Of all the mysterious things that could suddenly appear in your apartment and be the cause of worry, a potted plant isn't that high up on the list. But that's because you've never seen a plant like this before in this Twine-based text adventure with multiple endings.
Elaine's life isn't what she'd hoped for. She's been married for 25 years, sure, and she has a roof over her head, but anxieties, regrets, loneliness, and a feeling of disconnection make her days feel gray... but there is the matter of her house, which seems to be slowly changing around her in a way only she notices, and over the course of a week in this puzzle-less text adventure, the doors she opens can change her life by changing her past in unexpected ways... but is it for the better?
While out traveling through the barren deserts of Utah a flash flood hits. Your jeep doesn't make it and a split second decision decides if live or follow your jeep into a watery grave. But making that choice is just the start of your adventure as you search the desert for sanctuary in this free interactive fiction adventure.
Congratulations! You've found Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box! Why what does it do? You haven't the faintest idea. But when curiosity killed the cat satisfaction brought it back. So start poking around. All you can do is discover in this clever interactive fiction puzzle game.
Camp life isn't really doing it for Bridget. But every time she sleeps, a land of bird people need her help. You'll be helping her learn on the job in BIRDLAND. a Twine interactive-fiction adventure game written by Brendan Patrick Hennessy and illustrated by Izzy Marbella. A weird game, but the engaging, hilarious, and even realistic kind of weird that should be actively sought out.
When your boyfriend has his brain guzzled by an unspeakable creature from beyond the stars, what's a gal to do when the town won't take her seriously? That's up to you to decide in this snarky sci-fi horror text adventure from Steph Cherrywell!
You are assigned to investigate why an AI facility has gone dark in this sci-fi text adventure. After an incident you are separated from your team mate. You are only able to communicate through text as you help her reunite with you. Use the computer to hack the facility as you try to figure out what went wrong.
You've finally managed to snag an invitation to a magical ball... but when they only want beautiful people there, how are you supposed to go about making yourself "beautiful" with your limited (and weird!) cosmetics? A short but funny and engaging Twine tale with seven routes and endings to discover.
You're spending the night at your best friend's house, and someone special is coming by at midnight. Michael Lutz, author of My Father's Long, Long Legs delivers an unsettling twist on familiar territory in this Choose Your Own Adventure Style interactive horror fiction.
Sisters Kat and Aria are lost alone in the woods at night when they accidentally cross paths with two men who don't have the friendliest intentions. How far will they go to save themselves in this Choose Your Own Adventure style text-based tale?
You've been kidnapped and taken to a facility to test the killing capabilities of a hostile creature in this blend of survival horror and escape! Hunt for items and food and avoid the monster prowling after you in this text-only adventure game.
Voices from the Sea is a visual novel adventure from Zeiva Inc about a boy, a girl, the ocean, and sea shells. Lots and lots of sea shells. The plot is a little heavy on "aggressively ordinary boy meets magically energetic girl" tropes, but its relaxing vibe makes it easy to be won over to its charms.
A twine interactive fiction game where you play as someone living with depression, developed by Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey and Isaac Schankler, Depression Quest hopes to offer empathy and sympathy for what can be a very painful condition. Some awkward prose is balanced by its ambitiousness in subject matter, and makes a convincing case for how games can help us all understand each other better.
Descend into a dungeon with your brother Erasmus in this strange Twine text adventure, again and again and again and again. Failure is often the only way forward, so explore and experiment if you expect to uncover any of the game's endings, much less the real one.
Fans of zombies and sepia tinged art rejoice! Hyptosis has come out with another installment of humorous horror with Riverside. Taking place in the same continuity of his popular Sagittarian series of games, Riverside is a faster, almost parodiac take on the apocalypse. It won't win over those cold on the Choose Your Own Adventure style, but fans of Hyptosis' work will find it a fun bit of comedy.
You Were Made For Loneliness, a Twine narrative adventure by the Tsukareta author collective, weaves a tale of memory, the post-apocalypse, regret, murder, and in its own skewed way, love. It's a disjointed presentation, heavy on experimentation, but those who love exploring and piecing together a narrative from many component parts will find it a very intriguing experiation.
Like her namesake in One Thousand and One Night, Scheherazade Williams is a story-teller. Fresh off her latest success, and two new Holly Awards, she opens her email to discover that it's not enough for her bosses at Narrative, Inc.--they want more, and they want it now! But after 500 stories for this commercial enterprise, the well of new stories has run dry.
