What is a text adventure game?

A truly unique and immersive experience – but not for everyone

Have you ever wanted to change the events happening in the book you are reading? To save one of the characters, or to choose a different romantic interest? Have you ever wanted to cheer up your favorite character in a moment of sadness or loss? If at least one of these answers is “yes,” then you will like text adventures. Let me explain.

Imagine that it would be possible for a writer to ask you from time to time: “What do you think—what would be a good decision for this particular character to make in this situation? Should Olivia the Knight take a stand and fight this bunch of thugs? Or should she leave and then return when it’s dark and dispose of them one by one in their sleep? Or even maybe try to join them and then become the leader of the gang?”

If you regularly play computer games, especially role-playing games, you probably face such choices on a regular basis. Having a variety of options gives you the freedom to play the game the way you want, allows you to be creative when completing quests, and makes the game more fun. But what about text adventures?

Classic RPGs like Fallout and Neverwinter Nights and new ones like Pillars of Eternity, Tyrrany, and Pathfinder: Kingmaker all have elements of a text adventure inside of them, including the possibility of entering into dialogue with characters:

When you are facing a character who is supposed to talk to you, a set of response options/phrases appears. You do not type the full text of whatever you wish to say to the character, but still, if the game is good, the options provided can cover a wide range of possible actions. This makes the game more immersive and allows it to be closer to the real world. Why is this important? The game world becomes truly alive because the characters around you behave like they’re living beings.

Text adventures are games that put heavy focus on text-based interactions with the game world and the characters living inside of it. In most of the text adventures, you are reading a text that the game displays to you like a book, but, unlike a book, you have an opportunity to type text describing your actions in response, or at least to choose from a number of available options.

Why you should play text adventures

Text adventures are a different and unique approach to being interactive. They are even sometimes called “interactive fiction games.” While some of the simple (but still good) text adventure games direct you to just “read a paragraph describing the situation, read a set of actions and phrases available to you, and pick one,” others might allow you to actually send a message to the in-game character, something that is unprecedented in modern gaming.

This particular game mechanism is very ambitious and hard to implement. But when it is done right, it’s great — no other game can impress you like one in which you can ask your favorite character, “How are you?” and get a response. It is like you — who are not the in-game protagonist – you, are directly communicating with the character of your dreams. To implement this mechanism completely would mean inventing an artificial intelligence, of course, and the authors of text adventures are usually achieving only some of this kind of interactivity. It’s not rare that this level of interactivity surpasses the that in AAA games with multimillion-dollar budgets. To get to this level, the author of the game needs to truly be an artist who is free and full of courage and dedication.

So, if you are a fan of unique experiences, or even if you are just tired of the usual games (which are pretty look-alike nowadays), text adventures are for you.

Join us to experience
the most powerful text adventure games!

At Steel Smith’s Synthetics, we’re pushing modern technologies to the limit by creating immersive text adventure games that allow players to have conversations with unique and charming characters. Our upcoming title is Dark Forest: Reborn: a next-gen text adventure game set in a grim high-tech fantasy world. The game is in the heavy development stage. It doesn’t use any text generation algorithms and is fully handcrafted.

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If you want to read more about text adventures, check out our blog.