So I don't think there is a dedicated IF / Hypertext / Text Adventure / Choose Your Own adventure catchall thread beyond the general adventure game thread right?
If not, I'm making one here gosh darn it! Mainly because I have a hankering to play more text-based adventure games (old and new) ever since playing "The House Abandon" as part of Stories Untold.
For starters, my main reason in making this thread is suddenly finding out that the entire Magnetic Scrolls back catalogue can be played online here
I have a HUGE amount of nostalgia for these games on the Amiga (in particular Jinxter). They were never as polished as the Infocom stuff, with a lot more ways of screwing yourself over accidentally (and the writing is a bit on the "wacky" side) but I enjoyed the hell out of them and they had great (for the time) in game art. I'll be curious to see if my more patient adult (hah!) demeanour can improve my chances of actually completing one of them!
Any other classic recommendations beyond Infocom and my favourite, Anchorhead? I want to try to make some time to actually sit down and play some of them properly, for once.
I'll update this list with more later, and as and when I find suitable links and interesting things...there's a bunch more CYOA stuff on steam that I can add (probably a lot of them also available on iOS/android too).
Classics You can play now
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Magnetic Scrolls Games: Magnetic Scrolls Memorial (Online)
Indie Classics
* * * * * * * *
Anchorhead (Online) (IFDB Link)
New Commercial Interactive Fiction
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Parser based
Hadean Lands (Steam)
CYOA / Hypertext Games (iOS / android versions may be available)
Lifestream - A Haunting Text Adventure(Steam)
The Film Maker - A Text Adventure (Steam)
Shady Brook - A Dark Mystery Text Adventure (Steam)
Buried - An Interactive Story (Steam)
World of Darkness Preludes: Vampire & Mage (Steam)
Samurai of Hyuga (Steam)
Tin Star (Steam)
My Name is You (Steam) (Narrated)
Choice of Games collection (Steam) - I'm not going to list them all, there's a TON of 'em though.
This Book is a Dungeon (Steam)
Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here.
( the Grue got me )
-BEP
I have a WinFrotz folder with all of the Infocom games that I've moved from pc to pc for years. Sadly, I've never gone back and replayed them and I've certainly never played any others.
Someday, perhaps. But I'll be watching this thread in the meantime.
*actually* (puts on nasally voice) I believe , assuming the original English translation is correct, the quote should be...
"All hope abandon, ye who enter here"
Spoiler:I only know this 'cause I looked it up so I could use it in part of my pulp sci-fi Dante project for my illustration class
Somebody fire up Zork, go upstairs, get chomped and let us know what the quote was.
-BEP
http://i7-dungeon.sourceforge.net/so...
"You are outside a large gateway, on which is inscribed: [paragraph break]
[8 spaces]'Abandon every hope, all ye who enter here.'[paragraph break]
The gate is open; through it you can see a desolation, with a pile of mangled corpses in one corner. Thousands of voices, lamenting some hideous fate, can be heard."
Also, obligatory video for this thread:
I started Anchorhead a few years ago but didn't get very far. So, I should probably get started on that again.
My imagination was in 4k back in those Infocom days. The Great Underground Empire was a colorful majestic ruin, with all sorts of details going on in my head. Now my head's more like 1280x720, but Infocom and the Ultima games shaped the sort of stuff I'd always be interested in as an adult.
Jewel encrusted eggs and leather goddesses, mainly...
Don't play many of these but Vespers is great.
I was thinking more the original 'Dantes, Inferno' :). I'm sure your probably right with the zork reference.
I was close, but no banana.
-BEP
Not a game, but: Steve Meretzky kept a lot of papers from his Infocom days, and Jason Scott scanned thousands of pages and uploaded them to the Internet Archive. Design notes, office memos, all kinds of stuff.
We're taking the camper out for 4 days next weekend and a good old-fashioned text adventure seems like it would be perfect to play while Kit is napping and I'm relaxing. Even though I've tried to go back to them before and couldn't get back into them, I think i'll give it a try.
-BEP
pyxistyx wrote:*actually* (puts on nasally voice) I believe , assuming the original English translation is correct, the quote should be...
"All hope abandon, ye who enter here"
Spoiler:I only know this 'cause I looked it up so I could use it in part of my pulp sci-fi Dante project for my illustration class
Somebody fire up Zork, go upstairs, get chomped and let us know what the quote was.
-BEP
Nerd enough that I know you got it right, and I also know that you had to do something in particular (take something from an altar?) before it sent you to Hades on death.
