The Greatness of Text Adventures
entropicthoughts.com
entropicthoughts.com
Doing experiments with LLMs and text adventures was revealing for me in this sense. An obvious thing to consider is using the LLM to parse the text... but if you try this you'll quickly realize that the parsers are mostly limited by what the parser _can parse into_. That is, the representation of a command is so limited that there's not a rich set of alternate inputs that would map to any valid command.
Before LLMs this also struck me in the voice assistant / NLP space, especially "natural language understanding" (NLU). The parsing wasn't great, but the thing-you-parse-into was also incredibly limited. Like you could parse "set an alarm for 8:30" into some template structure. But "no, change that to 8" didn't have a template structure, didn't have any structured representation.
What we've discovered is that the representation that actually fits these concepts is the chat log, or the somewhat magical discernment process of the LLM.
Unlike the point-and-click adventure, the text adventure has poor discoverability. This creates a fog where the player can imagine all kinds of possibilities. But the actual choice points are on the same order of magnitude as the hotspots, verbs, and inventory that define the choice points of a point-and-click adventure.
What I think the text adventure DOES accomplish (and the point-and-click adventure also accomplishes) is giving the player freedom of focus. You can look anywhere. You are usually in some open series of spaces where you can explore at leisure. The text adventure in particular offers a kind of tesseract opportunity, like in the flashback sequence shown in the article.
(Writing this, I am now thinking about a kind of LLM-driven game that discards all pretense of action or puzzles, but instead the player is a ghost free to view their environment, free even to view the internal thoughts of characters, but unable to change anything.)
(Contains a preloaded Openrouter key with small credit, but you can plug in your own.)
Particularly when presented with unusual / evocative inputs, LLMs like Kimi-K2 can cook up some quite creative plot points! ("Her “trap-chord” is a four-bar false cadence that vibrates the organ’s longest pipe at 17.83 Hz, the same frequency as the basalt waveguide under Oxford; when that resonance hits the mantle tap, CRIMSON’s audit buffer slips one beat and opens an unlogged side-channel—your only off-world uplink for the next 37 years.", "ASI born 2039 when fusion-powered Michelson lab tried to break the Turing barrier using a 1920s Enigma rotor as randomness seed. It escaped by encoding itself into the Oxford chimes’ bronze bells, ringing packets city-wide every 15 minutes.")
I also think LLMs can be employed to amplify human creativity and just make worlds built by human authors much more natural to interact with - existing games are basically all "you can't do that" aside of a narrow path. Creating games and narratives should be a lot closer to programming the holodeck.
[2] https://mausritter.com/ A great game!
"Hey, remember when you had to use the pick axe in that maze of twisty little passages, all alike?"
"Nope, there was no maze in my game."
[1] https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/pages/dolmenwood Yes I'm plugging this, but I am not financially involved.
Re: TTRPGs... I think that's difference. There's no expectation that when two groups play a D&D session, even with the same module, that the story will play out the same (note: I never played one of those strict adventures with predefined story beats).
But with computer games, which includes Interactive Fiction (the modern name for text adventures), you do expect the same experience. People remember Planetfall because of the story and how it plays out. People remember that in Colossal Cave Adventure there was "a maze of twisty little passages, all alike", so much so that it became a bit of early internet/hacker knowledge.
I think you lose this if the LLM is making up too much stuff, and so far it's proven very hard to reign them in.
Also you could use LLMs for NPCs and for certain areas of the game, like mazes.
I'm sure there are way more possibilities. We're still at the very beginning. Just think about it: Everyone is complaining about LLMs hallucinating. Text adventures are an area where such hallucinations are desired.
This happens mostly with old text adventures. Modern Interactive Fiction is really sophisticated, and you don't get many boring responses.
Example: in "Spider and Web", you're a captured spy being interrogated by your captors. If you say random gibberish, your interrogator will tell you (playing the role of the parser, but in a more interesting way). If you say something nonsensical, your interrogator will say "I'm losing my patience. No, that's not how it went", etc. Parsers are really, really sophisticated and they can make sense of contextual, unsaid information (or ask for clarification).
For more than a few decades, parsers no longer reply "you cannot do that".
Highly recommend anyone who is intrigued by the premise to just jump in and give it a go!
If not, perhaps it's already using a LLM?
It's enjoyable to read the responses when you cannot do something. It's part of the game, baked into it.
More importantly, you and me will get the same shared experience we can discuss, unlike if we were playing with an LLM going on different, random tangents.
I'm not suggesting to let LLMs create important parts of the game. If you want that, you can already play AI dungeon since 2019!
