Several years ago I played Event[0]
It’s a sci-fi exploration/“walking simulator” that sees you stranded on an abandoned luxury space vessel, with only the vessel’s “AI”, Kaizen, for company. You can free-type whatever you like, and Kaizen will respond as best ‘he’ can, being helpful or unhelpful at times, opening and closing doors for you, giving you back-story on the ship and the people on it if you ask the right questions.
I’ve been looking for other games that use natural-language interaction and really coming up dry. I found a couple of horror-genre PC-simulator games like s.p.l.i.t (creepy!) and the demo of No Players Online (which was really fun by the way) and while both of those showed fake “chat apps” in the screenshots which got my hopes up, they are 100% programmed where you just press (any) keys and a pre-determined message types out letter by letter.
I don’t have my hopes up too high, because I realise that building this kind of interaction in a game is very difficult. It’s probably not worth it unless it’s the core focus of the game, and even then it’s going to have big problems. Event[0] itself was terribly flawed, as it’s clearly just using programmatic word matching, and often the responses are nonsensical or unrelated to what you asked.
That said, there were times it managed to shine, and in those moments it felt great, and I felt great for coming up with the right thing to ask, rather than being railroaded with predetermined options.
If you’ve got anything that might scratch a similar itch, please tell us about it :)
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Zork (of course)!
Not a “text based game” exactly, but NetHack www.nethack.org is character based.
I’ve been playing https://cluesbysam.com/ a lot recently. It’s a (free) daily logic puzzle, so not really story-driven, but it is 100% text based.
Modern Text Parser Games:
The Crimson Diamond - Highly Recommended
Description: Follow amateur geologist and reluctant detective Nancy Maple to the ghost town of Crimson, Ontario to investigate the discovery of a massive diamond in this retro-inspired, EGA text parser mystery adventure!
Tachyon Dreams Anthology - Recommended
Description: Time itself is breaking up, and Dodger, the dishwashing dude onboard Penrose Space Station, is the unlikely fixer. Join the chaos in this 80s-style comedy, sci-fi text-parser adventure as Dodger tackles a cosmic crisis like no other!
Buddy Simulator 1984 - Recommended (Only partially text-parser based)
Description: Thanks to next generation AI technology, BUDDY SIMULATOR 1984 simulates the experience of hanging out with a best buddy! Your buddy learns from you, constantly adapting to your interests and personality. But most importantly, your buddy can play games with you!
Code 7: A Story-Driven Hacking Adventure - Unfinished
Description: Try to save humanity in this episodic and fully voiced hacker story. Guide your partner through a thrilling and emotional science fiction journey by hacking systems and extracting information. All from your keyboard.
Classic Text Parser Games:
Eric the Unready - Recommended
Description: Eric the Unready established his reputation by impaling his instructor during jousting class. Then, when Princess Lorealle the Worthy is kidnapped, Eric begins a madcap quest through his hilarious fantasy world packed with horrible beasts!
Longer list of games not all of which I’ve played: Parser Graphic Adventure Games
List of highly rated interactive fiction not all of which I’ve played: IFDB List
Stories Untold is excellent, its a horror game that’s mostly text based.
Hey! I hope a little self promo here is alright! The game I’ve been working on is inspired by these older text based adventure games, and its a bit of a homage to that style. I’ve been building my own text parser for it. Its been a hobby project of mine for the last couple of years and is nearing completion.
It might not fit the bill completely in that it doesn’t really require natural language, but maybe it’ll help scratch the itch a little? There is a demo up on Steam ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/3919240/Soulfused/ ) and Itch ( https://confoxing.itch.io/soulfused ) If you do give it a try I would love to hear your thoughts!
Are MUDs still a thing?
Yes. I’ve played the Iron Realms ones still. People have opinions about them being pay to win. Several are in legacy mode now though which means no official support anymore but also no pay to win.
