games which are mostly text

[yakfak]

For fans of:

- rpg and/or adventure games which are mostly talking (disco elysium and planescape:torment 1 stuck in my mind forever)

- visual novel stuff (not an expert - from watching various stuff I get the feeling these are usually slice-o'-lifey dialogues and not much game is presented, but that's cool)

- MUDs? so many room descriptions <3 don't post if you played in terse mode

- old-as-dirt gaming which tells you to look at paragraph 82 of the manual to find out what the king/space trader/rad survivalist asks you to do

- honest to god text adventures (I never actually beat any of these, mostly I prefer reading about them)

- weird atari/amiga-era mixed-media text adventures??? early, insanely primitive Turingy ask-and-answer dos utilities? giggle

 

also for people who read RPG supplements without necessarily planning on playing them in a group. lol. I just kinda know people into all this, it's a tendency. there are so many systems that sometimes all you can do with them IS read and imagine. same with old abandoned TCGs - without support, they're just a bunch of imagination prompts and that's beautiful (RIP to the companies who wanted to make money from them, alas and lol) also, intentionally solo session TTRPGs based on journaling or world creation rule. I'm not talking about word-searches or wordle and I'm not really talking about classic roguelikes, despite them literally being all letters - what I mean is game narratives presented primarily through textual description

 

I like the written word and feel like it's still the most entertaining form even in 2024. what's everyone's fave wordy game?

[elborbahquarama]

i like the wizardry games and old children games like "le labyrinthe de la reine des ombres" or "le labyrinthe d'orthophus"

i like kentucky route zero

i like increpare in general

i love twine, it's a beautiful tool

i love all the games by thecatamites, like stephenstown (or by winter lake, like rat chaos)

i love the text parts in the nier games

i love pathologic (main designer is a huge sexual predator btw)

etc etc

i played higurashi no naku koro last year, and as expected there's a bunch of dumb stuff in it but it's also pretty fun lol (same for hypnospace outlaw)

[DiavoJinx]

I STILL play Zork I from time to time (easy to find online emulated in a browser).  It's still that good. =)

 

I've been pretty passionate about how good Zork I is over the years. I even created some of it in VR:

 

[xdarkmasterx]

Dark Souls. When you play it, you'll see mostly text...

 

[DiavoJinx]

6 minutes ago, xdarkmasterx said:

Dark Souls. When you play it, you'll see mostly text...

 

I know you're making a joke... but more seriously: most of the Soulsborne games' stories & lore are told via text descriptions on inventory items. =)

[yakfak]

there's some nice incidental lore in dark souls loading screens n stuff but not really much of a narrative imo - it's just "this legendary thing from this legendary place has a lot of meaning to this legendary people"/this will screw you up/this is only useful in pvp >:3

[dasho]

I used to play the 3-Kingdoms MUD quite a bit; before that I remember playing Legend of the Red Dragon on BBS and cheesing PVP with Thieving skills

[Not Jabba]

One thing I liked about the old Exile trilogy (later adapted into the Avernum series) is how much text it has, both to describe various events you trigger and sights you see and even more importantly for the huge amount of mostly optional dialogue you get when you talk to all the hundreds of characters. I don't know if 100 percent of that is still in the Avernum games, but I assume Spiderweb still can't make an RPG without putting several novels' worth of text into it.

Edited May 18 by Not Jabba

[Xyzzу]

>Your lamp is now shining brightly!

>You are in a debris room filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A low
 wide passage with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an
 awkward canyon leads upward and west. A note on the wall says: Magic Word "XYZZY"

>A three foot black rod with a rusty star on an end lies nearby.
 There is a small empty bottle here.

>_

 

[ducon]

 

[Maribo]

2 hours ago, yakfak said:

- rpg and/or adventure games which are mostly talking (disco elysium and planescape:torment 1 stuck in my mind forever)

I often find myself speaking about these two in the same breath as Pentiment. You always think that you're doing the right thing, in the moment.

