Interactive Fiction written by David Fisher:
You rush to your master’s side and await his instructions. He is studying a fragile looking scroll and muttering to himself.
He looks up and says, “Ah, there you are. This ...” -- he hands you the scroll -- “... goes back in the vault. I believe it is still open. And this little beastie ...” -- he hands you a small, empty brass cage -- “... goes back to my private quarters. Thank you, that will be all.”
You bow, and head downstairs to the vault. The heavy stone door is wide open, and a golden key juts out of the lock.
Without warning, someone shoves you roughly from behind. The scroll and the brass cage fly out of your hands as you fall to the ground. There is a loud “click”, and everything turns black.
Suveh Nux is a game of magical experimentation, written for the 2007 One Room Game Competition. It came first place out of nine games, and also received an Xyzzy award for Best Puzzles. You can download it here or play it online here.
You will also need an interpreter to play this game offline, such as Windows Frotz. See this page for more details.
A walkthrough for this game is also available, but the built in hints should be enough if you get stuck.
There is also an IF Wiki page, including a list of reviews, and a page at Jay Is Games containing hints and comments.
The following games were written for the 2007 C-40 competition, which required the games to be 40K or less in size. They definitely do not count as Interactive Fiction.
You will need an interpreter such as Windows Frotz to play these games.
ZRacer is a real-time racing game using ASCII graphics where you need to complete each track in under a certain time to advance to the next level. (You can turn off real-time mode and move one step at a time if you want to). Here is a screen shot:
Animals is a logic/observation puzzle. You need to work out the rule that determines whether a word should be included or excluded from a group, depending on the letters in the word (for example, “the word contains a double letter”) — which can be trickier than it might sound.
Cryptographer (version 1.4) is a simple code breaking game. You are given a piece of text with the letters A to Z each replaced with a different letter. Assign different values to the letters until you figure out what the original text says. It helps if you are familiar with Interactive Fiction, since the texts all relate to IF in some way.
As of version 1.3, it also includes an editor to let you enter messages for someone else to decode. Version 1.4 contains 11 more quotes, for a total of 73.