It’s barely mentioned aside from the title, but I just wanted to say that 80 Days is a really wonderful game that is well worth your time if you’re into text-based games.
It’s more of an interactive story than a puzzle game, with some light resource management elements. But the writing is wonderful and there are hundreds of possible paths and storylines to discover. Its replayability is very high, whether you’re trying to find the fastest route, seeking out the most remote locations or unlocking hidden subplots.
It really does well to invoke the spirit of adventure in travel, and it was a particular delight during the pandemic days when that wasn’t possible.
Plus they’ve open sourced the language and tools used to create the branching narrative!
The graphics are mostly for atmosphere, the main focus is paragraphs of prose that describe the story and what happens to the main characters. Instead of a parser, you tap to choose one of several choices at each decision point, and you can also decide which routes to take on the main map. Aside from that, you can buy and sell items to make money.
Your choices depend on where you are, of course, but can also be affected by your money, items in your inventory, and past decisions. So, for example, if you help an inventor in Prague, he may give you a device that you can use later in Delhi.
EDIT: Here's an example of the text scenes and how you choose options:
I haven't played this one through, but I think it's an extension of the work they did on "Sourcery", which was an adaptation of the old "choose your own adventure" books to digital. For that one, they kept the book's story structure, added static images, a map, and a dice-rolling mechanic for combat.
So the base story mechanic is multiple choice, with some state (inventory, flags, stats) based on the game play. It's kind of between a text adventure and a novel.
To me it feels like they're exploring a new portion of the interactive fiction space, and it's interesting to watch where they take it.
It's a choose your own adventure. It's got some neat graphics, but they're just decorative. You don't interact with them. There would be nothing different about the game if they were stripped out and you played the game through an 80-column command line.
The graphics are mostly 'functional', I wouldn't even go as far as calling them 'neat'.
There's basically only two kinds of graphics in the game: a world map and the icon for the items you can buy and sell. (Unless they changed the game, I haven't played in more than a year.)
It's been years since I played it, but I remember there being some fairly intricate vector illustrations in certain locations. A vague memory of some sort of giant land-walking robot you rode for a while. It may have had some animation, or that might just be my imagination.
Oh yeah but I'll never be interested in portable gaming. I tried it during the years. Arcade handhelds in the 80s, I had a PSP, I played games on my first gen iPhone. But always I ended up dropping it soon after. Similar to many other experiences, I'll never do serious work on a phone. It's really a secondary device for me. I'm not a mobile-first kind of person.
Working on a mobile feels like I'm reading the newspaper through the core of a toilet roll while trying to write a summary with a pen in my mouth. Whereas my 24" workstation is so productive and comfortable <3
The ink language mentioned in the article, created by Inkle studios for their games, is a joy to work with. It is designed to be embedded and makes writing branching dialog or complete stories very easy.
As well as 80 Days, I really liked Inkle's implementation of the old Steve Jackson Sorcery books (for iOS and other platforms). They really know how to polish their games.
Voyage of the Marigold[0] is a project I recently completed written in a mixture of ink and js for a the 2024 Spring Thing[1] Festival of Interactive Fiction. It didn't win a major prizes but I am happy with the way it turned out.
I loved the recent newsletter-turned-book '50 Years of Text Games' by Aaron Reed. It's a bunch of deep dives into a bunch of games from throughout history, most of which I hadn't heard of.
Yes! I was a backer for this while it was still running. Really cool series, don't have a physical copy of the book but do intend to get at least a digital copy at some point. Man that hard copy would make a GREAT coffee table book though...
I'm very familiar with the Infocom era and am still in touch with some of the folks. I admit I haven't kept up with the latest developments. Probably should take a look.
For folks interested in the early history, Jason Scott's Get Lamp documentary is highly recommended. (He also has an Infocom-focused edit.)
The latest developments in IF are pretty amazing compared to the Infocom days. The parsers are a lot more advanced and this was all before things like LLMs, which I assume could be used in some way here.
I can imagine. While sophisticated for the time, the Infocom parsers were often sort of an exercise in figuring out the right incantation. (Sort of like Alexa :-/ Low blow I know.) Especially with LLMs and voice recognition, there's a huge amount of potential present and future for a lot more fluid interactions. Not that I expect it to ever be a really mainstream genre.
I dunno, I think it could with the right evolution in the interface. Imagine an interactive story app that you listen to on your commute, where voice commands back to it are the only interface (eg so it’s safe to interact with while driving).
