Text adventure games
A text adventure is a type of adventure which exclusively or primarily communicates the game events through text. Text adventures generally don’t come with any graphical illustrations or animations, but if they do, those illustrations tend to be rather simplistic. They differ from visual novels in that visual novels are much more heavy on the illustration part.
List of Text adventure games[edit]
This is a list of free/libre text adventure games:
| Game | Screenshot | Last Release | Genres | Description | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adventure | 
|
2017-05-15 | Text adventure |
Adventure, aka Colossal Cave Adventure or just Colossal Caves[2], is a text-based adventure game written by William Crowther and Don Woods. The game is licensed under the 2-Clause BSD License. It did not originally include any license information except a rights reservation by Don Woods as it predates modern conventions on software licensing, however in 2017 Eric S. Raymond received permission from Woods that the game may be released under that license.[1] This applies to version 2.5, which was first released in 1995.[3] For Raymond's port to modern C, see Open Adventure. Adventure was the very first[4][5][6] interactive fiction game. In fact adventure games were named after it.[7] A version was included with The UNIX Book of Games by Janice Winsor in 1996. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Zork | 
|
1982 | Text adventure |
Zork, aka Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master, is a text-based adventure game initially written by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling and later published commercially by Infocom for PCs. The game was initially written for PDP-10 mainframe computer in MDL and later, after it proved to be popular, the game was expanded and released commercially. For commercial release the game was rewritten in the Zork Implementation Language (ZIL) which compiled into instructions for Z-machine. This made it possible to port the game to new platforms simply by porting the Z-machine interpreter itself, making the game logic platform independent. Due to its size, the commercial release necessitated splitting the game into three parts. The source code of the original MIT version was published as a part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tapes of Tech Square collection in 2020 and released under the MIT No Attribution license in 2022[10]. The source code of the commercial version was released under an MIT license in 2025[9]. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Open Adventure | 
|
2026-03-22 | Text adventure, Interactive fiction |
Open Adventure is a port of Adventure 2.5 to modern C. It is being developed by Eric S. Raymond after Don Woods gave permission for the original to be released under a BSD license.[12] It is meant to maintain the intended gameplay of the original 2.5 (also known as 430-point Adventure) as closely as possible while fixing bugs and modernizing source code, as well as supporting more recent conventions in interactive fiction command syntax.[13] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The night wolves attacked the mountain village of Venzone | 
|
2023-03-14 | Text adventure |
The night wolves attacked the mountain village of Venzone is a survival horror choose-your-own-adventure game created for the August 2021 LibreJam. The player takes up the story of three citizens, a Priest, Child and Farmer, from the village of Venzone, Italy in the year 1609 as it is besieged by supernatural wolves. Two paths for each scenario are given and these determine the fate of one or more of the protagonists. A selection of audio files set the mood. It is available to play through a web browser, or through a native build. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Look Around the Corner | 
|
2014-06-12 | Text adventure, Interactive fiction |
Look Around the Corner is a short and simple escape room puzzle game. In order to play it you will need a TADS interpreter such as QTads or alternatively you can play online by using the web interface at tads.org[15]. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dunnet | no image | 1992-07-25 | Text adventure |
Dunnet is a text adventure game included in Emacs. In Dunnet, we play a people (Robert Toukmond?) who is in a Unix system. We play using basic commands (go, look, take, put...) but the particularity of the game is we can access to computers and change the world. For example, on the computer pokey, a file "paper.o.Z" is in our home directory. The particularity of .o, in the game, is to represents items. When we uncompress the file, a paper appears in our inventory. When we use FTP for transfer our items to the gamma server, the files disappears and our items too. When we rlogin to gamma, we're teleported to a rooms, with our items. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Storm Over London | 
|
2015-04-02 | Interactive fiction, Text adventure |
Storm Over London is an interactive fiction game written in Hugo. While Hugo compilers and interpreters are non-free[17], the game itself is under an MIT license.[16] This page is a stub. Please help LibreGameWiki by expanding it.
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- ↑ 1.0 1.1 http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-adventure/history.html
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20120516043901/http://archive.gamespy.com/articles/march02/top30/2419/index.shtm
- ↑ http://rickadams.org/adventure/e_downloads.html
- ↑ http://rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html
- ↑ https://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/canon/Adventure.htm
- ↑ https://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Adventure
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20120510201955/http://www.wurb.com/if/game/1
- ↑ https://github.com/MITDDC/zork/blob/master/LICENSE.md
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/20/preserving-code-that-shaped-generations-zork-i-ii-and-iii-go-open-source
- ↑ https://github.com/MITDDC/zork/commit/fab25e9a2ac7f143845d43acecc326c1683ed71f
- ↑ https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure/-/blob/master/COPYING
- ↑ http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-adventure/history.html
- ↑ https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure/-/blob/master/notes.adoc
- ↑ COPYING and README.md in the download.
- ↑ https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=x4vpxyzi4e07jr7p
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 https://github.com/juhana/storm/blob/master/LICENSE
- ↑ Distributed as source, but according to he.c in the source code, distribution of modified source is prohibited.