Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?

84 pointsranuzz74 comments

I loved playing zork and torn.com is kinda text based.

With generative AI it feels like they can easily make a come back !!

I'm not convinced that current generative AI is a good fit for this kind of game. IMO, the heart of the text adventure game is the world model, and LLMs are notably lacking here. It's hard to believe the game is simulating a real place when it doesn't even have object permanence.

That said, my favorite human-authored text adventure game (I prefer that name to "interactive fiction" because I'm primarily looking for entertainment, not literary value) is Lost Pig:

http://grunk.org/lostpig/

Playable online with a Javascript-based interpreter at:

https://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A//mirror.ifarchive.org/if-...

It's a comedy, and just as with graphical adventure games, I think the whole adventure game concept works best with comedy. Even human-authored world models are inevitably flawed, and the resulting absurdity best matches the tone of comedy. I also recommend another comedy, Brain Guzzlers From Beyond!:

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=f55km4uutt2cqwwz

Both these are relatively modern games, written after the commercial collapse of the genre. They were the winners of the 2007 and 2015 Annual Interactive Fiction Competitions respectively. More information about this:

https://www.ifwiki.org/The_Annual_IF_Competition

I'm applying generative AI to interactive fiction with Spellbound

https://www.tryspellbound.com/app/scenario/65821/create

(You can click on the dice at the bottom to turn on D&D mode)

I've taken the approach of starting with the #1 problem with Gen AI for this application: that it writes bland prose with not much going on by default.

From there you can layer on systems that address things like object permanence, but even with a basic engine capable of generating fun to read pages of text I think you already get a pretty fun experience

> I'm not convinced that current generative AI is a good fit for this kind of game. IMO, the heart of the text adventure game is the world model, and LLMs are notably lacking here. It's hard to believe the game is simulating a real place when it doesn't even have object permanence.

The mechanics still need to be coded; however, like the OP, I believe there's an enormous opportunity to enrich the game content with LLMs. Like procedurally generated maps in roguelikes, LLMs can be used to create an order of magnitude more unique interactions in the game than what you could provide by crafting each dialogue tree by hand. While not as good or memorable (on average) as a hand-written character, it should be more than enough for Villager A, who normally would be completely mute.

yep, that's what I was thinking. A lot of filler can be written using llm.

Perhaps the game could be developed collaboratively online, so interested contributors could add dialog for the villagers and other characters, instead of trying to just outsource to hallucinating LLMs.

Agreed about the importance of a world model. People get enamored with increasing text volume with LLMs, but unless it ties back into distinct game state interactions, players quickly recognize it as fluff and it ends up not really adding to the game.

It's not exactly a text-based adventure game (more text-based trading), but recently I spent some time messing around with integrating an LLM with a text-based world model. It's not 100% reliable, but I've had some pretty satisfying interactions with it: https://github.com/heyitsguay/trader

Basically, you're a trader traveling around a world buying and selling goods, but the economy is tuned such that you can only really get ahead by conning the NPCs >:D

There’s a lot of IF like Eat Me or Midnight Swordfight which really lean on excellent writing, black comedy and wordplay. LLMs are still largely terrible at humour. Anything by Chandler Groover is recommended:

https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=author%3AChandler+Groover

Someone else mentioned Emily Short and there are also fantastically written games like Sunless Seas/Skies.

I'm shocked nobody's mentioned the Interactive Fiction Database, which is loaded up with tons of these available for free as abandonware or FOSS, depending on when it was created.

Here's my favorite, Conterfeit Monkey:

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl

It takes unique advantage of the text-based format by allowing the player to add and remove letters from words to transform any noun into any other noun if it can be done with a single letter change.

That’s my favorite too.

If anybody wants a quick intro to the game that works on mobile, here’s a demo I made that works in the browser and lets you tap links instead of learn parser syntax:

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

During the pandemic I decided to work through Zork, and ended up completing the first three Zork games with minimal "looking things up" (actually, much to my chagrin I had to look up something precisely once per game, and in each case it was a small puzzle right near the and of the game, almost perfect!).

I'll go ahead and second Planetfall though, which I saw someone else mention. For anyone else curious, I would put it on the "easier than Zork" side and is a rare text adventure I completed without any look-ups. I really really liked it. Save often. RTFM (in particular you'll want to look up the list of allowed verbs any time you get stuck). Those are the two helpful hints I would give to anyone thinking to themselves that they might want to try a classic text adventure.

Actually maybe more helpful would be to play something like Space Quest which has the same sensibility as text adventures (in that they often feel cruel to the user intentionally...) but is somewhat more accessible. Space Quest in particular shares a lot of DNA with planetfall all the way down to starring space janitors.

