I have a confession to make. It’s an unexplainable fondness for text adventures. Never mind that I am nowhere near old enough to ever have played them when they were originally created. The experiences are unlike what we see today in major console games. You are forced to read and picture the scenarios in your mind.
My imagination runs wild with thoughts of what could be on the other side of a pitch dark room. I don’t even know what a Grue is, but I don’t want to find out. For some reason, the mere thought of what a Grue could be is much creepier to me than what I think any game engine could visually reproduce. It’s probably because the monster represents my own fears, rather than being some creation an art director thought looked cool.
Games like Dead Space and Resident Evil tend to rely on cheap, “Boo!” scares and gore in an attempt to scare me, and it usually doesn’t work. Text adventures’ complete silence (aside from the sound of your fingers working a keyboard) and empty black backgrounds accompanied only by the hum of your computer running somehow trigger the right sensory combination to put me at unease. My brain is no longer taking in and processing complex images and sounds trying to digest everything happening onscreen at once. It is simply focused on working through the adventure, which almost becomes something of an interactive book.
Every word or action I type requires a conscious decision on my part, “You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.” It doesn’t even sound nice. The cold, colorless text stares right back at me with a total lack of compassion. Rather than telling me to be careful, the game pointing out my recklessness and saying that I will likely die for it.
Zork makes GPA’s Flash Game of the Month, because it is one of the most highly regarded text adventure games of all time and a genuinely immersive experience. Every gamer with a computer should play at least one text adventure in their life. Even if just to experience what games were like long before texture mapping, bloom lighting and cell-shading became common catchphrases in gaming lexicon.
If you decide to wander the underground empire, don’t forget to bring a torch.
For all three original Zork adventures, go here: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/188334
The Lurking Horror. This is another great text adventure, but I can't actually call it my Flash Game of the Month, because it's Java. Still, this is one of the creepiest games of the genre: http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/lurking.html
