It’s barely mentioned aside from the title, but I just wanted to say that 80 Days is a really wonderful game that is well worth your time if you’re into text-based games.
It’s more of an interactive story than a puzzle game, with some light resource management elements. But the writing is wonderful and there are hundreds of possible paths and storylines to discover. Its replayability is very high, whether you’re trying to find the fastest route, seeking out the most remote locations or unlocking hidden subplots.
It really does well to invoke the spirit of adventure in travel, and it was a particular delight during the pandemic days when that wasn’t possible.
Plus they’ve open sourced the language and tools used to create the branching narrative!
The ink language mentioned in the article, created by Inkle studios for their games, is a joy to work with. It is designed to be embedded and makes writing branching dialog or complete stories very easy.
As well as 80 Days, I really liked Inkle's implementation of the old Steve Jackson Sorcery books (for iOS and other platforms). They really know how to polish their games.
Voyage of the Marigold[0] is a project I recently completed written in a mixture of ink and js for a the 2024 Spring Thing[1] Festival of Interactive Fiction. It didn't win a major prizes but I am happy with the way it turned out.
I loved the recent newsletter-turned-book '50 Years of Text Games' by Aaron Reed. It's a bunch of deep dives into a bunch of games from throughout history, most of which I hadn't heard of.
Yes! I was a backer for this while it was still running. Really cool series, don't have a physical copy of the book but do intend to get at least a digital copy at some point. Man that hard copy would make a GREAT coffee table book though...
I'm very familiar with the Infocom era and am still in touch with some of the folks. I admit I haven't kept up with the latest developments. Probably should take a look.
For folks interested in the early history, Jason Scott's Get Lamp documentary is highly recommended. (He also has an Infocom-focused edit.)
The latest developments in IF are pretty amazing compared to the Infocom days. The parsers are a lot more advanced and this was all before things like LLMs, which I assume could be used in some way here.
I had also written a document called "Tricky Document" which describes several tricks involved with Z-machine programming (many of which Infocom did not use). http://zzo38computer.org/zmachine/doc/tricky.txt (I also wrote implementations of Z-machine in C, PostScript, JavaScript, and Glulx.)
Another text adventure system that I know of is "OASYS". The VM code was not documented, although it did include source code, and I have figured it out from the source code and written a document. The included OAC compiler was rather limited (no include files, you could not call a function that is defined later in the file, ambiguous syntax, strings duplicated in the output file, no pointer types, no type checking, no macros, no arrays, no bitwise operations, spurious vocabulary entries, and various other limitations), so I had written my own compiler (which still uses the same VM code, but with an entirely different syntax).
It was also a great example of the 'feelies' that came with games back then - the peril sensitive sunglasses and little baggie of belly button lint. It helped bridge the virtual text world with a connection to the physical.
I still have the Infocom game Leather Goddesses of Phobos, complete with scratch and sniff card, and the 3-D (blue-red) glasses for the enclosed comic book. If you don't have VR or first-person, it was the next best thing: they told you when to scratch and sniff.
Favourite part of this game: the untangling cream and the bonus joke about the rabbit.
Most hated part of this game: HOP, CLAP, KWEEPA.
Also funny how I recall this stuff vividly more than 3 decades later!
My first experience of IF was the tape-based Classic Adventure on the Amstrad CPC. My family bought the CPC late 1985, I bought Amstrad Action in December 1985 and saw the advert for it and new I wanted it more than all the other games that were reviewed with their flashy graphics and beeps and what-have-you.
Loved text adventures since my CPC6128 days. They are about the only things I could still use my Psion 5 for. I have Lost Treasures 1 and 2, and the Classics on CD.
There is a love/hate relationship with most of those old text adventures. They could make an entire world with just a handful of words and fill them with clever puzzles to delight the users.
But then the parser would be willfully obtuse and most of the gameplay would be figuring out the exact combination of commands to unlock the next snippit of the story. Sometimes requiring the player to telepathically connect with the developer to figure out precisely what phrasing he intended.
You see a special looking rock on the ground.
> PICK UP THE ROCK
Huh?
> PICK UP ROCK
Huh?
> PICK UP SPECIAL ROCK
Huh?
> PICK UP THE SPECIAL ROCK
You pick up the rock, it feels special in your hands, you are certain it will be important sometime later.
> PUT ROCK IN POCKET
Huh?
> PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN POCKET
Huh?
> PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN MY POCKET
I can't do that.
> OPEN POCKET
Huh?
> OPEN MY POCKET
You open your pocket.
> PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN MY POCKET
You safely store the rock.
It is no mystery why graphical adventure games basically wiped out the text adventure games.
Oh, you'd love the Apple II game called "Prisoner 2". It's entire purpose was to frustrate you at every turn with things you had to telepathically guess what the developer was thinking. The very first puzzle is a maze which is almost impossible to escape from... until you discover you can hit the 'ESC' key. It gets more dastardly from there.