There is also I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, which will drop you into an experience mirroring childhood -> adolescent -> adult scale of the (alien) world and (gorgeous) environments, among a lot of other things.

I've not played the entire thing, but A Hand With Many Fingers is entirely about reading dusty old articles, trudging around a poorly-lit archive, and trying to piece things together.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Check out Eamon.  It was a (primarily Apple II but there were a couple of DOS ports) text adventure system with RPG elements that had a whole bunch of modules made for it.

[ducon]

Baba is you?

Chants of Sennaar? It’s a point and click but…

Edited May 18 by ducon

[JackDBS]

My favorite visual novels are EVE Burst Error and Umineko. Both are very text heavy, especially Umineko which took me over 100 hours to read. Umi is a straight linear mystery VN, while EVE is like a detective game. I recommend both, but EVE has a very dated translation.

 

Dragon Quest VII is also very good and has a shit load of text.

[Mr. Freeze]

Zork! 

[Aaron Blain]

5 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

One thing I liked about the old Exile trilogy (later adapted into the Avernum series) is how much text it has

I'm very gradually working my way through the original Exile. I love how the setting, the landscapes etc are all conveyed through prose, and how much personality all the random NPC's have. I think of Jeff Vogel as my extremely hardworking digital DM.

 

Unconventional answer here, but in a similar vein something I always loved about Fallout 1 & 2 is the enormous amount of personality and life that comes through the text window in the corner of the screen.

 

I got decently far in Colossal Cave Adventure but I played it before I understood the concept of hand-mapping, so I got hopelessly stuck and gave up. I've been meaning to come back and get into other text adventures however.

 

Growing up I read every Lone Wolf and Fighting Fantasy I could get my hands on. I'm still heartbroken that the unique charm of the original Lone Wolf books has been replaced with standard grimdark in the reprints and videogame spinoffs.

[LegendaryEevee]

1.  Classic Pokémon games very dialogue heavy.

 

2.  Early Final Fantasy games (before 7)

 

3. Monster Rancher series.

 

4. Skyrim not just People talking but so many books notes and journals you can read at anytime anywhere you go.

[Not Jabba]

4 hours ago, Aaron Blain said:

I'm very gradually working my way through the original Exile.

 

Interesting -- what are you running them on? I didn't think it was possible to play them anymore, since they're post-DOS but have been deprecated for so long.

[Chopkinsca]

10 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

One thing I liked about the old Exile trilogy (later adapted into the Avernum series) is how much text it has, both to describe various events you trigger and sights you see and even more importantly for the huge amount of mostly optional dialogue you get when you talk to all the hundreds of characters. I don't know if 100 percent of that is still in the Avernum games, but I assume Spiderweb still can't make an RPG without putting several novels' worth of text into it.

 

I just got back into Spiderweb Software's games after taking a few years break. If I recall, Jeff gets more wordy with his games as time goes on. I rmember going back to the OG Avernum after playing his latest games and it felt like the text was more sparse. I do feel it was inevitable that these games would get mentioned in this thread.

 

47 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

 

Interesting -- what are you running them on? I didn't think it was possible to play them anymore, since they're post-DOS but have been deprecated for so long.

I think it was because 64 bit operating systems don't support 16 bit apps, or something like that. I would have started my adventures with Exile, but at the time there wasn't really an easy way to run them on modern computers. Since then, a seemingly working solution popped up. Once I am done replaying most of Jeff's games again, I'll have to give this a try. I know the Avernum games so well, that it would be interesting to see it in its original form. Familiar yet alien feeling, if that makes sense.

 

The fix, or whatever it is called:

https://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/topic/25777-exile-fix-for-x64-windows/

[Grain of Salt]

13 hours ago, yakfak said:

games which are mostly text

 

Does this count

 

[Wahrnehmungskrieg]

Emily Short's Counterfeit Monkey is famous for a reason -- one of the few games where the game's being text is so integral to its puzzle design. More generally, genres wholly in text have made massive innovations in interactive dialogue that are too numerous to put here given their variety (ranging from being able to interrogate someone about all they know about the world; to the moment in a conversation when you make a certain dialogue choice impacting the conversation the same way it would in reality) -- and given almost no non-text games implement them these innovations will remain under the aegis of text-based games for ages to come.

