Adventure (but it's admittedly a very difficult game to win):
Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
21–30 of 78 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#22[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#23Planetfall.
Yup, a transcendent experience for all ages.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#24During 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 pu…
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.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#25This 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 sometime…
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.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#26There 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...
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#27I'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 en…
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
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#28I'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 en…
> 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.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#29The 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.)
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?
#30nice! 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!