I was on my old one for memories a few years back and there were other players there, can’t really say it was thriving but hey.
Buddy of mine from grade school was super into a ST:TNG mud of the time. Never heard of or knew what the heck a MUD was until then.
Dave, hope all is well with ya!
Collossal Cave Adventure is a text-only adventure game. It uses the most primitive technologies in the most primitive ways (as it’s old, but it’s free and even has a web version as it’s old).
I remember Game Makers Toolkit raving about some text-based interactions in the game The Shivah in an old video about detective games.
Thanks, interesting suggestion. Even if it doesn’t have free-text interactions (not sure on that point) it still seems to have other mechanics around how doing ‘investigation’ in the game works which makes me want to check it out.
Many old Sierra adventure games are like this.
Text based adventures like Zork and Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy.
I always liked the Hugo series, myself.
It’s not really the difficulty of programming that these are not common today, but more that there are better, easier ways of having interactions which are more popular. Hell the entire genre of point and click adventure games that came after text parsers isn’t super big today and those are some of the easiest games to make.
Gonna keep an eye on this thread, because I’d also like to know about more games like that. Especially more modern ones. All the things I know of that fit the description are from my childhood. :x
Those kinds of old text-based adventures are definitely worth a shout, but I think you mentioned their biggest flaw - that other means of interaction are much more natural and intuitive than text parsers.
It’s very frustrating and not fun to be trying to find the right phrasing the game wants for “combine the x with the y” or “use the a in the b” when we can just click on things.
In Event[0] for example you are free to move around and look at things and click on things and find clues by yourself, but KaIzen is always there to chat to - and you often need to. So it’s a great blend because it’s a “normal” and modern game in most respects, but with free-text conversation as a core element.
Again it’s a flawed game (Only ‘Mixed’ on Steam and I agree with that!) but it’s an interesting experience regardless.
a bit later Sierra adventure game “Leisure Suit Larry 7” has both: mouse point & click AND text-parser. Though it is only really required in few places where you either need to ask about something not offered in the dialogue options, or figure out a clever verb for doing something (some are easter eggs and funnies, can’t really remember what else needed custom verbs typed in, fairly sure there was some).
In any case, the game isn’t for everyone’s tastes, it is goofy/juvenile/immature/naughty/“adult”, but overall more on the side of comical/cartoony and not really a “sex game”, even if getting laid is the goal for Larry.
Those kinds of old text-based adventures are definitely worth a shout, but I think you mentioned their biggest flaw - that other means of interaction are much more natural and intuitive than text parsers.
I think that they improved in later years, and experience and improved design helps with “hunt the verb”.
You might look at https://ifdb.org/
That being said, I haven’t played much in recent years, so maybe that’s a condemnation of them.
Starship Titanic comes to mind, though the text parser is only used to talk to characters.
You might also enjoy playing around with KathaaVerse. It uses AI (LLM) to turn any book into a text adventure. Last time I tried it, a lot of the time it felt more like playing a fever dream than an internally consistent story, though.
I played Starship Titanic as a kid, and loved it! Its one of four or five games I still kept the original PC “Big Box” for, all these years later.
The text parser being used only to talk to characters isn’t a detriment for me, it’s a feature! Clicking on things is much more intuitive for interactions, so just like Event[0] (which works the same way) I consider that a plus. Thinking about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs of Event[0] were actually inspired by Starship Titanic…
As for AI, that’s something I imagine we’ll see more of in the future. Something like KathaaVerse isn’t that exciting to me as it’s mostly a thin wrap around an LLM - which as you say is liable to go off the rails, and it’s not a rich experience.
For it to be compelling to me it needs to be a curated game first, with environments and interactions and actual programmed mechanics, and then AI second to potentially enhance that game experience with rich and natural conversation. It will be a fun match when someone gets it right.
The only thing that comes to mind is the mobile game Seedship, which I do highly recommend. It’s not the most expansive game but still fun. No “free typing” though.
