Text Adventures
Date : 2018-11-17 Entry ID : 12901 Game ID : 1068
Text adventures mostly disappeared from the games world, but playing this type of game might provide experiences unlike any other type of game.
The Text Adventure Genre
When the genre of text adventures was at its peak, I was about 10 years old and not a native english speaker, and this type of game seemed completely impenetrable. Also, I was always very focused on graphics and sound, and having the choice between a text adventure and, say, Marble Madness or Hybris, the game with no graphics or music would never win.
I did use to read Fighting Fantasy books, which were like text adventures, except with fixed choice instead of a text parser, and later on, I would make a short Warhammer 40K text adventure myself for the Amiga.
Hybrid text adventures had existed for a while, games such as Mindshadow, a text adventure with accompanying still images, originally written in 1984 for the Apple II by Ayman Adham, co-founder of Silicon & Synapse, programmer on Battle Chess and The Lost Vikings, and lead designer of World of Warcraft. The game was released by Activision, and the 1985 Amiga port is one of the earliest games to come out for the Amiga 1000. However, as this point, the genre was evolving into different styles of adventure games: there were the Sierra-style adventures games such as Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, which still used a text parser, but were fully graphical and animated with a controllable third person character, there were first person mouse-controlled adventure games such as Uninvited and Deja Vu, and finally the third person point 'n click adventures that ended up being very popular in the 1990's such as Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. All of these flavours of adventure games had graphics and sound, and seemed much more appealing to me at the time.
The Lurking Horror
30 years and thousands of video games later, I felt curious about text adventures. This was a very unique genre - could there possibly have been a unique experience that I had missed completely? I decided to try playing through a real text adventure by the prolific text adventure game company Infocom. The Lurking Horror from 1987 was supposedly one of the best of its kind. In the game you play as a university freshman just enrolled at a university, and everything takes place in the university location in a single night. The Lurking Horror is set in 'present day', which in this case means the 1980s, and it is very inspired by the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft.
I completed the game in 2018, and it was a pretty interesting experience. The Lurking Horror is far from perfect, and it actually had a lot of frustrating moments, many of which could be solved using modern design ideas adapted for the text adventure genre. But it did one thing right - it had one of the most intricate mechanical puzzles I have encountered in a game: The elevator puzzle. Here is a quote from my game log:
I made sure that the elevator was on the first floor, pryed open the elevator door, put the crowbar in the door to keep it open, climbed down, attached a chain I found to a rod using the padlock from the Tomb, climbed up and attached the other end of the chain to a hook on the bottom of the elevator, removed the crowbar, went up and called the elevator on a higher floor, ripping the rod out of the wall and opening a passage to the Steam Tunnels. Now this was a pretty sofisticated puzzle that made mechanical sense, and was pretty easy to figure out. Very nice.
Text Immersion
Games without graphics generate visuals in your mind as you play them, and these visuals are strong in your memory after playing the game. One of the first times I noticed this was playing Moria back in the 90s, a classic roguelike. I have a vivid memory of walking through dank tunnels with torches on the walls, hearing my footsteps echo against the stone walls. None of that is in the game, all of that is something I made up myself. The Lurking Horror had a similar effect, I can see G.U.E. Tech in my mind, the walkways, stairs, elevators, the snow storm outside, and something I haven't tried before: a clear layout of the whole place in my head, something rare for someone with no sense of direction such as myself.
Text adventures have the potential to be more immersive than most games, even games that deliberately avoid showing or hearing your own character, such as first person RPGs. In 'The Lurking Horror', I felt I completely inhabited the character, and it reminded me of playing a pen and paper RPG, without the social aspect. When a Call of Cthulhu pen and paper RPG 1990s campaign was started at the office where I work, I decided to transplant my character from 'The Lurking Horror' to this game. I took the backstory and decided that my character would be traumatized and antisocial after the events of the game, and played him like that.
Please check out my playthrough on YouTube.