(Okay, I guess it wasn’t a wrap. 
)
I kept thinking about the games, and trying to understand what it is that I learned from playing them. I thought it might be useful to write out my thoughts, so that’s what this is—kind of a capstone essay.
Something that the event organizer Garry Francis notes in the instructions for TALJ is as follows: “Writing a text adventure is hard. Writing a text adventure suitable for beginners with an in-game, context-sensitive tutorial is very hard.” After playing and thinking about these seven games, even as someone who has no experience attempting to code a text adventure, I have to agree with it.
I thought it would be helpful to, as a kind of wrap-up essay, describe some of my observations about what type of advice I would give to authors of future TALJ games from a player perspective.
Maybe this is all super basic and obvious advice that everyone already has thought of or said in a more knowledgeable way elsewhere. I’m not trying to condescend to anyone. But I sort of viewed it from the perspective of, if someone forced me to make a “beginner-friendly text adventure” based on my experiences here, how would I approach trying to organize my ideas? I put them in a few sections to make the post less onerous to look at.
Intentionally Training Players on Skills and Systems
Be very granular and specific about what aspects of text adventures you want your game to train, and plan a progression for how the player will learn those skills.
I think the goal of “train beginners to play parser games” is a fine overarching premise, but it’s hard to do everything at once. All of the games, for example, teach players the basics of how to use a command line and examine objects. But you can see that many of the games have systems or elements that they particularly emphasize:
-
Fat Bear teaches exploration of a complicated map, and that it is possible as a player to fail puzzles with careless timing of commands.
-
Tempus Fugit makes character interactions and physical object manipulation its focus.
-
The Time Crystals of Cythii trains the player how to manage the stress of turn limits, how to critically read the game’s cues, switching between navigation systems, working with objects of different sizes, inventory limits, and gets the player to think about new contexts for items they find.
-
The Witch Hedwig shows the player how to take advantage of turn-based events (the time-of-day mechanic).
-
Fixing Time focuses on inventory management and getting the player to learn how unfamiliar objects can group together to make something new.
-
Home Party focuses on combining objects, and social interactions with characters.
-
Quirky Test trains the player to solve rhyming puzzles, find the right place to use objects, and navigation.
For each skill or system, think about what the player has to learn to master that system. Take inventory management as an example. If you want your game to revolve around inventory management, you could think of it this way: (1) the player needs to understand that they have an inventory that they can check; (2) the player learns that they can pick up and/or drop items; (3) the player learns that some things are too big to pick up; (4) the player learns that some things cannot be picked up unless they are adjusted in some way or if they are holding or wearing a certain other item; (5) the player learns that they cannot hold everything at once by trying to pick up an item they don’t have room for; (6) the player learns that they should keep track of what rooms they leave items in; (7) the player learns that they need to hold the right combination of items to accomplish a task; (8) the player learns that they should read the item descriptions to see how those items fit toward their goals.
I mean, that is not even exhaustive, and I’m sure I’m missing a lot since I’m not a parser game author. But the idea should be, I think, to create situations where the player has to understand the fundamental skill in order to proceed. To take an example from #5 above, put the player in a room where they have four possible objects to pick up, but they can only hold two at once, and there is one combination of items that allows them to solve the puzzle. The player will start by trying to pick up everything, discover that they can’t hold everything at once, and then realize, oh, I need to put some thought into why I want to pick up objects and which combination makes sense for the situation.
You could do a similar brainstorming for any type of parser game skill you wanted to teach, breaking it down into smaller components and make sure that the player has to demonstrate some level of proficiency in order to get through.
Implicit and Explicit Hints
The game should make hints available, but not essential. If the player does actively ask for a hint, the game system should “understand” what the player is stuck on to give a relevant rather than a useless hint.
This is more of a psychological aspect of a game, I think. While I think it is beginner friendly to make sure that the player feels like they have hints available on request, I found that I was very stubborn and did not want to ask for that help unless I was desperate. I’m sure it varies a lot from person to person, but generally I think players don’t want to feel incompetent while playing. If you’re playing a beginner parser game, and think, “wow I got stuck constantly and had to ask for a lot of hints,” the response might be “text adventures are too hard for me to play.” Maybe that’s true! Maybe they are too hard for me to play. But the premise of the TALJ, I gather, is that they want people to play more text adventures after being introduced to them.
A really good beginner game I think has “hints” in plain sight. The descriptions of the rooms, objects, commentary from other characters, turn-based flavor text, and so on, are all opportunities to point to puzzle solutions. Here are two examples from Time Crystals of Cythii.
