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Ask HN: Great text based games to play?
218 points by cgb223 on Jan 21, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 157 comments
I’m of a younger generation, and have seen a lot of references to text based games in popular media. Games where it gives you a prompt like “You are in a forest” and you can type things like “I climb a tree” or “I look around” and it responds to that.

I’d love to try one of these out. I have a modern computer so I’m guessing it’ll have to be emulated somehow, but what do you recommend as a great text based game to try? Like ones that really make you think and get creative




I help run the Interactive Fiction Database. https://ifdb.org/

I think that our list of games ranked by review scores is certainly the finest repository of extraordinary text-based games in the world. https://ifdb.org/search?browse

Every game on that list is fantastic. For your reading convenience, the top ten are: Counterfeit Monkey, Anchorhead, Superluminal Vagrant Twin, 80 Days, Hadean Lands, Lost Pig, The Wizard Sniffer, Violet, and The Impossible Bottle.

You can click the "Play Online" button on almost any game in IFDB to play it right there in your browser, without downloading anything.

IFDB also includes all of the 20th century classics, including Infocom games, but IMO the modern games have long-since outclassed them.

If you're curious, here's our list of top-ranked Infocom games. https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=tag:infocom The top-ranked Infocom games are science-fiction games, topped by Trinity, Infocom's surreal "Alice in Wonderland" time-travel game, followed by Planetfall and A Mind Forever Voyaging.


Counterfeit Monkey is great writing:

  To review, we're Alexandra now. I was Alex, before the synthesis. You were...
 
  >I don't know
  ...oh boy. Okay. Okay. I need you on form here. This is going to be hard if you don't remember being Andra. Not panicking. As far as I can tell, the operation was a success. We're meant to be one person now, unrecognizable to anyone who knew us before.
hehe


Counterfeit Monkey is my all-time favorite. I like it so much, I made a mobile-friendly demo:

https://memalign.github.io/m/counterfeitmonkey/index.html


Nicely done! What are all those trees on the right? https://ibb.co/kSG36JX Some sort of game map?


Yeah, it’s the map which is slowly revealed as you move between locations.


Unable to play any of these online in Chrome on Windows - first 3 games I tried fail to load with the message TypeError: failed to fetch.

Update looks like it's timing out so maybe server is getting hammered.


I just want to pipe in with a personal standout from when I used to play more IF, which is _King of Shreds and Patches_, Lovecraft in the London of Shakespeare, and worth a playthrough.


Hadean Lands also has a mobile app version, with a button-oriented interface so you don't have to type so much on a touchscreen keyboard.


Just want to agree with the fun that ‘80 days’ is :)

There’s also ‘Magium’, which is not really a game so much as interactive fiction.


Infocom adventure games are some of the grand-daddy's of text adventures.

Zork is by far the most well known, but also pretty infamous are Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Godesses' of Phobos and A Mind Forever Voyaging.

As a warm-up, I'd recommend Moonmist. It's a mystery game listed as a "Beginner" game, and is great for introducing elements of the Infocom system.

The feelies are available to view here: https://gallery.guetech.org/greybox.html

There are a collection of game files here: https://eblong.com/infocom/

My preferred player is still Frotz. It compiles and runs on practically anything, my Psion, my Pis, Windows, everything.

https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/frotz


> feelies

This is a term we're going to have to explain to the younger generation: when games were shipped in boxes, those contained at minimum a disc and a printed manual, but some companies came up with gimmick items you could put in the box and "feel", to enhance your immersion in the game.

I still have my Ultima 6 "moonstone" and cloth map somewhere.


They also sometimes included essentially proto-copy protection, e.g. you need this decoder wheel to solve some puzzle--which of course worked a lot better pre-Web.

A lot of the original packaging could be rather unique generally but eventually they ended up standardizing for retail shelving.


I still love the wheel and manuals of SSI Gold Box games. Apparently there wasn't enough space for all those texts so the games guide you to read say Page 31 for a certain long dialog.

I actually think it gives a lot of immersion than modern day AAA games.


