Free Game Friday: Text-Based Games

05.10.2012
In honor of the we'll be featuring text-based games in this week's Free Game Friday roundup. Not all of this week's games come from the competition, but they all feature the written word as their main gameplay mechanic. We also didn't have space to feature all the great games in the competition, so here's in the competition if you need more interactive fiction. Text-based games are having a real renaissance right now, and the quality of interactive fiction has never been better.

In , a fantastic web-based text adventure for the Interactive Fiction contest, you're playing as the executor of a very unusual living will. The game's story has plenty of twists to keep you interested, but the real draw here may be the game's fantastic web design.

is an odd game because rather than entering text in this adventure, you're editing it. In a Renaissance-esque world where magic is real a revolution is brewing and you will decide its course, or, indeed, if it happens at all. It's effectively an epistolary game, where the player drafts letters from one of the game's characters to another. Depending on what you keep, cut, and revise, characters will react differently and will have different options available to them in their own letters.