Yes, they are adventure games.
I played Thaumistry: In Charm's Way in a playthough at AG about 7 years ago, and it was great fun! It's the only text adventure I've played so far, but I'm open to trying another.
I played Thaumistry: In Charm's Way in a playthough at AG about 7 years ago, and it was great fun! It's the only text adventure I've played so far, but I'm open to trying another.
“Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together.” -Vesta M. Kelly
Oh yes, text adventures are without any doubt adventure games. They are just as diverse as graphic adventures and have evolved a lot since Zork, so modern parsers are excellent. See ifdb.org for an amazing database and much more. I discovered interactive fiction in 1986 (first Magnetic Scrolls and later Infocom) and still play one or two games a year. We had about a dozen community text adventure playthroughs at the old Adventure Game forum, where anybody could post commands and only one person actually played the game and posted the game's responses to everybody's input. Great fun. We played some very good games, like Spider and Web, Anchorhead, Lost Pig, Bureaucracy, Counterfeit Monkey.
Absolutely. It's right there in the name, "text adventure", and the graphical ones are descended from them. Before the graphical ones existed, we didn't even need to distinguish "text" adventures from anything else. They just were what adventure games were. (You're aware of the ur-text Colossal Cave Adventure aka ADVENT, I assume?)
Key to what? To being classified as a "text adventure"? I suppose so, but I'm a bit confused about the question. Are you asking whether games that use text parsers for input and text for description, but have perhaps static (rather than animated) graphics, are "text adventures"?
Quote: Do you consider the absence of graphical representation to be key?
Key to what? To being classified as a "text adventure"? I suppose so, but I'm a bit confused about the question. Are you asking whether games that use text parsers for input and text for description, but have perhaps static (rather than animated) graphics, are "text adventures"?
This post was last modified: 11-25-2025, 07:44 PM by arcanetrivia.
Edit Reason: l'esprit de l'escalier
I realize very few people here still play text adventures but I'm going to recommend the latest addition to my Interactive Fiction Top Ten anyway: Type Help by William Rous, free at itch.io. Inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn, Her Story, Unheard, and The Roottrees Are Dead - 4 of my alltime favorite games, so of course I just had to try Type Help. Loved every minute of playing this spooky puzzle-mystery and I'm not the only one by far. It scores a solid 5 stars at itch.io and at ifdb.org.
You investigate mysterious deaths that took place at Galley House in the '30s by reading computer files with recordings of the sometimes weird conversations between people. At the start you have access to only a few files. Based on the info you get from the conversations, you figure out new file names. That's it. Whenever you want to read a particular file again, you click on its name in the file list. No frustrating parser that refuses to understand your English, just file names and a few simple commands which the game spells out for you. Finding the file names isn't particularly hard, with one or two exceptions near the end, but immensely satisfying. And when you finally understand what's been going on, it's great fun to read the conversations again from the start.
https://william-rous.itch.io/type-help
You investigate mysterious deaths that took place at Galley House in the '30s by reading computer files with recordings of the sometimes weird conversations between people. At the start you have access to only a few files. Based on the info you get from the conversations, you figure out new file names. That's it. Whenever you want to read a particular file again, you click on its name in the file list. No frustrating parser that refuses to understand your English, just file names and a few simple commands which the game spells out for you. Finding the file names isn't particularly hard, with one or two exceptions near the end, but immensely satisfying. And when you finally understand what's been going on, it's great fun to read the conversations again from the start.
https://william-rous.itch.io/type-help
Totally. Text adventures started it all off for me and when graphic text adventures came along it was just the next evolution of the same genre.
On another post I mentioned that one of my pivotal games was 'The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring' as a text adventure (which came packed with the book as well!)
Reading the book and playing the game was a wonderful double-win and gave my imagination room to grow and explore. Those old text adventure games were a gym for the imagination and I loved that about them.
On another post I mentioned that one of my pivotal games was 'The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring' as a text adventure (which came packed with the book as well!)
Reading the book and playing the game was a wonderful double-win and gave my imagination room to grow and explore. Those old text adventure games were a gym for the imagination and I loved that about them.