I actually am from the box/manual generation and never heard it called 'feelies'.. I remember to register some games i would have to look up charts or keys in the manual, or on page numbers


IIRC 'feelies' was a term coined at Infocom by Brian Moriarty for the extra gewgaws that wound up in the boxes. I don't think the term was used much elsewhere in the industry, even though it did become part of the general gamer vernacular at the time.


I should ask some of the other Infocom folks one of these days. I imagine one of them remember.


I recall this being a term in paper-age SF, a fututristic trope of what mass entertainment might become. A “feely” was a sort of movie that involved touch. It was almost always described somewhat disapprovingly, as a sign of future decadence.


It was in Brave New World, and I think originated there. The Feelies are also a jangle-rock band.


Oh, so that’s it. I couldn’t recall which one.


It's sad that game publishers don't do it anymore since I don't know when. Everything goes online nowadays. Boring.


Actually, there are a LOT of 'collector's edition' versions of physical games from publishers like Limited Run, Super Rare, and iam8bit. Check out this Cuphead package, for example:

https://www.iam8bit.com/collections/collectors-editions/prod...

Now, for many of us, they are prohibitively expensive, but they are available.


You are right. They are indeed very expensive.


That particular example is above the typical price, I think, but they're certainly called collector's editions for a reason. It's a shame, but I suspect the majority are purchased and left unopened.


Loved my Peril Sensitive Sunglasses from HHGTTG


Planetfall is another by the same author as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Godesses of Phobos and A Mind Forever Voyaging. AMFV doesn't get the love it deserves. It is more about real interactive fiction than puzzle solving. Hitchhiker's is enticing but pretty difficult--not as big an issue perhaps these days as it's so easy to "cheat" if you get stuck as opposed to calling the author :-)

Trinity is another good one. As is The Lurking Horror--set at a thinly-veiled MIT campus where many of the authors were from.


Planetfall Enchanter Trilogy Starcross (took place inside a space station -- map was wrap-around) Suspended was harder but definitely very good


Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short. https://github.com/i7/counterfeit-monkey/releases Maps and cheat sheets are in the "Counterfeit Monkey.materials" folder.

If you don't want to install a parser on your computer, you can play it online by putting the link to the .gblorb file into https://iplayif.com/ I.e. https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fi7%2Fc...

Modern games are generally going to be more approachable than old ones. Tastes have changed considerably. In the days when you couldn't pull up a walkthrough in a few seconds, taking days to think of the next step was part of the fun, and just getting permanently stuck at some point was fairly common. Also, letting the player keep going even after they have done something to make the game unwinnable is now considered very uncool. Navigation is much less tedious these days as well, fast travel for example, although the exact mechanics depend on the game.

And that's not mentioning the amount of CPU and RAM available, not only for the game's runtime, but also for tools like I7 (which was used to write Counterfeit Monkey).

For an quicker introduction to modern "interactive fiction", as it's called these days, check out competition entries. https://intfiction.org/c/competitions/7 These are generally written in a shorter amount of time and the results are quicker to play through.


My vast nostalgia for Infocom games--and the vast care and effort that went into those games--notwithstanding, they were written using 40 year old tech to run on machines that, at least initially, might have had a floppy disk and maybe 64K of memory (or less). Yes, they're more playable than a lot of graphics games of the time would be today, but they're from a different age.

Still dip into them every now and then though :-)


Savoir-Faire (https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=p0cizeb3kiwzlm2p) is another incredible game of hers.


Start here! --> A Dark Room [1]

A Dark Room is awesome. It's also what got my kids hooked on programming once they learned they could use a browser's developer console to write JavaScript to change various in-game variables.

Edit: A Dark Room isn't strictly a text-based game in the sense where there is much typing on a keyboard. It's more a point-and-click text-heavy game. But it still feels very much in the spirit of a classic text-based (typing) game.

[1]: https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/


Is the dark room really text based? First you see is a GUI with a button.


This is a fun one I played recently about shopping in a grocery store, called Aisle. You only have a single command you can give for the whole game, but there's a looot of them you can provide, and it gives you a different ending for each. Part of the fun is trying to figure out what you can say to find another ending. You can play it directly at the link below.

Play: https://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2F...


