Ask HN: What’s your favorite text-based adventure game?

The 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.)

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.

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:

http://grunk.org/lostpig/

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:

https://www.ifwiki.org/The_Annual_IF_Competition

> 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.

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

During 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.

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.

In 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.

I’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.

oh awesome. I wasn’t around when it was released but did play it on an emulator years after and was amazed at how magical it felt when the game understood what I was typing in plain English.

This 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 sometimes read the solutions to things like Zork and many of them still make no sense to me… not, like, I can’t understand the written text, but, like, even knowing the solution I still would never have thought to try that.

So the only Infocom game I ever completed on my own without a guide is Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/nord-and-bert-couldn-t-ma… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_and_Bert_Couldn%27t_Make_…

Completely different sort of game. And also one that may be the Infocom text game hardest to make into any other sort of medium. It could only work in text, and absolutely nothing else. (Though there are a couple of other contenders, I know.)

Although if you’re on the younger side, you may not have heard of some of the idioms that the game uses, which may raise the difficulty quite a bit. The 37 years since the game’s release has seen language shifts. I played it a lot closer to its release time.

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.

nice! 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!

I don’t particularly like it, but Work is an online multi-player RPG that pays me to play it.

(Prior to approximately 2020, it was more of a LARP situation, but my instance, at least, has moved to fully online.)

I’m gonna steer clear of games that use ASCII graphics as that’d be too many games to think about. With that out of the way: Toby’s Nose, A Dark Room, Kerkerkruip

Do graphical games with text parsers count?

The Crimson Diamond is a recent release that is beyond the stellar.