Many, many historic text adventures are available in the browser, thanks to the Parchment interpreter. You can find them on the IFDB, and click the link to play online. One of my favourites among the classics are Plundered Hearts[1].
There's also a lively community of people who make modern text adventures. These tend to be shorter and more well designed than many of the cruel games of the past. My all-time favourite is The Wise-Woman's Dog[2], a passion project with a very high quality bar.
Text adventures are great[3], and no, as of yet, they are not improved by LLMs. Too inconsistent, too much hallucination. They can't even play text adventures well.
> With the cantankerous Wizard of Wordplay evicted from his mansion, the worthless plot can now be redeveloped. The city regulations declare, however, that the rip-down job can't proceed until all the items within have been removed.
It's full of delightful wordplay and puzzles that play with the text-adventure medium, constraining what words you can use. Highly recommended.
Mine is ‘Anchorhead’ (1998), by Michael Gentry. I think it’s actually my favourite game of all time, of all genres.
I’ve played the old, text-only, Z-code version back in high school, around 1997, and the experience was so vivid and immersive that to this day I can draw a map of Anchorhead from memory and recite the lineage of the Verlac family. I think it’s still my favourite game of all time (although I spent much more time on some others).
These days, an illustrated version can be bought on Steam for something like $10. Highly recommended!
After spending way too long trying to press a button that doesn't do anything (press button, depress button, push button, button, press the button) or trying to talk to the speaker (say open, talk to speaker, talk at speaker, shout at speaker) I got frustrated and used claude to give me a walkthrough based on the source code.
The wikipedia page on this game is wild too - from the developer themselves: "It violated most, if not all, of the design guidelines for good interactive fiction in that you could get killed much too easily, the puzzles were way too obscure (many based on Saturday morning cartoons from my youth), but it had a certain charm".
Taking cryptic to an entirely new level.
All those saturday mornings I wasted as a kid watching cartoons like Animaniacs, DuckTales, and Thundercats aren’t even going to help me here. The game was written in 1979, so I’m guessing the puzzles are more closely based on Hanna-Barbera series like Magilla Gorilla, Jonny Quest, and The Herculoids.
Many, many historic text adventures are available in the browser, thanks to the Parchment interpreter. You can find them on the IFDB, and click the link to play online. One of my favourites among the classics are Plundered Hearts[1].
There's also a lively community of people who make modern text adventures. These tend to be shorter and more well designed than many of the cruel games of the past. My all-time favourite is The Wise-Woman's Dog[2], a passion project with a very high quality bar.
Text adventures are great[3], and no, as of yet, they are not improved by LLMs. Too inconsistent, too much hallucination. They can't even play text adventures well.
[1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=ddagftras22bnz8h
[2]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs
[3]: https://entropicthoughts.com/the-greatness-of-text-adventure...
My favorite of all time is "Ad Verbum".
> With the cantankerous Wizard of Wordplay evicted from his mansion, the worthless plot can now be redeveloped. The city regulations declare, however, that the rip-down job can't proceed until all the items within have been removed.
It's full of delightful wordplay and puzzles that play with the text-adventure medium, constraining what words you can use. Highly recommended.
Mine is ‘Anchorhead’ (1998), by Michael Gentry. I think it’s actually my favourite game of all time, of all genres.
I’ve played the old, text-only, Z-code version back in high school, around 1997, and the experience was so vivid and immersive that to this day I can draw a map of Anchorhead from memory and recite the lineage of the Verlac family. I think it’s still my favourite game of all time (although I spent much more time on some others).
These days, an illustrated version can be bought on Steam for something like $10. Highly recommended!
How was this built? It's gorgeous, I've been wanting to have a cool-retro-term in the browser for a long while.
If this was built ad-hoc for this game, fair play, but I would love to have this library if it's a library.
Ligatures in the retro terminal kill the illusion.
Spoilers in link.
After spending way too long trying to press a button that doesn't do anything (press button, depress button, push button, button, press the button) or trying to talk to the speaker (say open, talk to speaker, talk at speaker, shout at speaker) I got frustrated and used claude to give me a walkthrough based on the source code.
Turns out the correct command was "hi"
here's the walkthrough: https://pastebin.com/LHnFRFjw
Derp. Thanks. I was exactly stuck at the freaking button right now and not finding any help online. Yet :D
> Have you played before?
> No.
> I assume that means yes.
Yeah, that's that half-century-old state of the art in natural language processing working...
It's not NLP and it never was. The parser accepts a language with a specific syntax that just happens to vaguely look like English.
Some practise is required to become fluent in that language. But it's worth it, because it unlocks many amazing text adventures!
Thank you for explaining the joke.
I got on to a bus then nothing happened/worked.
Look, I think modern games with giant GO HERE arrows are dumb, but these games were an exercise in patience beyond necessary.
The wikipedia page on this game is wild too - from the developer themselves: "It violated most, if not all, of the design guidelines for good interactive fiction in that you could get killed much too easily, the puzzles were way too obscure (many based on Saturday morning cartoons from my youth), but it had a certain charm".
Taking cryptic to an entirely new level.
All those saturday mornings I wasted as a kid watching cartoons like Animaniacs, DuckTales, and Thundercats aren’t even going to help me here. The game was written in 1979, so I’m guessing the puzzles are more closely based on Hanna-Barbera series like Magilla Gorilla, Jonny Quest, and The Herculoids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAUNT
walk around the wall and find the "speaker". Say hi. Never-mind the button doesn't do anything.