Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

Broadly speaking there are two big "threads" to follow here. You have your MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon)[1] & MOOs (MUD, Object Oriented)[2] which are played over the network, and are more or less the text based equivalent to MMORPGs. Then you have your IF (Interactive Fiction)[3] / text adventure game that installs and runs locally like the old Infocom games. There is, of course, some overlap here.

You can find lists and links for MUDs and MOOs in several places, but one good resource is mudlistings.com[4]. For Interactive Fiction / text adventures, try the IFReviews[5] and IFdb[6] sites.

If you want specific recommendations... I'd say start with the canonical OG interactive fiction game, Colossal Cave[7]. It's available from the distro package managers on most Linux systems as "adventure" or "advent" or something along those lines. Another interesting one is "Battlestar"[8] which is usually available as part of the "bsdgames" package.

For a good MUD, I'm personally a fan of Avatar[9].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction

[4]: https://mudlistings.com/

[5]: http://www.ifreviews.org/

[6]: https://ifdb.org/

[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

[8]: https://www.ifwiki.org/Battlestar

[9]: https://www.outland.org/news.php

Pretty sure the Archlinux official repos had a package called "bsdgames" or similar that included a game like that. It's not there now. Maybe it got split up or sent to the AUR.

Infocom adventure games are some of the grand-daddy's of text adventures.

Zork is by far the most well known, but also pretty infamous are Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Godesses' of Phobos and A Mind Forever Voyaging.

As a warm-up, I'd recommend Moonmist. It's a mystery game listed as a "Beginner" game, and is great for introducing elements of the Infocom system.

The feelies are available to view here: https://gallery.guetech.org/greybox.html

There are a collection of game files here: https://eblong.com/infocom/

My preferred player is still Frotz. It compiles and runs on practically anything, my Psion, my Pis, Windows, everything.

https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/frotz

The Zork Anthology is available on GOG (https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_zork_anthology), there are also a few of them on IA like Star Trek - The Kobayashi Alternative (https://archive.org/details/msdos_Star_Trek_-_The_Kobayashi_...).

Some of my favourites are Enchanter and the great classic Planetfall.

tThe general term is "interactive fiction", and the ancestor is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure : you can play it in a browser at https://rickadams.org/adventure/advent/, and when you've tried it the source is small enough to just read through.

More recently the scene converged on the programming language "inform" https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ - so Inform games are portable. They're easy to write.

Infocom produced a whole series: https://if.illuminion.de/infocom.html ; try Trinity. Hitchhiker's is notoriously difficult and "unfair".