Archive for the ‘Video Games’ Category
I. A more perfect model to copy = less experiments
One of the things I’ve found jaunting through adventure games that’s … not exactly “disappointing”, but I can’t think of a better word … is that unlike CRPG history, there doesn’t seem to be that many early unique experiments. CRPGs sprang from pencil-and-paper where the computer equivalent was unclear, but most everyone in early adventure games seemed determined to copy Woods and Crowther.
There is one exception, and the game is so obscure it is quite possible I’m the first one who has played it since the 1980s.
SoftSide Magazine, October 1978.
Lance Micklus later on went to publish Dog Star Adventure in 1979, which appears to be the first published type-in text adventure. Treasure Hunt I’d call marginally an adventure, but in a form generally unrecognizable because rather than branching off Adventure, it has roots in Hunt the Wumpus.
II. A brief analysis of Wumpus
Hunt the Wumpus is a 1972 offering by Gregory Yob. Jimmy Maher has a two-part series on the full history here and here.
To get into Treasure Hunt — which has some of the same concepts in the gameplay — I thought a transcript of Wumpus with analysis might help. (I used the Z-code version.)
You are in room 5
Tunnels lead to 1 4 6
Shoot, Move or Quit (S-M-Q)? m
Where to? 6
I’m playing on the classic “squashed dodecahedron” from the original game.
It helps to have pre-mapped what room numbers correspond to what places on the map, although the dodecahedron structure makes it possible to “feel out” the geography off the cuff.
You are in room 6
Tunnels lead to 5 7 15
Shoot, Move or Quit (S-M-Q)? m
Where to? 15
I feel a draft!
You are in room 15
Tunnels lead to 6 14 16
Shoot, Move or Quit (S-M-Q)? m
Where to? 14
The “draft” indicates a room nearby has a bottomless pit. Since I came from room 6, the draft has to be either rooms 14 or 16.
A careful strategy would be to note that as a sort of logic puzzle condition, go back to 6, and save the knowledge for later. For instance, if a later room has no draft but room 14 adjacent, that means room 14 is safe.
In order to keep this transcript short, I foolishly plunge ahead to 14:
You are in room 14
Tunnels lead to 4 13 15
Shoot, Move or Quit (S-M-Q)? m
Where to? 13
Risky! But now I know the pit has to be in 16.
You are in room 13
Tunnels lead to 12 14 20
Shoot, Move or Quit (S-M-Q)? m
Where to? 29
Not possible – Where to? 20
I feel a draft!
I smell a wumpus!
You are in room 20
Tunnels lead to 13 16 19
Since 16 is the “draft” and we came from 13, 19 has to be the wumpus. Time to fire a shot:
Shoot, Move or Quit (S-M-Q)? s
No. of rooms (0-5)? 1
Room #? 19
19
Aha! You got the wumpus!
Hee hee hee – the wumpus’ll get you the next time!
There’s more to the game — the wumpus can wake up, you can fire the arrow through multiple rooms, and there are “bats” that can carry you around — but this is enough of an introduction because things are about to get much more complicated.
III. The Lumus Caves
Imagine Wumpus having treasures you have to find.
If you bought the game it came with a map, but I had to resort to making my own. I have no idea if it is something sensible like “a dodecahedron only larger” or “a moebius strip with an extra twist” so my version is a bit of a mess.
The full map I made — click to enlarge.
This definitely reflects one of the downfalls of non-compass mapping — it’s hard to get relative positioning right on a complicated map. Should this particular branch go right or left on the map? I didn’t know until I got farther and had to erase and redraw.
IV. How items work
YOU’RE IN CAVE 2 WHICH LEADS TO:
CAVE 1
CAVE 4
CAVE 5
THIS CAVE HAS GOLD COINS IN IT.
DO YOU WANT TO TAKE IT WITH YOU,
TYPE 1 FOR YES, OTHERWISE TYPE 2? 1
O.K. YOU’VE GOT GOLD COINS.
I should emphasize that even though the map is fixed, everything inside the rooms is randomly placed. In a different game the gold coins might be in room 63.
WHAT CAVE DO YOU WANT TO EXPLORE NEXT? 5
YOU’RE IN CAVE 5 WHICH LEADS TO:
CAVE 2
CAVE 10
CAVE 11
YOU’RE CARRYING:
GOLD COINS
THIS CAVE HAS A MAGIC WAND IN IT.