…by Sam Barlow, now better-known for the live-action video games Her Story, Telling Lies and Immortality.


"Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle" popped into my head not long ago and I thought wow, that's a reference not a lot of people in this world would understand.


Some great resources:

* Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) https://ifdb.org/

* IFWiki https://www.ifwiki.org/

* Playfic https://playfic.com/

* The Interactive Fiction Competition https://ifcomp.org/

* XYZZY Awards http://xyzzyawards.org/

* electronic book review http://electronicbookreview.com/

* Electronic Literature Organization https://eliterature.org/


If you reference XYZZY, you need to suggest Colossal Cave! I think this is the text game that inspired all the others (and the only game I've ever played on VAX/VMS). You may be able to run it with `advent` on Linux. There used to be an Emacs command for it (maybe `M-x adventure`?), but I don't remember it and I can't seem to find it on Google. It looks like there's also a Python version at https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/python-adventure


I actually made a browser version of Colossal Cave! It does some extra basic NLP to make the experience better too. Give it a try: https://adventure.chalifoux.dev/


Broadly speaking there are two big "threads" to follow here. You have your MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon)[1] & MOOs (MUD, Object Oriented)[2] which are played over the network, and are more or less the text based equivalent to MMORPGs. Then you have your IF (Interactive Fiction)[3] / text adventure game that installs and runs locally like the old Infocom games. There is, of course, some overlap here.

You can find lists and links for MUDs and MOOs in several places, but one good resource is mudlistings.com[4]. For Interactive Fiction / text adventures, try the IFReviews[5] and IFdb[6] sites.

If you want specific recommendations... I'd say start with the canonical OG interactive fiction game, Colossal Cave[7]. It's available from the distro package managers on most Linux systems as "adventure" or "advent" or something along those lines. Another interesting one is "Battlestar"[8] which is usually available as part of the "bsdgames" package.

For a good MUD, I'm personally a fan of Avatar[9].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction

[4]: https://mudlistings.com/

[5]: http://www.ifreviews.org/

[6]: https://ifdb.org/

[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

[8]: https://www.ifwiki.org/Battlestar

[9]: https://www.outland.org/news.php


https://www.mudverse.com/


Emily Short, a core member of the interactive fiction community, maintains an excellent, well-curated guide to help people find games that might suit their tastes.

https://emshort.blog/how-to-play/reading-if/


Now largely forgotten, UK company Magnetic Scrolls produced some of the best examples in the genre - but it might take some work to get them running, as they had (non-interactive) graphics and a simple menu/windowing system which were state of the art at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_Scrolls

The Pawn and Corruption received especially high praise.

Hard mode: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Bureaucracy, both by Douglas Adams. Bureaucracy is outright sadistic. I solved it with a friend over a couple months after us both failing solo for much longer, and we celebrated our win with alcohol. I still remember the crushing hangover, Adamsesque in its dimensions and intensity. Worth it.


Magnetic Scrolls! Thanks for the blast from the past.

Here’s a great snippet from an interview with Anita Sinclair, one of the founders:

How do you design your adventures? We have three development systems. We've got the VAX, which runs UNIX, and all the machine-dependent stuff gets developed on that. So when we've finished writing a game, we then upload it to the VAX, which does all the cross-compiling for us for the different machines. We then have Mac II's and Xenix machines, which run AU/X and XENT, and we have sub-development systems on that. All our tools are written in C.

https://msmemorial.if-legends.org/articles.htm/stnews4v4.php


I just noticed that you can play all the Magnetic Scrolls games online from that sites home page:

https://msmemorial.if-legends.org/memorial.php

Click on the chalice and there goes the weekend…


Strand Games have remastered some of the original Magnetic Scrolls games (The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves and Jinxter so far) for modern PCs.

https://strandgames.com/


Zork is of course the quintessential TBAG, alongside Hitchikers.

A couple of other good ones: Vespers: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=6dj2vguyiagrhvc2 9:05: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=qzftg3j8nh5f34i2 Slouching Towards Bedlam: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=032krqe6bjn5au78 (I haven't actually played this one but it's on my list)

I usually play Zork using the Rezrov project: https://metacpan.org/dist/Games-Rezrov/view/rezrov


+1 for 9:05. It’s sort, simple, and has one heck of a twist.


