this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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Games with Text-based Interaction? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 5 days ago by tiramichu@sh.itjust.works to c/games@lemmy.world
27 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Many old Sierra adventure games are like this.

Text based adventures like Zork and Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.

I always liked the Hugo series, myself.

It's not really the difficulty of programming that these are not common today, but more that there are better, easier ways of having interactions which are more popular. Hell the entire genre of point and click adventure games that came after text parsers isn't super big today and those are some of the easiest games to make.

Gonna keep an eye on this thread, because I'd also like to know about more games like that. Especially more modern ones. All the things I know of that fit the description are from my childhood. :x

[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Those kinds of old text-based adventures are definitely worth a shout, but I think you mentioned their biggest flaw - that other means of interaction are much more natural and intuitive than text parsers.

It's very frustrating and not fun to be trying to find the right phrasing the game wants for "combine the x with the y" or "use the a in the b" when we can just click on things.

In Event[0] for example you are free to move around and look at things and click on things and find clues by yourself, but KaIzen is always there to chat to - and you often need to. So it's a great blend because it's a "normal" and modern game in most respects, but with free-text conversation as a core element.

Again it's a flawed game (Only 'Mixed' on Steam and I agree with that!) but it's an interesting experience regardless.

[–] Malix@sopuli.xyz 5 points 5 days ago

a bit later Sierra adventure game "Leisure Suit Larry 7" has both: mouse point & click AND text-parser. Though it is only really required in few places where you either need to ask about something not offered in the dialogue options, or figure out a clever verb for doing something (some are easter eggs and funnies, can't really remember what else needed custom verbs typed in, fairly sure there was some).

In any case, the game isn't for everyone's tastes, it is goofy/juvenile/immature/naughty/"adult", but overall more on the side of comical/cartoony and not really a "sex game", even if getting laid is the goal for Larry.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 5 days ago

Those kinds of old text-based adventures are definitely worth a shout, but I think you mentioned their biggest flaw - that other means of interaction are much more natural and intuitive than text parsers.

I think that they improved in later years, and experience and improved design helps with "hunt the verb".

You might look at https://ifdb.org/

That being said, I haven't played much in recent years, so maybe that's a condemnation of them.