Many, many historic text adventures are available in the browser, thanks to the Parchment interpreter. You can find them on the IFDB, and click the link to play online. One of my favourites among the classics are Plundered Hearts[1].
There's also a lively community of people who make modern text adventures. These tend to be shorter and more well designed than many of the cruel games of the past. My all-time favourite is The Wise-Woman's Dog[2], a passion project with a very high quality bar.
Text adventures are great[3], and no, as of yet, they are not improved by LLMs. Too inconsistent, too much hallucination. They can't even play text adventures well.
A great modern text adventure is roadwarden. You can't play it in a terminal as it does have a GUI and images for the set pieces, but it's still a text adventure at heart.
> With the cantankerous Wizard of Wordplay evicted from his mansion, the worthless plot can now be redeveloped. The city regulations declare, however, that the rip-down job can't proceed until all the items within have been removed.
It's full of delightful wordplay and puzzles that play with the text-adventure medium, constraining what words you can use. Highly recommended.
Mine is ‘Anchorhead’ (1998), by Michael Gentry. I think it’s actually my favourite game of all time, of all genres.
I’ve played the old, text-only, Z-code version back in high school, around 1999, and the experience was so vivid and immersive that to this day I can draw a map of Anchorhead from memory and recite the lineage of the Verlac family. I think it’s still my favourite game of all time (although I spent much more time on some others).
These days, an illustrated version can be bought on Steam for something like $10. Highly recommended!
There was a time where I spent most evenings playing "A Mind Forever Voyaging" by Steve Meretzky [1], complete with trying to draw maps and jot down notes and clues, while listening to a Dave Brubeck album on repeat. The fact that I still remember that more than a decade later is a testament to how good that experience was.
Counterfeit Monkey similarly fuses classic text adventure mechanics with a wordplay mechanic where you can transform objects by adding and removing letters to solve puzzles.
Not sure if it qualifies as a real "text adventure", but I recently played "Type Help" (https://william-rous.itch.io/type-help) and was unexpectedly amazed, how such simple interface, with very few text commands, can lead player through very intriguing story. Will be looking into more IF games now.
> js/terminal.js implements the I/O layer: a typewriter-speed character queue drained via requestAnimationFrame, an inline editable prompt with command history, and two promise-based input methods (readToken for OPS5 accept, readLine for acceptline).
> css/crt.css creates the retro look: a bezel frame with power LED, a perspective-transformed screen, repeating scanlines, a slow horizontal band, flicker animation, and triple-layer phosphor text glow. Three themes are available — green P1 (default), amber P3, and white — switchable from the settings menu.
After spending way too long trying to press a button that doesn't do anything (press button, depress button, push button, button, press the button) or trying to talk to the speaker (say open, talk to speaker, talk at speaker, shout at speaker) I got frustrated and used claude to give me a walkthrough based on the source code.
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There's also a lively community of people who make modern text adventures. These tend to be shorter and more well designed than many of the cruel games of the past. My all-time favourite is The Wise-Woman's Dog[2], a passion project with a very high quality bar.
Text adventures are great[3], and no, as of yet, they are not improved by LLMs. Too inconsistent, too much hallucination. They can't even play text adventures well.
[1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=ddagftras22bnz8h
[2]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs
[3]: https://entropicthoughts.com/the-greatness-of-text-adventure...
> With the cantankerous Wizard of Wordplay evicted from his mansion, the worthless plot can now be redeveloped. The city regulations declare, however, that the rip-down job can't proceed until all the items within have been removed.
It's full of delightful wordplay and puzzles that play with the text-adventure medium, constraining what words you can use. Highly recommended.
I’ve played the old, text-only, Z-code version back in high school, around 1999, and the experience was so vivid and immersive that to this day I can draw a map of Anchorhead from memory and recite the lineage of the Verlac family. I think it’s still my favourite game of all time (although I spent much more time on some others).
These days, an illustrated version can be bought on Steam for something like $10. Highly recommended!
[1] https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4h62dvooeg9ajtfa
https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/
If this was built bespoke for this game, fair play, but I would love to have this library if it's a library.
EDIT: I found the repo https://github.com/jscalo/haunt
> js/terminal.js implements the I/O layer: a typewriter-speed character queue drained via requestAnimationFrame, an inline editable prompt with command history, and two promise-based input methods (readToken for OPS5 accept, readLine for acceptline).
> css/crt.css creates the retro look: a bezel frame with power LED, a perspective-transformed screen, repeating scanlines, a slow horizontal band, flicker animation, and triple-layer phosphor text glow. Three themes are available — green P1 (default), amber P3, and white — switchable from the settings menu.
After spending way too long trying to press a button that doesn't do anything (press button, depress button, push button, button, press the button) or trying to talk to the speaker (say open, talk to speaker, talk at speaker, shout at speaker) I got frustrated and used claude to give me a walkthrough based on the source code.
Turns out the correct command was "hi"
here's the walkthrough: https://pastebin.com/LHnFRFjw
> Have you played before?
> No.
> I assume that means yes.
Yeah, that's that half-century-old state of the art in natural language processing working...
Some practise is required to become fluent in that language. But it's worth it, because it unlocks many amazing text adventures!
Look, I think modern games with giant GO HERE arrows are dumb, but these games were an exercise in patience beyond necessary.