I played Fairest fairly early in my parser-playing career, and did indeed find it beginner-friendly!
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Magor Investigates is very easy:
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Most people tend to recommend games from IFComp, possibly because that’s all they know. However, I don’t think there’s many IFComp games that are suitable for beginners. Even though Lost Pig is very funny at the start, it’s very hard once you get underground.
As others have suggested, the top ranking Text Adventure Literacy Jam games are very good for beginners, as the whole point of the competition is to write games suitable for beginners. The games by Tristin Grizel Dean and Dee Cooke spring to mind, but there are others, including my own. All TALJ games have an in-game tutorial.
I’d also recommend Escape from the Troll’s Cave, as it is ridiculously easy, followed by The Babysitter and Hangman’s Gulch in that order. These were derived from games that were designed to introduce students to text adventures (or parser-based interactive fiction).
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I usually have them try Aisle, as it works great for the impatient and it’s impossible to get lost or stuck. I also think En Garde can be an interesting way to lure someone in as it starts with clicking and morphs into typing.
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One thing I’ve noticed with TALJ games is a lot of them are (by design) designed for young people. I think that was the original intention of the jam, right?
Do you have any recommendations for an older person who might want to join? It wouldn’t have to have gore or sex or anything like that, just to have themes that aren’t directed towards kids.
I know you have some games like that and I’ve seen games from Dee Cooke with adult themes (like the cancer/mountain running game). What would you recommend in this area (including games of yours)?
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In the first year, yes, but Chris relaxed the rules in the second year and only insisted on content warnings. We have continued with that approach in the 3rd and 4th years. Even so, most games have been suitable for a younger audience, even though they are not necessarily targetted at children.
In this year’s comp, ‘Bakemono no Sekai - World of Monsters’ and ‘The Wolf’ touched on horror and violence respectively.
In my own TALP games, ‘Carpathian Vampire’ has very mild horror and violence and ‘Who Kidnapped Mother Goose?’ has some risque content, but I (hopefully) removed all the swear words after testing.
I am entering a new game called ‘The Samurai and the Kappa’ in ParserComp 2024. This will be released on 1 July. It was originally written for Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2024, so it is a TALP game, but I didn’t enter it in TALJ, as testing indicated it may have been too hard for beginners. In the released version, the puzzles are still the same, but it now has a lot more helpful in-game hints, a HINT command and some special instructions on the game page. It includes nudity, mild sexual references and adult themes, but it’s all in keeping with the Japanese customs and mythology that it’s based on.
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So, I recently played So you’ve never played a text adventure before to completion recently, and found it nice and refreshing after getting my rear handed to me repeatedly by Infocom titles…
I want to play 77 verbs, but neither Frotz nor Fizmo can play it… anyone know a Linux interpreter, preferably one that runs in the console, that can play it?
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This is a Glulx game, so you’ll need a Glulx interpreter. My usual go-to is Gargoyle, which is a pain to install and configure by Windows standards but nothing unusual by Linux standards. But if you want a console version, you’ll want to build Git against glkterm, which will get you a classic ncurses interface. (Again, a pain by Windows standards but nothing unusual for Linux.)
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77 Verbs.zblorb (796.4 KB)
I just went and compiled it in Z-code. I had to change 2 numbers because they were too big for z-code, but my test script still ran so it should still work. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!
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Ah, no, Gargoyle is completely incompatible with screenreaders though. It doesn’t connect to the accessibility APIs so there’s no actual text there, it’s just rendered graphically.
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Oh, shoot, right. I missed that it needed screen reader accessibility!
Question: is a web page better or worse for screen readers than the terminal?
You may actually want cheapglk instead of glkterm, which doesn’t use ncurses—it just outputs the text to stdout without any formatting or markup. It’s good for using in pipelines.
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Honestly, I was ready to nope out of there at the mention of building Gargoyle even before hearing it doesn’t work at all with Orca, but after looking at what Aptitude lists Gargoyle as providing on the list of virtual packages and what the other options for those are(none of the other options of a z machine interpreter seem to support anything other than zcode, and tads2/3 appear to be another format entirely), I just did a search in aptitude for glulx, and it turns out there’s an interpreter named glulx, so I told Aptitude to install it and now my tty1 is sitting at the “What’s your Name” prmopt for 77 Verbs. And there are no results for blorb in aptitude, so the extension wouldn’t have helped had I thought to search for it earlier, so being told the format is glulx provided critical information for finding a pre-packaged interpreter.
As for console/terminal versus web, in the case of IF, espeakup in the console or Orca in a terminal window tends to read text as it appears on screen while Orca in Firefox tends to be quiet when the text of a page changes. FOr IF, the console/terminal behavior tends to provide a smoother gameplay experience as there’s less need for manual screen review… I once played a browser based version of Zork I and I was constantly having to arrow up to read the output than figure out how to get focus back to where I type commands. And ncurses interfaces, in my experience, tend to work well with console screen readers… though I do have a strongconsole bias, Firefox is the only GUI application I use on a regular basis, largely because so many web sites just don’t work with text-mode broswers and because graphical screen readers provide a bunch of navigational hotkeys for quickly jumping around web pages you don’t get with a console web browser(among others, h jumps between headings, 1-6 on the number row jump between headings of a specific level, e, r, x, and c gump between text entry, radio buttons, check boxes, and comboboxes respectively, s jumps between separators/horizontal rules, g between graphics, k between links, l between lists and i between list items, b for buttons, q for block quotes, and a few others I use so infrequently I forget). Of course, for every Blind Linux user who is at home in the console, there’s one who was brought up on Windows and finds the CLI scary(I’m barely old enough to have been exposed to DOS during my Basic PC Literacy classes at school, remember being wowed by Windows 95 on demo machines at Wal-Mart, switched to Linux right around the time Ubuntu was getting going good and Vista was becoming the modern windows to gripe about, and by the time I went blind in 2012, I was a full-time Linux user of several years as comfortable in the console as the GUI, and blindness only pushed me further to the CLI side of things… Never did get the hang of compiling code other than my own though and I’m very much a if I can’t sudp apt install it, at least give me a .deb I can download for manual installation or a tarball containing an install.sh.
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