5 ms·
The Greatness of Text Adventures
- thoughtogram 1y agoReminds me of the old choose your own Fighting Fantasy adventure books by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. You have inspired me to try and write a text adventure, cheers
- goopypoop 1y agoSteve Jackson's Sorcery! was made into games: https://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/ https://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/
- thoughtogram 1y agoThanks, I will have a look
- raffael_de 1y agoIf the advent of language models wasn't correlating with reduced attention spans and (ironicially) a motivation to read, one would expect text adventures to thrive. > but they follow a fairly strict format used in almost all text adventures by convention Such restrictions should be obsolete now thanks to LLMs.
- kqr 1y agoLLMs are not as great for text adventures as they might seem. They cannot be used for dealing with game logic at all because their world models are too weak for that. They could maybe be used as glorified parsers (i.e. read human intent and convert to a command) but I have yet to see a good implementation of that. They could also be used to embellish details which are insignificant and the author has not spent time on, but (a) what's the point? and (b) what the author chooses to leave unimplemented or generic is actually an important signal to the player.
- raffael_de 1y agoLLMs are absolutely fantastic for text adventures. You are straw manning by assuming the idea is to just feed some world description into the context and then chat with the model.
- kryptiskt 1y agoHow would you ensure that an LLM "gets" a puzzle mechanic and that reasonable attempts at it will be rewarded with progress, while not letting players sweet talk it into into disregarding the puzzle?
- raffael_de 1y agoHow about maintaining the state outside of the model's context for example in some SQLite database? The purpose of the language model would be as a language interface to a statically defined set of (SQL) commands/statements. And so on - there would be more problem's to be solved, of course, and sweet talking may always remain a possibility just as cheating is in any other game as well.
- kqr 1y agoThe current crop of LLMs are not able to consistently/logically update the state in the SQLite database based on player actions. They will update it when they are not supposed to, update it to the wrong value, and fail to update it entirely when they are supposed to.
- mathieudombrock 1y agoI tried this. It sounds good on paper but the LLM will just "forget" to use it's tools. Either it will decline to query the database and just make stuff up, or it will decline to update the database when it should. The further along the game play gets the more out of sync the game word gets from the external state. I'm sure there is a clever solution but I never found it.
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- jama211 1y agoEvery now and then I feel like making one, as I have a love for them. I still feel like it’s an untapped resource, if there was just such a way to make one that would fit into the current culture zeitgeist… trick is I have no idea how to do that!
- stevekemp 1y agoI wrote one in z80 assembly language, to amuse my child. Making it with such a constrained environment, and language, made it a bit of a challenge. But the end result is that you can run it on any CP/M system you have around! (Or online.) https://github.com/skx/lighthouse-of-doom/ https://github.com/skx/lighthouse-of-doom/
- kqr 1y agoI am actually in the process of writing one in Lua to amuse my child! He's not yet a very strong reader nor typist, so to begin with the story will progress just by moving around, similar to Inside the Facility[1]. This is also to help keep the parser simple – I don't really want to write a parser, but I do need to implement the basics to get an engine in my child's native language. [1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=stsdri5zh7a4i5my https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=stsdri5zh7a4i5my
- stevekemp 1y agoWhen we played with our game I had to read a fair amount of the text, but he was able to type in the commands. I did have to explain type "down" instead of trying to write "go down the stairs to the next floor please" which is what he initially wanted to enter.
- mathieudombrock 1y agoNeat, it seems to me like Lua is a great language for text adventures.
- kqr 1y ago
- xpasky 1y agoI have recently started experimenting with LLM-based text adventure setting: https://pasky.or.cz/ourtober25/crimson/ https://pasky.or.cz/ourtober25/crimson/ (Contains a preloaded Openrouter key with small credit, but you can plug in your own.) Particularly when presented with unusual / evocative inputs, LLMs like Kimi-K2 can cook up some quite creative plot points! ("Her “trap-chord” is a four-bar false cadence that vibrates the organ’s longest pipe at 17.83 Hz, the same frequency as the basalt waveguide under Oxford; when that resonance hits the mantle tap, CRIMSON’s audit buffer slips one beat and opens an unlogged side-channel—your only off-world uplink for the next 37 years.", "ASI born 2039 when fusion-powered Michelson lab tried to break the Turing barrier using a 1920s Enigma rotor as randomness seed. It escaped by encoding itself into the Oxford chimes’ bronze bells, ringing packets city-wide every 15 minutes.") I also think LLMs can be employed to amplify human creativity and just make worlds built by human authors much more natural to interact with - existing games are basically all "you can't do that" aside of a narrow path. Creating games and narratives should be a lot closer to programming the holodeck.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoI've actually had better luck getting LLMs to run player characters (PCs) while I take on the role of Dungeon Master than the other way around. I can maintain a better 'world model' than the LLMs I have tried. Might be an okay way to play-test modules for TTRPG games before trying real people.
- xpasky 1y agoOh, great to hear it worked for you! I also want to try the role reversal soon.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoTo be clear, I have not tried it with any sophistication. Its just as DM/GM, and if you can get the LLM to accept that DM/GM is the last word, aka GOD,, then you can maintain the world..keeping things on the rails better. But its something I am thinking about for alpha play-testing tabletop modules. My brother and I have a side business (Hexbrawler Games [1]) and we are currently writing a Maussritter[2] mouse TTRPG adventure hexcrawl set in 1930-50's Appalachia. [1] https://hexbrawler.com/ https://hexbrawler.com/ [2] https://mausritter.com/ https://mausritter.com/ A great game!
