Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.
Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. Inform can generate programs designed for the Z-code or Glulx virtual machines. Versions 1 through 5 were released between 1993 and 1996. Around 1996, Nelson rewrote Inform from first principles to create version 6 . Over the following decade, version 6 became reasonably stable and a popular language for writing interactive fiction. In 2006, Nelson released Inform 7, a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor.
Galatea is an interactive fiction video game by Emily Short featuring a modern rendition of the Greek myth of Galatea, the sculpture of a woman which gained life. It took "Best of Show" in the 2000 IF Art Show and won a XYZZY Award for Best Non-Player Character. The game displays an unusual rich approach to non-player character dialogue and diverts from the typical puzzle-solving in interactive fiction: the whole gameplay is based on the interaction with a single character in a single room.
The Fool's Errand is a 1987 computer game by Cliff Johnson. It is a meta-puzzle game with storytelling, visual puzzles and a cryptic treasure map. It is the tale of a wandering Fool who seeks his fortune in the Land of Tarot and braves the enchantments of the High Priestess.
Andrew Plotkin, also known as Zarf, is a central figure in the modern interactive fiction (IF) community. Having both written a number of award-winning games and developed a range of new file formats, interpreters, and other utilities for the design, production, and running of IF games, Plotkin is widely recognised for both his creative and his technical contributions to the homebrew IF scene.
System's Twilight: An Abstract Fairy Tale is a graphical interactive fiction computer game created by Andrew Plotkin and released in 1994.
In Cold Blood is an adventure game developed by Revolution Software for the PlayStation and Microsoft Windows in 2000 in Europe and in 2001 in North America. The player assumes the role of John Cord—an MI6 agent who is captured while on assignment and tries to figure out who betrayed him through a series of flashbacks.
The Dreamhold is an interactive fiction game by Andrew Plotkin released in 2004. Its primary purpose is to be a tutorial to IF, and because of that the "core" of the game is relatively easy to finish.
Rama is a first-person adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line in 1996. The game is based on Arthur C. Clarke's books Rendezvous with Rama (1973) and Rama II (1989) and supports both MS-DOS and Windows. In 1998, a PlayStation version was released in Japan.
Spider-Man is a 2002 action-adventure video game based on the Marvel Comics character Spider-Man and the 2002 film of the same name. Developed by Treyarch and published by Activision, it was released in 2002 for the Game Boy Advance, GameCube, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, and Xbox. The game expands on the film's plot, featuring scenes and villains not present in the film. Tobey Maguire and Willem Dafoe reprised their roles from the movie, as Spider-Man and the Green Goblin, respectively, while Bruce Campbell, who played a wrestling ring announcer in the film, narrates the game's tutorial and bonus levels.
Jon Ingold is a British author of interactive fiction and co-founder of inkle, where he co-directed 80 Days. His interactive fiction has frequently been nominated for XYZZY Awards and has won on multiple occasions, including Best Game, Best Story and Best Setting awards for All Roads in 2001. Ingold's works are notable for their attention to the levels of knowledge that the player and player character have of the in-game situation, with the effect often depending on a player who understands more than the character or vice versa. Ingold has also written a number of plays, short stories and novels.
Hunter, in Darkness is a 1999 interactive fiction game by Andrew Plotkin, written in Inform. It won the "Best Individual Puzzle" and "Best Setting" categories in the 1999 XYZZY Awards, and came in eighth overall in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition.
Earth and Sky is an interactive fiction trilogy written and produced by American author Paul O'Brian about the adventures of a brother and sister who gain superpowers while searching for their lost parents. Games in the series have won awards in the annual Interactive Fiction Competition and received an XYZZY Award.
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords is a game developed by Australian company Infinite Interactive and published by D3 Publisher. The game combines role-playing with tile-matching elements. Taking place in a high fantasy setting, the player moves his or her character around the game's world and encounters monsters and other enemies to fight so as to gain experience and acquire treasure as in a typical role-playing game. Combat takes place on a board similar to Bejeweled, and by making matches of colored gems, the combatants can cause damage to their opponents, cast spells, or perform other abilities that affect the flow of the game.
Limbo is a puzzle-platform video game developed by independent studio Playdead. The game was released in July 2010 on Xbox Live Arcade, and has since been ported to several other systems, including the PlayStation 3, Linux and Microsoft Windows. Limbo is a 2D side-scroller, incorporating a physics system that governs environmental objects and the player character. The player guides an unnamed boy through dangerous environments and traps as he searches for his sister. The developer built the game's puzzles expecting the player to fail before finding the correct solution. Playdead called the style of play "trial and death", and used gruesome imagery for the boy's deaths to steer the player from unworkable solutions.
An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. Colossal Cave Adventure is identified as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Myst.
Marvel Puzzle Quest is a video game released by D3 Publisher and Marvel Entertainment on October 3, 2013, and developed by Demiurge Studios. The fourth installment in the Puzzle Quest series, it is a free-to-play, match-three Bejeweled-style puzzle battle game set in the Marvel universe, featuring 234 playable, unlockable, recruitable Marvel characters.
Jewels of the Oracle is a 1995 adventure game developed by ELOI Productions and published by Discis Knowledge Research Inc. It was released on Macintosh, PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Windows. A sequel developed by Bardworks and published by Hoffman and Associates was released in 1998 entitled Jewels II: The Ultimate Challenge.
Puzzle Quest is a series of Match 3 and role-playing video game hybrids published by Infinity Plus Two. It was first begun in 2007 with the release of Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, a spin-off of the Warlords series of turn-based strategy games, and since expanded to other licensed content models. Its latest game, Puzzle Quest: The Legend Returns, was released in 2019.
