A text adventure in Pico-8?!?!

The idea for this game came from an idle thought I had one day … why were there no text adventures on the NES or Gameboy? Text adventures were very popular on 8-bit home computers. What would a text adventure be like on a platform that had gamepads but no keyboard?

So during a train journey I wrote a mock-up in Pico-8. And it turned out to be much more promising than I expected: the gameplay was described by text but the interaction was that of a point-and-click adventure game like The Secret of Monkey Island. There was no awkward “guess the verb” puzzles that are so annoying in parser-based text adventures. Movement between locations was described naturally in the text, instead of by compass directions.

When I saw the announcement for the 2024 Pico-8 Advent Calendar jam, I decided to develop the mockup into a full Christmas-themed text adventure.

By the time I finished, I had both a game and an extensible engine that can easily be used to write interactive fiction titles for the Pico-8 platform. The engine stores the elements of the interactive story in a simple database and uses generic routines to generate readable text from that database.

Now that I’ve finished the project, I really don’t know why text adventures were not produced for the Gameboy in its heyday. I think it would have been an ideal platform for the genre.