linusakesson.net
Games

The Impossible Bottle

Yikes! It seems I won the 26th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition! That is to say, The Impossible Bottle got a tied 1st place, which is still top-two out of 103 games.

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

Merciful puzzlefest. Parser or point-and-click, as you please. Web (including mobile) or Z-machine.

Play The Impossible Bottle online here!

When playing online, a transcript will be logged on the server. This helps me catch bugs and improve things.

If you are truly stuck, even after trying the built-in “hint” command, there is a walkthrough.

Download

You can also download the game and play locally. Extract the zip file and load the corresponding file into your preferred Z-machine interpreter, Å-machine interpreter, or web browser.

The Impossible Bottle is implemented in Dialog. It has an IFDB page.

Posted Sunday 6-Dec-2020 15:09

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Anonymous
Fri 11-Dec-2020 03:22
Congratulations on your victory! You definitely deserved it.
Anonymous
Wed 7-Apr-2021 12:21
Definitely deserved the win. I have found a bug: if you put the teenager doll on the white table, it doesn't appear, either there or on the smooth surface (though you can pick it up again).
Anonymous
Fri 14-May-2021 19:22
Linus, just finished The Impossible Bottle and wanted to tell you how much I loved it! All the aha moments landed perfectly and I found the world charming and delightful. Congratulations on the win!

-Ward C
Anonymous
Thu 20-May-2021 21:30
Thank you for a touching, sweet, on-point game for 2020. It had good puzzles and an excellent plot/story/metaphor. It was worth every minute I spent (there were a lot of them, I'm embarrassed to say).
Anonymous
Mon 7-Jun-2021 23:23
Definitely deserved the win. I have found a bug: if you put the teenager doll on the white table, it doesn't appear, either there or on the smooth surface (though you can pick it up again).

I'm not so sure this is a bug...I suspect Nolan knows how to find his way back ;)
Anonymous
Wed 20-Apr-2022 05:25
I never tried it hoping that it would one day run on the venerable c64. Do you perhaps still consider to try to figure out a way to transcend the "more-than-one-disk-side-size-limitation"?
lft
Linus Åkesson
Wed 20-Apr-2022 08:23
By a curious coincidence I've started to think about this in the last week or so. Adding multi-side support to the interpreter is one approach, but I suspect the game would still run quite slowly because it needs a lot of RAM to store state, leaving less RAM for paging. So I think it's better to try to shrink the code footprint by improving the compiler. I have some ideas...
Anonymous
Sun 8-Oct-2023 16:33
might have found a bug: when the stegosaurus knocks stuff off the house, sometimes you can't put them back, almost like a "room fullness" counter isn't properly decreased...