Recommendations for a fantasy fan new to IF?

General
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Hi all!

I’m brand new to the world of Interactive Fiction and wanted to introduce myself while asking for a few pointers.

I am a huge fan of the fantasy genre—I love deep world-building, magic systems, and epic adventures. I’m looking for text-based games that can truly immerse me in a mythical setting. Since I am a beginner, I would prefer recommendations that are relatively accessible, without impossible-to-crack puzzles that will get me stuck early on.

Whether it’s a modern choice-based story or a classic parser game, I’d love to hear your personal favorites and must-plays.

Looking forward to your suggestions and happy to be part of the forum!

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What IFs are your stand-out choices?
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The old school classic examples would be the Enchanter trilogy and Beyond Zork, but the Enchanter games have some hard puzzles in them. A friendlier example would be Wishbringer, especially if you’re okay with cozy urban fantasy rather than needing the setting to be specifically medieval. I was also tremendously fond of Telarium’s Dragonworld, for the Commodore 64, back in the day; you’d need to find that one from a C64 download site, and play it on a C64 emulator; it’s not playable in modern IF interpreters.

Among newer games, Lost Pig, Counterfeit Monkey, and Dreamhold are rather nice. (By “newer,” I mean “since IF started to be dominated by hobbyists rather than publishers,” which happened more than three decades ago.)

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Enchanter is a much loved game, and it’s not very hard. Part 2 and 3 (Sorcerer and Spellbreaker) are a lot harder. There’s nothing wrong with just playing Enchanter.

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Funny history about IF and fantasy. The IF community, going back to its Usenet days, has taken a very dim view of fantasy IF. Not because we hate fantasy (we love it), but because few authors have done it in a way that avoids all the common tropes and tells a unique and interesting story with cohesive fantasy puzzles. The saying is, any genre is fine as long as it’s well written and tells a good story with good interaction.

Also a lot of IF is driven towards smaller IFComp-sized games that play in a couple of hours. This does not lend itself to anything close to “epic fantasy” or even a single volume of material.

Also note I’m talking about parser stuff. I really don’t know anything about the choice world.

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As much as these games are great (or presumably great), I don’t know if they’re really beginner-friendly. Dreamhold fits the bill for being beginner-oriented but in my experience it still assumes too much. Wishbringer is supposedly targeted towards beginners—I don’t have any experience with it—but being an Infocom game, it’s probably less forgiving than modern ones.

I still will continue to recommend Violet, as that was my first completed game. It’s comedic realistic fiction, not fantasy, but it’s got a very robust hint system and a fun narrative voice. There’s also the super short 9:05, which doesn’t offer a lot in the way of gameplay but is a good example of how to navigate a parser system and the unique storytelling abilities of the medium.

In short, learn to play parser IF first and then find the fantasy.

I’m afraid I’m not well-versed in choice IF, although many are story-focused so the gameplay should be easy to pick up. There’s not as much of a puzzle standard in choice games, so whatever puzzles you encounter will likely be doable for you.

There are also hybrid works (especially in languages like Dialog) that let you switch between a hypertext and command line input at will. They are usually fundamentally parser-based.

You can find many works of both types on ifdb.org.

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Wishbringer gives you an artifact that’s essentially a cheat code for its puzzles – you can literally wish your way to a solution. There’s also the option of actually solving the puzzle without using the wishing stone, which gives you a higher score. So you can give all of them a try, and wish your way past anywhere that you get stuck, and then you can go back and give it another go in a later playthrough if you want another crack at it.

It was explicitly aimed at players who found typical Infocom games too hard.

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IIRC, though, it may render the game unwinnable to do this. I read this is by design; to illustrate how wishes are unrereliable and how it’s preferable to just “put in the work” instead of wishing.

Deep world building… magic system, sort of… Well, if you are willing to download a TADS interpreter for best experience, “According to Cain” is not strictly fantasy but it’s fairly deep. It’s a biblical setting. It doesn’t have a “magic system” like Enchanter or Spellcasting 101, but it has a system that feels like magic. It can be a bit overwhemling overwhelming for new players, maybe, but on the other hand it’s also got a few features that lessen the burden.