Any discussion of text games puts me in mind of the amazing blog and forthcoming book, "50 Years of Text Games": https://if50.substack.com/ Highly recommended and target of a recent Kickstarter which blew through its reserve by well over an order of magnitude.


If you're a fan of Tolkien, check out MUME (Multi-user Middle Earth), a MUD that's been online since 1990: https://mume.org/

Its unofficial community site is http://elvenrunes.com/ which has hosted forums and player-submitted "logs" (text logs of PvP fights) for over 20 years.


WoTMUD was pretty awesome too, I haven't looked to see if it's still online for years.


It is online and still quite active! Drop into the discord and say hello.

I spent many of my formative years on wotmud.


Is Trill still sitting at the Keep well, refusing to be useful?


Aw, that brings me back. It's so nice to meet another wotmudder in the wild!


I played MUME a ton in the mid to late 1990s, and still login once in a while.

It's truly a hidden gem. Walking around the world often feels like being inside a Tolkien novel.


I remember playing the two towers growing up

My internet/pc were never enough to run games but good enough to run a t2t client.

brings me back


tThe general term is "interactive fiction", and the ancestor is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure : you can play it in a browser at https://rickadams.org/adventure/advent/, and when you've tried it the source is small enough to just read through.

More recently the scene converged on the programming language "inform" https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ - so Inform games are portable. They're easy to write.

Infocom produced a whole series: https://if.illuminion.de/infocom.html ; try Trinity. Hitchhiker's is notoriously difficult and "unfair".


more Colossal Cave nostalgia: https://meheller.medium.com/adventure-3e663876d257

note that Willie Crowther was on the IMP team and probably wrote code related to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34165014


I've always had a soft spot for McMurphy's Mansion, a game where you look around your Scottish relative's estate to find 12 good bars. I have good memories of figuring this out with my Scottish grandmother as a child. You can play it with DOSBox or on Internet Archive.

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=gkqdo58j2zvjtxnk

https://archive.org/details/McMurphysMansionV1.5SW1989martin...

Apart from that, from short to long, some usual IF recommendations are:

Interstate 0: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=a3ym4ipix7sjsfrf

Glowgrass: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=b1xy3s75cjlty973

Anchorhead: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7

A Mind Forever Voyaging: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4h62dvooeg9ajtfa

You can also look for other beginner lists: https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=beginner&searchgo=Search+L...

You need an "interpreter" to play most of these, look up Gargoyle: http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/


The Grapevine network[0] is a fun little community of different MUDs where you can connect and hang out with other people who enjoy text-based worlds. If you're looking for something to play on your own, winners of the IF competition[1] are often excellent.

[0]: https://grapevine.haus

[1]: https://ifcomp.org/comp/2022


Grapevine is awesome. Good call-out.


Don't click. https://kittensgame.com

I take absolutely no responsibility for the consequences of clicking this link.

Remember: Praise the sun, and Zebras hate you for no reason.


Tip: if you are like me and can't help but play games that are elaborate loading screens that sap your productivity, try using cheats. It gets rid of the pull to play fast once you jump through all the content.


I'm playing for 30+ hours now. What have you done.


Spider and Web, https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/

Without giving anything away: It does something brilliant that wouldn't be possible in any other storytelling medium.


Even though it's famous inside (and out?) of text game circles, this is a game I still wish had a wider reach. It really just does something with video games that I didn't think was possible before playing it, and haven't seen explored satisfactorily since. Unfortunately, you sort of need to know how to play text games to appreciate it.

If anyone reading has tried text games and have found they just aren't for you, you can get somewhat of a proxy of the experience by reading through this community let's play of the game (https://adventuregamers.com/forums/viewthread/8481). Although long (like the game), I think it brings you on the typical journey of playing, even if you aren't necessarily making the connections yourself (which would normally be a big part of the appeal).


Seconded! And put on the album "Eye in the Sky" by The Alan Parsons Project while you play. I happened to listen to that while playing the game and thematically it's very appropriate.