DO YOU WANT TO TAKE IT WITH YOU,
TYPE 1 FOR YES, OTHERWISE TYPE 2? 1
O.K. YOU’VE GOT A MAGIC WAND.
WHAT CAVE DO YOU WANT TO EXPLORE NEXT?
Important points to note:
a.) There’s at most one object to a room. When entering a room with a portable object, you can either take it with you or leave it be.
b.) Leaving it be is more interesting than you might think, because there’s a three-object inventory limit. If you go back to the entrance of the cave (room 0) you will deposit all your treasures, but won’t be able to take any back. This is important because …
c.) …some treasures double as puzzle solutions. For example, the gold coins can be used on a vending machine to get new lantern batteries (yes, Lance must have been familiar with Adventure) but since this is done automatically upon entering the appropriate room, it is better to note the gold coins on the map and get them when the lantern starts to run low.
V. Dangers
Just like Wumpus, there are obstacles that will kill you if you wander in the wrong room.
YOU’RE IN CAVE 20 WHICH LEADS TO:
CAVE 10
CAVE 40
CAVE 41
THERE IS A PIT NEARBY. wATCH YOUR STEP.
YOU’RE CARRYING:
A NECKLACE
WHAT CAVE DO YOU WANT TO EXPLORE NEXT? 41
SORRY, BUT I TRIED TO WARN YOU.
YOU FELL INTO A DEEP PIT AND KILLED YOURSELF !!!
READY
>_
There are also potential cave collapses, a pirate that can steal your treasure, and a dragon.
VI. A puzzle example
There’s a room that has a barking noise. There’s also an invisible man looking for his dog, and he needs you to type the room number his dog is in and he’ll give you a $1000 bill. However, if you type the room the barking was heard in, you will fail.
It turns out — using Wumpus logic — the barking means the dog is in an _adjacent_ room. So to solve the puzzle you need to find three rooms the barking is coming from and triangulate.
(The “B” means “barking”. The red means a room with a danger notice, so there’s some adjacent room that is deadly or at least has an enemy that needs to be defeated by the right item.)
In any case, I’m not quite up to a successful run with 20 treasures, so I’ll save what will hopefully be a winning post (and the true secret to slaying a dragon) for next time.
Unlike The Interdependent Ludic Institute of Tlön, I don’t feel I have authority to decide the best of anything. But I can still pick stuff I like:
8. Blank Slate (Norfunder)
I don’t know if you caught the wave of AI-games about a decade ago, which invariably presented a raw intelligence to interact with and sold it as a game. The best examples — I’m thinking Grognard 0 and Lean Sykon here — spawned entire subnets and mod-scenes. Not long after the developers seemed to hit a creative wall, just because as stories the games seemed empty.
I don’t know how perfect a departure Blank Slate is, but boy, was it memorable.
Look — first scene — rather than the usual text communication, you enter individual characters and random gibberish splays across the screen. Many players thought their game was broken and inquired about a refund. Those who persisted five minutes in started to get text of a sort, but it was clear whatever creature inhabited the neural-net spoke no known language.
A bit more deciphering leads to its first words, in English. The weirdness doesn’t end there, because whatever is inside Blank Slate — everyone picks their own name for it, mine was Buddy — is from some linked universe where things are ever so slightly off, and then — I think this has been spoiled sufficiently to mention — the relevation that in that universe, the AIs are formed by “processing” living beings, killing them in the process.
The whole process leads to a moral/philosophical debate where you find by training Buddy’s intelligence he is capable of going back and destroying those who made him in the first place.
That’s just the first act.
7. Board Hero (Skizz)
Now that RFID+ is embedded in most athletic equipment, there’s been a boom of alter-sports games, but Board Hero keeps it simple.
Remember Tony Hawk Gaiden? Think that, but real life. Using some astounding algorithmic prowess, Board Hero detects the actual tricks being used on a skateboard and chains them together for combo points. The five minute leaderboard is fierce, but I’m more partial to the half-hour run which limits chaining allowing for a more leisurely ride.
Supposedly there’s some haywire bug involving the McTwist, but I’m never been able to do one, and I’m sure there will be a patch for it soon.
6. Ultimate Mod (-unknown-)
Some people argue if this is a game at all.
