Currently, the top game in my Steam wishlist is Stories Untold. It’s a recently developed textual adventure game, but “encapsulated” into a modern reality.
I’ve read very good reviews about it, especially about its first chapter, and I can not wait to play it in the following weeks.
When it will happen, it will probably be my first time I fully play a text adventure game, paradoxically. I developed a couple of short text adventures on the C64 back then but I’ve never played the genre classics, like Zork. I have specified “probably” because I can’t exclude that I’ve played some minor textual games on the C64 and forgot about them.
It’s a bit strange to play a text adventure today and it’s even more strange to see that someone has developed a modern version of them and that Stories Untold is selling quite well among non-dinosaur gamers.
I know that @besmaller usually plays text adventures, but are there other people in the forum that have ever played them?
Also, we talked A LOT about adventure game interfaces, mainly from a development/design point of view:
I am a big fan of Legend games (Eric the Unready in particular). I have started playing Gateway, Timequest, Spellcasting 101.
I guess I would not buy a text adventure controlled by keyboard, but I would definitely buy a text adventure where the interactable objects are written in bold, and can be clicked, and when you click them, the verbs specific for that object come out (the cruise for a corpse UI, in other words).
I assume you are a Thaumistry backer, then! Or at least actively waiting for it to be released.
(editing this post because I just realized you said you would not buy a text adventure just controlled by the keyboard, which is definitely what Thaumistry will be, but it is made by Bob Bates, co-founder of Legend, and designer for all the games you mentioned)
I once played “Dallas Quest” on the C64… I even finished it!
More recently, I started playing Zork (you can download it legally for free!), but I did not get very far yet… there are some things you can do which look like dead ends (like dropping the egg from the tree to open it, or not picking up weapons in the house etc.) I probably need to map out the rooms, objects and things I discovered and restart a few times, knowing it is a real old-school adventure game and thus not very forgiving as the LucasFilm games were.
I don’t remember any dead ends in Zork. There might have been, but my instinct is to say that isn’t possible. However, there is a game score, and I believe it’s possible to finish the game without getting the maximum score. You can die, however, there are many ways to accomplish that. Infocom did some pretty amazing testing on their games, and they are well made. The parser improved over time though. I think my favorite Zork was Zork III, or maybe the throwback mini-adventure they made called Zork: The Undiscovered Underground. But you really have to play them in order, there are a lot of humorous references which only make sense when you have played the previous games.
I got that one, and was very excited about it. But the text adventure component, while fun at first, and with a little bit of an “AI” feel to it, wasn’t as good as I was hoping for. It’s a first person 3D adventure, with the text portion being your interaction with a sentient computer, revealing more and more of the story as you go along (I think you start out not really remembering how you got there…)
As I write this, I am thinking about checking it out again, maybe I didn’t give it enough of a chance.
I didn’t know of Thaumistry, unfortunately. I’ve seen that they even had an interesting Kickstarter stretch goal that wasn’t reached: a soundtrack by Chris Huelsback, which I would have loved to listen to.
I have perceived Event[0] more as an exploration game in a 3D world, where the interactions with the text terminal are limited. But I might be wrong about that.
Can anyone suggest a very short interactive fiction? I would like to test some of them but without investing a lot of time.
Then there is Tin Man Games who specialise in digital remakes of the classic Steve Jackson Games playbooks like Forest Of Doom or Caverns Of The Snow Witch
And if you´re looking for something REALLY short but fun. You might as well check out this:
I was tempted to link one of those sites in my first post but it turns out that several of those games are not in the public domain. There is still a copyright on them and a few of them are still sold (even on GOG and Steam).
They are both free, fairly short, and some of the best I’ve played. You will need to download a Z-code interpreter client, like Glulx, or Gargoyle, to play them. (or I think there’s an online player on the pages for these games, though I tend not to like those).
I suspect text adventures would be more popular if they worked with clicks instead of forcing the user to type. After all, there are a lot of people who read novels. So, people have no problems reading. But they have problems typing. It seems to me a very naive assumption, that whoever is willing to read is also willing to type.
It’s too bad that the only ones who, to my knowledge, tried to do clickable text adventures (i.e. Legend) chose a UI where you need to click the verb first, which is so uncomfortable that it defeats the purpose.
Maybe it’s because my first experience of adventure gaming was Space Quest (which I loved - sorry Ron). I think I liked the freedom of trying whatever I wanted, regardless of whether it worked.
I’d buy and play a modern adventure game if it took my fancy. I played Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy last year and enjoyed that. It’s tricky keeping track of progress without the visual memories but on the other hand it’s fun using imagination.
Hehe, I also love Space Quest, but that’s because it was one of the first games I played.
I enjoyed playing with the text parser, but I will admit that when Space Quest IV came out with a point-and-click interface, I never looked back!* I really enjoy the icon interface in Leisure Suit Larry and the later Space Quests best.
(* Actually, it’s not quite true that I never looked back. I play all Space Quests once in a while. I just like the icon UI in the later ones more.)
And just to be sure, as much as I am a fan of Sierra games, I can’t help but feel that they would be even better had they been designed by LucasFilms. I don’t like the insta-deaths, illogical puzzles, and save-restore mechanics.
I have no doubt that simplifying the interface would make textual adventures a bit more popular but I still think that they would remain a niche genre. One of the reasons is that images will always be processed by the human brain more easily (and faster) than texts.
I like to type stuff and text adventures have a special charm for me.
I think that the process could be enriched (and simplified) by drawing objects, maps and hints on paper.
It does not apply in the same way or at the same level. Books are not interactive, and the defining characteristic of interactive fiction is not reading, but interactivity.
Throughout the history of adventure games and interactive fiction, it appears that the genre has always been of interest to a niche audience. It’s just that during the formative years of personal computing, there was a strong intersection between computer users and early adopters and those who enjoy reading, know how to type, and are keen to explore interactive fiction as a new genre.
As the world of computing expanded and reached the mainstream, that alignment became less and less pronounced, and the limitations of the genre’s reach became more and more obvious.
Take a look at the Digital Antiquarian for an in-depth exploration on the subject.
