IF Arcade

Recommendations by Ivanr

Graham Nelson once said that a text adventure is a "novel at war with a crossword puzzle". In some works, the novel wins, and in some the crossword wins. This is a list of games where both of them are trounced by the NES.

In other words, these are games that I enjoyed that are decidedly games, rather than stories, but which don't mainly rely on "puzzles" in the standard IF sense. These games are typically much shorter, and more replayable, than a standard puzzle-y work like "Curses!". (Pure ascii abuse, like a port of space invaders, is also not quite what I mean)

(This is incomplete, obviously. I'll probably keep expanding this, but I wanted to keep these in one place.)

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1. Textfire Golf
by Adam Cadre
(2001)
Average member rating: (23 ratings)

Ivanr says:

A classic. The mechanics here make impressive use of real-time text to simulate the kind of golf simulator you would find in an arcade, but Cadre also gives the game charms all its own.

2. Captain Verdeterre's Plunder
by Ryan Veeder
(2013)
Average member rating: (50 ratings)

Ivanr says:

A highly replayable optimization game, where you run from room to room in a ship that slowly fills with water, trying to rescue the most valuable objects before they're swallowed up. At the end you get a score, describing the process of selling off the rescued objects and how much you got from them. Surprisingly deep, and especially well-suited to tooling around with in odd hours.

3. Lock & Key
by Adam Cadre
(2002)
Average member rating: (74 ratings)

Ivanr says:

Another highly-replayable game. You are installing traps to stop an imprisoned adventurer - a reverse cave-crawl, sort of. Watch as your best-layed plans, well, you know. Funny and fun.

4. The Art of Fugue
by Victor Gijsbers, Jimmy Maher, Dorte Lassen, and Johan
(2010)
Average member rating: (6 ratings)

Ivanr says:

You control four characters, moving at a chronological offset from each other. A puzzle game, but not in a particularly standard sense. Has kind of an arcade-y feel.

5. Kerkerkruip
by Victor Gijsbers
(2011)
Average member rating: (68 ratings)

Ivanr says:

I haven't really played much of this one, but it's hard to imagine leaving it off of a list like this. A fully implemented roguelike.

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