The 2026 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction!

The 2026 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction features twenty-two new interactive stories submitted by authors working across the spectrum of text games. Participants chose to place their stories in either the Main Festival, where they are eligible for a Best In Show ribbon and prizes, or the Back Garden, with looser entry requirements allowing for more experimental or work-in-progress titles.

Main Festival

Play

23 Minutes By George Larkwright HTML/Javascript short poem animation puzzle-free Over the course of his morning commute, a man contemplates what it takes to be a good father. Author's Comment: “A real-time digital poem.
No branches or choices or puzzles to solve.
Just words and photos and a rhythm you choose.

N.B. For the best experience, please avoid playing on a mobile device.”

Best

Story

Best

Visuals

Most

Immersive

Play Online Download (72.1 MB; HTML/Javascript) Cover Art

Download

Before the Snow Melts By Zach Crowe short visual novel romance slice of life introspective emotional branching story character-focused short Over the course of a single week, you spend time with a childhood friend who is about to leave town. What you choose to say — or leave unsaid - will shape how that week ends. Author's Comment: “This started as an experiment for a larger game I’m working on, where choice is everything. I wanted to use this as a smaller, lighter testing ground for those ideas, and as an attempt at developing something like this on my own.

Thanks for taking the time to play it, and I hope you find some enjoyment from it :)”

Best

Atmosphere

Best Visual

Novel

Warmest

Winter

Play Online Download (84.7 MB; Ren'py) Cover Art

Play

The Coffee Cake Caper By Darius Foo full-length puzzle mystery detective A carnival bake-off sours when a finalist’s dough vanishes the night before judging. A cozy mystery with a fresh detective and lots of frosting.

Cosiest

Mystery

Longest

Proof

Best

Investigation

Play Online Download (6.20 MB; Fable) HintsSolutionCredits

Play

Crier By Antemaion short has graphics has music grim obscene HYPOGEAL PENANCE BIOME Author's Comment: “This game is a puppet-theatre of murk and slime. It is largely an exercise in aesthetics.”

Best

NPCs

Exegetic

Ludohazard

Grimiest

Demesne

Play Online

Play

“Can you catch em all?”

Cryptid Hunter By Adam Wade, Alex Kutza, Skye Murrell Twine short cryptids deduction environmental creature capture highly replayable Your a professional researcher that has to hunt down three legendary cryptids using a guide and your personal notes. Designed for multiple playthroughs where the legendary cryptids are different each time. Author's Comment: “This piece is for fans of cool Cryptids and deduction games who want replayability.”

Best

Concept

Best

Styling

Longest

Boi

Play Online Download (740 KB; Twine)

Play

Cyclic Fruition Number One By D E Haynes short html5 speechmark spiki A short story with hyperlink branching. Written after reading A Owen Barfield’s “This Ever Diverse Pair”. Author's Comment: “This is a demo piece for a new authoring framework called Spiki.”

Best Engine

Showcase

Most Enigmatic

Loop

Play Online Download (210 KB; Spiki) Spiki

Play

Enigmart By Sarah Willson Twine full-length puzzles kid-friendly “Too broke to afford full price? With the Enigmart Rewards app, you can save money on all your favorite specialty grocery items — and have fun doing it. Solve puzzles to unlock the savings on more than two dozen featured products!” Author's Comment: “This one’s for the Games Magazine subscribers and Penny Dell fiends. This experiment combines puzzles written during EnigMarch (a daily puzzle design challenge) with one of my favorite settings: the contemporary American grocery store. If you think Enigmart is surreal, I encourage you to look for the strangest product at your local supermarket or drugstore.”

Best

Deals

Best

Variety

Best

Puzzles (Tie)

Play Online Download (2.32 MB; Twine)

Play

Fantasy Opera: The Theater of Memory By Lamp Post Projects Ink full-length has graphics fantasy mystery puzzles RPG stats character customization The musicians of a new opera house are plagued by strange dreams. When you are asked to investigate their cause, you find that the answers may be hidden within the walls of the theater itself. A mystery of magic, music, and architecture set in a fantastical reimagining of 17th century Baroque Italy. Author's Comment: “This game is a sequel to Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade (which appeared in IFComp), but it may be played entirely on its own. Both games feature RPG-style stats, skill checks, and die rolls.”

