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.

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.

It's always intriguing when a game developer takes a technical, even mundane, activity and makes it into a competition. KernType, a unique puzzle game developed by Mark MacKay for edutainment site Method of Action, charges you with dragging the middle letters of a given word for a given font to make it aesthetically perfect. Your result will be compared against a professional typographer's, and you will be given a score based on how close you get to their solution. It's not a concept that survives multiple play-throughs, but it's quirky fun.

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.

Think Cinderella is all about frilly dresses and happily ever afters? Think again. Special Agent Cinder has been tasked by her godmother to infiltrate the Royal Ball and steal the military plans before the clock strikes twelve in this interactive comic. There are two different endings and lots of options... can you pull off the heist?

In this choose-your-own text adventure for Android and iOS, a logger wakes up hours after a hazy event to find the site destroyed and his crew missing. As you hunt for them, however, the choices you make will determine how things play out in this compellingly creepy and atmospheric tale.

Bro, Burning Man is like so awesome! But you know what's not so awesome? Having to hoof it through the desert back home because someone stole your car and Bitcoins (yes, Bitcoins). Thus begins your Desert Hike EX, in the form of a hilarious text-based adventure full of geeky references and nerdy shenanigans.

In a world where space travel is common, unfortunately so are space disasters. A ship goes down on a desolate moon, killing all but one crew member. This lone survivor is desperate for some human contact. Somehow you pick up the astronaut's signal and end up helping Taylor make crucial decisions through the worst day of their life in this thrilling sci-fi narrative for iOS.

After you are mistakenly contacted by a blood-mage, you decide to join her on her quest in this fantasy themed text adventure. Travel with Arika in real time as she plots revenge against those who killed her parents. Your choices will determine whether she succeeds or fails in her quest in this game for iOS and Apple Watch.

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.

Acting as a prequel to beloved atmospheric browser simulation A Dark Room, this roguelike adventure for iOS sends you across a hostile wasteland, where hunger and thirst are constant companions and death is just the beginning...

In this short text adventure from Hyptosis, lead a party of mercenaries from the esteemed guild, the Children of Brinn, on a job to solve the supernatural problems plaguing a tiny town. The choices you make determine who lives and dies and gets a face full of acid, and provides a brief but solid little diversion brimming with potential for future installments.

Want a solid retro arcade shooter? ASCII and you'll receive Battle for Asciion, by Relevo Video Games. Designed with a lot of love for its textual aesthetic, Battle for Asciion is a solid and challenging shoot-em-up, though hampered by its required button-mashing.

Alone in a library, you find a mysterious book that quite literally draws you in. You'll have to learn every lesson it contains if you ever want to be seen again. The Grimoire is an entry into our 10th Casual Gameplay Design Competition, with the theme of "Escape".

Creepy, subtle, and unfortunately very, very slow, this text-based horror game about waking up from a strange nightmare only to find your house pervaded with a disorienting sense of wrongness was created in just a month, and is an intriguing example of experimental storytelling.

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.

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.

Magic is real, but not everyone is happy about it, and your life as a normal teen takes a turn for the strange when you discover you're a witch, too. In addition to dealing with the shocking attitude of your parents and the general populace, you also may just have gotten embroiled in a seriously dangerous magical mystery in this Twine based adventure... whether you're ready for it or not.

No one likes being stuck inside city walls when all they want is the sweet freedom of open land. Problem is, getting out is quite tricky when there's a war raging outside the city walls and the guards are under strict order to not let anyone in or out. In Shifter, you have a trick or two up your sleeves, but in order to make use of that trick you need to get to know people. In this point and click escape adventure use your charm to help shift into a new point of view, literally.

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!

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.

If you enjoy interactive fiction or text adventures of years gone by, don't miss these works by award-winning author, Andrew Plotkin. Also known as "Zarf," Plotkin leverages his skills in programming, game and puzzle design to create engaging and compelling interactive fiction that are works of art.

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.

Matchstick Memories isn't your typical text adventure. Instead of typing, you move through a series of memories of colored fragments that you swipe, light, and connect to collect. You've got to plan your moves carefully to avoid traps and collect the elusive matchboxes. While the levels are borrowed from puzzle standards, unique presentation and gameplay mechanics make this game a surprisingly compelling and tactile experience.