I have yet to play “Worlds Apart” but it seems to consistently rank highly in terms of world-building. “Blue Lacuna” also seems to be a place you can lose yourself in.

A fantasy-setting comedic-style unusual parody with no magic system but magic items is “Adventurer’s Consumer’s Guide”, I think it may fit your bill only very tangentially but you may find it enjoyable. Or not.

An example of a non-fantasy-game magic-system-type-of-thing is Savoir Faire, worth experiencing. And what Counterfeit Monkey does is surely some kind of magic!

EDIT - “Bliss” is a fantasy game. I am not sure that I can recommend it or say it’s good, but I can tell with certainty that it’s a game I never forgot.

EDIT - Interestingly enouogh, IFDB may have you covered: IFDB’s search for “Fantasy”. Checking the higher-rated games on this list, some of which have been mentioned in this thread, is a great way to get started, though some of them aren’t “fantasy” in the “kingdoms, swords, sorcery and goblins” sense. The very first item, “Hadean Lands”, is something I meant to add as “If you like ‘According to Cain’, be sure to try Hadean Lands, though I definitely would not usually recommend it to a beginner. Not that it’s difficult, it’s just that the process of solving the game is not representative of IF in general, and as such it’s best experienced when you are already familiar with conventions. Having said that, no one’s stopping you. :slight_smile: “

As for what is beginner-friendly… I have no idea, really, but I don’t see anything the matter with tackling a bigger game and using hints until you get used to it. I grew up with adventure games that either came with the walkthrough AND I, as a kid, thought they were like interactive movies and you were SUPPOSED to play from the walkthrough… or, in the case of the Zork collection, which had the Zorks up until Nemesis, it came with the maps and clues. And I thought you were supposed to use the maps, as opposed to mapping the game yourself. Needless to say, my playthroughs were thoroughly spoiled… and yet here I am, more than 30 years later, still in love with the genre, and very much not dependant on hints and walkthroughs.

(I’m rather sorry that I played such games as Monkey Island 1, Cruise for a Corpse, and Loom thoroughly spoiled in this manner; I feel I didn’t get to experience them properly. On the other hand, it also navigated me through some Sierra games, so I learned about Sierra’s design philosophy while at the same time learning how to play their game and maximise my chances of success. It’s a win.)

EDIT - I hesitate to recommend “A Journey Into Xanth”, but it’s fantasy and it borrows from a well-known developed fantasy world, so while simplistic it may scratch a “fantasy world” itch.

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Suveh Nux is a terrific one-room learn-the-magic-system-to-escape parser game: pretty involved but actually has excellent onboarding and hinting, I think.

Stay? is a choice-based escape-the-time-loop game that’s pretty great. I found it a little jarring how much it flips between small choices and “three years pass by” but I did end up getting sucked in and sorting out all the corners of the loops is engaging too.

The Moonlit Tower by sci-fi author Yoon Ha Lee is a short dreamlike or poetic parser game (but built around fairly easy conventional parser-puzzles) with a Chinese folk-tale sort of setting.

Ataraxia and Eikas are long-ish choice-based “neighborhood simulators” – I kinda prefer Ataraxia’s dusting of folk horror but Eikas was written second and is more polished in a bunch of ways.

Sub Rosa is a long, somewhat difficult parser game but the atmosphere is impeccable. Sort of a fantasy heist game? You not only have to get in and out, but leave no trace of your presence (put everything back the way you found it). Mysterious, evocative prose and an interesting magical world with a mathematical flavor to some parts of its magic ritual system.

The Bones of Rosalinda and The Trials of Rosalinda are choice-based adventure games where you’re a skeleton who can detach various body parts to solve puzzles and defeat a necromancer and escape other trials.

I never clicked with Master of the Land but lots of people love it: a biggish choice-based world where there are interweaving stories and intrigues going on around you.

The Wise-Woman’s Dog is a bronze-age parser game (with a bunch of click-this-command conveniences) where you’re a magical dog trying to save your human from a life-threatening curse.

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It’s been a while since I played it, but I thought of Bronze, which has some gentle nudging for players who might need it.

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I highly recommend Pharos Fidelis and The Saltcast Adventure! Both are excellent, immersive fantasy stories with great worldbuilding.