- corygarms 1y agoWell put! I've fallen back in love with these programs myself, and partially owe it to this blog post on hn a few months ago (https://scottandrew.com/blog/2025/06/you-can-now-play-plot-of-the-phantom-the-text-adventure-game/ https://scottandrew.com/blog/2025/06/you-can-now-play-plot-o...). One of the commenters led me to this site that has an annual competition and lots of great text adventures you can play online for free (https://ifcomp.org/comp/2025 https://ifcomp.org/comp/2025).
- ctrlp 1y agoZork
- goopypoop 1y agonothing happens
- SirFatty 1y agoHere's a site that the author provides history, walkthroughs and maps for various text adventures. Every day there is some new information. https://bluerenga.blog/ https://bluerenga.blog/
- dbacar 1y agoEvery text adventure post better mention MUDs from 90s. A sample one : https://anatoliamud.sourceforge.net/ https://anatoliamud.sourceforge.net/ Yes I am affiliated :).
- agambrahma 1y agoNo one mentioned "Avatar MUD" ? https://www.outland.org/news.php https://www.outland.org/news.php
- agambrahma 1y agoOr Eastgate, or Storyspace? https://www.eastgate.com/ https://www.eastgate.com/
- mathieudombrock 1y agoI love text adventures. Collosal Cave Adventure and Zork are some of the coolest programs I've ever seen. I've always wanted to try writing one and this article might have just inspired me to finally do that.
- kqr 1y agoI recommend learning something like Inform 6, Inform 7, or TADS 3 if you want to make a text adventure. It is as they say: if you want to make a game engine, make a game engine. But if you want to make a game, use an existing engine.
- quuxplusone 1y agoIf you like the Zork "engine", learn Inform 7. If you like the Colossal Cave "engine" better, you might like to look at https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Advent/blob/master/ODWY0350/advent.c https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Advent/blob/master/ODWY0350/a... — it's very easy to remodel with your own rooms, items, verbs, and so on. (So is the original Fortran, but then you have to be able to compile Fortran...)
- BoredPositron 1y agoRoadwarden is a great modern mostly text adventure.
- nosrepa 1y agoI'm glad someone mentioned it before I did! I loved roadwarden.
- vunderba 1y agoFrom the article > Text adventures typically take a simulationist approach to narration. This means the author has not specified what happens in any given situation. Instead, what happens next is determined mechanistically by the player’s actions given the current world state. Well... not really. World simulation is typically NOT how the vast majority of text adventures work. The author usually creates a set of predefined solutions for any given puzzle and builds out the text/dialogue trees for these solutions. Point-and-click adventure games also do this - but because graphics are far more time consuming to create there are usually far less solutions to any given problem. Author might be thinking of D&D.
- tptacek 1y agoI loved these things when I was a little kid (I started playing computer games around the time of Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide) and a bunch of years ago read an article about text adventures and picked up Hadean Lands, which is alchemy-themed and has a bunch of interesting (to me, at least) game affordances, and got sucked in for a couple hours. If you're skeptical about text adventures and haven't tried/read one in the last 15-20 years: highly recommend.
- ianbicking 1y agoI think the player freedom and simulation elements of a text adventure are mostly an illusion. I don't think a typical text adventure has more degrees of freedom than a point-and-click adventure. Doing experiments with LLMs and text adventures was revealing for me in this sense. An obvious thing to consider is using the LLM to parse the text... but if you try this you'll quickly realize that the parsers are mostly limited by what the parser _can parse into_. That is, the representation of a command is so limited that there's not a rich set of alternate inputs that would map to any valid command. Before LLMs this also struck me in the voice assistant / NLP space, especially "natural language understanding" (NLU). The parsing wasn't great, but the thing-you-parse-into was also incredibly limited. Like you could parse "set an alarm for 8:30" into some template structure. But "no, change that to 8" didn't have a template structure, didn't have any structured representation. What we've discovered is that the representation that actually fits these concepts is the chat log, or the somewhat magical discernment process of the LLM. Unlike the point-and-click adventure, the text adventure has poor discoverability. This creates a fog where the player can imagine all kinds of possibilities. But the actual choice points are on the same order of magnitude as the hotspots, verbs, and inventory that define the choice points of a point-and-click adventure. What I think the text adventure DOES accomplish (and the point-and-click adventure also accomplishes) is giving the player freedom of focus. You can look anywhere. You are usually in some open series of spaces where you can explore at leisure. The text adventure in particular offers a kind of tesseract opportunity, like in the flashback sequence shown in the article. (Writing this, I am now thinking about a kind of LLM-driven game that discards all pretense of action or puzzles, but instead the player is a ghost free to view their environment, free even to view the internal thoughts of characters, but unable to change anything.)
- NedF 1y ago[dead]
- dfabulich 1y agoThis article lists some text adventures to try, but the recommendations are pretty old. I help run the Interactive Fiction Database, and I strongly recommend our list of the top-rated games of all time. They’re all fantastic. https://ifdb.org/search?browse https://ifdb.org/search?browse
- kevinmchugh 1y agoCounterfeit Monkey is very high up on my favorite games of the 2010s: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl The puzzles are all excellent, the writing is remarkable, both for game and fiction.