🗿 The Obelisk of Ashkar
Half a map, a rival four days ahead of you, and a temple that has had five hundred years to get good at killing people.
Signature mechanic — the satchel. What you carry is the difference between a fall and a handhold.
Text adventures that fight back
Free to play, nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. Type where you want to go and what you want to do, and the world answers. Your progress saves itself after every turn.
🤿 Thirty Fathoms
A hospital ship in forty fathoms, a hold nobody will name, and a hose that only reaches so far.
Signature mechanic — depth. Going down is free. Coming up is not.
🛢️ The Long Descent
Eleven miles down, in a machine that is failing, following a signal that started before there was anybody to send it.
Signature mechanic — the condition bar is not yours. You are a passenger in something that is slowly breaking.
🛰️ The Quiet Ship
You wake alone on a survey ship in Jupiter orbit eighty-five days after everyone else stopped writing in the log.
Signature mechanic — a power budget. Nothing drains; there are simply more systems than units, and every question you ask is something you chose not to power.
🧊 The Ninety-Ninth Day
Five people came back from the drill site. Four of them came back as themselves, and the plane is forty-one days away.
Signature mechanic — testimony. Six people answer everything you ask; the game is played by noticing where two accounts cannot both be true.
🔺 The Engine of Khufu
The chambers above the King's Chamber are not structural. They are tuned, and one man has been saying so since 1907 and has never once been asked to sing it.
Signature mechanic — resonance. Strike, listen, hum. And an acetylene lamp hisses, so you can see or you can hear, and never both.
🚂 The 4:52
The Blue Riband Express leaves Paddington at 3:10 and leaves the rails at 4:52, and you have been on it eleven times.
Signature mechanic — the loop. A hard 102-minute day that resets. Knowledge survives; nothing else does, including you.
🕯️ Ashgrove
A house in the West Riding with fourteen rooms on the plan and, on some nights, fifteen.
Signature mechanic — fear rewrites the prose. Room names, descriptions and the ways out all lie above a certain amount of fright. Four things never do.
🌵 The Long Dry
A stolen payroll, a drought, and a fourteen-year-old who will not go home.
Signature mechanic — three factions and a companion. Every door costs you another, and Cassie Bree has opinions and can be killed by a decision you made for a reason.
🎧 The Silent Partner
Two people, one job, one earpiece — and only one of you has hands.
Signature mechanic — two playable characters, switched at will. Separate bodies, separate pockets and separate knowledge, so the question is always which of us can do this.
🗼 The Turning Light
A rock lighthouse eleven miles out, a keeper at the foot of his own stairs, and a machine that must be wound every twenty minutes by the one man left to wind it.
Signature mechanic — the weight. A clockwork drive that runs down the tower, so every errand you go on is a round trip measured against being back at the top in time.
🧵 The Thread
Six hundred feet of cord, a quarter of a million dead being moved into the quarries under Paris, and a gallery that looks exactly like the last one.
Signature mechanic — the line. You pay cord out behind you and it is the only thing that knows the way back, so how far you can go is exactly how much of it you have left.
❄️ Fourteen Wakings
A hundred and thirteen years to Alpha Centauri, a crew whose grandchildren will finish the voyage, and a body that will come out of cold sleep fourteen times.
Signature mechanic — the waking. You are the one person aboard kept in cold sleep, you cannot supervise anything, and every thaw is one of fourteen you will ever have.
🪨 The Boundary Stone
A village that has agreed not to leave, a woman paid fourpence a body to say what killed people, and a pair of hands that remember every door they have been through.
Signature mechanic — contamination. Your hands carry it and every object carries it, and the searcher is the one person who goes into every house, which is why she can move it around.
🎭 The Fire Curtain
Nine hundred people, a gaslit theatre, and a fire that spreads by four rules printed on a card — which means you do not run from it, you steer it.
Signature mechanic — a hazard with published rules. Fire passes only through an open door, only into a place with something to burn, and with the draught first. Every door you touch moves it somewhere.
🗄️ Form Nineteen
You have been dead since March by clerical error, and the certificate that says you are alive requires a document that is only issued to living persons.
Signature mechanic — a dependency graph. Every counter requires two other things, each of which requires two more, and somewhere in it is a circle no amount of queueing resolves.
📜 Undercroft
You are directing an excavation that has six days left before a road goes through it, and the cellar stair comes up in 1348, and the house has been writing you down since 1201.
Signature mechanic — causal editing. What you do in 1348 is already true in 1968. The house’s own register has four gaps in it, and the acts alternate era, and what you do in the earlier one is what the later one has always said.
