Anchorhead

I love Lovecraft, I adore text adventures, I venerate Anchorhead.

I love the atmosphere it portrays, and plays out like a D&D session, but you stand alone. Excellent writing!

[I]>reach fire escape What do you want to reach the metal ladder around? >climb ladder You still can't quite reach the bottom rung; it's just a few inches above your outstretched fingertips. >use umbrella ladder That's not a verb I recognize. >reach umbrella ladder I didn't understand that sentence. >get fire escspe You can't see any such thing. >use umbrella to reach for rung That's not a verb I recognize. >pull ladder with umbrella (first closing the umbrella) You hook the handle of your umbrella around the bottom rung and put your whole weight on it. With a sudden, ratcheting crash that nearly knocks you off the garbage can, the ladder slides down and locks into place.[/i]

a classic

Looks great on Steam and is one of the greatest text adventures ever made.

I liked the story, but the bugs and incongruities had me consulting a walkthrough, and good adventures shouldn't need walkthroughs to solve. WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW!!! - The Storm Tunnel lets you go south to the Flooded Passage before the gate is cracked or the manhole is opened, causing the player to be trapped - Side note: Boy, that is sure a *lot* of steps you need to perform just to crack that grate open... - Desk drawer: when you have the key, 'unlock drawer' and 'open drawer' doesn't work because it thinks you're talking about the key and not the drawer - Crystal - it needs a train to crack it, yet it isn't hard enough to break the padlock?!?!? - You can't go to sleep on the 2nd day if you locked the door because Michael can't get in. But if you lock the cellar, he can still get in there on the third day. So, does he have keys or not? - Hands versus eyes in the safe password. Why would someone think to multiply the hands number by 5 but not multiply the eyes number by 2? - The needle. This isn't visible when looking in the tear; only the canvas square is visible. Both should be visible at once, especially given how crucial the needle is. - Broom - it should be usable as an oar, at least for a little while. - Wharf: completely unintuitive that you can't find your way back to a busy pier (with many other boats) unless you hang a lamp on a hook. Perhaps that should be called a lamppost in the description? - Ending: why worry about Croseus taking over your husband again, when he was sent to the void?

The best parser interactive fiction.

One of the best text adventures ever made. Intense,thrilling story,challenging puzzles,amazing atmosphere. some tips: 1.make a map while playing. 2.save often in different files. 3.write notes.

(Review x-posted to my Wordpress blog, Gunlord500) This game is REALLY good! I don't wanna spoil too much, but suffice it to say that the story is written as a Lovecraftian tale involving cosmic monstrosities the sight of whom drives people mad, and though it's not explicitly part of the Cthulhu mythos (the monsters are all original from Gentry), it matches Lovecraft's style perfectly. I think I saw a couple of spelling errors here and there, but other than that, the slow burn of horror is absolutely fantastic! This is definitely a must-play for folks with the patience for old-school text adventure games. Note my mention of 'patience.' This isn't a visual novel, really--despite its improvements on the 1998 version, the Steam version of Anchorhead is still very much a text adventure game in the vein of Zork, and those have a VERY long pedigree, since the 70s, really. In those games, you can't actually navigate around a visual map of any sort, with a controller or mouse, and you can't even click on anything with a mouse either! It's all done entirely through text. The game will give you a description--say "you're in a room, and there are doors to the north and west," and you have to manually type "GO NORTH" to get to the next scene. Again, very old school, but even if you're a fast typer it can get a little tiresome, especially since some of the commands can be a *little* obscure. For instance--and this is right at the beginning of the game, no spoilers--at the start of the game you need to use your umbrella to pull a nearby ladder down. Now, in most cases you'd think typing "use umbrella on ladder" would work, but no, it's very specifically "pull ladder with umbrella." That's no big deal, but also, some of the later puzzles are REALLY difficult without the use of a walkthrough or hint pamphlet, but those can be found easily enough. Finally, there are a couple of bugs, I think, like you can get stuck in one area (the sewers) if you go there too early--again, I dont wanna spoil anything, but I also want folks to be aware so they don't have to restart the game. So yeah, I DEFINITELY recommend this game, with the above caveats. Check it out!

I haven't played a text game in ages, but heard about this and wanted to give it a go. It's pretty good. Story is good, puzzels are challenging but not impossible, etc..