I think you could do most of it as a point and click. Perhaps with the exception of that one command (if you know what I mean) because the mere possibility of it would be revealing in a point-and-click. But you could do that in a Sierra AGI type graphical adventure because that still has a parser.

On topic, I would myself recommend Coloratura - https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=g0fl99ovcrq2sqzk - for the sense of wonder/unusual protagonist.


For something that’s not a text adventure (the best of which are great), there’s also nethack.

Be warned, it’s insanely difficult and a massive time suck.


Or more broadly, rogue-likes.

My favourites are definitely Nethack and DCSS (aka crawl). I would also like to try Cogmind (but it's unfortunately Windows-only), and maybe Dwarf Fortress. Other noteworthy titles are ADOM and Moria/Angband.

There's a lot going on these days in this genre that kinda departs from some of the core ideas of a roguelike, the term "roguelite" is sometimes used. It's a fun rabbit hole to go down into, lots of really good games.


there is a large archive of roguelikes available here:

https://archive.org/details/ArchiveRL.7z


Skip the official/mainline game, go directly to the fork with usability enhancements.

https://github.com/search?q=nethack4

http://nethack4.org


Also Evilhack has a lot of improvements and more interesting gameplay than vanilla Nethack. I would definitely recommend trying it.


I don't know whether this thread answered your question, but I just posted about a game I built on Show HN. Here's the link - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34585909.


Photopia by Adam Cadre. https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=ju778uv5xaswnlpl

It's short and sweet game and a good introduction to interactive fiction (IF) in my opinion.


Check out the list on Mudlet (https://mudlet.org), it's a FOSS desktop app for playing online test games you describe. Comes with a selection of good games pre -configured.


Look for MUDs and MOOs[1]

I've liked and played in the past a lot of these text based role playing games, especially when I was on a shittier dial up connection or remote satellite connections. I liked Aardwolf and Realms of Despair the most. I've played the IRE games like Achaea and Aetolia way too much. While those two definitely have a great lore and many active players, I have always loathed IREs pay to win "credits" style.

Text based gaming is still alive and evolving. Just don't expect a AAA game and definitely not single player.

[1] https://www.topmudsites.com/


I would never recommend an Iron Realms game to someone for a couple of reasons.

One being the pay to win aspects where players who pay real money to buy items get major advantages.

Another being the amount of grinding required to level up.

I'd recommend Akanbar instead. It has no pay to win features. Balance based real time combat loosely based on the old Avalon game (Achaea did not invent balance based mud combat, it came from the now dead game 'Avalon') and you don't have to learn a coding language just to become competitive and partake effectively in the pvp if that's a part of the game you have interest in.

It sits in a sweet spot between complexity and simplicity and has a fun concept, well made guilds and a dedicated playerbase and admin.


I agree, I wouldn't recommend IRE games these days for anyone; especially newcomers. Same reasons and quite a few other ones. But it's has been quite a few years since I had time to engage in any type of MMO or MUD though, so I don't have any current up to date recommendations.


The IRE games are very well done. I too have spent many, many hours in Achaea, and more recently (a year or two ago) in Starmourn.

You can get by without paying for credits, though it does involve more in-game grinding. For me, what made me lose my interest in these games is the role playing requirement. I understand that for some people that is part of the fun, but I could never really get into it.


Very sadly, TMS was shifted to an archive-only format a short while ago. End of an era. It looks like Mud Connect is dead, too. Not sure there are any aggregators still standing? :/


https://www.mudverse.com/ is actively maintained.


Thanks for that! As someone who got into tech directly because of MUDs, it was sad to see TMS go.


I loved playing Aardwolf years and years ago. I was a big fan of godwars type mostly. What a flashback!


Play CYPHER, Cyberpunk Text Adventure here: https://cabrerabrothers.com

"Ever since you came back from the Moon colonies you've been struggling to get into the smuggling business again. Things aren't as easy as they once were though, especially without your old pal Eddie around. It was him who brought all the major players in the market to do business with. And boy did they line up to hire you. Even the Yakuza used to pay almost twice the standard rate for moving passcodes through the international borders inside your Synapse.