Best Deduction

Game

Best

Customization

Outstanding Illustrations &

Design

Play Online Download (7.81 MB; Ink) Cover Art

Play

“A grassy knoll watches over the gazebos that dot the flatter patch of yard. You stand among them near some Crockett wickets rising up from the earth like children's tombstones.”

The House By Miles Poehler Twine short horror humor mystery characters descriptions of gore magic sci-fi romance dog YA-friendly space alien Choose a character plus three more to be in your party. Explore a mysterious house to try to escape. But is what you are really exploring: ... yourselves?! Author's Comment: “This game features a cast of characters from as wildly different genres as I could fit in. By way of math my goal was to get the most unique character interactions possible. Once you are done, replay it as a different character to see what they think (it’s often humorous to compare what they think to what they say).”

Play Online Download (190 KB; Twine)

Play

Latinorum By Roberto Ceccarelli short English Italiano SPQR back to school retrocomputing Commodore 64 80s nostalgia two-words parser A.D. MCMLXXXIV, somewhere in Italy. It’s May and the end of the school year is approaching. If you don’t do well in your last Latin test, Prof. De Boccis will fail you. De Boccis comes from another city and, knowing that he may be delayed by public transport, he leaves the test at school so that a colleague can start the test immediately. The plan is to get hold of the text and then translate it with the help of your classmate Secchioni: he will get a perfect A, while you will insert a few errors so as not to arouse too much suspicion. Author's Comment: “In 1985, a year after graduating from high school, I came across a program in the Italian magazine MCmicromputer, for the Apple II, that allowed you to create text-based adventures.
Driven by curiosity, I ported it to my Commodore 64 and wrote a short adventure game set in my school, which featured fictionalized versions of some real-life events.
Back then, it wasn’t easy to distribute certain things, so the floppy disk sat in a drawer until last summer, when I tried to retrieve SOSYA, the program I had presented for my high school graduation exam (anyone interested can find it on my website).
I thought the story was nice, so I completely rewrote the parser and tweaked the story a bit, but still for the Commodore 64.
And now it’s time to share it with you: remember, this is a story from over 40 years ago that runs on a computer from that era.
As a result, you’ll need a physical keyboard to play the online version.”

Best Retro

Game

Best

Setting

Optimum

Ludum

Play OnlineCover ArtMy Commodore 64Download d64 image Download (4.58 MB; Commodore 64)

Play

Maybe you'll respect this dead person instead By Ellric Smith Twine short graphic violence You play a mute spirit summoner who requires his summons to speak for him as he tries to prove himself despite his disadvantages.

Most Beautiful

Narrator

Most intriguing

Introduction

Best

Crustacean

Play Online Download (182 KB; Twine) Cover Art

Play

meminerimus By diluculum Inform/Glulx micro puzzleless limited parser bisquixe in-game content warnings has hyperlinks An exploration of a parent-child relationship through some brief vignettes. Author's Comment: “I forgot to thank them in the in-game credits but I used Daniel Stelzer’s code to work around the Glulx string limits to set the styling for the command bar.”

Most Friendly

Interface

Most Tragic

Story

Father of the

Year

Play Online Download (1.01 MB; Inform/Glulx) Cover ArtOriginal Cover Art

Play

The Missing City Council By Solarius Inform/Z short perfectly normal mystery You are a concerned city resident who needs to attend a City Council meeting about the zoning of your property. However, once you enter the City Hall, you immediately notice that something is off... Author's Comment: “My first piece of interactive fiction. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?”

