an indie adventure game about a frog in space.

Space Frog!

Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon have seen more than enough to last a life time. They've been given hardly any information on what they are supposed to investigate and are also bringing some fresh recruits along.

A sci-fi narrative game made in Twine.

Unto the Night

The elders have entrusted you, an elite vampire courier, to deliver their secrets. Can you outrun the hunters, the other drivers, and the rising sun?

Vampire: The Masquerade - Night Road

A short 20 minute non-linear narrative game about negative experiences after coming out as transgender.

Gender Dysphoria

Hope is a Bitsy game about learning to rely on others and fighting against hopelessness, together.

Hope

—our company mission to provide grieving families with accurate, compassionate simulations of their deceased loved ones—

You! Winnifred Meyer. Remember? You are Winnifred Meyer, and you died at age twenty-six in a car accident.

Compassionate Simulation

The first Taleframe game based on the 90s children's horror soap opera.

Crocodracula: The Beginning

you are a tiny frog in a leather jacket vest. you think it makes you look cool. and you would be correct!

Tiny Rainbow Rebels

It's been over a year since you were last home, and now it's time to finally clear out those last few things, and the memories they bring back.

Moving On

When someone falls into a late afternoon nap, they will invariably wake to find their mind vacated of the ability to comprehend time.

Short twine game about communication and loneliness.

Interactive Fiction Browser Games