For generations, your family have been the guardians of the Time Crystals of Cythii. It’s a pretty cushy job. All you have to do is prevent the crystals from being stolen, but no one would be stupid enough to steal them or the stability of time would be torn to shreds.
Unfortunately, the unthinkable has happened.
While your parents were out doing the shopping, you were left in charge. You must have dozed off and someone snuck into the time tower and stole the crystals. This has resulted in time warps appearing all over time in the worst possible places. You can’t even travel through the time tower without being warped to a different time period.
It’s your duty to find the crystals and return them to their rightful place before your parents get home, or you will be in big, big trouble!
The Time Crystals of Cythii is my entry in Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2025. It’s a traditional text adventure (or parser-based interactive fiction) with a time travel theme. I don’t want to say too much about the theme, as I don’t want to spoil the surprises. However, I can tell you that it turned out to be quite a large game, probably the biggest I’ve written so far, so you can expect to spend about three to four hours playing it, depending on your experience.
It’s unquestionably a puzzle fest, but the puzzles are intertwined in some historically-accurate events. Some of the puzzles are quite devious, but there are plenty of in-game clues, providing you read carefully and recognise the clues for what they are. If you get stuck, there’s a very helpful HINT command, but try to avoid using it if you can.
The game was written part-time over a period of four months. It went through three rounds of testing and many of the enhancements were a direct result of the fantastic feedback received from my testers. (They’re credited on the game page and in the game.) None of the testers have seen the final version, so any remaining issues are due to me, not them.
You can play the game online at The Time Crystals of Cythii or download the z5 file to play in your favourite z-code interpreter.