Great text based games to play?

I help run the Interactive Fiction Database. https://ifdb.org/

I think that our list of games ranked by review scores is certainly the finest repository of extraordinary text-based games in the world. https://ifdb.org/search?browse

Every game on that list is fantastic. For your reading convenience, the top ten are: Counterfeit Monkey, Anchorhead, Superluminal Vagrant Twin, 80 Days, Hadean Lands, Lost Pig, The Wizard Sniffer, Violet, and The Impossible Bottle.

You can click the "Play Online" button on almost any game in IFDB to play it right there in your browser, without downloading anything.

IFDB also includes all of the 20th century classics, including Infocom games, but IMO the modern games have long-since outclassed them.

If you're curious, here's our list of top-ranked Infocom games. https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=tag:infocom The top-ranked Infocom games are science-fiction games, topped by Trinity, Infocom's surreal "Alice in Wonderland" time-travel game, followed by Planetfall and A Mind Forever Voyaging.

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

Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short. https://github.com/i7/counterfeit-monkey/releases Maps and cheat sheets are in the "Counterfeit Monkey.materials" folder.

If you don't want to install a parser on your computer, you can play it online by putting the link to the .gblorb file into https://iplayif.com/ I.e. https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fi7%2Fc...

Modern games are generally going to be more approachable than old ones. Tastes have changed considerably. In the days when you couldn't pull up a walkthrough in a few seconds, taking days to think of the next step was part of the fun, and just getting permanently stuck at some point was fairly common. Also, letting the player keep going even after they have done something to make the game unwinnable is now considered very uncool. Navigation is much less tedious these days as well, fast travel for example, although the exact mechanics depend on the game.

And that's not mentioning the amount of CPU and RAM available, not only for the game's runtime, but also for tools like I7 (which was used to write Counterfeit Monkey).

For an quicker introduction to modern "interactive fiction", as it's called these days, check out competition entries. https://intfiction.org/c/competitions/7 These are generally written in a shorter amount of time and the results are quicker to play through.

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/

This is a fun one I played recently about shopping in a grocery store, called Aisle. You only have a single command you can give for the whole game, but there's a looot of them you can provide, and it gives you a different ending for each. Part of the fun is trying to figure out what you can say to find another ending. You can play it directly at the link below.

Play: https://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2F...

Some great resources:

* Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) https://ifdb.org/

* IFWiki https://www.ifwiki.org/

* Playfic https://playfic.com/

* The Interactive Fiction Competition https://ifcomp.org/

* XYZZY Awards http://xyzzyawards.org/

* electronic book review http://electronicbookreview.com/

* Electronic Literature Organization https://eliterature.org/

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

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/

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.

Zork is of course the quintessential TBAG, alongside Hitchikers.

A couple of other good ones: Vespers: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=6dj2vguyiagrhvc2 9:05: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=qzftg3j8nh5f34i2 Slouching Towards Bedlam: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=032krqe6bjn5au78 (I haven't actually played this one but it's on my list)

I usually play Zork using the Rezrov project: https://metacpan.org/dist/Games-Rezrov/view/rezrov

Any discussion of text games puts me in mind of the amazing blog and forthcoming book, "50 Years of Text Games": https://if50.substack.com/ Highly recommended and target of a recent Kickstarter which blew through its reserve by well over an order of magnitude.

If you're a fan of Tolkien, check out MUME (Multi-user Middle Earth), a MUD that's been online since 1990: https://mume.org/

Its unofficial community site is http://elvenrunes.com/ which has hosted forums and player-submitted "logs" (text logs of PvP fights) for over 20 years.

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".

I've always had a soft spot for McMurphy's Mansion, a game where you look around your Scottish relative's estate to find 12 good bars. I have good memories of figuring this out with my Scottish grandmother as a child. You can play it with DOSBox or on Internet Archive.

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=gkqdo58j2zvjtxnk

https://archive.org/details/McMurphysMansionV1.5SW1989martin...

Apart from that, from short to long, some usual IF recommendations are:

Interstate 0: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=a3ym4ipix7sjsfrf

Glowgrass: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=b1xy3s75cjlty973

Anchorhead: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7

A Mind Forever Voyaging: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4h62dvooeg9ajtfa

You can also look for other beginner lists: https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=beginner&searchgo=Search+L...

You need an "interpreter" to play most of these, look up Gargoyle: http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/

The Grapevine network[0] is a fun little community of different MUDs where you can connect and hang out with other people who enjoy text-based worlds. If you're looking for something to play on your own, winners of the IF competition[1] are often excellent.

[0]: https://grapevine.haus

[1]: https://ifcomp.org/comp/2022

Don't click. https://kittensgame.com

I take absolutely no responsibility for the consequences of clicking this link.

Remember: Praise the sun, and Zebras hate you for no reason.

Spider and Web, https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/

Without giving anything away: It does something brilliant that wouldn't be possible in any other storytelling medium.

For something that’s not a text adventure (the best of which are great), there’s also nethack.

