[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Great text based games to play?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Great text based games to play?
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
Author : cgb223
Score : 81 points
Date : 2023-01-21 19:02 UTC (3 hours ago)
| hugs wrote:
| 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/
| raldi wrote:
| 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.
| someguyorother wrote:
| 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.
| mongol wrote:
| What about these games like Leisure Suit Larry? They were
| graphical but I think you typed the instructions?
| nmstoker wrote:
| For those, check out Scumm VM:
|
| https://www.scummvm.org/
| tmcneal wrote:
| 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.
| arglebargle123 wrote:
| WoTMUD was pretty awesome too, I haven't looked to see if it's
| still online for years.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| 50 Years of Text Games
|
| https://if50.substack.com/archive
| mind-blight wrote:
| 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.
| atemerev wrote:
| Photopia
|
| Varicella
|
| Violet
|
| (these three impressed me the most)
| suprjami wrote:
| 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/
| wtt604 wrote:
| 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
| jghn wrote:
| 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/
| abnry wrote:
| 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.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| For Android there's an app called Audio IF that might do what
| you're looking for.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| 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/
| sp332 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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 :-)
| mindcrime wrote:
| 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
| nimithryn wrote:
| "Gostak" is a truly unique game. It's like Zork, but many of the
| nouns and verbs are made up words.
| nimithryn wrote:
| Here's a link: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=w5s3sv43s3p98v45
| eigenhombre wrote:
| 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.
| ctoth wrote:
| 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
| vq wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway151492 wrote:
| 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
| awb wrote:
| 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...
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| 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/
| gpanders wrote:
| 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.
| Humdeee wrote:
| I loved playing Aardwolf years and years ago. I was a big fan
| of godwars type mostly. What a flashback!
| Sebguer wrote:
| 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? :/
| dawnerd wrote:
| I've been looking for a text based game in the style of
| bootleggers. Those management style games are fun.
| arglebargle123 wrote:
| Check and see if any of the MUDs are still online, WoTMUD was
| tons of fun.
| vvendigo wrote:
| https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/
| [deleted]
| thom wrote:
| telnet discworld.starturtle.net
| jolmg wrote:
| 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.
| mindcrime wrote:
| 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
| II2II wrote:
| 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.
| rgmerk wrote:
| 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.
| rollcat wrote:
| 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.
| zabzonk wrote:
| 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.
| nathell wrote:
| Anchorhead! My favourite game of all time.
| mcphage wrote:
| 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.
| VadimPR wrote:
| 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.
| gradstudent wrote:
| Violet is exceptionally good:
| https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/e-utl5-bu0yya2ycst0m...
| allanquatermain wrote:
| 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.
| jslakro wrote:
| 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
| toto444 wrote:
| This one is short, fun and illustrated with emojis.
|
| https://memalign.github.io/p/dungeon-memalign.html
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| nickt wrote:
| 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
| nickt wrote:
| 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...
| cableshaft wrote:
| 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...
| tomstuart wrote:
| ...by Sam Barlow, now better-known for the live-action video
| games _Her Story_ , _Telling Lies_ and _Immortality_.
| quadcore wrote:
| 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.
| jghn wrote:
| 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.
| the_doctah wrote:
| Dragonrealms!
| kianryan wrote:
| 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
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| andremedeiros wrote:
| Check out ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery.) It's been around for
| a long time and has a great story to it.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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/
| tmtvl wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| 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
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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".
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-21 23:01 UTC)