 

(In fact, the common theme in modern games is to *simplify* their dialogue system, whether due to budgetary/time/console constraints, design mistake, or because it is simply better to excise half-baked cruft from the game -- when playing Fallout 1 the Tell Me About system seemed more like a way in which you could break the immersion by typing in a noun referenced in dialogue and getting a 'never heard of it' more than anything else. Dialogue is really an all-or-nothing deal.)

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

God, how many hours I put into Dwarf Fortress over the years, and I still got barely any idea what I'm doing. Of the old text adventures, Lurking Horror is the one I enjoyed most. And one day I promised myself to give some rouge variant a fair shake. I tried Nethack a while back and had a good time but I've also heard great things about DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup). But I'm unsure which one to pick, there's so many variations and they're all really demanding.

Now, leaving the realm of actual text games, as a kid, I spent a ton of time with TES Oblivion. Found the combat absolute ass to engage with so I turned the difficulty all the way down, and just aimlessly wandered around talking to people, going on sidequests. I really enjoyed the variety, there's some that take themselves very seriously, and some are like "a troll came in and stole 27 potatoes." Or the village with a kajit collecting rare cheeses, great stuff. Shivering Isles was super fascinating in particular.
Another of my all-time favourites is OpenTTD. Building a railway networks of just the right capacity to not waste resources and maximise utility. It always feels like optimal network is possible but is always just out of reach. Production capacity changes, vehicle reliability decreases with age, replacing an old fleet of busses for newer models can be such a pain if you didn't organise them well.
Also shout-out to the PalmOS Space Trader (and its android port). Another management game. Fairly simplistic but very enjoyable.

[Sonikkumania]

The original Wasteland.

The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog.

[yakfak]

i could gush about 1987 wasteland for hours. but primarily about its graphical presentation and its nonstandard, slightly simulationist systems and door game influence! i could gush about rogue and dwarf fortress for hours too but those are games where you create the narrative >:3 generally a lot of good name drops here

 

pentiment, eamon, counterfeit monkey are incredibly good suggestions which i'll look into! imo elder scrolls games are not text driven although I really love the writing in some of daggerfall's quests and books. feels like a continuation of rpg mag short story culture. also you would never learn the word "circinate" from oblivion or skyrim, something had already shifted by that point

[ALilGrayBoi]

Earthbound is like 40% sprites and 60% text. Whenever I show the game to anyone they get put off by the amount of words during fights.

[Milkeno]

On 5/18/2024 at 6:25 AM, yakfak said:

what's everyone's fave wordy game?

as mentioned in your post, mine is disco elysium. I've heard of planescape but never played it. I might give it ago after I'm done being so busy with other things.

Edited May 20 by Milkeno

[Aaron Blain]

On 5/18/2024 at 9:54 PM, Not Jabba said:

Interesting -- what are you running them on? I didn't think it was possible to play them anymore, since they're post-DOS but have been deprecated for so long.

Mostly in Win 3.1 in DosBox, but I also play it in Linux sometimes via WINE, where it works perfectly. I think it's more difficult in modern Windows, I see people on YouTube setting up VM's to play it.

 

Usually I prefer DosBox Staging, but when I'm using Windows 3.1 I switch to mainline DosBox 0.74 where I get better performance.

 

@Chopkinsca I got pretty far in Avernum 1 before switching, but I decided I like the bigger party, the food mechanic, and there's some other stuff like poison that is different. Exile has a bit more of that oldschool rpg brutality. It was a tough choice though because I absolutely love Avernum's interface improvements. I also just have a windows 3.x fixation.

Edited May 20 by Aaron Blain