#Free text adventure game for free#

You start life with access to a Triage MK III, a device that aids you in analysing, solving and dealing with items and puzzles. The game gives no clear indication of who you are or what is is going on apart from the disturbing voice of an unknown agent: both an interesting method for keeping you off-balance and perhaps denoting an insane protagonist. It’s a dark, forbidding, mystery game that draws you into its unsettling storyline by simply having you listen to a recording on a phonograph. Yeats line from “Rough Beast: The Second Coming”. The game appropriately takes its name from the W.B. They even have a yearly interactive fiction competition for the little darlings.Ī submission that stands out clearly in the interactive fiction competition is “Slouching Toward Bedlam”. This being the case, hordes of slavering, nicotine stained authors have the opportunity to write really rather wonderful text adventures while killing time until their epic love story involving narwhals starts to sell. Interactive fiction offers a comparatively lower barrier to production than most modern games. So interactive fiction has a long and distinguished heritage, but are there more modern offerings? In fact yes, there are. Updated version of “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” : Gallery You can play the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy here although if you are new to text adventures I recommend the BBC re-release, it adds graphical elements and will hold your hand in a slightly more caring way, in as much as offering a quick execution could be considered “more caring” than enduring months of having body parts removed slowly enough to prevent bleeding to death. If not, and I hate myself for saying this, pick up a walkthrough because this game is fantastic and deserves to be finished. If you can make it past the babble fish puzzle then you are certainly made of stern enough stuff to play any of the other adventures on this page. HHGTTG is totally as incomprehensible as it is hilarious. This actually has no causal relationship to the game, it’s just a genuinely good book that will do you no end of good to read. It will do you no end of good to have read the book. Now I must warn you this game is hard, very hard. A wonderful adaptation of “the increasingly inaccurately named trilogy” written by the sadly deceased Douglas Adams.

Hitchhiker’s Guide To The GalaxyĪnother great classic text adventure available online in both its former glory, and as a fantastic 20th anniversary edition made by the BBC. Try not to get eaten by a grue and remember, “If used and maintained in accordance with normal operating practices for small universes, Zork will provide many months of trouble-free operation”.

#Free text adventure game for free#

You can play the original Zork for free here and I highly recommend that you do. I must warn you, Legends of Zork is set in the same universe but not a text adventure by any means. The franchise is still continued with a casual persistent MMO browser based version of Zork that began in April 2009. No matter how far we have moved on into high resolution, face blistering feasts for the eyes, games today still claim descendancy from these heady ideals of telling a story that people would love.

This game began the dynasty from which modern gaming can claim it’s heritage. Zork, the first Infocom game, was created at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling in 1977. Adventure eventually gave inspiration to the behemoth Infocom, arguably the greatest text adventure publisher ever to exist. It was created by Will Crowther and kick started an entire genre. The first text adventure was called simply Adventure owing to the well documented shortage of catchy names in the seventies. Sometimes, an in depth and well crafted interactive fiction can be just as satisfying as using a spectacularly modeled, surreal weapon to convert a beautifully animated alien killing machine into something liposuction surgeons throw out at the end of a day. Text adventures can be great in much the same way the novel is almost always better than the film: if only out of virtue of being able to create Harry Potter in your own mind, rather than watching some bespectacled oik grow hair in embarrassing places year after year.Ī well oiled imagination can be relied on to provide vivid imagery, not surprising considering that it is the filter the real world must pass through before reaching your conscious experience. Some wise people even see graphics based computer games as a step backwards, the equivalent of drawing pictures on cave walls in comparison to the Illiad. Some of the first computer games in existence are text adventures and when done correctly they can be as engrossing, inspiring and as horrifying as any novel. Text adventures, or interactive fiction, are old, really old.