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A few of my personal favorites in the fantasy genre are Risorgimento Represso and its sequel, Illuminismo Iniziato, Treasures of A Slaver’s Kingdom, and How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title. All of these are large, fairly complicated parser games–especially PQ–but they’ve all got robust hint systems, and walkthroughs if it comes down to it.

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I was going to recommend The Saltcast Adventure but @alyshkalia beat me to it. It’s a fairly long (3 hours?) choice-based game with extensive world building and if I remember rightly it’s pretty difficult to get completely stuck or outright lose.

I don’t know many of them well myself, but if epics are your thing, it’s probably worth checking out the Choice of Games catalogue - length is usually a selling point for their readership, and plenty of their high-profile games are fantasy-themed.

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I’m only going to echo what others here have already said, but:

  • Suveh Nux is a small escape-the-room game with a rigorous magic system that you have to master in order to break out
  • The Wise-Woman’s Dog (note: my own game) is a big treasure-hunt romp through a historical fantasy setting (the Hittite Empire but where magic actually works the way the Hittites thought it worked), intended to be approachable for newcomers
  • Hadean Lands (note: costs money) is one of my personal favorites, a big adventure in an “alchemypunk”(?) setting that tries to make old-school gameplay accessible to modern audiences

I love the Enchanter trilogy, but they also very much have 70s-80s design sensibilities—it’s possible to make Enchanter unwinnable on the very first turn and not realize until hours or days later.

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The Gnomish Treasury won this year’s Text Adventure Literacy Jam, a competition for beginner-friendly parser games. You play as the custodian of the gnomish royal treasury, tasked with restoring some recently recovered, but damaged, historical artifacts. There isn’t much magic, but there’s plenty of world-building. It’s very beginner friendly, and the puzzles aren’t too difficult.

The Antediluvian Weapon, which placed third in the same competition, is an espionage-heist game set in a fantasy version of the Renaissance. It’s a bit trickier than The Gnomish Treasury, but it’s definitely still good for beginners.

I agree with Josh Grams about The Wise-Woman’s Dog, the Rosalinda games, Ataraxia, and Eikas; they’re some of my favorites. Drew Cook’s recommendation of Bronze, a dark fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast, is also a good one.

Lamp Post Projects, author of The Gnomish Treasury, has also written several other choice-based games set in the same world. I’ve played The Path of Totality, which is about a journey to view a solar eclipse, and Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade, a mystery game following a detective who must uncover a magical plot before the premiere of an opera, and enjoyed both of them.

The Princess of Vestria feels like a YA fantasy novel in IF form. You play as a teenage princess on a quest to save her brother from a mysterious illness. Some of the puzzles are a bit under-clued, but other than that, I’d recommend it.

Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider is a short limited parser game with fairly easy puzzles and excellent writing, set in a Dungeons and Dragons-like world.

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Most proposed games above that I played, are not that easy e.g. I don’t find Enchanter easy, just less hard than e.g. Spellbreaker. However, Wishbringer might be okay for beginners. Another approach for a newcomer could be to follow a medium hard game from start to finish with a walkthrough to enjoy the story and get an idea of how puzzles are commonly solved in e.g. parser games. Would that be of interest?

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Ooooh I have a good rec that no one else mentioned yet – Wearing the Claw by Paul O’Brien. Simple, relatively short, not too hardcore with worldbuilding but also a pure, sincere example of fantasy worldbuilding. It was the game that really hooked me on text adventures as a kid when I found it in a Windows 9x launcher on some shareware CD.

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I haven’t updated it in a while, but I have a list of dozens of good fantasy games:
https://ifdb.org/viewlist?id=jxdh59v76x3loeqw

along with specifically Zorkian fantasy games:

and fairtyale/nursery rhyme games:
https://ifdb.org/viewlist?id=8551tke467zi9pn

and religious/mythological games:

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By any chance, was that collection approximately 10 games and did it include The Lesson of the Tortoise?

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Fantasy is a staple genre over at Choice of Games, if you’re happy to have choice-based rather than parser-based text adventures. (And, for most of them, to pay money for the full game, though they have substantial demos you can try for free.)

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Yes. That’s the one. Also Theatre.

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