A mysterious file called Ultmod began getting passed around IRC and the fuzznets. People — I don’t know, I guess people with really good backups of their files — installed it on a whim but reported nothing. Then one of those brave experimentalists was playing Dark Wraith III (that RPG from five years ago) and noticed an entirely new area attached to the main quest. There was a series of cryptic numbers and pictures.
Other reports streamed in, from all variety of genres. Most memorable were the ghosts: a ghost train in SimCity 3, a ghost child in Couture, a ghost … tentacle alien thing in Super Pony Magical Stars.
Apparently Ultmod was designed to modify very specific games and add cryptic clues which fit together in a sort of meta-puzzle. Nobody has solved it yet, but rumors — perhaps started by the developers — hint at a genuine buried treasure somewhere in Iceland.
5. Triple Paradox (Interaxis)
The rash of time travel games is almost as bad as the zombie-boom we went through 10 years ago, but this one is something special because while most of game time travel is in a stable pre-designed framework (with enough mucking resulting in PARADOX GAME OVER), this one works in what I’d call butterfly effect mechanics. You attempt to stop some sort of tragedy (different each game) by leaping back and forth within a 24 hour window. HOWEVER, even the smallest change to reality changes the entire plot, all the way down, such that while the tragedy is stopped some other tragedy happens, so to stop that one you have to go back again, and of course killing your past selves is a viable option, and somehow the procedural-plot machinery under the hood is complex enough to handle it.
4. Mineral Survivor (Hologram Games)
I’m always been a fan of even the corniest of the games in the disaster-survival genre, but I’m confident this one will win over even non-genre fans.
You’re a miner-savant who has the ability to “see” from the perspective of minerals in the ground. It’s not see as in visual exactly, or even sonic; there’s this overlapping blend which really screams YOU ARE SOMETHING ELSE as you’re experiencing it. In any case, as is usual there’s a collapse disaster and there’s a lot of scenes where you have to navigate collapsed geology with precision timing but it’s a lot more forgiving than other such games because of the aforementioned mineral-sensing mechanic.
What really leaps this game to the next level are the memory-strands. Diamonds in particular have the ability to sense ramifications of causality, that is, observe scenes from the past and the future at the same time that are happening on the surface world. In the case of this tragedy — grieving families, lost opportunities — you get a kaleidoscope that would be overwhelming were it not for the developers adding a “blur” mechanic which allows you to see stories in less detail, only the salient points.
3. Ancestor (Glow)
This is the first time I’ve got to choose the method of my character’s demise in the startup screen.
After that, you play an ancestor ghost who follows multiple generations trying to nurture your family name to grand goals. The interface isn’t anything novel — it’s pretty much ripped off of Times of Leviathan — but the stories that emerge really are breathtaking.
For instance: Tolas-a-Yokikan was the first in a line that led expeditions to the fishing isle of Takkyiku, where she had her first encounter — nudged by my ghost, of course — with The Divine Tree, who tells her how to save the world. But on arriving at the third jewel, the coatylaptus finally caught up to her, but fortunately her progenitor egg had already been planted in the soil. So went the next three generations, all getting a little farther on the Holy Mountain, but each time being distracted by the Three Evils. The last generation — infertile, so I knew the stakes were high — managed to reach the Rock of All Murmurs and to scrawl the three words to restore the balance.
I know! I know! Certainly not for everyone. Still, the music, the visuals, and the sheer harmony of it all made me feel like something deeply profound had happened.
2. Greek Philosopher Simulator (Torchal)
I felt like the same developer’s Roman Senator Simulator was a disappointment because it focused solely on mechanics; pretty soon I was running the story like a spreadsheet.
Greek Philosopher Simulator ups the ante by not only including the politics and wars swarming the country, but requiring actual philosophical debate. While it seems odd to predicate a long speech on how the world is actually composed of fire (scandalizing the Pythagoreans, later leading to an all-out war) the game mechanics cleverly straddle the line between rationality and rhetoric.
My crowning moment was creating a logical argument — using the now famous predicate interface — that convinced a group of Peripatetics that nothing at all existed, including the philosophers themselves (somehow sidestepping the existence of the argument itself through a clever use of litotes). My screenshots somehow found their way to the devs who commented they didn’t realize such a thing was even possible.
1. Dragon Hall (22925)
I have never been a fan of the no-genre movement (that is, labeling games by story genre rather than gameplay genre) simply because it seems like everything I’ve tried has been a weak action-adventure made weaker by the lack of commitment.