To be fair, I was obsessed with the original Zork trilogy as a child. It would probably not be an exaggeration to say that it completely changed my life, or at least my career path: I begged for a Commodore 64 ostensibly for educational purposes, but honestly only to play Zork. My attempts to write my own text adventures lead me down the path to an eventual tech career.
I even bought all the books, and wrote childish fan mail to Infocom. (I also picked up the I-F documentary, GET LAMP.)
Nowadays I've fallen out with I-F (as, ironically, work sucks up all my spare puzzle-solving brainpower) but I understand there's still quite a community online. Which is why I figured we didn't have a thread here. But I'd love to follow this one to hear about highlights and what is tickling the fancy of my fellow Goodjers.
The IFComp is an annual competition of short interactive fiction, which has resulted in dozens of new works every year. Notable games from past IFComps include The Edifice, Photopia, Slouching Towards Bedlam, Vespers, Floatpoint, Lost Pig, Violet, and Brain Guzzlers from Beyond!
The XYZZY Awards are somewhat like the Oscars of parser IF, voted on by active IF community members.
Some good IF games for beginners are Bronze (Emily Short), The Dreamhold (Andrew Plotkin), Hunter, in Darkness (Andrew Plotkin).
I loved mapping these games as a kid. My best memories are:
1. Mapping the maze in (I think) Hollywood Hijinx which involved walking "two feet east" and "five feet north" and so forth. It was easy, but fun.
2. Playing Zork 2 and finally realizing...
...that one room was spinning, making mapping really confusing. "You feel disoriented."
I can't believe I spoiler tagged a 30 year old game.
Notable, short IF games that won't take too long and you can play right now:
9:05
Aisle
Suveh Nux
Galatea
Some other interesting notables:
Alabaster
Counterfeit Monkey
Spider and Web
If you're looking for larger, Infocom-style puzzle adventures, there are quite a few.
One of the reasons for the IF revival was the reverse engineering of Infocom's Z-machine format and the creation of the Inform text-adventure language. This lead to a number of early projects that were consciously heavily influenced by Infocom's style. They tend to be a bit more difficult than more recent games but with a bit more story than some of the Infocom games. You might think of them as Zork with a plot. There's some truly baroque set-piece puzzles in here that are satisfying to solve. The interfaces can be a bit clumsier than later IF, but their length lets them set up elaborate wheels within wheels.
Curses! - A search for a map in your attic leads you into a strange journey of family secrets.
Jigsaw - Time travelling through history as you attempt to keep it from being altered by a mysterious stranger.
Christminster - Your brother invited you to visit him at his university, but you arrive to find that he has vanished.
Contrariwise, if the Infocom games like Zork were too puzzle-heavy and not interesting enough story-wise, the flowering of the form has lead to much more accessible games.
Lost Pig - Grunk has lost pig. Grunk must find pig.
Violet - Finishing your thesis may be harder than you thought.
City of Secrets
Blue Lacuna - Travel between worlds, shape the fates of many
Spider and Web - an espionage thriller that's innovative even today
Creatures Such As We
Vespers
The Moonlit Tower
Anchorhead
Hello, sailor!
Nothing happens here.
Oh, and the original Adventure, a.k.a. ADVENT, a.k.a. Colossal Cave Adventure
The C port of the original source code was just released online today.
Christminster - Your brother invited you to visit him at his university, but you arrive to find that he has vanished.
This was my immediate thought when I realized what this thread is for. That game is quite large, and extremely well-written. I only remember one really tough puzzle; most of them were medium to hardish. I was shocked when I realized that Christminster, which looms so very large in my memories of great IF, is over twenty years old. f*ck. It feels like I played it four or five years ago. It was written a lot closer to the Infocom era than the present!
Fortunately, IF doesn't age much, so it's still great.
The official Christminster page is here: http://garethrees.org/1995/08/08/chr...
Counterfeit Monkey
I think this was the last full IF game I finished, a few years back. It was really funny, and very brain-taxing. I can't even imagine how hard it must have been to write. The central mechanic of the game is manipulating the words around you to change the reality you're in.... thus, Counterfeit Monkey is one letter removal away from becoming a pile of green bills. Ms. Short did a truly astonishing job of building that combinatorial explosion of possible words and modifiers into her game. It's a title that really should be played just to marvel at how unbelievably hard it was to make.
I tried to play through the IFComp last year, but I really hate what most authors are going to: browser games. They're becoming more choose-your-own-adventure stories, which is okay, but it's not quite IF the way I like it best. They also lose a fair bit of control over the environment, and a lot of those games have a very sloppy, inaccurate feel to them.