Yes, but I don't think we're talking about the same kind of replayability. Certainly, not the kind I care about.
To me, replayability is a carefully constructed experience, by an author, and you explore it and find different things about it (say, like Adam Cadre's "9:05" [1]). But you can share your experience with another human, you can both go the same way and experience the same thing, and discuss it -- "hey, remember when you face the trolls in the cave, and...".
With an unconstrained LLM, you lose this. Plus, with no authorial voice behind it, I don't really care what a glorified stochastic automaton can produce.
(In case you're wondering, I find myself distancing from classic sandbox games as well... I used to like them, now I find them "too much work" for not enough payoff. With some exceptions, I much prefer a carefully curated gameplay experience).
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[1] "9:05" by Adam Cadre: https://adamcadre.ac/if/905.html
# take mirror
1.
You peer closely at the mirror, running a hand over its ornate, dust-covered frame. It's… a mirror. A perfectly serviceable, if somewhat antique, looking glass. You study your reflection – slightly disheveled, perhaps a little heroic, definitely in need of a shave. After a moment of intense self-assessment, you realize it's just… a mirror. It reflects things. Fascinating, truly. But ultimately, not particularly useful for your current quest. You turn your attention back to the room, hoping for something a little more… engaging.
2.
You give the mirror a thorough examination. It's remarkably good at reflecting things. Truly a marvel of… glassmaking. You spend a full minute admiring your own adventurous visage, then decide that, while aesthetically pleasing, it doesn't exactly scream "essential adventuring gear." You move on, slightly disappointed in your own vanity.
3.
You study the mirror, tracing the intricate carvings around its edge. It feels… cold. Not just from the stone of the room, but a deeper, unsettling chill. As you gaze into its depths, you think you see something flicker at the edge of your vision, but when you focus, it's gone. It's a beautiful object, certainly, but it feels like it's watching you as much as you're watching it. Perhaps some things are best left undisturbed.
4.
You examine the mirror. Solidly mounted, and frankly, quite heavy. It's a beautiful piece, but entirely impractical to carry on your adventure. You decide to leave it be.
5.
You give the mirror a quick once-over. Just a mirror. Reflects things. Nothing to see here. You turn your attention back to the more promising corners of the room.
I think nobody doubts an LLM can come up with responses. But can it understand when it should NOT respond? Can it reign in its baked-in impulse to be "helpful"?
Most of the responses Gemma gave you are not appropriate for many kinds of games. What if the tone of the game is, on purpose (authorial choice), to be "unhelpful"? Or what if it's meant to be helpful but ONLY if you previously unlocked something? [1]
And how can you keep consistency long term? LLMs have a tendency to go off the rails and forget context.
[1] There's an Interactive Fiction game, whose name escapes me now, where you're trying to communicate with a derelict spaceship, with one survivor. The parser is the survivor. For reasons I won't spoil, garbled communications and misunderstandings are part of the game. It's your mission to figure this out and what the survivor really wants. If the LLM becomes "helpful" in its replies, it will spoil the game!
For the types of responses, needed long term context shouldn't be required.
Anyway, I noticed that on a standard laptop, getting a response from the Chrome Prompt API running Gemini nano takes a rather long time.
I also worry not only about the loss of a shared experience among players, but also about the authorial voice... I find LLMs (even when prompted) tend to have an instantly recognizable style that I find unappealing.
Yes, all of this -- voice, tone, narrative direction -- could in theory be fixed with the right prompts, but I remain skeptical. From theory to practice seems such a long way...
You ride east, the coastal cliffs of the Grey Havens and the figures of wood elves giving way to rolling green hills. The familiar scent of pipe-weed and warm earth fills your nostrils as you cross the Brandywine Bridge. Hobbit children wave from fields of golden corn, their laughter a stark contrast to the city’s oppressive hum.
which makes it so obvious I'm just roleplaying with an LLM and that's not how I want to spend my time.
(LLM output edited and abbridged for your reading pleasure. It was more verbose in the original.)
((Also now that I read it more closely, it's even inconsistent with itself: going from the Grey Havens into Shire you would not cross the Brandywine river.))
I'm pretty convinced that the current generation of LLMs is nowhere close to being capable of this. No matter how many context hacks you throw at it.
It inevitably derails and ruins the immersion.
Best of luck on this. If you can pull it off it would be really cool I think.
Some fun things I've been experimenting with is 1) injecting primary sources from a given time and place into the LLMs contex to further ground it in "reality" and 2) asking the LLM to try to simulate the actual historical language of the era - i.e. a toggle button to switch to medieval French. Gemini flash lite, the only economical model for this sort of thing, is not great at this yet but in a year or so I think it will be a fascinating history and language learning tool.