Though some people may find it hard to watch at times, this short interactive visual novel/story takes place over one night in 2010, as the narrator's boyfriend urges him to come out to his parents. Make your choices, but do so carefully, since everyone remembers everything you say.
A mystery has erupted in the peaceful zombie society and its up to Detective Margh and his sidekick Ghvnn to figure it out. Read along and help Margh make choices that will alter the plot in future chapters and perhaps find out that this mystery goes deeper than you thought.
Jonas Kyratzes delivers an experience both magical and melancholy in this Twine-based choose-your-own-adventure game as you play one of seven heroes chosen to take up arms against a legendary beast that rises every hundred years to bathe the land in flame.
It's easy to immerse yourself in this beautiful, atmospheric audio-visual adventure by Connor Sherlock, but your time is limited. You have only 20 minutes before The Rapture Is Here And You Will Be Forcibly Removed From Your Home. So what do you do? Run! Use [WASD] to move and your mouse to look all around. Explore until your curiosity is rewarded with discovery. Or stand around and wait. It's up to you.
You are Victor the Tenacious, bravest, strongest, and most intelligentest knight in the whole kingdom. You have been tasked with rescuing the fair Princess Sonia from the Black Dragon Urquel. Oh yeah, and you've let your faithful squire has tag along for the ride too. A short-but-funny Twine yarn by David T. Marchand that fans of fantasy humor won't want to miss.
Lynnea Glasser (formerly Dally) returns to the interactive fiction scene with Coloratura. Play as a displaced alien who only seeks to get away from the blind, apathetic humans and return to their place of bliss. Without the ability to directly manipulate objects, you can 'color' the humans moods to create situations beneficial to your goal. Whether dealing with them violently or more peacefully, you will get back to your resting place. Whatever it takes.
In this creepy bit of Twine-delivered interactive fiction, a young girl's father becomes obsessed with digging a hole beneath their house. As the years pass, he begins to resemble less and less the man she once knew... and perhaps even less of a man at all...
Socrates Jones doesn't get why you'd care about philosophy if you don't have a long white robe and a longer beard, but a freak accident means he's about to learn more about it than he'd ever thought he needed... in fact, his life depends on it! An educational visual novel inspired by Phoenix Wright, Pro Philosopher will teach you how to debate intelligently and constructively, and keep you entertained along the way.
King of Bees in Fantasy Land, a Twine adventure game by Brendan Patrick Hennesy, hails to an earlier time of gaming plotting; one where "all your base are belong to us". Thought there's not much action to speak of, this little choose-your-own-adventure tale of a Space Knight taking on the Evil King of Bees in the year 2888 is a quick, smart, piece of video game comedy.
A duck may want many things. A simple life? An education? High adventure? Clearly there are choices to be made, and you're just the one to help! A Duck Has An Adventure is a humorous piece of CYOA interactive art by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, and while it has more art than gameness, it's a quacking good time.
A dark chamber, a missing memory, and a splitting headache... to get to the truth and find your way out, you'll have to encounter some uncomfortable truths as you solve puzzles and explore in this atmospheric horror text adventure.
An experimental text-based adventure game from ScriptWelder that has you waking up disoriented in an unknown place, trying to get information from a source that not too eager to give anything away. A short but intelligent sci-fi yarn, with an up-to-the-task conversational parser that the author is dedicated to improving through community feedback.
The zombie apocalypse is hard on everyone, and paddling down a dank bayou isn't anyone's idea of a good time... unless you're playing the latest chapter in Hyptosis's choose-your-own-adventure series. With all the blood and profanity you've come to expect, if you enjoy this particular brand of interactive fiction and don't mind some unforeseeable deaths, make time in your coffee break to take a leisurely paddle down the water.
A nice piece of interactive art, The Little Girl Nobody Liked is a picture-perfect picture book minigame by Deirdra Kiai. Even with all its multiple endings, it only clocks in at a couple minutes in length. Still, it's soothing, adorable, and subversive, and is just the thing to check out before an afternoon nap.
Though one should strive to live without regrets, considering all the different paths a life might have taken is an inherently intriguing concept. Some games attempt to analyze the psychology of our decisions and their consequences. On the other hand, some games, like Relive Your Life, an interactive movie by FrozenFire, will have you button mashing to fend off a competing sperm, before failing to acquire a preferred toy at recess kicks of a chain of events that leads to a popular resurgence in nudism/bear-wrestling. And it'll rhyme too! Clever prose and voice-acting by Egoraptor are highlights, and make up for tacked-on minigames.