In any case “just like the holodeck on Star Trek!” never seems to have happened.
Dragon Hall … well, didn’t change my mind, but for two hours or so, wow. First off, it’s a third-person corporate thriller (already being different there) where the interaction you’d think is primarily social, but really there’s so many options at any moment it feels like … ok, obviously I’m having trouble here. Look, in an adventure game, I feel like I’m constantly looking for locks to fit keys; in a strategy game, I’m always optimizing; in an action game, I’m priming my reflexes. Here, all I was thinking what would my character do? and somehow I could do every option I thought of, and for a while I was inhabiting a world rather than playing a game.
Then the sheen wore off and I was finding the optimum thing to say to the Twile Sisters so they would turn against the Syndicate and give me the password. But it was great while it lasted.
Some games I’ve investigated for the All the Adventures project simply don’t seem to exist any more. I have cataloged them here for reference and especially if someone has a lead.
“Lost” doesn’t have to mean “lost forever”. For instance, the book Twisty Little Passages mentions Lugi as not even having a known author, but now the author has a web page.
Wander (1974, Peter Langston)
This is probably my “most wanted”, not only because comments on old newsgroups indicate wide distrubtion, but also the early date (earlier than Adventure!) and author (who earlier wrote Empire and later went on to fame at Lucasarts).
Wander uses “databases” as its worlds. These are reportedly by Peter:
castle: you explore a rural area and a castle searching for a beautiful damsel.
a3: you are the diplomat Retief (A sf character written by Keith Laumer) assigned to save earthmen on Aldebaran III
library: You explore a library after civilization has been destroyed.
tut: the player receives a tutorial in binary arithmetic.
The date of 1974 I have only seen mentioned in one place, the Inform Designer Manual.
Peter Langston’s ‘Wander’ (1974), a text-based world modelling program included in his PSL games distribution for Unix and incorporating rooms, states and portable objects, was at least a proto-adventure: perhaps many others existed, but failed to find a Don Woods to complete the task?
The PSL games distribution might still be active somewhere (it’s mentioned on a gopher at MIT), but not any account I have access to.
We now know that Crowther’s Adventure was already an adventure before Don Woods got to it. Could Wander be an adventure before Crowther? I won’t know unless I find I copy.
(ADD: Big update here.)
LORD (1981, Olli J. Paavola)
I’ve got dual interest in this one, not only from it being a mainframe game from Finland (it was written while Olli was at the Helsinki University of Technology) but also for being allegedly the first interactive fiction book adaptation.
However, by all reports I’ve seen this didn’t have wide distribution and is probably lost forever.
There’s a touch more detail at this newsgroup post from 1995:
With 550 separate locations, this game is huge by most standards. It does not really try to be completely consistent with Tolkien but mixes elements from many other sources. It is clear, however, that it is made with a great love for and knowledge of Tolkien’s books.
The same post mentions The Shire as a text adventure from possibly 1979, which puts the “earliest book adaptation” statement into question. (Orthanc is also mentioned but is an RPG.)
New Adventure (1979/1980, Mark Niemiec)
Martian Adventure (1979/1980, Brad Templeton and Kieran Carroll)
These were written at the University of Waterloo and it mentions here that “Archive tapes for this mainframe exist and it might prove possible to get at the source code for these games.”
FisK (1980, John Sobotik and Richard Beigel)
From here: “A really big, Zork-like game that started at an innocuous house like Zork and led to a big complex of rooms with treasures and bad guys.”
Underground (1978, Gary Kleppe)
According to David Cornelson, this was on the Milwaukee Public School’s mainframe in PDP Basic. While the original tape is lost it is possible the game made its way elsewhere.
Gary Kleppe himself later has added some details. The full list is in the comments, but here’s a few relevant parts that might help identify the game:
* At the entrance to the caves is a robot, but you have a laser pistol with which you can shoot it.
* There is a chess set locked down by a computer. If you initially play against the computer you will lose, but if you’ve found and read a certain book then you can beat it and it will give you a trophy (a treasure). After that you can blast the computer to take the set which is also a treasure.
* There’s a room where the description is written backwards, as is any message that gets displayed to you while you’re there. You also need to type commands backwards for the parser to understand them.
Also known as the Concours de Fictions Interactives Francophones 2015; voting is now open.
