Also its inspiration The Impossible Bottle.
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Don’t mind me, just adding all of these to my to-play list. This is actually a topic that I am deeply fascinated with, and have tried to work on before.
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Cygnet Committee … might interest you.
Thanks for the mention! The main gimmick is that it uses sound based navigation.
You might want to check out this game demo called Winters Wake by cheeseness, which uses a mouse look mechanic similar to FPS games.
I found it specifically by searching for games that did this a while ago. I think it was exhibited at a show, but I haven’t seen it talked about here and I’m not sure the author visits the forums. Incidentally it looks a lot like my own game, but that’s just coincidence and the mechanic is quite different.
Yes! Lots of @aschultz 's other games always have unique navigation too. His last palindrome game was on a donut planet with cyclical navigation being key to the puzzles.
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Many thanks, everyone!
A few of your suggestions (Ether, Midnight. Swordfight., Castle of the Red Prince) were already in my list; still, the affirmation is very helpful. The rest of the titles mentioned seem really interesting as well.
Feel free to keep posting, if anything else comes to your mind!
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Dead Like Ants has a different navigational system, since you’re living in an ant colony in a tree.
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My help will mainly be with parser games and, in particular, my own, which trend toward puzzliness and abusing compass directions (navigation) rather than world building. But I hope something is useful in here!
And if someone says “hey, that’s not innovative, game/story X is innovative!” I’d love to have that to try. This is the sort of thing I’m looking for, too.
I’ve seen a few parser games use GO TO or GT to go to a certain place. This feels like standard good practice in a larger game without a lot of tense events, though of course sneaky players may try to GT places they haven’t been yet or which should be off-limits.
IFDB.org has a few lists that may help. Some lists cover works already mentioned above.
I can think of two recent works in Inform that use text spacing/frames in an interesting way.
Arthur DiBianca’s Trouble in Sector 471 (2022 IFComp) has a really neat layout – his text maps in general are really handy, but in the case of 471, the stuff off to the side can be customized, which is fun and practical.
Mike Spivey’s Junior Arithmancer (2018 IFComp) feels like an exam sheet on the right. It’s laid out clearly so you can see how far you’ve gotten in certain spells.
For directions, I can’t vouch for all the travel games, but some do seem to take a big-picture view beyond north/south/east/west. One thing in text adventures that makes me smile is the whole “walking between continents/islands” gag. Leo Weinreb used walking between islands and ancient Greek countries for Hercules (2021)–I guess if you’re a God or demigod, you can do that-- and Mikko Vuorinen used directions between modern countries in The Adventures of the President of the United States of America (~2003). There must be more.
Fore/Aft is used in Phil Riley’s Crash. It’s hardly the only work ever to do so, but I think it’s used in an interesting way when you have to go outside the spaceship, so I’d like to note it.
BJ Best’s Off-Season at the Dream Factory and CJ Pacian’s 2010 IFComp game Rogue of the Multiverse both use forward/left/right/back, OSDF for one sub-area (for retro effect) and RotM for the whole game. (Pacian is listed in the IFDB polls below & has more than just Red Castle above.)
I’ll second @gfaregan’s mention of The Northnorth Passage, and there’s an outside chance other things in the list work well too:
Non-compass directions in parser games:
ETA: Wade Clarke’s contribution to Cragne Manor uses a toggle-3-binary-options formula to flip between 8 different sorts of rooms. It came about because everyone only got one room for the project, but they could push the envelope. Source and explanations are here as you may not have time to attack all of CM 
M1F5 – Cragne Manor source code for The Music Room (Wade Clarke)
My own stuff got a bit long, so I hope it doesn’t read like self-promotion. It’s more a case of, I bet one of these will have something you want, but I don’t know which. Also, my hope is that the walkthrough included or big picture writeup below can give a big-picture view so playing through isn’t necessary.
- Woe Cubs Woe is on a pentagram. There is a text map in the header. Diagonal directions include NWW versus NNW because, for instance, there are two diagonal passages from the southeast point on the outside. The game accepts, say, NNW if you can only go NNW but type NWW. Also, typing WN is equivalent to NWW and NW is equivalent to NNW.
- A Roiling Original is an anagram finding game where some areas have “unusual” directions to guess. The sub-areas are themed by part of speech, and one introductory area is prepositions, which provide a guess-the-verb without too many possibilities. For instance, you can’t enter PAT’S directly so you have to go PAST. There’s another area with non-action verbs that help you think about how to move on, and a third area has active verbs, so you must for instance TRAMPLE across a templar ramplet, or LEAP in the direction of a pale plea. In the adjective area, you can makes something NEAREST when you are close to drowning.
- @pbparjeter mentioned Tours Roust Torus (sequel to Roiling) has a heptagon of locations in a circle where the commands are a for clockwise or b for counterclockwise and you can also type aa, bb, etc. (Note: Cygnet Committee, by pbparjeter, has a map attractively laid out. I just remember it being unusually effective, but I don’t remember details.)
- A Checkered Haunting allows the player to type “RN” or “RE” to, say, run north or east as far as possible on a 5x5 grid (you can’t walk over the same square twice.)
- The Problems Compound has one late puzzle that includes diagonal directions where, say, 2 S + 2 E = 3 SE in a 13x13 box. In other words, diagonal directions move you roughly their actual Pythagorean distance. (1.5 vs. 1.414.) Usually S + E = SE.