Maybe that’s just a subset of the more general “AI companion” opportunity, but I expect you could get some really interesting experiences by calibrating the balance between the manually curated/composed parts of it and the parts that get a bit more painted-in by the LLM.
Am thinking especially of stories with conflicting timelines, unreliable narrators, etc, where you’d maybe be revisiting the same events from multiple perspectives to piece together what actually happened.
I had also written a document called "Tricky Document" which describes several tricks involved with Z-machine programming (many of which Infocom did not use). http://zzo38computer.org/zmachine/doc/tricky.txt (I also wrote implementations of Z-machine in C, PostScript, JavaScript, and Glulx.)
Another text adventure system that I know of is "OASYS". The VM code was not documented, although it did include source code, and I have figured it out from the source code and written a document. The included OAC compiler was rather limited (no include files, you could not call a function that is defined later in the file, ambiguous syntax, strings duplicated in the output file, no pointer types, no type checking, no macros, no arrays, no bitwise operations, spurious vocabulary entries, and various other limitations), so I had written my own compiler (which still uses the same VM code, but with an entirely different syntax).
The BBC released an online version for the 30th Anniversary of the Hitchhikers Guide with some additional graphics if anyone would like some nostalgia [1].
I don't know anyone who finished that game. It could be very frustrating. I was very pleased just to get the babel fish. Since then I have read the walk through and I doubt could have ever completed it without help. [2] (spoilers!)
> A photo of a brain and a statement that imagination was the best graphics anyone could get [...]
Funny enough, that actually applied to computer graphics just as well. Have a look at eg the sprites of Super Maria Bros: there's so little detail, and your imagination fills in the rest.
(In twenty years, we can point at today's graphics and say the same, I guess. It's always easier to see with past works.)
I never really played HHGG as a kid but started it up on my Apple //e using this wonderful disk image, which has a great front end for Infocom games, in case anyone hasn't seen it:
It was also a great example of the 'feelies' that came with games back then - the peril sensitive sunglasses and little baggie of belly button lint. It helped bridge the virtual text world with a connection to the physical.
I still have the Infocom game Leather Goddesses of Phobos, complete with scratch and sniff card, and the 3-D (blue-red) glasses for the enclosed comic book. If you don't have VR or first-person, it was the next best thing: they told you when to scratch and sniff.
Favourite part of this game: the untangling cream and the bonus joke about the rabbit.
Most hated part of this game: HOP, CLAP, KWEEPA.
Also funny how I recall this stuff vividly more than 3 decades later!
My first experience of IF was the tape-based Classic Adventure on the Amstrad CPC. My family bought the CPC late 1985, I bought Amstrad Action in December 1985 and saw the advert for it and new I wanted it more than all the other games that were reviewed with their flashy graphics and beeps and what-have-you.
There were a couple of standard "invisible inks." [0] I assume Invisiclues used one of them--most likely baking soda given they didn't use heat to reveal. No idea how stable either of those were as inks.
I think that Invisiclues is good idea, and that UHS format can be used as a computer file with a similar use. There are FOSS implementations of UHS such as OpenUHS and FreeUHS. Maybe someone will be able to rewrite the Invisiclues in UHS format. (I also wrote a UHS writer program in uxn. And, I had written UHS parser in PostScript; if you have printer with invisible ink (or scratch-off layer) then maybe it will be possible to use this PostScript code to make a program that will print out with invisible ink, too.)
I've never been great at working my way all the way through games. I think I may have completed that one--mostly because I could get hints from the author :-)
Loved text adventures since my CPC6128 days. They are about the only things I could still use my Psion 5 for. I have Lost Treasures 1 and 2, and the Classics on CD.
There is a love/hate relationship with most of those old text adventures. They could make an entire world with just a handful of words and fill them with clever puzzles to delight the users.
But then the parser would be willfully obtuse and most of the gameplay would be figuring out the exact combination of commands to unlock the next snippit of the story. Sometimes requiring the player to telepathically connect with the developer to figure out precisely what phrasing he intended.
You see a special looking rock on the ground.
> PICK UP THE ROCK
Huh?
> PICK UP ROCK
Huh?
> PICK UP SPECIAL ROCK
Huh?
> PICK UP THE SPECIAL ROCK
You pick up the rock, it feels special in your hands, you are certain it will be important sometime later.
> PUT ROCK IN POCKET
Huh?
> PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN POCKET
Huh?
> PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN MY POCKET
I can't do that.
> OPEN POCKET
Huh?
