HelixFox Games

To play, enter commands into the text box. Type help if you get stuck.

This is a very bizarre game that not everyone will understand (it certainly has plenty of injokes), but I wanted to make it. Once again time restrictions reared their ugly head and I had to cut two features that would have made the game a lot better: changing the game world and achievements.

Changing the game world would have made the game a lot more complex and involved. As it stands right now, you basically flounder around until you come across an ending – it’s not possible to have any effect on the world until you finish the game, at which point you start again with a blank slate. Changing the game world would have added support for locations changing according to your actions, people saying different things, etc.

Achievements would have been good to show you how many endings there are and to keep track of your progress in finding the different endings. There are currently nine endings to find.

The other main thing that this game suffers from is a lack of recognised commands. I put in as many as I can think of, but inevitably there will be plenty I missed! Amusingly, I use MochiServices to track the commands people tried that were unrecognised. Here are my favourites: Drink Toilet, Mastrabate, Get in Fridge, Strangle Sheets.

Ultimately, text adventures are a very clunky way of playing a game and a definite relic of the past. I don’t see a resurgence of them or anything like that; in fact, as soon as the ‘regular’ adventure games starting showing up (such as Monkey Island and the Lucasarts games, etc), I think those games outclassed old text adventures for simple playability. Text adventures were just a product of the poor hardware of the time, though they do have the nostalgia factor.

Maybe I’ll try and do a Monkey Island style game!