Several years ago I played Event[0]
It’s a sci-fi exploration/“walking simulator” that sees you stranded on an abandoned luxury space vessel, with only the vessel’s “AI”, Kaizen, for company. You can free-type whatever you like, and Kaizen will respond as best ‘he’ can, being helpful or unhelpful at times, opening and closing doors for you, giving you back-story on the ship and the people on it if you ask the right questions.
I’ve been looking for other games that use natural-language interaction and really coming up dry. I found a couple of horror-genre PC-simulator games like s.p.l.i.t (creepy!) and the demo of No Players Online (which was really fun by the way) and while both of those showed fake “chat apps” in the screenshots which got my hopes up, they are 100% programmed where you just press (any) keys and a pre-determined message types out letter by letter.
I don’t have my hopes up too high, because I realise that building this kind of interaction in a game is very difficult. It’s probably not worth it unless it’s the core focus of the game, and even then it’s going to have big problems. Event[0] itself was terribly flawed, as it’s clearly just using programmatic word matching, and often the responses are nonsensical or unrelated to what you asked.
That said, there were times it managed to shine, and in those moments it felt great, and I felt great for coming up with the right thing to ask, rather than being railroaded with predetermined options.
If you’ve got anything that might scratch a similar itch, please tell us about it :)
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This is a specific genre of text adventure - have you been on text adventure sites to try and find more? Because they’re low cost to make you can find loads for free or little money.
Modern Text Parser Games:
The Crimson Diamond - Highly Recommended
Description: Follow amateur geologist and reluctant detective Nancy Maple to the ghost town of Crimson, Ontario to investigate the discovery of a massive diamond in this retro-inspired, EGA text parser mystery adventure!
Tachyon Dreams Anthology - Recommended
Description: Time itself is breaking up, and Dodger, the dishwashing dude onboard Penrose Space Station, is the unlikely fixer. Join the chaos in this 80s-style comedy, sci-fi text-parser adventure as Dodger tackles a cosmic crisis like no other!
Buddy Simulator 1984 - Recommended (Only partially text-parser based)
Description: Thanks to next generation AI technology, BUDDY SIMULATOR 1984 simulates the experience of hanging out with a best buddy! Your buddy learns from you, constantly adapting to your interests and personality. But most importantly, your buddy can play games with you!
Code 7: A Story-Driven Hacking Adventure - Unfinished
Description: Try to save humanity in this episodic and fully voiced hacker story. Guide your partner through a thrilling and emotional science fiction journey by hacking systems and extracting information. All from your keyboard.
Classic Text Parser Games:
Eric the Unready - Recommended
Description: Eric the Unready established his reputation by impaling his instructor during jousting class. Then, when Princess Lorealle the Worthy is kidnapped, Eric begins a madcap quest through his hilarious fantasy world packed with horrible beasts!
Longer list of games not all of which I’ve played: Parser Graphic Adventure Games
List of highly rated interactive fiction not all of which I’ve played: IFDB List
Thank you for all the suggestions!
Buddy Simulator 1984 looks great because it (seems to?) combine text chat with other gameplay.
I honestly did a bad job with the title of the post (entirely my fault!) because most people have been going straight to the text adventure genre for recommendations, and that wasn’t what I had hoped for.
Text adventure games are easy to find. So are games that simply involve a lot of typing of any kind.
What’s not easy to find are games which aren’t necessarily entirely text-based or text parsing in their interactions, but have natural language chat as part of their gameplay loop.
So they could be absolutely any genre - walking sim, puzzle, horror - anything! Even an FPS or an RTS! Of course, I struggle to imagine how a game could fit natural language chat as part of a single player FPS, but if someone did it, I’d be interested!
In all, what im trying to find is a pretty specific, weird and rare non-genre that doesn’t fit established categorisation, and that’s why I needed Fellow Humans to help.
So, thank you for the Buddy Simulator recommendation. I’ll certainly be playing that :)
Zork (of course)!
Not a “text based game” exactly, but NetHack www.nethack.org is character based.
I’ve been playing https://cluesbysam.com/ a lot recently. It’s a (free) daily logic puzzle, so not really story-driven, but it is 100% text based.
Hey! I hope a little self promo here is alright! The game I’ve been working on is inspired by these older text based adventure games, and its a bit of a homage to that style. I’ve been building my own text parser for it. Its been a hobby project of mine for the last couple of years and is nearing completion.
It might not fit the bill completely in that it doesn’t really require natural language, but maybe it’ll help scratch the itch a little? There is a demo up on Steam ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/3919240/Soulfused/ ) and Itch ( https://confoxing.itch.io/soulfused ) If you do give it a try I would love to hear your thoughts!
Collossal Cave Adventure is a text-only adventure game. It uses the most primitive technologies in the most primitive ways (as it’s old, but it’s free and even has a web version as it’s old).
Starship Titanic comes to mind, though the text parser is only used to talk to characters.
You might also enjoy playing around with KathaaVerse. It uses AI (LLM) to turn any book into a text adventure. Last time I tried it, a lot of the time it felt more like playing a fever dream than an internally consistent story, though.
I played Starship Titanic as a kid, and loved it! Its one of four or five games I still kept the original PC “Big Box” for, all these years later.
The text parser being used only to talk to characters isn’t a detriment for me, it’s a feature! Clicking on things is much more intuitive for interactions, so just like Event[0] (which works the same way) I consider that a plus. Thinking about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs of Event[0] were actually inspired by Starship Titanic…
As for AI, that’s something I imagine we’ll see more of in the future. Something like KathaaVerse isn’t that exciting to me as it’s mostly a thin wrap around an LLM - which as you say is liable to go off the rails, and it’s not a rich experience.
For it to be compelling to me it needs to be a curated game first, with environments and interactions and actual programmed mechanics, and then AI second to potentially enhance that game experience with rich and natural conversation. It will be a fun match when someone gets it right.
The only thing that comes to mind is the mobile game Seedship, which I do highly recommend. It’s not the most expansive game but still fun. No “free typing” though.