Andrew Plotkin developed a rating system for adventure game cruelty that's popular within the community:

https://www.ifwiki.org/Cruelty_scale

Space Quest is rated the maximum "Cruel" under this system, as it's easy to render the game unwinnable with no feedback that you're in this state. Almost all modern adventure games are less cruel.

We always called this “getting Sierra’d”

I’m looking at you KQ5 - “Failing to rescue this rat will result in yet another DMW. This is probably the single most infamous puzzle in King's Quest 5”

Out of curiosity, do you think you realized any benefit from some of the puzzles entering into common knowledge by now? And/or the Seinfeld Effect?

I could see how that would be true. By on the other hand in objective terms it’s pretty obscure pop culture knowledge so could also see it providing zero benefit

Planetfall was great, it’s the only infocom game I managed to complete. I think I might enjoy a mind forever voyaging more now than I did at the time, but I remember being terribly confused. Hitchhiker’s Guide is so manifestly unfair that it loops back around to being funny again, but I couldn’t even manage the babelfish, so I didn’t get much play out of it.

There are still people writing new games, games that are playable upon the same Infocom interpreter that was used to run Zork!

I wrote a CP/M emulator specifically so that I could play a trivial adventure game I wrote in Z80 assembly on Linux/Mac systems - so I should say that I prefer the infocom games.

However my favourite text-adventure is The Hobbit, the first such game I played on the ZX Spectrum back in the early eighties. Read about it in this two part piece:

https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit-redux/

Interviews with the author suggest I'm not the only one who got in touch, years later, to send her fan-mail. But I'm glad I did it regardless and very pleased she took the time to reply:

https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/18/hobbit_author_veronik...

In the early 90s I (and a friend) wrote a text adventure game based on the Punk scene at the time. It was my first piece of software that I released. This was a period of time where I used to print and keep my emails. This was done on TADS, was called "The Broken String" and was/is on the IFArchive. I can't say THIS was my favourite game, but it does have a sentimental hold over me. The premise was that in order to "save the scene" you must form a new band, going through the city looking for band members.

Other than that I was quite fond of the Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls games. Most of them were great. The games that I absolutely adored were all the text based Sierra games. All of them. I was quite upset when they removed the text parser.

This isn't my "favorite" but if you're going to mention generative AI and text adventure games and you don't know about AI Dungeon, well, now you do: https://play.aidungeon.com/

I was always terrible at text adventure games because my brain does not run on the style of logic that they do. I mean that without any particular judgment. I observe that it at least sometimes makes sense to other people. But I have sometimes read the solutions to things like Zork and many of them still make no sense to me... not, like, I can't understand the written text, but, like, even knowing the solution I still would never have thought to try that.

So the only Infocom game I ever completed on my own without a guide is Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/nord-and-bert-couldn-t-ma... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_and_Bert_Couldn%27t_Make_...

Completely different sort of game. And also one that may be the Infocom text game hardest to make into any other sort of medium. It could only work in text, and absolutely nothing else. (Though there are a couple of other contenders, I know.)

Although if you're on the younger side, you may not have heard of some of the idioms that the game uses, which may raise the difficulty quite a bit. The 37 years since the game's release has seen language shifts. I played it a lot closer to its release time.

Except for Planetfall, I agree puzzle solutions were non-deducible especially for a teenager. Hitchhiker's and Zork, despite their immense popularity, were impossible without the cheatbooks which were a bustling business.

Nord and Bert was the one game I couldn't complete, even with hints.

The Gostak, by Carl Muckenhoupt.

Its opening text reads as follows:

Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.

Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes discren them.

But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.

And what you have to do over the course of the game is not merely solve the puzzles but work out what all the words mean. (The grammar is just that of English, as are a lot of the little function-words. More than that would have been impossible.)

amazing! it sure is creative. found the online version gonna give it a try.

If you like it, be sure to also check out Andrew Plotkin’s ‘Lighan ses Lion’ [0], an entry in WalkthroughComp run by Emily Short [1]. It’s not a game, just a transcript of a fictitious game, but well worth checking out for a chuckle... or as a brain teaser.

Also, the Beast puzzle in ’The Edifice’ [2] by Lucian Paul Smith comes to mind.

[0]: https://www.eblong.com/zarf/zplet/lighan.html

[1]: https://www.ifwiki.org/WalkthroughComp

[2]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4tb9soabrb4apqzd

Zork was amazing, and was on the internet in the 1970's.

Zork history is pretty amazing too: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/29885/eaten-grue-brief-h...