Be warned, it’s insanely difficult and a massive time suck.

I don't know whether this thread answered your question, but I just posted about a game I built on Show HN. Here's the link - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34585909.

Photopia by Adam Cadre. https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=ju778uv5xaswnlpl

It's short and sweet game and a good introduction to interactive fiction (IF) in my opinion.

Check out the list on Mudlet (https://mudlet.org), it's a FOSS desktop app for playing online test games you describe. Comes with a selection of good games pre -configured.

Look for MUDs and MOOs[1]

I've liked and played in the past a lot of these text based role playing games, especially when I was on a shittier dial up connection or remote satellite connections. I liked Aardwolf and Realms of Despair the most. I've played the IRE games like Achaea and Aetolia way too much. While those two definitely have a great lore and many active players, I have always loathed IREs pay to win "credits" style.

Text based gaming is still alive and evolving. Just don't expect a AAA game and definitely not single player.

[1] https://www.topmudsites.com/

Play CYPHER, Cyberpunk Text Adventure here: https://cabrerabrothers.com

"Ever since you came back from the Moon colonies you've been struggling to get into the smuggling business again. Things aren't as easy as they once were though, especially without your old pal Eddie around. It was him who brought all the major players in the market to do business with. And boy did they line up to hire you. Even the Yakuza used to pay almost twice the standard rate for moving passcodes through the international borders inside your Synapse.

All you've got now is a French crook that goes by the name of Lime, who cares more about setting up his own deals than bringing new quality customers on board to work with.

You always knew working with that french bastard was trouble, only you never realized how much until one of the deals he had setup went wrong."

# Make your way through the crowded streets of NeoSushi City!

A deal that goes wrong. A beautiful young woman wearing red cowboy boots following you into a Yakuza nightclub. A pack of Retrievers hired to chop your head off and "Mr.Smith", a mysterious man who claims to be a friend in a world where everyone is after the passcode stored in your Synapse. Will you live long enough to see what it unlocks?"

From the game's website:

CYPHER Cyberpunk Text Adventure is unlike anything you have ever played before; it is a whole new dimension in game interaction and storytelling you can vividly experience from within the realms of your own imagination!

Think of a book or movie you like the most, now imagine for a moment a limitless world of interaction and adventure where you not only take control of the main character of the story, but ARE the main character of the story! Every word you say, every decision or action you take is exclusively your own in the world of CYPHER.

In Text Adventures you communicate with the game world through conversational English sentences, the same way you would do in a chatroom or writing emails. The story unravels into a thrilling interactive experience that will keep you on the edge of your seat for hours... as long as you can escape death.

My first computer game in the mid 80s was a text adventure game called “Hunt the Wumpus”, voted one of the top 100 games of all time.

Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus

Emulator: https://archive.org/details/Hunt_the_Wumpus_1977_Creative_Co...

You can play Zork online: https://playclassic.games/games/adventure-dos-games-online/p...

And the granddaddy of them all, Adventure: https://rickadams.org/adventure/advent/

- Anchorhead. "anchor.z8". Not libre software, but cool. And, one day, it might be. You need a Z-Machine interpreter, such as Frotz.

- Dungeon. That's Zork I-III, condensed. More pure to the original adventures than the Infocom's further changes. 70% of chances of being libre software in a very close future, few months of years.

- Spiritwrak. A Zorkian adventure, but libre software. Good to play.

- Spider and Web. "Tangle.z5". Like the movie "Memento", based on flashbacks on an interrogation. You must recall what you've done and how.

- Vicious Cycles. "Cycles.z5". Close to the movie "Source Code", but the game came earlier.

- All Things Devours. "Devours.z5". A time travelling puzzle. You can compile it from source: https://jxself.org/git/devours

- Slashem. Not text adventures, but a roguelike. Buuut... Slashem comes from Nethack and that from Hack until you arrive to Rogue as the origin, and that game it's basically Adventure+RPG concepts+a top down view. Also, objects matter a lot on a text adventure because of their interaction. The same happens in Slashem, combat and proper usage of objects are equally needed to win.

May I recommend bitburner? > Bitburner is a programming-based incremental game that revolves around hacking and cyberpunk themes.

https://github.com/danielyxie/bitburner https://danielyxie.github.io/bitburner/

It's not quite what you're describing, but it's an amazing game built entirely in ASCII: http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com (not playable on mobile).

The guy who built the mobile app did a really interesting recording about how the blind community picked up on it in a way that hadn't anticipated thanks to screen readers.

I just asked chatGPT if it could act as game master for a text-based rpg and it says "sure" and proceeded to start the story telling. Amazing.

https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

Hadean Lands is a great modern IF game where you learn alchemical rituals, and have to figure out the meaning behind them to modify the ritual to solve puzzles. And I’ll second the recommendation for Emily Short’s Counterfeit Monkey.

Another fun interesting one is Aisle… the whole game is a single command, but you can enter all sorts of things, and get different outcomes.