In Sagittarian 4: Berger by Hyptosis, you rejoin your old friends, Sage, Dusty, and Anna, in their quest to find safety after the zombie apocalypse. The small band of survivors are no longer strangers, but friends. Some are even lovers. Can you protect these people you've grown so close to over the last four games, or will you have to send them to their certain deaths for the good of the group? Combining great artwork, funny and well-developed dialogue, and even a dynamic soundtrack, it's an experience that really sticks with you.
Gamer Mom, by Mordechai Buckman and Kyler Kelly, is a unique text adventure about a Mom trying to convince her family to play World of Warcraft together and mend their broken relationship. But it won't be easy! Your daughter hates you and only wants to text on her cellphone all day and your husband is a workaholic who doesn't want to spend anytime as a family. Even if you manage to succeed in your goal, the game doesn't end there and you might be surprised at what happens next. Gamer Mom is a short, but lasting, experience that manages to be sad, poignant, and even funny...just like life itself.
It's a dark and stormy night. Wait, no, it's pretty sunny outside, so neither of those. You take the leaflet from the mailbox... gahh, no, not that, either. You know what? It doesn't matter. It's time to play. Time to play JayIsPonies, an "epic" choose your own adventure sort of game where you collect pizza and probably do a bunch of other halfway crazy stuff!
The decisions you make in this YouTube interactive fan fiction game (based on the AMC television show) not only determine the fate of one Madison Avenue advertising agency, they might just save the world. Help Don Draper regain his confidence, inner peace and good ideas while preventing his untimely death. Although it's disappointing this isn't a true platform game since your involvement doesn't extend beyond clicking an occasional option, Mad Men: The Game is an entertaining and enjoyable parody of 1960s culture and the show that has everyone talking about it.
This lyrical work of interactive fiction, brainchild of Jonas Kyratzes who created The Book of Living Magic, will envelope you in a surrealistic experience of discovery, a gentle stroll through a timeless pastoral state where your decisions are rewarded with rich verse and life-pondering revelations. Each passage presents you with a choice which will determine your path; stroll slowly through the experience and play more than once to fully appreciate the outcomes of each option. Arcadia: a Pastoral Tale elevates the oft misjudged browser game onto the loftier plane of artistic poignancy.
The sequel to 2010's text adventure RPG Choice of Romance has arrived, and picks up right where the original left off. Will you be able to hold onto your new power in the court, or have you just painted a very large target on your back... and who can you trust to watch out for a dagger pointed at you when everyone has their own agenda?
Flaws, the interactive work of fiction from author Jon Ingold, is a difficult game to categorize as well as a different game to review. For starters, it isn't really a game in the traditional sense, more like a choose your own adventure produced for modern, Kindle-enabled devices. Then there's the nature of the story, where discussing even a few of the details can spoil whole bits of the experience. Suffice it to say, Flaws is an intriguing interactive fiction "game" about finding treasure and fame, the Andromeda galaxy, a mysterious diadem, and a possible assassination.
Hospitals are full of all sorts of hazards, like paper robes that don't close all the way, doctors with cold hands, and... zombies? HM! Lynnea Dally's undead apocalypse begins with you waking from a rather impromptu bout of unconsciousness in the hospital radiation room, but you have more things than a rather impressive headache to worry about in this horror interactive fiction game.
YFYIAR is a simple interactive fiction game where you must escape from a room. As play progresses, however, the conventions of normal text adventures begin to break down as the computer narrator begins to express its dislike for you, your humanity, and all it entails.
Crafted in the style of classic 'choose your own adventure' games, Zebulon features the exploits of a somewhat wayward space crew. The story itself is relatively simple; you're the captain of a small ship that runs regular courier missions for Asmico, a delivery and service IT company. With you are your shipwright and communication officer; your shipright Hariett is a straight-laced, by-the-book stick in the mud while Reynolds, the communication officer, is unlikely to win 'Employee of the month' anytime soon. Your choices in your interactions with them, and certain events, will determine your outcome.
When Todd gets a visit from the future (namely, himself) he finds his life changes drastically when he receives information that may get him the one thing he wants most. Is this text adventure a simple story about doing anything for the one you love? Or is there something much more complicated, and much darker, going on? With 35 different endings and an extremely forgiving play style, Thousand Dollar Soul is a lot more complicated than you might think.
