I’m excited to announce something I’ve been working on for the past few months: a recommendation app for Interactive Fiction!
I’ve wanted to build a recommendation system from scratch on a real-world dataset with current models and techniques, and I’ve also wanted to get back into playing Interactive Fiction after being away from the scene for a few years. It’s cool to see this app out in the world now as something that I’ll personally use and that will also hopefully be useful to others in the community.
How it works
You search by game, author, reviewer, or vibe to get a list of games ranked according to semantic relevance from machine learning models. You can then filter the results by metadata (system, tags, years, user ratings, etc.) and you’re set to discover the next great IF game tailored to your interests.
- game: pick an IF game and get back games with a similar feel
- author: pick an IF author and get back games in their spirit (excluding their own)
- reviewer: pick an IFDB username and get back games that suit their taste based on their ratings (excluding ones they’ve played/rated)
- vibe: pick a set of systems/genres/tags and get back games that vibe with that set
Each search mode’s input becomes a query of systems/genres/tags, and two models rank against it: a fast two-tower encoder embeds the query and every game into a common space to pull a longlist of candidate games by similarity, then a slower but more accurate cross-encoder scores each candidate game against the query directly.
The game, author and reviewer rankings are pre-computed ahead of time and served as a lookup, whereas vibe is scored live and takes a few seconds to compute (queries may get queued based on traffic).
The source code is available on Github, and the data comes from IFDB via quarterly database dumps published to the IF Archive (around 15K games, 80K ratings, and 20K users as of June 2026). After filtering to games with enough signal to learn from, the app ultimately lets you search around 10K games, 6K authors and 3K reviewers.
Go play something
I’m excited to start playing some of the top games I discovered when passing my IFDB username into reviewer mode, with Les lettres du Docteur Jeangille and The Absence of Miriam Lane up next for me. What’s next for you?