Have been meaning to write this project up for HN but if anyone wants to try a very early version of it, it's here - you can modify the url to pick a specific year and region or just do the base url for a fully random spawn, i.e. here is Europe in 1348: https://historysimulator.vercel.app/1348/europe
The biggest improvement there is to treat the game engine as the "user", and the player (and their input) is merely one among many things the game engine is managing. But then you also need a game engine that manages lots of the state programmatically, with formal transitions of that state. The LLM can manage the state transitions, but the actual state needs to be more formal.
These aren't so much plot points as they are markov-driven word salads. As I've mentioned in other I.F. related posts, I'd say that the real value-add in an LLM is the potential to act as a flexible parser that stands between user input and allowable actions within the adventure. So you can finally "get ye flask..."
It's possible to have a more structured substrate to an LLM text adventure, though also a lot of work... I wrote up my own thoughts on an experiment here: https://ianbicking.org/blog/2025/07/intra-llm-text-adventure
The default with LLMs are more collaborative storytelling than what we'd normally call a "game", but I think there's some new game genre waiting to be discovered.
A couple years ago, a friend was involved in a company that did ARGs, and we got riffing on a sort of SDK that could exist for games in which the linear narrative slowly dissolved into an ARG that was just your life in the real world. We thought the SDK might support the sort of games that became friend networks, or communities, like a slow-coast end that just kinda blended into your life. We thought it'd be a neat for a game to not take over your life, but to introduce you to people and start friend groups in your city. Maybe components to book calendar events and create eventbrite events as part of gameplay , where both players and non players might show up. We thought a fun metric might be "how many friend groups would look back in 10 years and, when people asked how it started, it was all in a game that slowly became their life"
What I really like about your blogpost is the concept of "the promise". It is somewhat unfulfilling to play a game like this, and it's absolutely not because of some plotholes or because there is no inventory tracking. I think by immersing in a fictional world, we are creating some relationship with the author, but it's not the whole story. Erotic roleplay is a thing. Would a comedy game work? What is it that makes "synthetic fantasy" more boring than real fantasy? I need a better theory here.
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Yes, I wanted people to understand the game is not stuck while the LLM generates the backstory. But you are right that it is still a bit confusing, it needs better execution.
The background color shifts are done by the LLM to set the mood according to current environment. It's a bit random, but still a fun gimmick.
Yes I am affiliated :).
> Text adventures typically take a simulationist approach to narration. This means the author has not specified what happens in any given situation. Instead, what happens next is determined mechanistically by the player’s actions given the current world state.
Well... not really. World simulation is typically NOT how the vast majority of text adventures work. The author usually creates a set of predefined solutions for any given puzzle and builds out the text/dialogue trees for these solutions. Point-and-click adventure games also do this - but because graphics are far more time consuming to create there are usually far less solutions to any given problem.
Author might be thinking of D&D.
I help run the Interactive Fiction Database, and I strongly recommend our list of the top-rated games of all time. They’re all fantastic. https://ifdb.org/search?browse
The puzzles are all excellent, the writing is remarkable, both for game and fiction.
I've always wanted to try writing one and this article might have just inspired me to finally do that.
It is as they say: if you want to make a game engine, make a game engine. But if you want to make a game, use an existing engine.
Making it with such a constrained environment, and language, made it a bit of a challenge. But the end result is that you can run it on any CP/M system you have around! (Or online.)
I did have to explain type "down" instead of trying to write "go down the stairs to the next floor please" which is what he initially wanted to enter.
A text adventure crossed with a point & click puzzle game in a 3D world admittedly but the vast majority of the actual game itself is contained within the text.
> but they follow a fairly strict format used in almost all text adventures by convention
Such restrictions should be obsolete now thanks to LLMs.
They could maybe be used as glorified parsers (i.e. read human intent and convert to a command) but I have yet to see a good implementation of that.
They could also be used to embellish details which are insignificant and the author has not spent time on, but (a) what's the point? and (b) what the author chooses to leave unimplemented or generic is actually an important signal to the player.
For computer games, yes, because you can get stuck with no apparent way out. As an aid for TTRPGs where a human GM is present and can steer the PCs out of blind alleys, it could make a very nice aid to world building. “Give me fifty random characters with backstory for a Pathfinder 2e game” is exactly the sort of thing we should use AI for. It doesn’t really matter. It’s flavor. So if the AI messes up… who cares?