- As people kindly mentioned above, Threediopolis/Fourdiopolis are puzzle games both allow certain manipulation and conglomeration of how to move around. Fourdiopolis has teleporters that move you +/-2 north, west and up. Each also allows for a header that shows your task list and what you’ve found and what you need to find.
- The Cube in the Cavern is a silly game where you walk across a cube’s 6 faces. The compass rose is NESW on 2, NSUD on 2, and EWUD on 2.
- In Big Nose on the Big Pyramid, a 2021 April Fool’s game, you only move diagonally. It sort-of parodies an arcade game, which you might guess is Q*Bert. It (as well as Haunting) is meant to show a mathematical concept of parity.
- Fivebyfivia Delenda Est is a small game on a reduced chessboard where you move like a knight. It and the ones below were inspired by Magnus Olsson’s Zugzwang (another April Fool’s game,) which involves pretty basic ordering a piece around–or moving, yourself. Zugzwang is from ~1999 or so, though.
- Fourbyfourian Quarryin’ is a small game on a reduced chessboard where you can say “a1” or “e5” to move to that square.
- I also wrote 2 games that were classic chess endgame puzzles (You Won’t Get Her Back, Zero Chance of Recovery) where you had the option of putting the board in the headers, so the map wasn’t printed every move. It could toggle spaces between the squares, and it could also label the rows and columns, and it could toggle if there were lines or spaces between squares. You could also toggle if dots appeared on unoccupied squares instead of N, K, or B. So having these 4 binary options relates to text spacing in a way.
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I have a WIP (forever starting, never finishing) that adds B and A to N, S, E, and W. The premise being you can travel BEFORE and AFTER in every room, being increments of hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, and centuries depending on how far along in the game you are. This factors into both the puzzles and revealed narrative of the overall location the PC finds themselves in.
I had to remap the compass points while still using the standard compass points, which took some doing and, other than some simple proof of concept puzzles and a pretty bare narrative outline, the funky time-travel space mechanic is the only meaningful part I’ve got working correctly thus far.
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YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO this sounds amazing!!!
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Wow… okay, I guess y’all like the idea. I’ll get back to it then.
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That’s a neat idea! I actually did a similar prototype for Alice Aforethought in Inform to see if it would work, and I was able to mirror/reverse all the compass directions at will. It would have made everyone so angry the way I was planning to do it!
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I mean, it sounds like the workload can grow really quickly, if every room potentially supports time shifting. Don’t destroy yourself to meet forum opinion…!
But if the workload is manageable, then you know I’m absolutely in your target audience! Front row, even!
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One thing I had was: What do you call directions in outer space? I’m thinking maybe ones that can be a one-letter word (N for North, for example) while being different to the already existing letters. My main reason for this is that I want to be able to go in a direction with 3 base directions in it (eg. UNE - Up, North, East; into a corner of a 3D cube).
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Depending on the inertial frame you want to use as a reference, the likeliest trio would be towards and away from the center of mass (sunward at a system scale, coreward at the galactic level), with or against the relevant spin (planetary orbits for a system, spiral rotation for the galaxy), then good old up and down.
Of course these aren’t cubic axes, but unless the player is moving at incredibly large scales that won’t matter.
Edit: so C(oreward), R(imward), S(pinward), A(ntispin), and U and D - that’s three reuses of an existing direction abbreviation, but since U and D are meant to be opposite to each other, and orthogonal to S, I don’t think that should require any additional work.
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I think @aschultz’s The Cube in the Cavern might have done this? Or maybe it just had all combinations of two directions out of six?
Edit: oops, that was already in the list.
Also, you don’t want to play Hard Puzzle 4 but IIRC it had a bit where you could rotate a section of the game along two axes to control which parts were in reach. Have other games done this?
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It also seems plausible enough to repurpose earthbound directions: up and down are away from/toward the local gravity well, east and west are with/against the orbit, north and south are perpendicular to the plane of the orbit.
I vaguely recall astronomers actually using a convention similar to this—isn’t “galactic north” the direction perpendicular to the galactic plane (distinguished from galactic south by right hand rule)?
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You could also simply do X, Y, and Z axes. While the positive of each is pretty obvious, I feel like the negative might get annoying; who wants to type -X, -Y, and -Z each time? Not sure what would be an intuitive single letter stand-in though.
This allows movement in 3D space with only a single reference point and no other sense of movement or reference. Spinward/Clockwise/up/down/etc all assume both an established direction of movement and a plane that movement typically occurs in addition to a central point of origin.
Might be useful in environments where no outside frame of reference can be determined by the PC, like submerged in dark water, or drifting in deep intergalactic space.
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A, B, and C, obviously!
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Cygnet Committee, by pbparjeter, has a map attractively laid out. I just remember it being unusually effective, but I don’t remember details
The map was partially modeled after the map for Babel, which has a kind of hub structure with small loops. There are also a fair number of one way doors that become two-way doors. Babel is one of the best IF maps and easy to remember for those reasons, I think.
In my game, the color scheme also helps as a memory aid (I hope).
Finally there’s also a sort of mind game: it’s set at an angle, where north is actually northeast. If you set a map at an angle, the player’s mental image will be better than the actual image, kind of like how isometric games feel natural with a keyboard if you play long enough.
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As an aside, I was thinking about making the core mechanic of that game, the simple walking traversement of time, into an extension that someone could just plug in and go. It seems like the sort of thing that could be used by alot of people. It isn’t anything fancy someone couldn’t figure out themselves by just referring to the manual and cookbook, but it might save someone some time and aggravation.
With that said, I’ve never made an extension, so if there’s no interest, I can just move on too.
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