A small time data smuggler in the corporate-dominated futuristic city of NeoSushi, Dogeron Kenan's job is to transport passcodes in his cybernetic arm, trying to keep one step ahead of both the lawful and unlawful who want to stop him. But things just went south, and now everyone in the town is out to get him. It's going to be a long night. An excellent piece of interactive fiction by the Cabrera Brothers, with an atmosphere that more than makes up for parser issues.

Floatpoint is a sci-fi themed interactive fiction game by Emily Short that walked away with first prize in the 2006 Interactive Fiction Competition. You play the role of an ambassador on a mission to a cold, icy planet called Alehart. Humans colonized the world ages ago, but an advancing glacier threatens to overtake the city and eradicate its inhabitants. As you try to negotiate a deal to bring the colonists back to Earth, a web of mysteries begins to unfold itself. This might not be an easy job after all.

In this short but unsettling bit of interactive fiction, one girl flees for her life after the end of the world, pursued by creatures who will devour her, flesh and bone, or take everything that makes her human.

Now is your chance Space Cadet. One final chance to become the space hero you've always wanted to be. All you have to do is pass the Captain's test and impress only the most daring, most heroic, and most critical instructor in all the known galaxy, Captain Dirk Parsec, in this pay-what-you-want indie Twine tale with 26 different endings.

Those of you who enjoy a stripped-down text adventure game and don't mind a bit of repetition will get a bit of fun out of these DHTML-based Enchanted Forest games. The point is to get as much gold as you can. For such a simple game it's surprisingly addictive, but don't worry—if you're a true casual gamer, you can leave your game at any time and when you return, it will be waiting exactly as you left it.

Holding onto your job just got a whole lot more difficult when your boss, a ruthless woman known around the office as The Crocodile, informs you that the estate agent who makes the least in the next several months will be fired. You may have the drive and the determination, but even you might find Crowther Terrace a difficult property to move... one might say you only have a ghost of a chance. A delightfully witty and even a little spooky text adventure from Choice of Games and the talented Gavin Inglis.

When your homeworld falls to an alien threat, you find yourself embroiled in a mess of intergalactic politics that could influence its very survival. Choice of Games delivers a sci-fi text adventure for your mobile device that's lighter on character development than usual in favour of delivering an action-packed story that will have you questioning who you can trust on and off the battlefield, provided you survive it.

After your rather unceremonious birth, you're sent to the temple of the Silene Monks, where you choose whether to be a medic, a warrior or an engineer. From there, it's up to you to make the right choices to fulfill your destiny and, most crucially, not die. But Trial of the Clone is more than a simple choose-your-own-adventure. Along the way you'll gain stat points, weapons and items, which you can keep track of via a built-in D&D-style Adventure Sheet. These come to play in battles which pop up occasionally and affect the course of the story. Battles are pretty simple: You deal damage to your opponent based on your given stats plus a random number from 0 to 3, and then your opponent does the same — the last one standing wins. Loss in a battle doesn't necessarily mean death; it may just mean being relocated to a different department (say, engineering, where physical strength, ability and charisma are less in demand).

Much interactive fiction requires a time commitment of an hour or two, and sometimes quite a bit more. Not so with the text adventure entries in the Commonplace Book project, in which each entrant took a line from a notebook by H. P. Lovecraft and spun it out into a game. This was an international competition, drawing entries in English, French, and Spanish, as well as a couple of graphical point-and-click adventures.

A cinematic simulation of hacking that owes more to Wargames and Sneakers than Kevin Mitnick and Adrian Lamo, Uplink: Hacker Elitecyberpunk intrigue. Originally released by Introversion Software in 2001, and streamlined into the Hacker Elite version for the US market, the latter is now available for purchase from the lovely indie and retro game outlet GOG, and it's a worthy addition to any gamers library.

About a year and a half ago we posted a logic puzzle published by Coudal Partners, the people behind The Show and the ones responsible for recording the recent live tours of both the Pixies and Dead Can Dance. Well, they have just published a new one, and this one will surely give your brain a tickle.

This edition of weekend download highlights a few notable IF titles. All you need is a computer and the ability to read and you're good to go!