IFComp08: Snack Time!
IFs this year have run the gamut from huge (Piracy 2.0) to tiny and stupid (too many to list). This is a game on the very short end, probably about 10-20 minutes of amusement. It's not especially deep, it's basically just one puzzle or several tiny puzzles, but it has some qualities the other tiny games don't have which keeps it from painful and stupid like the other short games.
Firstly, it has a (somewhat) novel narrator, a dog. This sort of thing (narrator with a unique take on the world, e.g. Grunk) has been done, so it's not totally new. But Snack Time! manages to both maintain this illusion while simultaneously not belaboring the narrator's limitations. For example, the game refers to the thing your pet (your human) is sleeping on as a 'long soft thing' but doesn't penalize you when you get sick of calling it a 'long soft thing' and just resort to calling it a 'couch'.
So, there's just one puzzle - get the human to give you some food. It's not really clear that you want the human's food, or that if you don't get some now you'll have to wait until dinner. Anyway, there's really only one way to accomplish this, and there's a bit of a time limit, but the price of starting over in such a short game isn't particularly high, so I won't penalize it for that.
Also, the hint system has an amusing Macguffin.
5/10. Good, simple, silly. Not especially deep, but could be a good intro for a newbie IF player.