Fun seeing Panks references in the wild, so to speak.
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I love Life of a Wizard for Android (you can buy it on Steam for the PC for about Ā£2.50, I think, but itās free with ads on Android). Itās a choice-based game rather than a parser-based game, and whilst it doesnāt have randomised content or turn-based combat, it does have some of the RPG elements you mentioned (skills, equipment, companions, etc.).
I found it quite inspiring. I liked how it was told in the past tense (youāre reciting your life story to your apprentice, if I remember correctly) so you couldnāt ādieā so much as prematurely end the story because you didnāt make the right choices to seize all of the opportunities with which your character was presented within the game.
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Spider and Web plays with this as well. You are being interrogated about past events and how you play through the scene is ostensibly what youāre telling your interrogator in the present.
So, if you die while playing, the game reverts to the present moment with the interrogator saying, āAnd then you died?ā looking at you pointedly.
Which causes the PC to backpedal and you continue your story from a point just before dying. Sorta like an amusing auto-undo.
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I tried Kerkerkruip and found its combat intriguing but like any Roguelike I think completing the game successfully involves a certain degree of luck. Will be digging more into this one.
Sam Rubyās contributions to Eamon included something called the Advanced Combat & Encumberance system (ACE) which was fully implemented in his adventure Sanctuary. From what Iāve read in his notes that might be an ideal Eamon combat system as it introduces real strategy and includes some nifty things like ranged combat. I still want to play through this adventure to see how ACE works and if at some point it can be reverse engineered.
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Iād second many of the recommendations above - especially 4x4 Archipelago and Kerkerkruip - and add Black Knife Dungeon, which is a lighter take on the genre that uses a fun push-your-luck gameplay structure and a bunch of good observation puzzles.
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I just remembered Krago Castle - a very old ZX Spectrum game from 1983 (possibly) that I had. No idea what happened to it. I seem to remember it had free-roaming NPCs that you could either fight or avoid and you could search for secret doors but it was random whether you would find them (so you had to keep searching once you got stuck). It was also semi-parser-based (in that some things you could do from single button presses, like directions, and other things you could only do with commands, like TAKE). I think it was also semi-real-time, too, so if you didnāt do anything, the NPCs would still do their thing after a while (so you could escape if you were quick enough and there was an NPC in the room). I remember enjoying it at the time, but am not sure if thatās just because Iām feeling nostalgic or because it was, actually, any good!
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I scrolled down here to recommend 4x4 Archipelago and The Little Match Girl 3, which have both been mentioned already, so I guess this is a +1. Theyāre both fun and expertly designed in totally different ways. Excited to check out some more of these suggestions, too!
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You might count games like Roadwarden (https://moralanxietystudio.com/); primarily text although illustrated.
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CursĆ©d Pickle of Shireton is set inside of an imaginary MMORPG with light stats, quests, and resource collection, and I did the dreaded ātimed combatā thing combined with the concept of a busy box time-management clicker game.
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I just wanted to thank everyone for their input thus far. These recommendations are amazing!
But donāt let me stop you. These types of games are like cookies to meā¦
ā¦oh, wonderful, life destroying, responsibility avoiding COOKIES!
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Before the graphical tile set introduced in 2022, could Dwarf Fortress be considered a text dependent RPG-adjacent title?
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