All you've got now is a French crook that goes by the name of Lime, who cares more about setting up his own deals than bringing new quality customers on board to work with.

You always knew working with that french bastard was trouble, only you never realized how much until one of the deals he had setup went wrong."

# Make your way through the crowded streets of NeoSushi City!

A deal that goes wrong. A beautiful young woman wearing red cowboy boots following you into a Yakuza nightclub. A pack of Retrievers hired to chop your head off and "Mr.Smith", a mysterious man who claims to be a friend in a world where everyone is after the passcode stored in your Synapse. Will you live long enough to see what it unlocks?"

From the game's website:

CYPHER Cyberpunk Text Adventure is unlike anything you have ever played before; it is a whole new dimension in game interaction and storytelling you can vividly experience from within the realms of your own imagination!

Think of a book or movie you like the most, now imagine for a moment a limitless world of interaction and adventure where you not only take control of the main character of the story, but ARE the main character of the story! Every word you say, every decision or action you take is exclusively your own in the world of CYPHER.

In Text Adventures you communicate with the game world through conversational English sentences, the same way you would do in a chatroom or writing emails. The story unravels into a thrilling interactive experience that will keep you on the edge of your seat for hours... as long as you can escape death.


My first computer game in the mid 80s was a text adventure game called “Hunt the Wumpus”, voted one of the top 100 games of all time.

Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus

Emulator: https://archive.org/details/Hunt_the_Wumpus_1977_Creative_Co...


That brought back some good memories! My dad and I enjoyed playing the TI 99/4 variant quite a bit, though that version is more of a graphical game than a text adventure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkWJMU16GrU


You can play Zork online: https://playclassic.games/games/adventure-dos-games-online/p...

And the granddaddy of them all, Adventure: https://rickadams.org/adventure/advent/


- Anchorhead. "anchor.z8". Not libre software, but cool. And, one day, it might be. You need a Z-Machine interpreter, such as Frotz.

- Dungeon. That's Zork I-III, condensed. More pure to the original adventures than the Infocom's further changes. 70% of chances of being libre software in a very close future, few months of years.

- Spiritwrak. A Zorkian adventure, but libre software. Good to play.

- Spider and Web. "Tangle.z5". Like the movie "Memento", based on flashbacks on an interrogation. You must recall what you've done and how.

- Vicious Cycles. "Cycles.z5". Close to the movie "Source Code", but the game came earlier.

- All Things Devours. "Devours.z5". A time travelling puzzle. You can compile it from source: https://jxself.org/git/devours

- Slashem. Not text adventures, but a roguelike. Buuut... Slashem comes from Nethack and that from Hack until you arrive to Rogue as the origin, and that game it's basically Adventure+RPG concepts+a top down view. Also, objects matter a lot on a text adventure because of their interaction. The same happens in Slashem, combat and proper usage of objects are equally needed to win.


May I recommend bitburner? > Bitburner is a programming-based incremental game that revolves around hacking and cyberpunk themes.

https://github.com/danielyxie/bitburner https://danielyxie.github.io/bitburner/


It's not quite what you're describing, but it's an amazing game built entirely in ASCII: http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com (not playable on mobile).

The guy who built the mobile app did a really interesting recording about how the blind community picked up on it in a way that hadn't anticipated thanks to screen readers.


I just asked chatGPT if it could act as game master for a text-based rpg and it says "sure" and proceeded to start the story telling. Amazing.


I just did the same thing. It sent me on a campaign to recover an ancient artifact, but it played out the whole scenario for me without stopping to ask what decisions I would make, and there was zero conflict along the way. Nice descriptions of the forest and labyrinth my character had to navigate though.


I did this a couple of weeks ago. At first it refused, saying it was just a language model or something like that. I said "go north" and it just started up a game.

I also tried to get it to play a game of Rogue for me w/ the old ascii graphics, but it held firm in its refusal on that one.


https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/


Hadean Lands is a great modern IF game where you learn alchemical rituals, and have to figure out the meaning behind them to modify the ritual to solve puzzles. And I’ll second the recommendation for Emily Short’s Counterfeit Monkey.