The 2010 Interactive Fiction Competition is here! Yes, the competition that brought us such interactive fiction classics as Violet, Lost Pig, Floatpoint, and Slouching Towards Bedlam is back with 26 new games, 23 of which can be played in the comfort of your browser. Voting will end November 15, 2010, so get your votes in now if you want to help choose the next winner!
So what's your stance on twu wuv? Does it make you sigh and set your little heart to pitty-patting, or are you currently walled off in your cootie-free-fort to ride out the epidemic? Regardless, there's more than just a pretty face to this latest text RPG adventure from Choice of Games. As the eldest son or daughter of a declining noble family, you are sent to Court for a Season to see and be seen. Will you find a suitable match? Wind up alone? Or become embroiled in dangerous political intrigue? The choice, as they say, is yours.
Your entire young life has been building up to this. You were born to it, your maternal line. You, Lalu, are the Usher, charged with guiding the queen's soul to the afterlife, a task of great splendor and nobility. But that doesn't change how you feel now. All you can think is that you've been raised to die. If only there were some way out. The Usher is a game of interactive fiction, an entry into our first ever interactive fiction competition, Casual Gameplay Design Competition #7. As such, you use a text parser to interact with the game.
Without even a computer to play solitaire on, it's Monday, 16:30, and time is standing still in this piece of interactive fiction. Maybe with the help of the office gnomes you can beguile your true love in the tower next door with mime and paper airplanes?
Dan Efran's title Ka, an entry in our interactive fiction and escape themed Casual Gameplay Design Competition #7, starts in decidedly close quarters, with your royal spirit crammed in next to your corpse. Most text adventures struggle to some degree with pacing, but in Ka, at least, your initial goal is clear: leave. After that? Well, you're dead. You have to come to terms with it sometime.
You're dangling from a chimney on a rooftop six stories above ground, looking for spider silk. Your brother's making sure the door to the stairs back down stays open. When he appears below you looking nonchalant, you get a deep sinking feeling. Roofed is an offbeat interactive fiction title with a clever narrative that'll leave you wanting more.
It's another great day for the end of the world! Oh, wait, I forgot... that was yesterday! Dead Frontier: Outbreak 2 is a text adventure about trying to survive in an undead world. Having survived the events of the first game, you set out in search of much needed medical supplies. Making the right choices is important if you want to see the end of the day.
I don't suppose you've ever felt trapped at a really tedious party, wishing you could throw off the shackles of social convention and impale your host on a cocktail weenie toothpick, make a rope out of your own hair to escape out the bathroom window, beat yourself unconscious with the cheese tray--anything to avoid listening to some guy tell you another story about his golfing ability? In real life it's the opposite of entertaining, but in Party Foul, it makes for a hilarious puzzle to test all your escaping power
Enter into the experience of visualizing visualizing (whoa, meta!) in the CGDC7 award-winning interactive fiction title Dual Transform by Andrew Plotkin. Take on the role of a virtual engineer, of sorts, feeling the pressure of really making this project something to remember... something that really feels real.
Lost. In space. Alone. On a badly damaged ship. It's a bad day for anyone, and it's even worse for you since you can't remember how you got into this predicament. Fragile Shells is a clever, clean bit of interactive fiction from Stephen Granade, and a runner-up in Casual Gameplay Design Competition 7.
"Hero" is such a broad term. Don't you think, cowboy? You were just liberating that silver after all. Before you can ride off into the sunset, you'll need to get out of this jail cell. Hoosegow is a tongue-in-cheek bit of interactive fiction set in the wild west, and the proud winner of CGDC7.
Byzantine Perspective is a tight little heist game from this year's annual interactive fiction competition. You're a student with less-than-legal plans for how to fund your education: get into a museum of Byzantine artifacts, get the valuable antique chalice, get out again. You're rigged out in your best cat-burglar clothes, with your best cat-burglar tools — some of them borrowed from an acquaintance, which raises never-answered questions about what sorts of company the protagonist keeps.
We're pleased to announce a very special Casual Gameplay Design Competition, one focused entirely on interactive fiction! For CGDC #7, we're calling on IF authors to craft one-room games incorporating the theme "escape". It's text-only this time around, so you can spend your time polishing puzzles instead of pixels. Full details are below, so fire up your Z-code compiler and get to writing!
For those of us who love the idea of digital espionage but who don't have the ability to hack our way into a paper bag, Exoriare is here to fulfill all of our cyberpunk fantasies. The new alternate reality game from Smoking Gun Interactive sucks you in to a world of government conspiracies and stands poised to keep you hooked for a long time to come.