The IF community recognized these problems early (late 90's/early 2000's) and mitigated them with helpers and a lot of playtesting.
This is not really an issue in any games released in the last 20 years.
I think for me the worst "guess the verb" blocker was in Enchanter with the mouse hole and how to get the parchment out of it. Who the hell is going to think of "REACH IN HOLE"?
The scale of the IF text-parser problem isn't that bad, and they addressed a lot of the issues decades ago, modern games don't struggle with this nearly as much. It's just that that Interactive Fiction tends to be a niche hobby, so most of the IF written today assumes you are already at least a intermediate in the field -- they often don't throw in a Tutorial, the way every modern triple-A game does.
From an 'intro accessibility' standpoint, Modern videogames are often way more willfully-obtuse. We just don't recognize it, because it's assumed that everyone who plays a game already has basic understanding of twin-stick first-person and third-person gamepad controls, we assume it like it's another form of basic literacy. (Who hasn't played a game before, right?)
But for folks who don't -- for the (many) folks who have literally never touched a gamepad in their life, sitting them down to modern graphical interactive-fiction controller game (say something like Firewatch, or Gone Home, or Edith Finch, or Life is Strange) is even more challenging for those folks than the traditional IF text parser.
I've seen people spend thirty minutes just trying to figure out how to look in a general direction -- it takes truly-new adults quite a while to get used to the feel of twin-thumbsticks for movement+camera-control, it requires a lot of careful fine-motor control on both sticks simultaneously and often has to be felt to be learned well.
At least with text-based IF, most people have been exposed to typing at school or at work or at a library or such. The same is not usually true of twin-thumbstick gamepads.
Graphical adventure games were largely parser-driven for like a decade. Sierra's AGI parser worked well; my recollection is that it usually looked for a verb and a noun and ignored any extraneous text.
The site is straight from the late nineties; mobile wasn’t a concern at the time, and it remains not a concern. These are better consumed in a desktop. The whole site is a delightful bastion of “The Old Internet.” The role playing games are also plenty fun!
In my personal archives though, I only have a copy of the 1977 update by Dan Woods where the player can score a maximum of 350 points. This, I believe, is the Fortran source code of the 1977 version: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/adv350-p...
I feel like IF tech could be use for more than just fiction. Imagine government forms that could use it to help people navigate a complex bureaucratic system of forms, or something like the python cookiecutter for generating project layouts which could ask for more detail about your preferences before spitting out a template, online tutorials which customise to cover the 3 main cases etc.
[+] [-] pimlottc|1 year ago|reply
It’s more of an interactive story than a puzzle game, with some light resource management elements. But the writing is wonderful and there are hundreds of possible paths and storylines to discover. Its replayability is very high, whether you’re trying to find the fastest route, seeking out the most remote locations or unlocking hidden subplots.
It really does well to invoke the spirit of adventure in travel, and it was a particular delight during the pandemic days when that wasn’t possible.
Plus they’ve open sourced the language and tools used to create the branching narrative!
https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/
[+] [-] The_Blade|1 year ago|reply
Meg Jayanth++
Choose Your Own Adventure++
[+] [-] wkat4242|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewStephens|1 year ago|reply
As well as 80 Days, I really liked Inkle's implementation of the old Steve Jackson Sorcery books (for iOS and other platforms). They really know how to polish their games.
Voyage of the Marigold[0] is a project I recently completed written in a mixture of ink and js for a the 2024 Spring Thing[1] Festival of Interactive Fiction. It didn't win a major prizes but I am happy with the way it turned out.
[0] https://sheep.horse/voyage_of_the_marigold/
(Your enjoyment will probably be proportional to how much you like Star Trek)
[1] https://www.springthing.net/2024/play.html
(I recommend Rescue At Quickenheath, another game that didn't win a major prize but was my favorite)
[+] [-] MattGrommes|1 year ago|reply
https://aareed.itch.io/50-years-of-text-games
[+] [-] atribecalledqst|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|1 year ago|reply
For folks interested in the early history, Jason Scott's Get Lamp documentary is highly recommended. (He also has an Infocom-focused edit.)
[+] [-] 7thaccount|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] entropicdrifter|1 year ago|reply
You can play almost the whole history from your browser if you want.
[+] [-] zzo38computer|1 year ago|reply
I had also written a document called "Tricky Document" which describes several tricks involved with Z-machine programming (many of which Infocom did not use). http://zzo38computer.org/zmachine/doc/tricky.txt (I also wrote implementations of Z-machine in C, PostScript, JavaScript, and Glulx.)