> OPEN MY POCKET
You open your pocket.
> PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN MY POCKET
You safely store the rock.
It is no mystery why graphical adventure games basically wiped out the text adventure games.
Oh, you'd love the Apple II game called "Prisoner 2". It's entire purpose was to frustrate you at every turn with things you had to telepathically guess what the developer was thinking. The very first puzzle is a maze which is almost impossible to escape from... until you discover you can hit the 'ESC' key. It gets more dastardly from there.
The IF community recognized these problems early (late 90's/early 2000's) and mitigated them with helpers and a lot of playtesting.
This is not really an issue in any games released in the last 20 years.
I think for me the worst "guess the verb" blocker was in Enchanter with the mouse hole and how to get the parchment out of it. Who the hell is going to think of "REACH IN HOLE"?
The scale of the IF text-parser problem isn't that bad, and they addressed a lot of the issues decades ago, modern games don't struggle with this nearly as much. It's just that that Interactive Fiction tends to be a niche hobby, so most of the IF written today assumes you are already at least a intermediate in the field -- they often don't throw in a Tutorial, the way every modern triple-A game does.
From an 'intro accessibility' standpoint, Modern videogames are often way more willfully-obtuse. We just don't recognize it, because it's assumed that everyone who plays a game already has basic understanding of twin-stick first-person and third-person gamepad controls, we assume it like it's another form of basic literacy. (Who hasn't played a game before, right?)
But for folks who don't -- for the (many) folks who have literally never touched a gamepad in their life, sitting them down to modern graphical interactive-fiction controller game (say something like Firewatch, or Gone Home, or Edith Finch, or Life is Strange) is even more challenging for those folks than the traditional IF text parser.
I've seen people spend thirty minutes just trying to figure out how to look in a general direction -- it takes truly-new adults quite a while to get used to the feel of twin-thumbsticks for movement+camera-control, it requires a lot of careful fine-motor control on both sticks simultaneously and often has to be felt to be learned well.
At least with text-based IF, most people have been exposed to typing at school or at work or at a library or such. The same is not usually true of twin-thumbstick gamepads.
That's bloat. Current Z-Machine interpreters and libraries (Inform6+Inform6lib and better with Inform 7) have a MUCH better parser than the typical adventures for limited 'computers' from the 80's.
Graphical adventure games were largely parser-driven for like a decade. Sierra's AGI parser worked well; my recollection is that it usually looked for a verb and a noun and ignored any extraneous text.
The site is straight from the late nineties; mobile wasn’t a concern at the time, and it remains not a concern. These are better consumed in a desktop. The whole site is a delightful bastion of “The Old Internet.” The role playing games are also plenty fun!
In my personal archives though, I only have a copy of the 1977 update by Dan Woods where the player can score a maximum of 350 points. This, I believe, is the Fortran source code of the 1977 version: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/adv350-p...
I feel like IF tech could be use for more than just fiction. Imagine government forms that could use it to help people navigate a complex bureaucratic system of forms, or something like the python cookiecutter for generating project layouts which could ask for more detail about your preferences before spitting out a template, online tutorials which customise to cover the 3 main cases etc.
Also, this article misses a small point in time in 2007-2012 where Textfyre was an unsuccessful attempt at commercial IF.
One of the published games was written by Jon Ingold (with Ian Finley), called The Shadow in the Cathedral, which is available at https://textfyre.itch.io/.
I'm not sure, but I think this is the last parser-IF game Jon had a hand in...and may have been a spark for Inkle Studios.
I remember a time where I was playing "A mind forever voyaging" every day while listening to "Jazz impressions from New York" by Dave Brubeck on endless repeat. Good times. Both are excellent pieces of art and I can attest that they complement each other very well.
The IF archive (IF standing for “interactive fiction”, and the archive containing exclusively text adventures and related content) has existed since 1992. So to answer your question, it is unlikely that a “non-gamer blog” invented the term. In fact, the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup apparently dates back to 1987, well before the concept of blogs, or really “gamer” in its modern sense, had come about.
It’s more of an interactive story than a puzzle game, with some light resource management elements. But the writing is wonderful and there are hundreds of possible paths and storylines to discover. Its replayability is very high, whether you’re trying to find the fastest route, seeking out the most remote locations or unlocking hidden subplots.
It really does well to invoke the spirit of adventure in travel, and it was a particular delight during the pandemic days when that wasn’t possible.
Plus they’ve open sourced the language and tools used to create the branching narrative!
https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/