Planetfall.
Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
11–20 of 78 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#12Do graphical games with text parsers count?
The Crimson Diamond is a recent release that is beyond the stellar.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#13I'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:
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:
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#14In 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.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#15Lost Pig. Grunk need find pig.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#16I'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.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#17Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#18I'm a fan of the Thy Dungeonman series. Still haven't gotten ye flask...
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#19During 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.