Decline Best Text Adventures?

[Siveon]

I haven't played a Text Adventure in a while but I certainly had an inclination to play really good wordy text parser adventure games.

I know about Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide, and while I haven't played that I wonder what's really good outside of that. Or really what you guys even think about some text adventures/what you've played. I only really played this one freeware game on the browser, but I forget the name.

 

[Jenkem]

 

[Cael]

Lone Wolf utilising Seventh Sense.

You won't find a better text game.

 

[Siveon]

Lost Pig and Hunter in Darkness

Lost Pig! That's the game I played.

 

[Strange Fellow]

You already have some Infocom games on the list, so I'll suggest Legend Entertainment games, which apparently I can't shut the fuck up about on this forum. Eric the Unready, Timequest, Gateway, Spellcasting. Of those, I had the best time with Gateway, but the other ones are great too.

Actually I'll suggest one more Infocom game as well: A Mind Forever Voyaging. Kind of unconventional in that it's very light on puzzles, but a very well written game.

 

[Nano]

Microsoft Adventure from 1981, an IBM PC launch title.

 

[opium fiend]

Anchorhead is a wonderfuly atmospheric Lovecraftian adventure.
Blue Lacuna, you're like a dimension hopper stuck on a beatiful Myst-like island. Fuckton of interaction with enviroment.

 

[abnaxus]

Leather Goddesses of Phobos

(anything written by Steve Meretzky is absolutely hilarious)

 

[MRY]

It depends on what you're looking for. In particular, how puzzle-intensive, how difficult, how large, and how well-written. The [EDIT: second to] last is a non-trivial point. I almost never finish large text adventures because of a mix of becoming overwhelmed and becoming bored. My preference tends to be for a modest amount of modestly difficult puzzles in a short to medium length game, with good writing. For that reason, I don't particularly care for the Infocom-era adventures.

Anyway, my suggested games would be:

Metamorphoses by Emily Short: neat quasi-physics puzzles, good writing, many different solutions.
Spider & Web by Andrew Plotkin: Great puzzles, great set-up for the early game, and my favorite moment in an adventure game.
Photopia by Adam Cadre: delightful maudlin schmaltz. No puzzles, but it has some neat moments.
Anchorhead by Mike Gentry: Decent length, good puzzles (though a couple annoying walking-dead scenarios), one especially fun research-based puzzle, some good creepy moments.
Slouching Toward Bedlam: Fun conceit, decent enough puzzles, some neat endings.
Shade (Plotkin) and 9:05 (Cadre): Very short, can't explain why I like them without messing them up.

Running out of patience for explaining why I like certain games, so I'll just list: Babel (Finley), City of Secrets (Short), Coloratura (Glasser), Lost Pig, The Edifice (Smith -- the language puzzle is great!), King of Shreds and Patches (though I got annoyed/bored and quit at one point).

 

[Norfleet]

DWARF FORTRESS. It's in text. It has an adventure more. Ergo, it's a text adventure.

 

[Don Peste]

Actually I'll suggest one more Infocom game as well: A Mind Forever Voyaging. Kind of unconventional in that it's very light on puzzles, but a very well written game.

I have this on my phone. And I'm stuck at the very first puzzle, the dog.

 

[Falksi]

 

[Strange Fellow]

Actually I'll suggest one more Infocom game as well: A Mind Forever Voyaging. Kind of unconventional in that it's very light on puzzles, but a very well written game.

I have this on my phone. And I'm stuck at the very first puzzle, the dog.

I know that feeling, my brain tends to lock up when presented with anything even vaguely resembling an adventure game puzzle. Still I play them...

 

[CryptRat]

I don't know much about Text adventures but I enjoyed the Guttersnipe trilogy. The first game is available here and the two other games are two links away. You're playing as a street urchin escorted by her scholarly rat. The first game takes place in a fairground and the games are funny, they are certainly not that hard or I wouldn't have managed to beat them but I thought the puzzles were fun enough.

 

[Blaine]

THE Andrew Plotkin text adventure game, as far as I'm concerned. Blisteringly, mind-bendingly difficult puzzles, although he added a nice map to the game client since I played, which may help a bit. As the description states, the puzzles are all interlinked. You have to constantly have the meta-puzzle in mind while solving each individual puzzle, because doing things in one can obstruct or alter the others.

https://hadeanlands.com/

 

[newtmonkey]

Added to Steam wishlist! Will pick this up next time I make a bulk Steam purchase.

