What is a terminal-based game you've played that's worth mentioning?
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What is a terminal-based game you've played that's worth mentioning?
I’ve recently been experiencing terminal based games in Termux because I’ve always heard about them. One very neat thing is that I find myself actually using my imagination way more and it’s a feeling that I haven’t felt truly in a long time while playing a game.
I’ve been enjoying rogue-likes like brogue or dungeon crawl stone soup, but Ive been expanding my horizons a bit and found npush.
What I do find… bleh? Is that text adventures appear to be not as good. For such text heavy games, their stories leave something to be desired. I would love if anyone could recommend something that truly made them think/philosophize about things or made them feel something.
Anyway, this is a request for any terminal-based games :)
P.S. I highly recommend if anyone wants to also try out these games on their phones via Termux, buy a 518BT keyboard. It took me some time to find this kb but with this plus putting the phone in landscape mode, you effectively have a readable, portable 80x24 terminal :D (since no on-screen kb is covering anything)
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PSA for those unaware: Dwarf Fortress, despite running via SDL by default, can still be configured to run in a modern ANSI-capable terminal.
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Aye, how did I forget :). All I was doing was
apt search gamein Termux and it didn’t come up, but I suspect there are definitely builds out there for it.
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https://www.nethack.org/ Hard but enjoyable game. Still maintained after so many years
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And the developers have famously thought of everything.
I also like SLASH’EM, a Nethack expansion/variant.
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I started with nethack but quickly learned that more experienced rogue-like gamers prefer DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) so I went with that instead, but of course I’ll find my way back to nethack eventually :)
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They are both quite fascinating and very much diametrically opposite games. Crawl gives you lots of information if you look for it, has very few sneaky mechanical interactions between features. You win by knowing what resources you have on hand, and using them judiciously. To identify a potion or scroll, use it (somewhere safe). It probably won’t kill you.
Nethack on the other hand is alllll about the sneaky interactions between mechanics. It tells you very little up front, and you learn by trying things and making mistakes. There is an entire IRL skill tree you have to learn to safely identify potions and scrolls, and figuring it out is part of the fun.
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And you don’t need to play nethack on terminal, it’s on the web too!: http://nethack.glitch.me/
Or the hard-fought server: http://nethack.glitch.me/?host=hardfought.org
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I played that a lot way back when, and only ever made it to the castle maybe 3 or 4 times. I probably should have read more strategies, but I mostly played it blind.
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Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS, or often just “crawl”) is the terminal-based game I got the most addicted to in the past. I think its also got the best UX of any classic roguelike I’ve tried:
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The majority of the Infocom games besides Zork were very story-oriented. Zork was more like an in-joke that got out of control. These can mostly be played today in the terminal using an application like Frotz; you download the Z-machine file and run it with Frotz in the terminal. There is an interactive fiction competition each year, so there are still people making these kinds of games, and there is an online database of games as well. I haven’t played a huge number of these but my favorites are Anchorhead, which is a Lovecraftian game with a lot of atmosphere, and And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One, which is ostensibly a recursive game about this kind of game but actually becomes a touching game about young friendship.
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Yeah, I’ve tried Zork and meh. I’ve tried another one about some person who’s a writer and you start in a room and they’re having relationship drama and I quit that one too after trying for a good 30 minutes to give it a chance lol.
I’ll give Anchorhead a shot! Really I would expect interactive text adventures to be so fun :’)
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You should try Trinity.
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I have fond memories of playing Zork, but as a “flagship” game for an entire genre it is nearly one of the worst choices you could pick given how capricious and willfully obtuse it can be. There’s a vibrant community of people making newer, far more playable interactive fiction, but unfortunately it’s hard to come out of the shadow of Zork.
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Most of the puzzles in Zork at least made sense once you saw the answer (though the difference between the things you could use the stiletto and nasty knife for were annoying). Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the absolute worst. There’s a bit near the start where you need to feed a dog and if you don’t it eats you when you time travel several hours of gameplay later. And don’t get me started on the dark.
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I loved the original three Zorks, but Beyond Zork will always have a special place in my heart.
Especially the guide that came with it “The Lore and Legends of Quendor.”
The inclusion of a map was awesome, and the puzzle tie-ins to the guide were really satisfying.
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I agree with @technomancy’s comment. Zork is big and funny and cool and all that, but not a very well-written or user-friendly introduction to the genre.
