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.
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.
I work in game dev (animation side) and what strikes me about these old text adventures is how much the parser's limitations shaped the design philosophy. When you can't express everything, you have to make the world's constraints feel intentional rather than arbitrary.
Modern games sometimes have the opposite problem — the engine can do anything, so the world feels boundless and yet strangely hollow. There's something to learn from how Haunt had to be ruthlessly economical.
Funny -- I feel almost the opposite way! In modern games there's a very small set of action one can take in any situation (hence why game controllers can get by with so few buttons) whereas in text adventures, there are several dozens of plausible actions in any situation, down to details like "smell photo" or "break frame".
Sure, a modern game could implement breaking the picture frame as a narrative element, but then it would be telegraphed as "press X to break frame" -- one action in a small set possible at that time. The text adventure would also have to hint at it, of course, but it would be more subtle, like "there is a piece of paper wedged behind the picture" or whatever. The user would then have to figure out on their own that the frame is breakable.
Of course, that unparalleled freedom is also why good text adventures are difficult both to make and to play.
The wikipedia page on this game is wild too - from the developer themselves: "It violated most, if not all, of the design guidelines for good interactive fiction in that you could get killed much too easily, the puzzles were way too obscure (many based on Saturday morning cartoons from my youth), but it had a certain charm".
Taking cryptic to an entirely new level.
All those saturday mornings I wasted as a kid watching cartoons like Animaniacs, DuckTales, and Thundercats aren’t even going to help me here. The game was written in 1979, so I’m guessing the puzzles are more closely based on Hanna-Barbera series like Magilla Gorilla, Jonny Quest, and The Herculoids.
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.
[1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=ddagftras22bnz8h
[2]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs
[3]: https://entropicthoughts.com/the-greatness-of-text-adventure...
Spoilers in link.
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
Derp. Thanks. I was exactly stuck at the freaking button right now and not finding any help online. Yet :D
I work in game dev (animation side) and what strikes me about these old text adventures is how much the parser's limitations shaped the design philosophy. When you can't express everything, you have to make the world's constraints feel intentional rather than arbitrary.
Modern games sometimes have the opposite problem — the engine can do anything, so the world feels boundless and yet strangely hollow. There's something to learn from how Haunt had to be ruthlessly economical.
Funny -- I feel almost the opposite way! In modern games there's a very small set of action one can take in any situation (hence why game controllers can get by with so few buttons) whereas in text adventures, there are several dozens of plausible actions in any situation, down to details like "smell photo" or "break frame".
Sure, a modern game could implement breaking the picture frame as a narrative element, but then it would be telegraphed as "press X to break frame" -- one action in a small set possible at that time. The text adventure would also have to hint at it, of course, but it would be more subtle, like "there is a piece of paper wedged behind the picture" or whatever. The user would then have to figure out on their own that the frame is breakable.
Of course, that unparalleled freedom is also why good text adventures are difficult both to make and to play.
> 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...
It's not NLP and it never was. The parser accepts a language with a specific syntax that just happens to vaguely look like English.
I got on to a bus then nothing happened/worked.
Look, I think modern games with giant GO HERE arrows are dumb, but these games were an exercise in patience beyond necessary.
The wikipedia page on this game is wild too - from the developer themselves: "It violated most, if not all, of the design guidelines for good interactive fiction in that you could get killed much too easily, the puzzles were way too obscure (many based on Saturday morning cartoons from my youth), but it had a certain charm".
Taking cryptic to an entirely new level.
All those saturday mornings I wasted as a kid watching cartoons like Animaniacs, DuckTales, and Thundercats aren’t even going to help me here. The game was written in 1979, so I’m guessing the puzzles are more closely based on Hanna-Barbera series like Magilla Gorilla, Jonny Quest, and The Herculoids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAUNT
walk around the wall and find the "speaker". Say hi. Never-mind the button doesn't do anything.