Is there a way to play IF on game consoles? Which console? Are there any titles specially written for a console? How well do standard IF formats work there?
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Some choice-based games are on console, especially visual novels. So is Heaven’s Vault. What those both have in common are having a lot of graphics and no typing.
You can play Zork in Call of Duty on a monitor, and a little keyboard pops up you can type into. I’ve seen a video of someone beating the whole thing.
I don’t know of any other console parser games or text-only choice games. Oh, I guess A Dark Room is text-only (kind of). Really fun game.
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ScummVM supports some IF file formats, I think: ScummVM
Among the systems on which you can play those games are Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, PS Vita, Switch, Dreamcast, AmigaOS, Atari/FreeMiNT, RISC OS, Haiku, PSP, PS3, Maemo, GCW Zero and many more…
Here’s a list of some of the games: Engines/Glk - ScummVM :: Wiki
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It’s not exactly a console, but I’d assume most choice-based IF would work well on a Steam Deck.
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There are hacky ways to run IF games on consoles, usually by using emulators of older desktop computers on those consoles via homebrewed software. Since keyboards are not popular for consoles (nor are mice), and you have to jailbreak the console first, and it’s much easier to run the same software on a desktop computer, this method is mostly for novelty purposes.
I have here a photo someone sent me of my Apple II game Leadlight running on an Apple II emulator on a jailbroken Wii console.
-Wade
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While this rarely seems to be what people mean, a great number of commercial visual novels are available for gaming platforms. If I were to rank them in terms of title availability, Steam is the far away leader, then Switch, then Playstation. Xbox is probably last for reasons that don’t have anything to do with IF or Visual Novels specifically.
Xbox does have a full-featured browser, though. PlayStation’s is limited and hard to access. Switch has no browser at all. Both Playstation and Xbox have ok voice recognition, but Playstation is poor for parser games because in my experience it’s hard-to-impossible to find/place the cursor sometimes. My guess is that Xbox would do better, but that’s only a guess. I believe both consoles support external keyboards, though I haven’t needed to try that out.
I did play two games on my PlayStation browser before typing this post: A Paradox Between Worlds (choicescript) and The Archivist and the Revolution (Dendry). I’m sure the Xbox browser would handle these things fine.
But unless I wanted to do some other kind of gaming with it, I’d probably just buy a cheap mini PC with a wireless keyboard/mouse. That way, I could have a local interpreter, download game files, and eumulate old systems.
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Hugo Labrande (@mulehollandaise) released Tristam Island for several platforms, including recent Nintendo handhelds and Dreamcast.
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Frotz has been ported to practically every console you can imagine, and it’s possible to make “easily” bootable discs for, say, Dreamcast (a console for which there are lots of keyboard adapters and so forth.)
INFGMB is an amazingly good Z-Machine V3 interpreter for the original Gameboy. It has tons of great convenience features.
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I think that was one of the reasons why Inkle has morphed to their very visual UI and interfaces. 80 Days is apparently available on Nintendo Switch.
Also the Visual Novel Danganronpa series gained popularity in the US when it was released on the PSP and translated to English. The deluxe re-release edition of Doki Doki Literature Club was released on consoles with extensive additions and re-worked to make its unusual plot mechanics viable on a platform that isn’t a computer.
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Most inkle games are on Switch: 80 days, Heaven’s Vault, Overboard!, A Highland Song, the 4 Sorcery!
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I remember having a Gameboy rom of Zork at one point, though it had the press left and right to cycle through available characters and press A to input selected character style of input without even the benefit of an onscreen keyboard or letter grid. Considering such input is annoying as hell for imputing Initials or a 3-letter nickname on a high score screen or inputing a short password for stage select in a game with no save function, I can’t imagine someone actually beating a parser game that way.
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I assumed the question was specifically about currently available, off-the-shelf hardware. If not, you could always try the playstation (1) version of Zork I. There are no apparent accessibility features; this looks like an exclusively graphical presentation.
(this takes a long time to start up, the emulator has to load a lot of stuff)
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I played A Dark Room on Switch and really enjoyed it. It’s text-based for sure but I think it’s less IF and more genre-defying.
Everything I’ve learned about console publishing so far tells me that it would be a remarkable achievement to get a text-only IF published.
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I’ve played a lot of zmachine games on Xbox360.
I wrote my own interpreter for it many years ago using XNA game studio.
Edit: Incidentally, you can just plug a usb keyboard into an Xbox360 and it works.
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A Steamdeck is a linux box, so you could run basically anything you could run on any other linux box. Parser games wouldn’t be much fun unless you added an external keyboard, but lots and lots of choice games would be fine.
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I came in to mention this port; it also released on the Sega Saturn.
It should be noted that this port is Japanese langauge only.
It is interesting to me that this is the SECOND graphical Zork released in Japan, with the first being on the PC-98 and not nearly as “immersive” graphically as the PS1/Saturn version. I think it is also interesting that they specifically call it Zork 1, hinting at their plans for releasing a sequel, I imagine.
If I recall correctly, I remember exploring the contents of the PS1 disc to extract the graphics. I stumbled upon English-language graphics (menu items I think?) and wondered if there might be some way to enable English mode, but alas it was beyond my skills to figure that out.
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I loved playing Forgotton Anne on console when I was younger (disclosure: I now work part-time with this studio who made the game)
It has visual gameplay (puzzle-platforming) and voice acting besides the choice-IF structure.
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