-
Bananas: Even though I had never seen a monkey during the entire game, I was pretty sure that I needed to give the banana to a monkey strictly because the game cued me to think this, by having a character mention monkeys. This is an example of a “hint” that isn’t explicitly from a hint command, but rather is the world priming the player to think about what they will eventually need.
-
The Baker’s Lantern: This is a counter-example. In the first area I visited, there was a baker with a lantern. Since I hadn’t been anywhere else yet, I thought the lantern was an important object in this scene. The game went out of its way to tell me that the lantern was too hot for me to pick up, and also that the baker needed it to finish working. I interpreted this as a two-part puzzle: (1) I needed to find a way to protect myself from the heat—by finding an oven mitt or something—so that I could eventually pick up the lantern; (2) similarly, because of the ability to talk to the baker, I thought another part of the puzzle was to convince the baker to let me borrow the lantern. However, this was a puzzle that I just kind of hallucinated into existence by reading into the description, because you are not meant to ever pick this lantern up.
These cases illustrate the power of those descriptions. In the first case, the game’s descriptions instilled in me a suspicion about a creature existing in game that I needed but had never directly seen; in the second, I inflicted myself with an unachievable goal, essentially a red herring puzzle.
Onto the other point about hints, if the player does ask for them, they should get the player on the right track. (Er, sorry if it seems like I’m picking on Time Crystals of Cythii, it just has a lot of really relevant examples.) Compare my responses to the two hints I requested in this game:
-
Trampoline: After getting trapped on the Titanic, I asked for a hint and learned that the trampoline was salvageable. This helped me overcome the assumption I had that the trampoline had disappeared forever based on what happened with it earlier.
-
Red Crystal: After getting stuck on this puzzle, the hint incorrectly assumed that my issue here was not understanding that I needed a smaller creature’s help. Instead, my issue was that I had never met a creature that could help me, which was in a different location.
I’m sure it’s super difficult to fine-tune hints, especially when there are multiple issues a player might be having with the same puzzle (in the red crystal hint, I can understand why the game might have thought that was the issue, but it got unlucky in that I was stuck on another aspect of the puzzle.) That’s probably why every IF event has instructions that are like “get ten million people to beta test your game, and then desperately hope that the ten-million-and-first person who plays it doesn’t randomly execute the exact perfect combination of commands to softlock it.”
So, okay. You want to build hints into your game, both implicit/subtle hints, and hints upon request. My thought would be, for every step/command that the player is required to do in order to progress the game—anything that bottlenecks the player—try to brainstorm ways to point the player toward the command. Maybe there’s flavor text that happens if the player spends more than x number of turns in a room. Maybe the player is prevented from leaving that room until the command is found. Maybe the room description or item description mentions it. Maybe a character in the room mentions either the right verb or the right object for a puzzle. I’m sure you can think of other ideas.
Here’s a good example from Fixing Time. At one point, a very unusual verb is required: “dismantle.” This is a verb that a player would be unlikely to use on their own. However, the game includes this in a description for the bellows object: “Until these are DISMANTLEd and panels replaced and the leather repaired, the bellows will remain broken and Farid’s forge will stay cold.” The game not only mentions the odd verb directly in the description of the object that needs dismantling, but it’s in all caps to make sure that the player notices it. If you want to train the player to use an unusual verb, that’s certainly a functional way of doing so. “Dismantle” could have become an unsolvable bottleneck for me, but it didn’t, because of this built-in hint.
The Approachability of “Limited” Parsers
Limited parsers have the potential be very beginner friendly.
Something that really surprised me about the TALJ entries is that there wasn’t an author who used a “limited parser”/“limited verbs” approach. By “limited parser,” I mean a game where instead of having the player use a wide set of verbs, the game is structured to make one main verb (or a few) the primary focus of gameplay.
In the few competitions I’ve observed, limited parsers ended up winning or co-winning: The Bat by Chandler M. Groover (IF Comp 2024), Familiar Problems by Daniel, Ada, and Sarah Stelzer (Ecto Comp 2024), and Cut the Sky by SV Linwood (Spring Thing 2025). Maybe this is a coincidence, but I don’t really think so? I think these games play a lot more fluidly and are beginner friendly in part because they shift the player’s focus away from trying to phrase commands and toward other aspects of gameplay like inventory management or objects and their environments. That is, these are games that make the “parsing” part more straightforward.
I observed when trying to share IF Comp games with non-IF-fluent friends, they bounced off of the games with wide ranging verb sets, but found The Bat much more approachable. That game orients its puzzles around a very restrictive inventory, and the verb “attends to”/“a” which is the primary verb of the game. These facets of the game aim the player’s attention toward the objects and rooms more, inviting them to think about what combination of two items they can hold that will allow them to logically progress something they are working on.