That said, I thought Cactus Blue Motel (3rd place in the 2016 competition) was very memorable, despite being a browser game. I'd definitely give that one a look. That place became surprisingly real for me, and has a very well delineated space in my head, much better defined than the spaces taken by most books.
I backed Hadean Lands, several years ago, and if there's a Mount Everest of IF games, that has to be it. That title used to belong, probably, to Infocom's Spellbreaker, but Hadean Lands seems WAY more complex. I got quite a ways in, and it felt like there was a TON more to do... but I eventually got distracted into other games. If you're looking for something seriously challenging, look no further.
Counterfeit Monkey was hard to write because of the sheer solution space Short's chosen mechanic created. Hadean Lands was hard to write because it's complex. It's such a big game that he's got automation in it.... one of the mechanics is a 'reset' that essentially starts the game over, so if you've figured out a way to get to a place, reset the game, and then tell it to take you to that place, it will replay your solution to get there. If you find a better solution, it will start to use that one instead. So, despite constantly starting over, you're not really starting over.
Counterfeit Monkey is a (relatively) little project from a master of the craft; Hadean Lands is a big one.
I love these guys:
When I get time I'll do a separate post for browser/Twine narrative games, because there are some truly lovely gems that take advantage of things that parser fiction can't. But parser fiction is it's own thing in the IF community, so there was a bit of controversy over including it in the IFComp. I think that's been partially resolved and partially evolved, as new forms if IF are invented and as more parser fiction is written.
Christminster is in some ways the most straightforward of the three I mentioned. This is mostly because Jigsaw is built around a nicely crunchy time-travelling jigsaw puzzle (and the opening sequence has a time pressure that you won't understand right away) while Curses! is a deeply baroque collection of intertwined interactions.
I haven't finished Curses or Jigsaw, mind you, despite several attempts over the years. I should revisit them.
Andrew Plotkin came up with the "IF Cruelty Scale". From the IFWiki:
Merciful: cannot get stuck.
Polite: can get stuck or die, but it's immediately obvious that you're stuck or dead.
Tough: can get stuck, but it's immediately obvious that you're about to do something irrevocable.
Nasty: can get stuck, but when you do something irrevocable, it's clear.
Cruel: can get stuck by doing something which isn't obviously irrevocable (even after the act).
Sounds like the Pawn is at least Nasty. Many Infocom games were at this level. At least one, Hitchhiker's Guide, is outright cruel. There's an early-game puzzle where if a dog looks uncomfortable and swallows, you have lost. You have to feed it a sandwich, so that it's distracted and doesn't swallow, or you can't win the game. You won't know this for many many hours, as you'll lose right at the very end, literally after taking your final action.
Most Sierra games hovered around the Tough level, except that almost all of them had ways where you could abruptly (and painfully) die from doing routine things. Example: interacting with a deck plate sticking up in one of the Roger Wilco games would cause you to slash open your wrist, fountain blood, and die. You had zero warning this was dangerous, and if you hadn't saved recently, too bad.
Fortunately, these things were mostly intended as jokes, so they tended to be very early (before you had much invested).
LucasArts games went to the Merciful approach for the most part; most of their games don't have loss states. That is, either you're still playing a game, or you've won, there's no other possible outcome. If you can figure out the puzzles, you can win, no matter what you've already done. Most modern games are like this, and I find it much more comfortable. It wasn't so polite, way back when.
Half of my old D&D characters are named after spells from the Enchanter trilogy, including:
Nitfol
Belboz
Melbor
Cleesh
Gaspar
Golmac
Gondar
Jindak
Kulcad
Malyon
Rezrov
...and of course Throck
This Zork talk has got me all riled up, I'm going to go play Grand Inquisitor.
This Zork talk has got me all riled up, I'm going to go play Grand Inquisitor.
Same here. I replayed Nemesis not too long ago and it's still awesome. I expect Grand Inquisitor will still be as well.
Although this thread has me super intrigued by the original text based Zorks.
Running Man wrote:This Zork talk has got me all riled up, I'm going to go play Grand Inquisitor.
Same here. I replayed Nemesis not too long ago and it's still awesome. I expect Grand Inquisitor will still be as well.
Although this thread has me super intrigued by the original text based Zorks.
I only played the Zork text games, with Beyond Zork being the only minor outlier to that. It sounds like I should check our Nemesis and GI.
-BEP
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