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Text Adventures
Interactive fiction, MUDs and choose-your-path stories. Some are forty years old and still better written than most things released this year.
17 sites
Starts as one button beside a dying fire and quietly becomes something much larger. Best played without reading anything about it first.
- 1 hr+
Enormous free MUD with hundreds of areas and a browser client, so you can be killed by a wandering mob without installing anything.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Text MUD running continuously since 1997, with a player-run economy, real politics and a genuinely intimidating combat system.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Free MUD with multiclassing, a web client and a player base that has been levelling the same characters since the nineties.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Long branching novels where your stats matter and the prose does not embarrass itself; a good number play free in the browser.
- 1 hr+
Community-written choose-your-path stories with ratings, which is the only thing keeping the good ones above the fan fiction.
- 10 min
Ankh-Morpork rendered as a text world, with guilds, working shops and an obsessive attention to what Pratchett actually wrote.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
London has been dragged underground by bats, and the writing is far better than that sentence suggests. Free, endless, faintly sinister.
- 1 hr+
Catalogue, reviews and play links for four decades of interactive fiction, maintained by people who take the form extremely seriously.
- 10 min
The annual competition that decides what interactive fiction is this year, with every entry free to play in the browser.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Where interactive fiction authors argue about parser design, post works in progress and review each other with alarming thoroughness.
- 10 min
Point it at any classic story file and it runs in the tab, which makes the whole Infocom era playable without installing an interpreter.
- 10 min
- Desktop
You are a colony ship AI choosing which disasters to absorb, and every run ends with a summary of how badly humanity settled.
- 10 min
Thousands of browser-playable parser and choice games, plus Quest, the authoring tool most of them were written in.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Every interactive fiction file anyone thought worth keeping since 1992, in a directory listing that has never once been redesigned.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
The listing that has catalogued live text MUDs since 1994, and still tells you which of them have people logged in tonight.
- 10 min
- Desktop
The tool behind half the interactive fiction of the past decade, running in the browser and learnable in about twenty minutes.
- 10 min
- Desktop
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Text Adventures: questions
How many sites are in Text Adventures?
17 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
12 of the 17 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
7 of 17 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 17 are safe for work and 17 work with the sound off.