Comment by noelwelsh

> I recommend not starting with the old classics because they were in part made to be frustrating and difficult and played over a long time. Instead, look at modern text adventures that follow more recent advances in game design.

A timely comment for me. I tried the linked Planetfall game, and gave up after a little bit of wandering around and nothing happening. Apparently I was supposed to just putter about for longer until the game really started with the emergency event, which got me thinking about game design in these early games.

Some of these games really liked to give you a combinatorial search problem dressed up as a game. In Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the first puzzles is to get a bird into a cage, so you can use the bird to scare away a snake. The bird is scared of a rod you find earlier, so you have to drop the rod in a different room before you get the bird (and then go back and get the rod). Now none of this makes any sense. The expectation is that you have nothing better to do then just try different combinations until you find what works. In a way it's asking you to play a meta-game, rather than the game.

This reminds me of Sword of the Samurai [1], a Fighting Fantasy book I had the misfortune to read when I was a lot younger. It was fiendishly difficult if you actually played by the rules. Partly this is because the combat was really hard (see the linked review) but also because there were just so many choices where the book gives no hints what is a good choice to make. For example, right at the end there is fight between you and your buddies versus four baddies. Each one of your buddies can take out a specific baddy, but there is no indication which is which. So the book is really designed with the expectation that you're constantly going to cheat. This meta-game of bookmarking each decision point and exploring the decision tree before committing is the actual game that the book is written for, and it has a lot of content to explore if you realise this is the game you should play.

So yeah, game design has come a long way :-)

[1]: https://fightingfantasy.net/articles/the-parallax-walkthroug...