Haunt, the 70s text adventure game, is now playable on a website

SV_BubbleTime

I got on to a bus then nothing happened/worked. Look, I think modern games with giant GO HERE arrows are dumb, but these games were an exercise in patience beyond necessary.

throwanem

> Have you played before? > No. > I assume that means yes. Yeah, that's that half-century-old state of the art in natural language processing working...

joongix

I work in game dev (animation side) and what strikes me about these old text adventures is how much the parser's limitations shaped the design philosophy. When you can't express everything, you have to make the world's constraints feel intentional rather than arbitrary. Modern games sometimes have the opposite problem — the engine can do anything, so the world feels boundless and yet strangely hollow. There's something to learn from how Haunt had to be ruthlessly economical.

kqr

Many, many historic text adventures are available in the browser, thanks to the Parchment interpreter. You can find them on the IFDB, and click the link to play online. One of my favourites among the classics are Plundered Hearts[1]. There's also a lively community of people who make modern text adventures. These tend to be shorter and more well designed than many of the cruel games of the past. My all-time favourite is The Wise-Woman's Dog[2], a passion project with a very high quality bar. Text adventures are great[3], and no, as of yet, they are not improved by LLMs. Too inconsistent, too much hallucination. They can't even play text adventures well. [1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=ddagftras22bnz8h [2]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs [3]: https://entropicthoughts.com/the-greatness-of-text-adventure...

pinchydev

Spoilers in link. After spending way too long trying to press a button that doesn't do anything (press button, depress button, push button, button, press the button) or trying to talk to the speaker (say open, talk to speaker, talk at speaker, shout at speaker) I got frustrated and used claude to give me a walkthrough based on the source code. Turns out the correct command was "hi" here's the walkthrough: https://pastebin.com/LHnFRFjw