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!
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
> 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!
You're quite abjectly wrong, though. Text adventures were heavily advertised, in their illustrious and very brief moment of sunshine, as 'accepting English input' (cf. Maher, The Digital Antiquarian), which by definition constitutes NLP. They were just extremely bad at it, hence their accompaniment by a constant stream of excuses like the one you just made. (You must have had to dust it off first! That one is older than me.)
I would understand your joke if it was made in the 1980s, but today it only shows a very old misunderstanding of the genre. (One might say you must have had to dust that misunderstanding off first!)
[1]: The systems that do strive to understand English – usually through LLMs – generally do not result in very satisfying games. They are primarily made by AI enthusiasts rather than text adventure designers.
Your profile says you are a quantitative analyst. (I take this as reliable, since it does not also call you a rhetorician or humorist.) The fetish for logic puzzles thus checks out, but I admit I had thought the denumeration of time among the arts of number. Or had you mistaken Graham Nelson, Emily Short, and allies for Infocom alumnae?
Look, I think modern games with giant GO HERE arrows are dumb, but these games were an exercise in patience beyond necessary.
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.