Now, maybe the main thing you want to focus on for “text adventure literacy” is teaching the player how to win a linguistics fight against the parser and understand which verbs and prepositions to use in which situations. That’s an important skill to train for the more intermediate/difficult text adventures, for sure. I agree that eventually, the player has to manage verbs to get deeper into the genre. But if you are trying to get them into parsers for the first time ever, it might be detrimental to leave players feeling frustrated that they can’t communicate the solution in their head to the program they are typing into? Those are some of the most frustrating situations, because a hint won’t necessarily help you. You have solved the conceptual puzzle, but have to find a way to word that solution that the game understands. It can be so infuriating!
My default assumption would be that trying to program in a ton of different verbs would be more difficult than programming a limited set of verbs, but I don’t know enough about coding to know if this is true. Maybe it’s actually much harder to code a single verb to do a lot of context-dependent things?
Clear and Compelling Goals
Players should have goals that are clear and emotionally compelling.
The game should prime players to have specific goals in mind, and develop plans for reaching those goals. I actually think most of the TALJ 2025 games did this very effectively. For instance, The Witch Hedwig asks the player to search for enumerated ingredients for a potion recipe. Fat Bear asks the player to eat twelve meals. These are very clear goals.
One of the toughest moments in a parser game is the feeling of, “I don’t even know what I’m trying to do right now.” That rarely came up for me here, but I still think it bears mentioning. Framing the game so the player understands their overall goal, and can mark progress toward the goal, seems to be helpful in providing structure to what can be an otherwise nonlinear or navigational-intensive experience.
This is more of a personal perspective I guess, but as someone who writes non-parser interactive fiction, what I really crave is an emotionally gripping experience. I think spending time crafting engaging plot and characters, or a strong atmosphere/aesthetic, can help smooth over some of the parser game issues. If I’m not writing reviews in a structured way like this thread and just playing in a casual way, I’d be much more likely to drop an under-implemented/under-polished parser game if I didn’t care about the plot or characters. But, if I’m emotionally invested, I would be more willing to fight through game-design-related obstacles to see the resolution of the story or more of the world. So this is just my way of saying that like… even if you are writing a game that is primarily puzzle-focused, I think it’s still worth taking the time to develop plot, characters, and aesthetics in a really intentional and focused way. Even looking at the TALJ scoring criteria, that’s arguably two out of six categories (story, writing).
A player who is collecting things to make a number go up is going to have a different experience than a player who is collecting things they feel determined to get in order to have an impact on the setting and characters. If a game has some messy or obtuse puzzles, but I was emotionally engaged, I would value that experience much more than a game that was perhaps slightly more polished and coherent in its implementation, but I felt nothing while playing. This is super subjective, but that’s how I feel about it as someone who is not necessarily invested in puzzles for puzzles’ sake.
Sequential Learning
It can be effective to bottleneck the player early to teach them crucial gameplay elements, and then open up the world more later.
Some of the games in TALJ 2025 have very open worlds that the player is free to explore without too much direction. Fat Bear is probably the best example of this. The map is sprawling and there isn’t anything hindering the player’s travel from place to place, making the game effectively very nonlinear. Similarly, Fixing Time puts the player in a lab with a massive number of objects and asks them to make sense of those objects as the main way of learning how to play. These are games where it seems like the intent is to train the player to combine objects from anywhere on the map with each other.
Tempus Fugit has an especially modular approach, with the game divided into self-contained sections that must be solved sequentially. This limits the open-world feeling of exploration to an extent, but also allows the author to know that a player has to learn a verb before getting to the next sequence. Once the player has been prompted to and executed a “hack” action, the author can reasonably count on that experience in a later module where the player is tested on remembering that they have the ability to “hack” things.
The nonlinear/open-world vs. linear/sequential worlds have pros and cons, but for a beginner game especially, I think having at least one or two linear/sequential sections that are smaller in scope, very polished in implementation, and focused on training the core skills that are important for later puzzles in the same game, will pay dividends.
Perhaps nothing I’ve said here is the most unique or interesting. No doubt, there are hundreds of articles and essays out there on parser game design that I simply don’t know about due to my newness on the forum, but these were the kinds of things that crossed my mind while considering just how much goes into trying to make a beginner-friendly text adventure.
Finally, I want to thank the authors of these games for all the time and effort they spent developing them and crafting these experiences! The hours and hours spent on coding, writing, and testing are evident, even if I did nitpick elements from my no-programming-knowledge-ass high horse. Your projects are valuable and I’m glad that you did the hard thing and submitted your games to be judged by internet randos like me.
Take care,
DemonApologist
)