Most Original

Story

Most Surprising

Ending

Best Sopwith

Camel

Play Online Download (3.64 MB; Inform/Z) Cover ArtWalkthroughPlaythrough (recorded commands)

Play

Our Lady of Thorns By Joel Burton Inform/Z full-length Inform puzzles atmospheric historical mystery tragedy cw:murder “Five months a novice here, and still you have not yet made peace with the schedule.” You have until Compline to solve a mystery at your medieval monastery. Author's Comment: “I’m a long time player of IF, dating back to Infocom games in my youth, but this is my first serious attempt at writing IF. In my real life, I’m a software engineer and teacher, and one of my long-hobbies has been reading and writing fiction. IF is proving to be a fun way to meld both of the sides. My goals for Our Lady of Thorns were to write something with ambiguous endings; the tag of “mystery/tragedy” is accurate. Probably the two most unexpected things in the process was just how delightful the playtesting process was, and how much I enjoyed the research into medieval monasteries.”

Best

Parser

Best

Puzzles (Tie)

Cutest

Cat

Play Online Download (938 KB; Inform/Z) Cover ArtGame homepagePlayer map (no spoilers)

Play

“After years of meticulous manipulation, your plans are nearing completion. Then those pesky heroes, who would dare thwart you, arrive. Will they stop you? Or will you succeed at your Perilous Plot?”

The Perilous Plot By Carrie Berg Twine gothic novel many choices puzzleless no pets harmed unwilling drug use gaslighting villain You are the villain in a Gothic novel trying to outsmart the heroes determined on thwarting your plans. Author's Comment: “This game originally came about because I was in a book club where we read Wilkie Collins’s “The Woman In White”, which, while considered a classic, I cannot recommend because he was clearly paid by the word. And most of the book is less the “first detective novel” it bills itself as, and is more a slow-burn law drama where you will learn, in full detail, the intricacies of 1800s inheritance laws…

Still, I got through it and it inspired me to go down a Gothic novel rabbit hole (though to be fair, I do love a lot of other Gothic novels, just not “The Woman In White”), where I found a brilliant Guardian article that broke down some of the parts of Gothic novels in a humorous way.

I literally based my entire “strength of your Gaze causes the heroes to Faint” system off of the charts in that article. Every hero comes with a different number of Faints before they are incapacitated. Only, since I have two heroes show up, their numbers are added together.

The weather system in game is also taken from the charts. I have ten types of weather, and each hero is at their best in one type (thus harder for you to take advantage of) but also more susceptible in another type of weather, so you’ll want to make sure you confront any heroes under the right meteorological conditions.

The setting was pretty obvious, a huge manor in the middle of nowhere, that you (the villain) do not rightfully own, and barely maintain.

There’s over 40,000 words in the game, though you’ll likely only see a fraction of them each time you play. I hope you enjoy playing this as much as I enjoyed writing it!”

Dark&Stormiest

Manor

Twirliest

Moustache

Wackiest

Weather

Play Online Download (271 KB; Twine)

Play

A Quiet Scurry By Moss & Quill Studios Twine short A Quiet Scurry is a short interactive story about a single night in the life of one of the UK’s smallest mammals - the harvest mouse. You wake in a woven nest as dusk settles over a wheat field. Hunger draws you out. The world around you is vastly larger than you. And, it is not safe. You might die, you might survive.

Best Animal

Protagonist

Best

Microgame

Cutest

Danger

Play Online Download (6.86 MB; Twine) Cover Art

Play

Social Democracy: Popular Front By Autumn Chen Dendry full-length historical has graphics has music You are the French socialists in 1936. Can you bring peace, bread, and liberty to France, and defend the country against fascism?

Least Radical

Radicals

Most

Educational

Most Spiel des

Jahres-worthy

Play OnlineCover Art

Play

Strings: a (bug)folk song By Tabitha & baezil Inform/Glulx short merciful puzzles A bug bard sets out to gather four master musicians and call the moon down from the sky. Author's Comment: “Cover art by Drew Shields. In-game graphics by baezil. Content warnings available in game.”

