The humble text adventure helped define video games. From the days of Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork, players engaged in intricate gameplay through words alone, which described environments and provided a way to indicate actions by choosing from sets of verbs and nouns. While the format may seem limiting now, modern versions of these text-based adventure games are working hard to redefine the genre. Incorporating novel twists and more poignant premises, games like Adam Cadre's 9:05 have made text-adventures more complex and interesting through twists on seemingly mundane tasks like "go to work."
Modern text-based adventure games have created scenarios that are truly a delight to play and have helped players reconsider what it means to adventure. But more than that, they've also asked players to reconsider what "text" even means. These four games offer different interpretations of "text" and what services it can render in the pursuit of good gaming that go beyond the original expectations of the genre.
Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium has graphics -- really interesting and moody graphics. It also has character designs, voice acting and a soundtrack to go with it. Despite these nods to a modern style of adventuring, the critically-acclaimed 2019 game from ZA/UM presents its quests, information and narrative choices through a text interface.
Disco Elysium's text interface is visually rich, using different colors to signify different speakers during a conversation, as well as to highlight which portions of the interface are interactable. This is part of what sets it apart as a text adventure -- text is no longer just a combination of letters to signify a word, but also a complex interaction between words and their presentation style to signify something more.
Focusing on the text interface in Disco Elysium is maybe doing the game a disservice, and it's certainly not the first game to play with how the text in an adventure is presented. But it's worth considering this game as what a fully modern interpretation of a standard text-adventure might look like, where text is at the heart of the story and the way of interacting, but not the only way that a player engages with the game.
Baba Is You
The 2019 puzzle game Baba Is You from developer Arvi Teikari reinvents text by asking players to think of words themselves as objects. Each level of this puzzle game explicitly lays out its rules on the screen, defining the player, the objective and the things standing in the way. But none of these rules are static -- in fact, players are meant to interact with the words, moving around these linguistic blocks to change the very nature of the level.
For instance, removing the verb from the declaration "wall is stop" means that the wall no longer stops a player's movement. Instead, they can move freely through walls, into new rooms and outside the bounds of the level altogether. Pushing the noun "wall" into the sentence "flag is win" can change the win condition to "wall is win" and, ultimately, be the solution to the puzzle.
Even with this unique gameplay mechanic, the fundamental building blocks of the text-adventure genre are still in place here. By making puzzles from the words themselves, Baba Is You reinterprets what it means to be a text adventure. Players don't enter text; they manipulate it visually, redefining what it means to interact with text.
Epic RPG
A more straightforward addition to the idea of "text" is the use of emojis. Epic RPG, the Discord bot created by user lume#0001 in 2019, allows players to join in battles by reacting to text-based messaging with emojis (at least until the most recent update). Here, a player declares themselves involved in a fight against a miniboss by adding a "dagger" emoji, visually signifying their intentions to fight.
Epic RPG's re-imagining of "text" falls in line with a general movement to incorporate images into the textual space as the number of emojis continuously increases and new, relevant ones keep being codified into Unicode practice. But these visuals aren't the modern graphics players might be used to, but rather individual signifiers being used the same way a traditional text adventure might have them write the word "fight."
AI Dungeon
Perhaps the most straightforward progression from the early days of text adventure games, AI Dungeon uses the same type of text-only interface. However, instead of pre-programed responses and limited narrative trees, it creates a game's story using machine learning and natural language processing algorithms. AI Dungeon allows players or groups of players to roleplay different scenarios using text commands and descriptions, but the machine learning back end means that players are never limited to a set of options like directions to walk or items to interact with.
AI Dungeon doesn't re-imagine "text" so much as "the production of text." If Disco Elysium was a modern version of what a text-adventure could look like, AI Dungeon is a modern version of how a text-adventure could act. Without limitations on content and choices, AI Dungeon can feel even more like a real-life game of Dungeons & Dragons with the computer responding in real-time to a player's choices.
For AI Dungeon, "text" is an ever-changing target rather than a choice in a dialogue tree or a Boolean in code. While natural language processing algorithms aren't perfect, and sometimes are laughably poor at maintaining semantic continuity (or even good syntax), AI Dungeon shows players the possibility of text that isn't pre-written.
Each of these games modifies the idea of a "text adventure," expanding how the text is created and interacted with or what "text" even means. As designers keep experimenting with ideas of the text-based adventure genre, players will continue to be able to interact with games in new ways. Even if this is the oldest type of adventure game, it is clear it doesn't need to remain stuck in the past.