Another fun interesting one is Aisle… the whole game is a single command, but you can enter all sorts of things, and get different outcomes.


I tried to revive the medium 14 years ago. The remnants are at https://textfyre.itch.io/. Shadow in the Cathedral received strong reviews and Jack Toresal has a unique interface if you can get Silverlight running.


Gemstone (currently Gemstone IV) is an online MUD that has been around for 30+ years and has a pretty thriving community and very active development as well as strong gamemaster interaction. https://www.play.net/gs4/

There is a free subscription but it is quite limited compared to the paid membership. I used to play back in the mid 90s and resubscribed a few years ago because I have found nothing else nearly as complex or immersive. Steep learning curve to start but folks are often willing to help others learn. Check out the learning wiki at https://gswiki.play.net/Main_Page


I learned about Gemstone from this great article by historian and former player Benjamin Breen:

http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/10/dont-cry-for-me-elanth...


Check out ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery.) It’s been around for a long time and has a great story to it.


For a modern one that was great, on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/339350/Choice_of_Robots/


If you want to try a multiplayer text game I'd recommend Akanbar.

I would say it has the best qualities of many text games and MUDs with less of the weaknesses of its rivals.

You don't need an emulator, you can play from the website, however it's usually advised to download a client to connect from (Mudlet, Cmud, Mushclient, TinTin) so that you can make use of triggers (copy and paste a line from the game into the client so that if that line comes up again your character will react automatically with a 'triggered' response) and aliases (shorten commands, make 'sh' sip health instead of typing it out everytime).


The Zork Anthology is available on GOG (https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_zork_anthology), there are also a few of them on IA like Star Trek - The Kobayashi Alternative (https://archive.org/details/msdos_Star_Trek_-_The_Kobayashi_...).

Some of my favourites are Enchanter and the great classic Planetfall.


>great classic Planetfall

There's an extremely inside joke about me in Planetfall relating to the author's rather odd sense of humor. And, no, I'm not going to reveal it :-)

Planetfall is probably one of the more accessible Infocom games even if less-known or less name recognition.


This one is short, fun and illustrated with emojis.

https://memalign.github.io/p/dungeon-memalign.html


Thanks for playing and sharing it!

Direct link to the game:

https://memalign.github.io/m/dungeon/index.html


https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

Does this count?


I would love to find a text-based, strategy game - imagine something like Master of Magic, Master of Orion 2, or Total War Warhammer, or something like that, but just text-based.


Not exactly what you are looking for, but Hidden Agenda is an interesting text-based strategy game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Agenda_(1988_video_game...


You just made me think of Guerrilla in Bolivia [0], a text-based strategy game with some basic graphics, from 1990.

Edit: and also "The global dilemma: guns or butter" [1], also from 1990.

[0]: https://www.mobygames.com/game/ch-guerilla-in-bolivia

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Dilemma:_Guns_or_Bu...


Dwarf Fortress? http://bay12games.com/dwarves/


AI Dungeon generates endless text adventures: https://aidungeon.io


50 Years of Text Games

https://if50.substack.com/archive


Taco Fiction: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=2ej7ntbmoit9ytvy

You can use gargoyle as your IF player and run many games https://github.com/garglk/garglk/releases


One avenue for text games is the BBS “door” games of the 1990s, which you can still find online today (see: telnetbbsguide.com). Trade Wars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, and Barren Realms Elite are some classics. These are turns-based games where you log in each day to play your set of turns. It can be addictive.


Trade Wars was a fantastic game, but that last time I played about a decade ago a lot of people had turned to automation which took a lot of the fun out of it, for me personally.


Roadwarden is a recent text adventure that has some sections like the ones you want. The story is pretty good too.


When I was growing up we had a BBC Micro and the sine qua non of text based adventure games were those made by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_9_Computing

Good luck finding an emulator though.


Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/interactivefiction/ . It's surprisingly lively and they have lots of recommendations for beginners.


“Gostak” is a truly unique game. It’s like Zork, but many of the nouns and verbs are made up words.


Here’s a link: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=w5s3sv43s3p98v45


Violet is exceptionally good: https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/e-utl5-bu0yya2ycst0m...


