Look, I think modern games with giant GO HERE arrows are dumb, but these games were an exercise in patience beyond necessary.

> No.

> I assume that means yes.

Yeah, that's that half-century-old state of the art in natural language processing working...

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.

There's also a lively community of people who make modern text adventures. These tend to be shorter and more well designed than many of the cruel games of the past. My all-time favourite is The Wise-Woman's Dog[2], a passion project with a very high quality bar.

Text adventures are great[3], and no, as of yet, they are not improved by LLMs.

[1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=ddagftras22bnz8h

[2]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs

[3]: https://entropicthoughts.com/the-greatness-of-text-adventure...

After spending way too long trying to press a button that doesn't do anything (press button, depress button, push button, button, press the button) or trying to talk to the speaker (say open, talk to speaker, talk at speaker, shout at speaker) I got frustrated and used claude to give me a walkthrough based on the source code.

Turns out the correct command was "hi"

here's the walkthrough: https://pastebin.com/LHnFRFjw