How to play a text adventure

Four minutes, and then you will be fine. There is no manual to memorise and no guess-the-verb nonsense in these games.

1. You type what you want to do

The game describes where you are. You type an instruction. It tells you what happened. That is the whole loop. Instructions are short and plain:

look
examine the wall
take the rope
use the mirror on the sunbeam
talk to faroukh

You can drop "the" and it will not care. Capital letters do not matter. Neither does punctuation — and a question mark on its own is the help screen, because that is what people type when they are lost.

2. What a turn actually looks like

If you have never seen one, this is the shape of the thing. Four turns, from the first room of one of the games here:

> look

THE HARBOUR STEPS
Wet stone going down into green water, a bollard, and a newspaper
somebody left folded on the third step. The town is north.

> examine the newspaper

Four days old and rain-swollen. The third column is about an
expedition leaving for the interior, and it names a man you were
told was still in Cairo.

> take the newspaper

Taken: the newspaper.

> n

Notice what happened there. The room mentioned a newspaper in passing; looking at it turned a piece of scenery into a fact, and taking it turned the fact into a thing you can show somebody. That is the entire loop of a text adventure, and everything else is a variation on it.

3. Moving around

Compass directions, abbreviated. n, s, e, w, and the diagonals ne, nw, se, sw. Also u and d for up and down, and in and out. Every room lists its exits, and the compass on the right lights up the directions that go somewhere — you can click those instead of typing.

Two conveniences worth knowing. back retraces the way you just came, which is the fastest way out of somewhere dark. And on a ship or inside a machine you can say fore and aft instead of north and south, because nobody who has ever been on a boat says north.

4. Reading a room properly

A room description is doing two jobs at once and it helps to know which is which. Most of it is scenery — atmosphere, and there for the pleasure of it. But every description also contains the two or three nouns that are load-bearing, and the way to tell is to look at them.

The rule these games follow: if a description names a specific object, that object can be examined, and examining it tells you something the room did not. A "wet stone floor" is scenery. "A bollard" is an object. When you are stuck, the answer is nearly always a noun you read past.

5. The three habits that keep you alive

Examine everything

This is the whole game. Rooms describe themselves in general terms; the detail that saves your life is one examine away. If a description mentions an object, look at it. If it mentions a floor, look at the floor.

Read the writing on the wall

When a game bothers to carve an instruction into a lintel, it is not being atmospheric. It is telling you the rule of the next room, and it will be a rule that kills you if you ignore it.

Carry more than you think you need

An object you walked past in act one is frequently the answer in act four. Nothing here is dead weight, and there is no inventory limit.

6. When it does not understand you

It happens, and it is nearly always one of four things. In order of likelihood:

• The word for the thing is not the word you used. Try the exact noun the room used. The description is the vocabulary list.
• You are being too specific. examine the small brass ship's lantern when examine lantern would have done. One or two words is usually right.
• You are asking for two things at once. One verb, one object. There is no take all, and take the rope and the lamp is one command too many.
• The verb genuinely is not in the game. Then it is not the answer — these games do not hide solutions behind vocabulary. help lists everything the parser knows.

What it will never be is a puzzle you solved correctly and phrased wrongly. If you have worked out what to do, there is a plain way to say it.

7. Drawing a map

Old-fashioned and still the best advice in the genre. Rooms and arrows on the back of an envelope, built as you go. It takes no time, it makes a twenty-room building navigable, and it turns where was that door from a five-minute problem into a glance.

These games are all built so a map is worth having and never required: exits are listed every time, the compass shows what is live, and back always works. But you will enjoy them more with one.

8. Dying

You will. In these games death is not random and it is not a trick: the screen tells you what killed you and where you were warned. You restart at the beginning of the current act with everything you had at the start of it, so a death costs you minutes, not an evening.

The design rule behind that, if you are curious: every trap says what it is twice before it fires — once in the room, once by the object doing it — and the death screen quotes the warning you walked past. A death you could not have avoided would be a bug, and it is the kind we fix first.

9. Saving

Automatic, after every turn, in your own browser. Close the tab and come back next week and you will be in the same room with the same things in your bag. Type save to force it, load to go back to your last save, and restart to wipe it and begin again.

The save lives in the browser you played in — a save made in Chrome will not appear in Firefox, and a phone will not see a laptop's game. Private/incognito windows forget everything when you close them, and clearing "cookies and site data" clears it too. Nothing is stored on any server here, which is also why nobody can lose it for you.

10. If you get stuck

In this order, and most people never get past the second step:

1. Type journal. Everything you have established is written down in there, and the answer is usually already in it.
2. look again, and examine the nouns in the description you have not examined yet.
3. Talk to whoever is in the room. talk to them first, then ask them about anything you have heard of. People here know things and will say them.
4. Every game has a hint page that gives you one nudge at a time, act by act, without spoiling the act you have not reached. And a full walkthrough, if you would rather just see it.

Full command reference Pick a game