If you've ever seen source code with comment warnings such as "It is pitch black" or "You are likely to be eaten by a grue" or "You're in a maze of twisty little passages", then you've encountered some of Zork's famous lines.

oh awesome. I wasn't around when it was released but did play it on an emulator years after and was amazed at how magical it felt when the game understood what I was typing in plain English.

Nope on the last one:) That's from Adventure.

Honestly it's still my favourite this day, if you can memorize the mazes and some of the puzzles and you get a good run with the RNG, its still fun from time to time to see how few moves you can complete it in.

For me it is 9:05 by Adam Cadre [0]. Short, linear, easy but with a great twist.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9:05

Either the classic "A Mind Forever Voyaging" or the Lovecraftian "Anchorhead"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_Forever_Voyaging https://store.steampowered.com/app/726870/Anchorhead/

If you want to live these games vicariously I can also recommend the Eaten by a Grue podcast over at https://monsterfeet.com/grue/

I am Perry Sim. The combination in that story between calculating the future in simulation and the outcomes of the project were chilling.

I really like Hadean Lands

https://store.steampowered.com/app/376240/Hadean_Lands/

You are an alchemist whose spacecraft crashed at a nexus between worlds. You need to discover and perform alchemical rituals to explore and try to escape.

It has some great quality of life features, such as allowing you to re-perform any ritual you have successfully completed in a single command, and allowing you to recall any significant information you have deduced.

On top of this, some great writing and a very strange atmosphere.

We are going through something of a golden age of text-based games. There are still plenty of parser-based games being created but choice-based games have been growing in popularity and complexity over the last few years. And yes, people have been experimenting with generative AI.

There are several competitions each year for new text based games and an active community.

https://intfiction.org

Tooting my own horn, if you like retro Star Trek-like things then here is a short somewhat randomized choice-based text game I entered in a competition a few months back.

https://sheep.horse/voyage_of_the_marigold/

Hi Andrew, just wanted to me and my family really enjoyed Voyage of the Marigold! It's such an excellent little game. We played through it a couple of time, each time discovering new things. Thank you for writing it.

I've played Star Trek: Resurgence a couple of months ago, and I must say I enjoyed your game much more than Resurgence, which is incredible considering that it was written just by you. IMO your game stays very close to spirit of the classic Trek I grew up with.

Thank you very much, you have made my day. I basically sat down and wrote the game that has been in my head for 30 years, which is why it looks the way it does.

I don't want generative AI, but an interactive fiction with speech recognition to make the game be a spoken word game would be interesting. Like Bandersnatch.

It's been a long time since I've been into this, so my tastes might have changed.

But my favorites were:

Photopia, 9:05, and I-0 by Adam Cadre

The Enchanter trilogy. My first introduction to Enchanter was actually this unofficial sequel: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=x6ne0bbd2oqm6h3a, which I loved.

Slouching Toward Bedlam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slouching_Towards_Bedlam

If you like Zork, "Janitor" will make you laugh: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=utic1iedvvnnsf3a

Also have very fund memories of Humbug and Jacaranda Jim (wow it took me a very long internet search to find the names.. I forgot almost everything about what those games were about, and all I had to go on is that they were DOS executables and that the author was some anti-virus author).

https://grahamcluley.com/misc/jacaranda-jim/

https://grahamcluley.com/misc/humbug/

I love seeing Adam Cadre's name in the wild, I know him through the Lyttle Lytton contest that he's held every year since 2001. It's a fun deep dive of terrible (on purpose) writing. https://adamcadre.ac/lyttle/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...

I played the game prior to having read the novel. It was so terribly confusing.

I think the game came with some serious crutch / walkthrough otherwise I'd probably have never gotten my robe on, much less worked out the babel fish.

I suppose it was the inspiration for me to finally read it, though. So that paid off. :)

Counterfeit Monkey - https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl

Emily Short can generally be relied upon of worthwhile games, but this IMHO is the most imaginative and engrossing. It has a really cool central mechanic and I found it really enjoyable.

I'm not very well-up on IF, but I thought "For a change" was absolutely amazing when I discovered it: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=t61i5akczyblx2zd

I think that with the current state of the art I'd be wary of using gen AI for the output ... but for making the input more accommodating of actual human vocabulary and grammar (instead of the usual limitations) I do think that LLMs could be amazing.

I spent so much time playing HHGTTG [0] as a kid it is kinda embarrassing to admit to it these days. I loved all of the Infocom interactive fiction games. They were great. But very much from a different age of computing. I guess they are like the gaming equivalent of the difference between a book and a movie.