The three entries are here.
Since these things often pass by the English-speaking interactive fiction world without a trace, I decided to try translating the opening of each. I took liberties with grammar and accuracy is not guaranteed.
—
WARNING: This game contains scenes of blood.
It’s late.
The day was long and exhausting.
You’re content to be finally alone in your room to enjoy a well-deserved rest.
All is quiet about you: this promises to be a tranquil evening.
Or maybe not?
L’Envol (The Flight)
Une participation de Anonyme au concours francophone de la fiction interactive, édition 2014. (Anonymous participant)
In a soft bed
You are lying in bed under a quilt. Everything is quiet. The dim glow of your bedside lamp casts strange shadows while gently illuminating the room’s furniture and objects.
Your room’s window (facing your bed) is open.
You can also see a guitar, a bedside table, a wardrobe (which is closed), a chair, and a desk.
—
It is winter and night is beginning. Street lights that line the street reflect the windows. A few cars rumble past noisily on the pavement.
Couples walk by, dressed in thick overcoats and hats. A chestnut vendor reads a newspaper by the light of a fire.
The imposing Teatro delle Muse appears at the corner of a street, grabbing your thoughts. You enter through a small door set into a much larger one made of raw wood. The door closes behind you.
Comédie (Comedy)
Une fiction interactive par Edgar Havre
Entrance
The theater entrance is narrow with high ceilings. There are imposing crude wooden doors with a small opening for the staff.
To the north there are grand encircling windows of gold which suggest an enormous hall. Carpets are lined with purple velvet cords, and two corridors lead visitors to the top of some stairs.
You can see a man of powerful stature.
—
The curtains close. Just before they shut, she takes a fleeting look in his eyes and tries to smile at him.
It is in vain. Her lips do not move. Not just there; despite his efforts, his face also remains frozen.
The curtains are closed now. The wires that hold her up fall, followed by the wooden cross.
“At the next performance, I will,” she promises (as always).
Sourire de bois (Wooden Smile)
Un conte interactif par un soldat de plomb unijambiste (An interactive story by a one-legged tin soldier)
On stage
The show has just ended. She knows from experience she still has some time until the next performance.
She has time meanwhile to rest, and to collect decorative things that are damaged and might otherwise be discarded. Over time she has made a collection of memorabilia.
If you aren’t familiar with how Greenlight works, people vote for games to appear on the Steam service. (There are no downvotes, only upvotes.) Games with enough votes will eventually be able to appear on the service for sale.
Three games by IF luminaries have just appeared. If you care about the success of interactive fiction, please vote!
Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter (Mike Gentry and David Cornelson)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=371862595
The Shadow in the Cathedral (Ian Finley and Jon Ingold)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=371866777
Hadean Lands (Andrew Plotkin)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=380279925
Please feel free to let me know about anything that should be added.
Hot off their success of 80 Days inkle is gearing up to finish their third Sorcery! game.
This one is big, complicated and different, and we think will up the ante on the kind of gameplay a text-driven choice-based game can achieve.
Using the same engine as Blood & Laurels, the folks at Versu are set to release Bramble House:
Bramble House is the only home that fifteen-year-old Penny has ever known. Penny is bound in service to the witch Stregma, forced to deal with everything from mundane dishwashing to evicting monstrous guests.
This one is enigmatic, but Brianna Wu has a new project intending to
…create an entirely new category of interactive novel you can play on your tablet or phone. It will be visual, it will interactive, and it will allow the reader to decide where the story goes.
I am unclear what’s going to be new here, but–
Our goal is to empower everyone out there to tell their own stories, and unleash a new wave of games from people of colour, members of the GLBT community, people with disabilities. Our long-term goal is to replace Twine.
Sunless Sea promises a release in February.
Explore a vast underground ocean in your customised steamship! A PC & Mac game in glorious 2D, Sunless Sea is a game of exploration, survival and loneliness set in the award-winning Victorian Gothic universe of Fallen London. Take to the helm and set sail for the unknown. Light and darkness are your greatest allies, but a stout set of cannon and a gunnery officer with a grudge will come in useful too.
Sol Invictus will be out for mobile devices Janurary 8th.
For three years the soldiers of the Black Lance Legion have watched as the Invaders turned their solar system into a hellish, desolate wasteland. Humanity’s most advanced fighting force lurked in the shadows, doing little while their species was forced to choose between eternal enslavement… or extinction.