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There is a collection called
bsd-gamesof which I play the linux ports. https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/BSD_gamesI’ve not played them all but I really got addicted to
atc, which is an air traffic control game.-
Yes! I love bdsgames. Lots of good choices and widely available.
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nethack, obviously?
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Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a rather simulationist zombie apocalypse roguelike. Has fully customizable vehicles! Also check out the commit graph for some bonus horror. :)
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I’ve been trying to find a DOS game that I played in the mid ’90s. It was called something like GammaWorld (there is, apparently, a game called Gamma World that had a failed attempt at being made into a computer game 15+ years later). It was a world exploration thing set in a post-apocalyptic world, with a text-based map. Can anyone help me remember what it was called / find a copy?
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No, that looks graphical. This was purely text based (hence being almost on-topic). I remember that, at the time, it used different characters and colours far more than any other text-based game I’d played. It was a rogue-like (no fixed plot random worlds, random events) and Wasteland looks as if it has a story.
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I found it! Alphaman. Released 1995 and somewhat retro at the time. I knew it was greek-letter + word!
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There’s a lot of really excellent text-only interactive fiction games being published via https://www.choiceofgames.com/. They’re not terminal based, but could easily be, the UI is just text with multiple choice. So you could possibly use the browser based UI in
w3mor something.I particularly enjoyed https://www.choiceofgames.com/tally-ho/ and the sequel https://www.choiceofgames.com/jolly-good-cakes-and-ale/
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I have an idea for a terminal based game. I’m inspired by dungeon crawlers from the 80s and 90s like the Bard’s Tale, Legend of Grimrock, Eye of the Beholder, etc. I also like the modern genre of auto-battlers or idle games. Their monetization strategy is usually awful. The underlying idea of the game “playing” itself, and you making higher level decisions is kind of cool. So anyway I have an idea for a text based, fantasy, party, dungeon crawler, which plays out idle, and has rogue-like elements. As you “play” you occasionally get some kind of game currency, or cards, or something (not sure what) that lets you poke in and adjust the automatic aspects somehow. Like perhaps you get a “corset of match making” that lets you pick which of three possible new party members are added to the party the next time you visit the tavern, rather than that choice being made randomly as usual. These kinds of non-idle choice-based items would carry over from one life to the next. You could use it, or you could hold on to it, for the next play-through. On a development note, I have this idea 1% coded up in python, but modern python environment setup made me pull out my hair and stop working on it.
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Interactive fiction has had a bit of a renaissance.
A good one to dip your toes into is Violet (https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4glrrfh7wrp9zz7b), a one-room game with fun writing and decent puzzles. Really though there’s a ton of good IF out there now.
There’s always NetHack, of course.
I also occasionally play some old BBS door games like Legend of the Red Dragon on some BBS’s that have been set up for nostalgia’s sake.
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All of the mid 90’s BBS door games. Usurper, Lair of the Red Dragon, Tradewars 2002, Global War and Barren Realms Elite are the ones that immediately come to mind.
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I just remember playing Legend of the Red Dragon when I was eight, and when I finally got to the level where I “Laid” Violet, I had no idea what it meant, and when I asked my Dad I still remember his knowing chuckle.
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What ever happened to Seth Able? (somehow I still remember this) :D
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Without doubt: ADOM. I first played it around 2001 or so, and I was blown away by the depth. The creator actually got funded and made a graphical port a while back (https://www.adom.de/home/index.html), but the original terminal based game is still freely available for download.
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The only one of his I’ve played is A Change in the Weather which is rather brutal but short and I liked it quite a bit. I should try Shade.
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This is my favorite terminal game of all time: freecell.
The user interface is sneakily really clever. The whole thing is like 600 lines of C. Free cell is also just a Good Game.
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I used to spend hours in DoomRL (now “DRL”), a rougelike inspired by Doom. It’s long since had a graphical mode and a 2.5D spiritual sequel in Jupiter Ascenting, but the older versions that I played were entirely text based. I think it was where I discovered one of my favourite things: turn based games that let you move or act as fast or slow as you want.
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Back in the early 80s a friend had an HP-UX workstation and there was a game on it called Warp. I only remember two things: (1) We had a ton of fun with it. (2) You could save all your steps up to a point and if you restarted it, you could Warp through all your previous steps.
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