An unnamed cubicle slave grinds his way through another day at work, his biggest worry being whether or not someone left the coffee pot dry. That is until the scream comes. Now you have to help him get home to his wife before zombies get her or you in this choose your own adventure style game.
Make It Good is a dark, noir-esque detective mystery from Fail-Safe author Jon Ingold. You are cast in the role of a down-on-his-luck detective struggling to solve a murder case or risk losing his job. Moving about a complete, living world, you'll turn over every potted plant, scrutinize every room, and question every character as you attempt to stitch together shards of information to discover just what happened.
Slouching Towards Bedlam is a work of interactive fiction created by Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster. Set in the Bedlam Hospital insane asylum in a steampunk-style 1885 London, you begin in an office with a brass-laden phonograph playing a demented soliloquy. It's a subtly disturbing game that draws you into a rich, elusive world of intrigue and allows you to react to the story however you see fit, carving out five unique endings based upon your interpretation of the plot.
Fail-Safe is a work of interactive fiction created by Jon Ingold. It could be one of the strangest text-based games you've ever seen (in a simple, subdued kind of way), as Ingold removes all meta-commands from the parser, forbidding you do to things like saving your progress. But there's a good reason for this. Fail-Safe immerses you so deeply in the world that even the conventions of playing a game would snap you out of it. And when you start playing, you'll see why that's a crucial part of the experience.
What you think is irrelevant, in this text-based adventure/interactive fiction by John Cooney. The man behind the mirrored glass tells you that you are a llama and if you know what is good for you, you will believe him. Following any and all instructions given to you is also not a bad idea if you enjoy things like breathing and not being dead.
Violet is a richly engaging one-room puzzle game from the annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2008). The problem? You're a graduate student working on your dissertation, but you haven't gotten any writing done in months. Your girlfriend Violet has put her life on hold, waiting for you to finish, and she's getting fed up. If you don't get a thousand words written today, your relationship is over and she flies home to Australia.
An ingenious piece of alternative history interactive fiction created by Adam Cadre. In Varicella, you have the pleasure of abandoning your usual scruples to play one of the most delightfully nasty antiheroes that I've come across: the eponymous Primo Varicella, Palace Minister at the Palazzo del Piemonte, and a tremendous opportunity awaits you. Can you seize the day (and the throne)?
Ah, human drama. The trials and tribulations of star-crossed lovers, the agonizing decisions made on the battlefield, the ...supreme annoyance of having some rotten kid try to steal your favorite toy? And so unfolds the very entertaining yet surprisingly complex scenario of baby vs. baby in this unique one-room themed piece of interactive fiction.
In this piece of interactive fiction, the premise is quite simple: you are the prime candidate for the position of Director of the Museum and Institute for Puzzles and Problem Solving. In order to prove your aptitude in this field, you must solve one "simple" puzzle yourself. Explore a single room, gathering clues and solving puzzles, until you finally reach the unknown problem's answer.
9:05, by Adam Cadre, is another snack-sized text adventure that is just right for a casual audience. Even if you're new to the genre and are looking for something short and simple as a primer, do give this one a try. You've screwed up on the job before, but never like this. You've overslept in a major way, and you're in for a world of trouble if you don't act fast.
Enlightenment is a snack-sized text adventure set in the general neighborhood of the Zork universe, with Infocom-esque humor, sly quotes and footnotes, and a wealth of entertaining but unnecessary actions. It doesn't play like an 80s game, though: it is short, polished, and focused, with lots of clues and guidance, and probably won't take more than an hour to play.
In Lost Pig, you are Grunk, a rather dim creature who works on a farm and who, evidently, loses a pig. Using your best typing skills, find your way through the forest and beyond and retrieve that darn swine. It won't be easy, since pigs in Grunk's world are not cooperative. Utilize your intuition (and maybe a little luck) and you'll find your way out of Grunk's mess in this hilarious interactive fiction.
"Suveh Nux" is a short, puzzle-oriented piece of interactive fiction by David Fisher, with a neat premise: the player is trapped in a vault (that's not the neat part) and can escape only if he learns the magical language that controls his environment. Plenty of interactive fiction games involve puzzles about magic words. "Suveh Nux" takes this a step further with a whole magical grammar to learn, including verbs, nouns, and modifying phrases.
Hotel is a 10-episode interactive narrative from Han Hoogerbrugge about a scientist named Dr. Doglin who drugs his patients to perform tests on their response to freak accident injuries. The rather disturbing piece was just recently finished in its entirety and worth a look if you're the mature, adventurous type.
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