Another text adventure system that I know of is "OASYS". The VM code was not documented, although it did include source code, and I have figured it out from the source code and written a document. The included OAC compiler was rather limited (no include files, you could not call a function that is defined later in the file, ambiguous syntax, strings duplicated in the output file, no pointer types, no type checking, no macros, no arrays, no bitwise operations, spurious vocabulary entries, and various other limitations), so I had written my own compiler (which still uses the same VM code, but with an entirely different syntax).
[+] [-] odysseus|1 year ago|reply
I remember purchasing it in a Babbages or something for $14 and being so excited.
Brought it home and ran it on a 286 with a monitor capable of displaying text in one color: amber
> insert babelfish into ear
[+] [-] OldGuyInTheClub|1 year ago|reply
I never could finish the Hitchhiker's game though.
[1] https://www.atarimania.com/pgepub.awp?param=publisher-&value...
--> "We stick our graphics where the sun don't shine..."
[+] [-] salgernon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nathell|1 year ago|reply
https://www.inform-fiction.org/manual/html/s46.html
[+] [-] scioto|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ralferoo|1 year ago|reply
Most hated part of this game: HOP, CLAP, KWEEPA.
Also funny how I recall this stuff vividly more than 3 decades later!
My first experience of IF was the tape-based Classic Adventure on the Amstrad CPC. My family bought the CPC late 1985, I bought Amstrad Action in December 1985 and saw the advert for it and new I wanted it more than all the other games that were reviewed with their flashy graphics and beeps and what-have-you.
[+] [-] JoeDaDude|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zabzonk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 867-5309|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dudinax|1 year ago|reply
Will Not Let Me Go
https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2017/Will%...
A Twine game that simulates dementia. It's a brilliant, well written game that ironically will stick in your memory.
[+] [-] mwigdahl|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] markx2|1 year ago|reply
This is fantastic: http://www.getlamp.com/
You can also hunt down the Infocom Universe Bootleg. It has pretty much all the games, bonus games, invisiclues, IUB database, software tools.
IUB.zip is 397.5mb zipped
[+] [-] jandrese|1 year ago|reply
But then the parser would be willfully obtuse and most of the gameplay would be figuring out the exact combination of commands to unlock the next snippit of the story. Sometimes requiring the player to telepathically connect with the developer to figure out precisely what phrasing he intended.
It is no mystery why graphical adventure games basically wiped out the text adventure games.[+] [-] technothrasher|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ChicagoDave|1 year ago|reply
This is not really an issue in any games released in the last 20 years.
I think for me the worst "guess the verb" blocker was in Enchanter with the mouse hole and how to get the parchment out of it. Who the hell is going to think of "REACH IN HOLE"?
[+] [-] maxsilver|1 year ago|reply
From an 'intro accessibility' standpoint, Modern videogames are often way more willfully-obtuse. We just don't recognize it, because it's assumed that everyone who plays a game already has basic understanding of twin-stick first-person and third-person gamepad controls, we assume it like it's another form of basic literacy. (Who hasn't played a game before, right?)
But for folks who don't -- for the (many) folks who have literally never touched a gamepad in their life, sitting them down to modern graphical interactive-fiction controller game (say something like Firewatch, or Gone Home, or Edith Finch, or Life is Strange) is even more challenging for those folks than the traditional IF text parser.
I've seen people spend thirty minutes just trying to figure out how to look in a general direction -- it takes truly-new adults quite a while to get used to the feel of twin-thumbsticks for movement+camera-control, it requires a lot of careful fine-motor control on both sticks simultaneously and often has to be felt to be learned well.
At least with text-based IF, most people have been exposed to typing at school or at work or at a library or such. The same is not usually true of twin-thumbstick gamepads.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lIl-IIIl|1 year ago|reply
but it's not so bad. I definitely run into this issue with graphical based games as well.
[+] [-] TillE|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vunderba|1 year ago|reply
Overly literal text parsers and the obligatory tedious maze portion of text adventures were the major pain points back in the day.
[+] [-] cpfohl|1 year ago|reply
http://www.rinkworks.com/adventure/
The site is straight from the late nineties; mobile wasn’t a concern at the time, and it remains not a concern. These are better consumed in a desktop. The whole site is a delightful bastion of “The Old Internet.” The role playing games are also plenty fun!
[+] [-] textfiles|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blueferret|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|1 year ago|reply
I'm playing Hadean Lands at the moment and wasn't expecting to have to scroll past a map of the game.
[+] [-] smallerize|1 year ago|reply
Edit: it's in the preview screenshots on the App Store. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hadean-lands/id918958300
[+] [-] susam|1 year ago|reply
This is the game that started it all!
In my personal archives though, I only have a copy of the 1977 update by Dan Woods where the player can score a maximum of 350 points. This, I believe, is the Fortran source code of the 1977 version: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/adv350-p...
[+] [-] cpill|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] autoexec|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ChicagoDave|1 year ago|reply