Tin Man Games has created many gamebooks with an impressive engine for computers and mobile devices, and in 2015 intends to release
* Caverns of the Snow Witch, a conversion of the Fighting Fantasy book by Ian Livingstone
* Bloodbones, also originally a Fighting Fantasy book but by Jonathan Green
* To Be or Not to Be by Ryan North, a CYOA by the author of Dinosaur Comics
* The Gatekeeper’s Oath and Lords of Nurroth, both original gamebooks (the first more about spells and puzzles, the second more of a traditional combat outing)
Choice of Games (and their associated label, Hosted Games) has quite a few new works scheduled for 2015:
The Hero of Kendrickstone, by Paul Wang, author of Mecha Ace. You are a young adventurer, seeking fame, glory, and a square meal.
The Lost Heir. The start of a trilogy by @Lucid, author of Life of a Wizard and Life of a Mobster.
Choice of the Petal Throne. Takes place in the world of Tékumel.
Shadow Horror. The latest from Allen Gies.
Killing Time: You are a high-priced assassin, traveling the world and killing people in far away places.
Volunteer Firefighter.
Demon Lord of the Labyrinth. You are a demon lord, recently escaped to the Material Plane, trying to rehabilitate an old labyrinth.
A Wise Use of Time, by Jim Dattilo, author of Zombie Exodus. An insurance executive, you awake one morning to find yourself possessed of the ability to command the flow of time. How did this happen, and what are you going to do with your new-found powers?
MetaHuman, Inc., by Paul Gresty, author of The ORPHEUS Ruse. You’re a division head that suddenly becomes CEO of a huge multinational corporation that’s busy developing sorcery/cutting edge technology; you have to deal with typical corporate shenanigans (employee embezzlement, workplace romances gone sour) while trying to fend off the sinister “majority shareholders” and figure out what happened to the previous CEO.
Champion of the Gods, by Jonathan Valuckas, author of the Fleet. You are a demigod, striving to make your way in a sword-and-sandal world.
Hollywood Visionary, by Aaron Reed. You are a movie-maker in 1950s Hollywood, trying to craft your first feature.
Versus, a new series by Zachary Sergi. A sci-fi yarn where you are on a prison planet, fighting to return home.
Heroes Rise: The Hero Project: Redemption Season. A new game in the Heroes Rise world, with a new main character, where the player is a contestant in season two of The Hero Project.
Ratings War. You are a journalist in a cyberpunk future.
Reflections is a parser-based game that will be out in 2015. It is
a story about gypsies, magic, death, life, and the Power of the Blood.
Paul O’Brian and Christopher Huang’s work on Empath’s Gift is currently in limbo but should also hopefully see the light of day in 2015. It is about
a summer college campus where a group of gifted students gather.
Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe project an April release date for Ice-Bound: A Novel of Reconfiguration, played via either iPad or a computer with a web camera.
Half of the Ice-Bound experience is an 80-page full color art book: the Ice-Bound Compendium. Filled with Holmquist’s personal files, unfinished chapters and alternate drafts, collages of research and strange, distorted transmissions, the book mingles Holmquist’s story with those of his creations. It isn’t clear where these images came from, but one thing is certain: KRIS desperately wants to see it.
Interaction involves showing pages of the book to the artificial intelligence in the game.
DestinyQuest is a web-based gamebook, based on the earlier paper-based version by Michael Ward. Act I is already available.
Robb Sherwin’s Cyberganked mashes together The Bard’s Tale, text adventures, and a CGA aesthetic.
Jim Aikin has been hard at work on The Only Possible Prom Dress, a sequel to Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina from 1999. Both are old school text adventures:
Same location, but greatly elaborated. Similar plot premise. Lots of new characters. A few of the puzzles are related to those in the first game, but most are completely new.
Sword Daughter, an adaptation of a gamebook from the 1980s, is currently in beta.
All your life, you dream of adventure: knights, dragons, magic rings, chests of gold, and all the danger and glory that awaits a professional swordswoman. But every dream has a cost. You are on your way across the desert wastes to compete in the Warrior Games when your caravan is attacked. Orcs and bandits murder your father, capture your companions, and leave you for dead.
Now alone in the world, will you choose to seek glory, vengeance, treasure… or love?
Renga in Blue 