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.

> 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...

I work in game dev (animation side) and what strikes me about these old text adventures is how much the parser's limitations shaped the design philosophy. When you can't express everything, you have to make the world's constraints feel intentional rather than arbitrary.

Modern games sometimes have the opposite problem — the engine can do anything, so the world feels boundless and yet strangely hollow. There's something to learn from how Haunt had to be ruthlessly economical.