[0]: https://douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html

I'm fond of Moonmist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonmist), a haunted mansion whodunnit, because my mother introduced me to it when I was very young.

I learned years later that the story changes according to your answer when a character asks you for your favorite color. It's such a simple trick but it keeps your friends from spoiling it for you.

Galatea is an old one I enjoyed, essentially as a character piece: https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/emrhyy7pp0c8bjkjeuhs...

I'm not sold on generative AI for this purpose -- maintaining a consistent character who remembers and reacts appropriately given past interactions seems tough.

Anchorhead, by Michael Gentry.

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!

Lost Pig. Grunk need find pig.

https://pr-if.org/play/lostpig/

I am not do sure, though I feel the idea is compelling enough to warrant exploration!

Text adventure games are fun and I enjoy them a few times per year.

I need to mention "Eaten By a Grue" podcast. Kay Savitz (sp?) and Kerrington Vanston play all the INFOCOM games and review them. It is an excellent library of text game commentary and insight.

Very highly recommended. They do produce a new episode from time to time as of 2024.

https://monsterfeet.com/grue/

The very best games combine witty writing, bonkers puzzles and premises and enough freedom to let you the player actually adventure some without feeling like you are on a ride with rails.

Gen AI may well come up with prose, but how well will it do character, puzzles and link game history into the thing like we see in the better titles?

That said, my mind is open. Let us see some productions!

We do have a IF game compo every year. "Eaten By a Grue" has reviewed a few games and basically listeners come away with the idea there are great new games every year.

I see others mention "lost pig" and 'nuff said.

I welcome a production to play and review.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - which has the best hint system ever (and you can play it hint-by-hint while still having loads of fun, as sometimes they’re misleading)

A Mind Forever Voyaging for the story and setting.

I doubt anyone would get a quarter of quality from genAI though.

Personally, I mostly enjoy cyoa types of text based games. My favorite it Warsim: The Realm of Aslona which is more simulation focused then most text based adventure games.

Multi user dungeons are also fun! I'm working on one right now but more cyoa focused.

Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin. If you decide to play it, I recommend *not* reading about it first; just jump in for maximum effect.

https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Tangle.z5

https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/qski30iszearnimjkrzv...

I don't particularly like it, but Work is an online multi-player RPG that pays me to play it.

(Prior to approximately 2020, it was more of a LARP situation, but my instance, at least, has moved to fully online.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Scott_Adams_Adventure_...

Adventure (but it's admittedly a very difficult game to win):

https://grack.com/demos/adventure/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_Goddesses_of_Phobos

I'm gonna steer clear of games that use ASCII graphics as that'd be too many games to think about. With that out of the way: Toby's Nose, A Dark Room, Kerkerkruip

I really enjoyed Wishbringer as a prequel to the Enchanter saga, all by Infocom.

I played all 4 games in series and still occasionally think about the story and world they built.

Wishbringer is more of a gentle dip into that world, and the events in it have no bearing on the rest of the series, but if you like Wishbringer or find it too easy then you will really like or maybe even love Enchanter, Sorcerer, and Spellbreaker.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAUNT

I tend to like games for their individual puzzles/tricks. I fondly remember the babel fish puzzle in HHGTTG, but my favorite was Leather Goddesses of Phobos. It was a bit risque (usually a draw for a teen), and the game "knew" if the player was male or female without ever asking. Took me several playthroughs to figure out how it managed to do that.

As a kid, I spent hours on https://www.materiamagica.com/

I don’t play it much any more, but it brings me joy to know that it is still online. The world is expansive and multiplayer. Best text based game I’ve played.

Vagrus: The River Realms[1] is excellent.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/909660/Vagrus__The_Riven_...

Curses by Graham Nelson

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

It's worth giving Aisle a try. It's from Sam Barlow (creator of Her Story).

You only have one command, and then the story "ends". It's an interesting way to tell a narrative. You can feel the DNA of Her Story in there.

I'm a fan of the Thy Dungeonman series. Still haven't gotten ye flask...

It's been awhile, but isn't the trick to give ye flask to Dennis?

nice! lots of new suggestions... I recently picked up torn again and remembered old text-based or interactive fiction games... I'm gonna play whatever is available online. thanks!

I remember really liking Bad Machine. You're a robot in a factory that's been in an accident, and you debug yourself.

Do graphical games with text parsers count?

The Crimson Diamond is a recent release that is beyond the stellar.

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

No love for Eamon?

Roadwarden has great writing and is fairly new.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Planetfall.

Yup, a transcendent experience for all ages.

Kubernetes.

Excel

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