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

https://haunt.madebywindmill.com

by jscalo • 3 months ago

84 25 3 months ago

haunt.madebywindmill.com

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.

vunderba• 3 months ago

The wikipedia page on this game is wild too - from the developer themselves: "It violated most, if not all, of the design guidelines for good interactive fiction in that you could get killed much too easily, the puzzles were way too obscure (many based on Saturday morning cartoons from my youth), but it had a certain charm".

Taking cryptic to an entirely new level.

All those saturday mornings I wasted as a kid watching cartoons like Animaniacs, DuckTales, and Thundercats aren’t even going to help me here. The game was written in 1979, so I’m guessing the puzzles are more closely based on Hanna-Barbera series like Magilla Gorilla, Jonny Quest, and The Herculoids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAUNT

pinchydev2• 3 months ago

walk around the wall and find the "speaker". Say hi. Never-mind the button doesn't do anything.

oersted2• 3 months ago

It should have taken you to the mansion. Yes I agree that the game is unnecessarily obtuse, but the vibe-coded interpreter itself is rather buggy too. I've had several crashes, resets, and state corruptions.

Sometimes it's a bit hard to distinguish between a bug and archaic design :)

throwanem3• 3 months ago

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...

kqr3• 3 months ago

It's not NLP and it never was. The parser accepts a language with a specific syntax that just happens to vaguely look like English.

Some practise is required to become fluent in that language. But it's worth it, because it unlocks many amazing text adventures!

throwanem3• 3 months ago

Thank you for explaining the joke.

You're quite abjectly wrong, though. Text adventures were heavily advertised, in their illustrious and very brief moment of sunshine, as 'accepting English input' (cf. Maher, The Digital Antiquarian), which by definition constitutes NLP. They were just extremely bad at it, hence their accompaniment by a constant stream of excuses like the one you just made. (You must have had to dust it off first! That one is older than me.)

SquibblesRedux• 3 months ago

And don't forget:

"hi" and "hello" are not the same.

kqr3• 3 months ago

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...

JoshTriplett• 3 months ago

My favorite of all time is "Ad Verbum".

With the cantankerous Wizard of Wordplay evicted from his mansion, the worthless plot can now be redeveloped. The city regulations declare, however, that the rip-down job can't proceed until all the items within have been removed.

It's full of delightful wordplay and puzzles that play with the text-adventure medium, constraining what words you can use. Highly recommended.

nathell2• 3 months ago

Mine is ‘Anchorhead’ (1998), by Michael Gentry. I think it’s actually my favourite game of all time, of all genres.

I’ve played the old, text-only, Z-code version back in high school, around 1999, and the experience was so vivid and immersive that to this day I can draw a map of Anchorhead from memory and recite the lineage of the Verlac family. I think it’s still my favourite game of all time (although I spent much more time on some others).

These days, an illustrated version can be bought on Steam for something like $10. Highly recommended!

kleiba22• 3 months ago

There was a time where I spent most evenings playing "A Mind Forever Voyaging" by Steve Meretzky [1], complete with trying to draw maps and jot down notes and clues, while listening to a Dave Brubeck album on repeat. The fact that I still remember that more than a decade later is a testament to how good that experience was.

[1] https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4h62dvooeg9ajtfa

waisbrot• 3 months ago

"Spider and Web" is quite short, pretty easy, mostly gives good hints. A great starter-game, I think. I also love Zarf's writing.

https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/

ZeroGravitas• 3 months ago

Counterfeit Monkey similarly fuses classic text adventure mechanics with a wordplay mechanic where you can transform objects by adding and removing letters to solve puzzles.

butz• 3 months ago

Not sure if it qualifies as a real "text adventure", but I recently played "Type Help" (https://william-rous.itch.io/type-help) and was unexpectedly amazed, how such simple interface, with very few text commands, can lead player through very intriguing story. Will be looking into more IF games now.

nosrepa• 3 months ago

A great modern text adventure is roadwarden. You can't play it in a terminal as it does have a GUI and images for the set pieces, but it's still a text adventure at heart.

pinchydev2• 3 months ago

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

toabi• 3 months ago

Derp. Thanks. I was exactly stuck at the freaking button right now and not finding any help online. Yet :D

oersted2• 3 months ago

How was this built? It's gorgeous, I've been wanting to have a cool-retro-term in the browser for a long while.

If this was built bespoke for this game, fair play, but I would love to have this library if it's a library.

EDIT: I found the repo https://github.com/jscalo/haunt

js/terminal.js implements the I/O layer: a typewriter-speed character queue drained via requestAnimationFrame, an inline editable prompt with command history, and two promise-based input methods (readToken for OPS5 accept, readLine for acceptline).
css/crt.css creates the retro look: a bezel frame with power LED, a perspective-transformed screen, repeating scanlines, a slow horizontal band, flicker animation, and triple-layer phosphor text glow. Three themes are available — green P1 (default), amber P3, and white — switchable from the settings menu.

nathell2• 3 months ago

Ligatures in the retro terminal kill the illusion.

tenthirtyam• 3 months ago

Fund, but had my CPU maxing out (on firefox).

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

Related Stories