Apart from IF, I still sorely miss playing MUDs from when I was younger. Some of the worlds created by amateur writers were truly magical. Something I haven't ever quite got the same feeling from any graphical MMO.


Came here to say the same. Somehow some of the locations from interactive fiction still live in my memory in a way graphical adventures don't.


If you don't know who infocom are, check out their stuff, and as a companion check out the eaten by a grue podcast

https://monsterfeet.com/grue/

Edit, autocorrect


Does anybody of a way to play text adventure games on your phone using text to speech and audio only? Last time I looked for something that did this I couldn't find anything. Seems like there should be a demand for it.


For Android there's an app called Audio IF that might do what you're looking for.


There is a great one still active right now. It’s a crime text based MMO called Torn City You can use my referral link

https://torn.com/1514924


You can read this blog(soon a book to be published) : https://if50.substack.com

It goes over the most important and influential text adventure games.


Check and see if any of the MUDs are still online, WoTMUD was tons of fun.


Pretty sure the Archlinux official repos had a package called "bsdgames" or similar that included a game like that. It's not there now. Maybe it got split up or sent to the AUR.


bsdgames is usually available on most *nix type OS's and probably some non-*nix ones as well. There's all sorts of neat stuff in that package:

https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/BSD_games


It is bsd-games in the community repository, and trek in AUR. The bsd-games package includes Adventure, which is the traditional text adventure game. Those packages also include a collection of other text based games that demonstrate how varied text based games can be.


Years ago there was Nuke Zone, but not sure if it's still around

edit: it is still around, but got renamed https://assault.online


If you want to try a multiplayer text game I'd recommend Akanbar.

I would say it has the best qualities of many text games and MUDs with less of the weaknesses of its rivals.


Already mentioned, but another hearty recommendation for Planetfall. I played that game in the 1980s, and I still enjoy playing it from time to time.


“Stories Untold” on Steam might be a fun start. It’s a 3D game which simulates the experience of playing short horror text adventures alone at home.


telnet discworld.starturtle.net


Aardwolf mud: https://www.aardwolf.com/


Anchorhead! My favourite game of all time.


What about these games like Leisure Suit Larry? They were graphical but I think you typed the instructions?


For those, check out Scumm VM:

https://www.scummvm.org/


I’ve been looking for a text based game in the style of bootleggers. Those management style games are fun.


Are there any inhabited and lively MUDS/MUSHes/MUXes still around? I miss those.


I loved these games far more than reasonable when I was young.

However for me, the appeal has passed.


none would be my opinion. i started playing and writing these kind of games in the early 80s, and IMHO none comes near to something like bg2 or morrowind, if a retro experience is what you want.


Lmao I wanna test later if ChatGPT can entertain me with this.


Saw this one today it's on Steam

Warsim Realm of Aslona

ASCII based kind of neat


https://store.steampowered.com/app/659540/Warsim_The_Realm_o...


You should look into /r/mud games.


Dragonrealms!


I still play from time to time. For the most part the only in game communities tend to just use the world props as a prop/sandbox for freeform roleplaying. The people who script level their characters tend to talk on discord and probably other chats. I don't think spontaneous in game interaction is much of a thing anymore.


IMO Dragonrealms was great in the late 90s and early 2000s, but when I tried to get back into it in 2020 I found that rampant AFK scripting for skill progression killed my desire to put much time into it. It was supposedly still against the rules, but those rules were basically completely unenforced and people would just flagrantly violate them while the GMs didn't seem to care. I ended up canceling my account after about a month.


That's pretty much modern Dragonrealms, yeah. It really is a shame. The golden age of the was unmatched though.


Gemstone iv @ play.net


telnet 6000 4dimensions.org


Linux


Photopia

Varicella

Violet

(these three impressed me the most)


Here's one I made with ChatG, with DallE images too. But otherwise a choose your own adventure/Zork clone.

Two stories:

  - your spaceship has crash landed

  - Breaking Rad: what of Walt & Jesse cooked acid instead of meth (a friend's idea)
Needs you to have an OpenAI key.

They're super fun

https://pablo-mayrgundter.github.io/artificial-adventure/




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