Cutest

Critters

Pluckiest

Tune

Loveliest

Moonwife

Play Online Download (1.07 MB; Inform/Glulx)

Play

The Universal Robot (Assembled By Hex) By Agnieszka Trzaska Twine short puzzles science-fiction comedy dark humor multiple endings You are Hex the Dextron, a maintenance technician onboard Greenest Gizmos Corporation’s orbital station. You’ve just been tasked with assembling a robot capable of doing all kinds of work – exciting! The only problem is, your boss clearly hopes to replace you with said robot. Can you avoid getting fired?

Best

Endings

Funniest

Dystopia

Most Relevant

Satire

Play Online Download (591 KB; Twine)

Back Garden

Play

Exchange By Peter Johnston Ink micro demo short sci-fi drama choices matter replayable A choice-driven story that asks the question: what’s the true cost of immortality? Author's Comment: “Thanks for checking out Exchange! This is the first act of a near future sci-fi choice driven story that dives into the value of legacy, considers what we owe each other, and asks whether or not a single act of grace can redeem a lifetime of greed.

I'd like to finish the final two acts soon, and I'm really looking forward to any feedback. And make sure you play it more than once!”

Least HIPAA

compliant

Most Anticipated

Release

Play OnlineCover Art

Join the Swarm By Senica Thing Twine full-length “For the fourth time Senica interactive Fiction team offers the best from East European student IF to the kind attention of the Spring Thing reviewers. This year's games were designed by eight students from Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania who are new to IF, with two extra games by authors with longer experience who felt like “joining the swarm”. /see also: https://sif-gamebook.webnode.sk/ The most favourably reviewed student entry will receive a “best reviewed student IF” award.”

Most Admirable Fresh

Authors

Best Anthology

(4th Award)

Best

Experimentation

Yellow Swarm WHAT A MESS The Underground Dungeon

Swarm of Thieves Join The Swarm by SAT Join Le Swarm by Neural

John The Swan It's Here Dystopia A Swarm Of Spiders

Download (2.35 MB; Twine)

Download

“An accidental trip to a strange and magical place that has a lot of mushrooms for some reason”

Unseelie By Alun Clewe TADS 3 short forgiving fantasy A game where you’re exploring a strange otherworldly place, interacting with odd characters, and trying to find your way back home. Also, there are a lot of mushrooms for some reason.

Diamond in the

Rough

Best

Creature

Most Promising

Setting

Download (287 KB; TADS 3)

Archive of all 2026 entries (186 MB zip): Download from itch.io

Festival Readme and Changelog of updated games

Anyone is welcome to submit to Spring Thing. The organizer reserves the right to not show a submission they feel is inappropriate for the festival, but entries are not otherwise vetted, and their contents and opinions reflect the views of the original author, not the Thing as a whole.

Spring Thing features all kinds of text games, but two of the major divisions are between what are sometimes called choiced-based games (where you interact by clicking links) and parser-based games (where you interact by typing commands).

To those unfamiliar with the parser, it can seem confusing or intimidating. Here are some resources for getting started:

• Emily Short's Welcome to Interactive Fiction overview (8-page PDF)
• A handy reference card (created by Andrew Plotkin and Lea Albaugh)
• You might also try a game written specifically to help newcomers get used to parsers, such as The Dreamhold or Bronze.

To play some parser IF offline, the downloaded story file needs to be opened with a program called an interpreter, much like a .doc file needs Microsoft Word to open. Clicking on the story format (next to the download link) will take you to instructions for finding the right interpreter to play a particular game.

Players of the 2026 festival could nominate games for two kinds of prize ribbons:

• A Best in Show blue ribbon, for Main Festival entries. The top two nominees each year win a Best in Show ribbon to display by their game.
• Audience Award ribbons, for all participants, which are suggested by nominators and can be anything they like: “Best Story,” “Best Parser Game,” “Personal Favorite,” “Alumni's Choice,” “Cutest Vampires”... you get the idea.

After the festival closes, nominations also close and ribbons are awarded. The games will remain permanently available on the festival site and at the IF Archive, along with any supplemental material of the author's choosing (walkthrough, source code, etc).