Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

This one is short, fun and illustrated with emojis.

https://memalign.github.io/p/dungeon-memalign.html

Now largely forgotten, UK company Magnetic Scrolls produced some of the best examples in the genre - but it might take some work to get them running, as they had (non-interactive) graphics and a simple menu/windowing system which were state of the art at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_Scrolls

The Pawn and Corruption received especially high praise.

Hard mode: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Bureaucracy, both by Douglas Adams. Bureaucracy is outright sadistic. I solved it with a friend over a couple months after us both failing solo for much longer, and we celebrated our win with alcohol. I still remember the crushing hangover, Adamsesque in its dimensions and intensity. Worth it.

Start here! --> A Dark Room [1]

A Dark Room is awesome. It's also what got my kids hooked on programming once they learned they could use a browser's developer console to write JavaScript to change various in-game variables.

Edit: A Dark Room isn't strictly a text-based game in the sense where there is much typing on a keyboard. It's more a point-and-click text-heavy game. But it still feels very much in the spirit of a classic text-based (typing) game.

[1]: https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

Does anybody of a way to play text adventure games on your phone using text to speech and audio only? Last time I looked for something that did this I couldn't find anything. Seems like there should be a demand for it.

Emily Short, a core member of the interactive fiction community, maintains an excellent, well-curated guide to help people find games that might suit their tastes.

https://emshort.blog/how-to-play/reading-if/