 

[newtmonkey]

Siveon
Have you played Lurking Horror? That's a good one.

 

[Siveon]

Siveon
Have you played Lurking Horror? That's a good one.

Nope but this sounds interesting. Very lovecraftian I take it? I'm not good on horror but quality is quality.

 

[newtmonkey]

Siveon

It's widely regarded as a quality text adventure, and it's not too long either. It's still a pretty conventional text adventure, which means you'll be exploring a map, picking up items, and solving puzzles. It's got a decent atmosphere (I recommend configuring it for green text on black background to replicate the monochrome monitor feel for ultimate immersion lol).

 

[JarlFrank]

You already have some Infocom games on the list, so I'll suggest Legend Entertainment games, which apparently I can't shut the fuck up about on this forum. Eric the Unready, Timequest, Gateway, Spellcasting. Of those, I had the best time with Gateway, but the other ones are great too.

Since I love these kinds of parser-based text adventures BUT WITH GRAPHICS, please recommend me more of those types of games if you know any others.

 

[JarlFrank]

Anchorhead is a wonderfuly atmospheric Lovecraftian adventure.

In a similar vein, The King Of Shreds And Patches is awesome too. Lovecraftian game set in Elizabethan London.

Also, I really enjoyed Emily Short's Counterfeit Monkey. It makes good use of the text adventure as a medium, as it lets you interact with objects on a fun level: you can remove or add letters to objects in order to turn them into different things.
I remember one puzzle where I had to scare some teenage girl away, so I turned a pear into an ear by removing the p, and turned a tome into a toe by removing the m, and showed her the severed body parts which made her think I was a serial killer :D

Quite fun and creative.

 

[Strange Fellow]

You already have some Infocom games on the list, so I'll suggest Legend Entertainment games, which apparently I can't shut the fuck up about on this forum. Eric the Unready, Timequest, Gateway, Spellcasting. Of those, I had the best time with Gateway, but the other ones are great too.

Since I love these kinds of parser-based text adventures BUT WITH GRAPHICS, please recommend me more of those types of games if you know any others.

I wish I did.
I can't recommend them as I haven't really played them, but the Telarium (Trillium) games have (very primitive) graphics. Their game Fahrenheit 451 actually features contributions from Ray Bradbury himself, which is pretty cool. The Wikipedia page also claims that Arthur C. Clarke contributed to Rendezvous with Rama, but I can't find any other references to corroborate that claim.

 

[Marquess Cornwallis]

Since I love these kinds of parser-based text adventures BUT WITH GRAPHICS, please recommend me more of those types of games if you know any others.

Apart from the LE classics, two that immediately come to mind are The Hobbit by Beam Software (who also made a number of other games of the type, e.g. The Castle of Terror) -- which can be played online at the Internet archive -- and Gremlins: The Adventure by (what would later become) Adventure Soft (who went on to make the Elvira and Simon the Sorcerer games), available from various abandonware sites.
Neither is what you'd call visually stunning, of course, and while I did like them back then on the C64, it was quite a while ago and they may not have aged all that well.

 

[Atrachasis]

You already have some Infocom games on the list, so I'll suggest Legend Entertainment games, which apparently I can't shut the fuck up about on this forum. Eric the Unready, Timequest, Gateway, Spellcasting. Of those, I had the best time with Gateway, but the other ones are great too.

Since I love these kinds of parser-based text adventures BUT WITH GRAPHICS, please recommend me more of those types of games if you know any others.

Well, you might go back and have a look at the roots of Interplay... let's see, I fondly and vividly remember Tass Times in Tonetown, never got very far in Borrowed Time, and never played Mindshadow.

The Magnetic Scrolls games technically had graphics (and superb ones, too, at least on the Atari), but not of the clickable kind, so that's probably not what you're thinking of. They might still float around on abandonware sites; I remember going back and finally finishing The Pawn and Guild of Thieves a few years back. Had some creative ideas back then, such as in Jinxter, where, instead of dying, you were saved by some unfathomable happenstance, but had your luck stat decreased by one. And once that had reached zero, the next mistake would be fatal. Fish, IIRC, had you play as an interdimensional agent inhabiting the body of a gold fish...

 

[JarlFrank]

The Magnetic Scrolls games technically had graphics (and superb ones, too, at least on the Atari), but not of the clickable kind, so that's probably not what you're thinking of.

No, no, that's EXACTLY what I'm thinking of! Traditional parser-based IF except with illustrated scenes! Thanks, these look amazing!