I tried to revive the medium 14 years ago. The remnants are at https://textfyre.itch.io/. Shadow in the Cathedral received strong reviews and Jack Toresal has a unique interface if you can get Silverlight running.

Gemstone (currently Gemstone IV) is an online MUD that has been around for 30+ years and has a pretty thriving community and very active development as well as strong gamemaster interaction. https://www.play.net/gs4/

There is a free subscription but it is quite limited compared to the paid membership. I used to play back in the mid 90s and resubscribed a few years ago because I have found nothing else nearly as complex or immersive. Steep learning curve to start but folks are often willing to help others learn. Check out the learning wiki at https://gswiki.play.net/Main_Page

Check out ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery.) It’s been around for a long time and has a great story to it.

For a modern one that was great, on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/339350/Choice_of_Robots/

If you want to try a multiplayer text game I'd recommend Akanbar.

I would say it has the best qualities of many text games and MUDs with less of the weaknesses of its rivals.

You don't need an emulator, you can play from the website, however it's usually advised to download a client to connect from (Mudlet, Cmud, Mushclient, TinTin) so that you can make use of triggers (copy and paste a line from the game into the client so that if that line comes up again your character will react automatically with a 'triggered' response) and aliases (shorten commands, make 'sh' sip health instead of typing it out everytime).

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.

This one is short, fun and illustrated with emojis.

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

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

Does this count?

I would love to find a text-based, strategy game - imagine something like Master of Magic, Master of Orion 2, or Total War Warhammer, or something like that, but just text-based.

AI Dungeon generates endless text adventures: https://aidungeon.io

50 Years of Text Games

https://if50.substack.com/archive

Taco Fiction: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=2ej7ntbmoit9ytvy

You can use gargoyle as your IF player and run many games https://github.com/garglk/garglk/releases

One avenue for text games is the BBS “door” games of the 1990s, which you can still find online today (see: telnetbbsguide.com). Trade Wars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, and Barren Realms Elite are some classics. These are turns-based games where you log in each day to play your set of turns. It can be addictive.

Roadwarden is a recent text adventure that has some sections like the ones you want. The story is pretty good too.

When I was growing up we had a BBC Micro and the sine qua non of text based adventure games were those made by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_9_Computing

Good luck finding an emulator though.

Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/interactivefiction/ . It's surprisingly lively and they have lots of recommendations for beginners.

“Gostak” is a truly unique game. It’s like Zork, but many of the nouns and verbs are made up words.

Violet is exceptionally good: https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/e-utl5-bu0yya2ycst0m...

Apart from IF, I still sorely miss playing MUDs from when I was younger. Some of the worlds created by amateur writers were truly magical. Something I haven't ever quite got the same feeling from any graphical MMO.

If you don't know who infocom are, check out their stuff, and as a companion check out the eaten by a grue podcast

https://monsterfeet.com/grue/

Edit, autocorrect

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.

There is a great one still active right now. It’s a crime text based MMO called Torn City You can use my referral link

https://torn.com/1514924

You can read this blog(soon a book to be published) : https://if50.substack.com

It goes over the most important and influential text adventure games.

Check and see if any of the MUDs are still online, WoTMUD was tons of fun.

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.

Years ago there was Nuke Zone, but not sure if it's still around

edit: it is still around, but got renamed https://assault.online

If you want to try a multiplayer text game I'd recommend Akanbar.

I would say it has the best qualities of many text games and MUDs with less of the weaknesses of its rivals.

Already mentioned, but another hearty recommendation for Planetfall. I played that game in the 1980s, and I still enjoy playing it from time to time.

“Stories Untold” on Steam might be a fun start. It’s a 3D game which simulates the experience of playing short horror text adventures alone at home.

telnet discworld.starturtle.net

Aardwolf mud: https://www.aardwolf.com/

Anchorhead! My favourite game of all time.

What about these games like Leisure Suit Larry? They were graphical but I think you typed the instructions?

I’ve been looking for a text based game in the style of bootleggers. Those management style games are fun.

Are there any inhabited and lively MUDS/MUSHes/MUXes still around? I miss those.

I loved these games far more than reasonable when I was young.

However for me, the appeal has passed.

none would be my opinion. i started playing and writing these kind of games in the early 80s, and IMHO none comes near to something like bg2 or morrowind, if a retro experience is what you want.

Lmao I wanna test later if ChatGPT can entertain me with this.

Saw this one today it's on Steam

Warsim Realm of Aslona

ASCII based kind of neat

You should look into /r/mud games.

Dragonrealms!

Gemstone iv @ play.net

telnet 6000 4dimensions.org

Linux

Photopia

Varicella

Violet

(these three impressed me the most)

Here's one I made with ChatG, with DallE images too. But otherwise a choose your own adventure/Zork clone.

Two stories:

  - your spaceship has crash landed

  - Breaking Rad: what of Walt & Jesse cooked acid instead of meth (a friend's idea)

Needs you to have an OpenAI key.

They're super fun

https://pablo-mayrgundter.github.io/artificial-adventure/