🧶 The Card Loom
You do not work the loom. You punch cards, and then you start the engine, and then the machine does exactly and only what you wrote down, at a hundred and forty picks a minute, in front of everybody.
Signature mechanic — deferred execution. You compose a chain of cards, start the engine, and watch it run without being able to intervene. The machine is honest and therefore unforgiving, and debugging it is the game.
🪟 Nine Acres of Glass
The Great Exhibition building is being taken down around you to a printed timetable, bay by bay, and there are twelve things in it that belong to other people, and you cannot get them all.
Signature mechanic — a map that is consumed. Every week more of the building is crated, carted and permanently gone. Nothing about the loss is a surprise, nothing about it is reversible, and the schedule has been on a board by the south door since the first morning.
🦌 The Tracker
One man is following you through the hills in the summer after Culloden. He is not fast and he is not clever. He reads the ground, and everything you do writes on it.
Signature mechanic — an adversary that models you. He follows the signs you leave: a print in peat, ash in a hearth, silt in a burn, smoke. He is never omniscient and never teleports, and when he finds you it is always traceable to something you left.
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What these are
A text adventure is a game made of prose and typed commands. There are no graphics to look at and
nothing to aim: you read a description of where you are, and you type things like examine the
floor or use the mirror on the sunbeam or just n to go north. The game
does what you said, tells you what happened, and waits.
The games here are built to one rule: every trap tells you about itself twice before it kills you — once in the environment, and once by the object doing the killing. When you die, the screen names the warning you walked past. Nothing here is a coin toss, and nothing is a guess-the-verb puzzle.
Each one runs about two to three hours if you are careful, and considerably less if you are not. They are hard on purpose, but they are never unfair, and there is no state you can reach where the game is quietly unwinnable and does not tell you.
No two of them work the same way
That was the point of building them as a set rather than one at a time. Every game has a rule the others do not have, and it is always the thing the game is actually about:
- The Obelisk of Ashkar — the satchel is the puzzle — the whip and the rope are two answers to one chasm, and going into a temple without oil in your lamp is a slow death by stumbling.
- Thirty Fathoms — you are on an air hose, and coming up too fast kills you.
- The Long Descent — you do not repair yourself, you repair the machine you are riding in.
- The Quiet Ship — there is not enough power for every system, so you choose which.
- The Ninety-Ninth Day — six people give evidence and some of them are lying.
- The Engine of Khufu — you can see or you can hear and never both, because the lamp hisses — so the pyramid is read by striking it, listening, and humming back.
- The 4:52 — a hundred and two minutes, then everything resets except what you worked out.
- Ashgrove — the house lies in its own descriptions, and tells you when it will.
- The Long Dry — three factions want the same water and you cannot satisfy all three.
- The Silent Partner — two people, one radio; the hands are never in the same place as the eyes.
- The Turning Light — a machine at the top of the tower wants winding every twenty minutes, and everything else is at the bottom.
- The Thread — the cord you pay out behind you is the only map there is, and there are six hundred feet of it.
- Fourteen Wakings — you sleep in decades and the world changes while you are under, and you get fourteen thaws.
- The Boundary Stone — everything you touch remembers it, and so do you, and some things can never be cleaned.
- The Fire Curtain — the fire obeys four printed rules, so you do not outrun it — you open and shut doors and steer it away from the people.
- Form Nineteen — every document requires two others, and one of the chains is a circle.
- Undercroft — the record has four gaps and you cannot contradict a word that is already written — you can only fill what was left blank.
- The Card Loom — you write the instructions and then you cannot touch it — the gap between what you meant and what you punched is where the puzzles are.
- Nine Acres of Glass — the building shrinks to a published schedule and what goes is gone — the game is deciding, in advance, what you are prepared to lose.
- The Tracker — the man behind you reads sign, so the game is not running — it is choosing what to write on the country and where.
More on the way
New adventures get added as they are finished and tested, which works out at roughly one a month. If you would like to be told when the next one lands — or you have an idea for one — email hello@freetextadventures.com.
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New to this?
If you have never played one before, what is a text adventure? explains the idea in about two minutes. Then how to play covers the practical side — it takes four more minutes and it is the difference between an enjoyable afternoon and a confusing one. There is also a full command reference listing every verb the parser understands.
Tell us
Found a bug, hit a puzzle that felt unfair, spotted a typo, or want to suggest a setting for a future game? Write to hello@freetextadventures.com. Unfair puzzles especially — that is the only kind of bug that really matters here, and every report gets read.