counterfeit-monkey VS parchment

Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short. https://github.com/i7/counterfeit-monkey/releases

If you don't want to install a parser on your computer, you can play it online by putting the link to the .gblorb file into https://iplayif.com/ I.e. https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fi7%2Fc...

Modern games are generally going to be more approachable than old ones. Tastes have changed considerably. In the days when you couldn't pull up a walkthrough in a few seconds, taking days to think of the next step was part of the fun, and just getting permanently stuck at some point was fairly common. Also, letting the player keep going even after they have done something to make the game unwinnable is now considered very uncool. Navigation is much less tedious these days as well, fast travel for example, although the exact mechanics depend on the game.

And that's not mentioning the amount of CPU and RAM available, not only for the game's runtime, but also for tools like I7 (which was used to write Counterfeit Monkey).

For an quicker introduction to modern "interactive fiction", as it's called these days, check out competition entries. https://intfiction.org/c/competitions/7 These are generally written in a shorter amount of time and the results are quicker to play through.

Various old skool text adventures:

If you are already experienced with them then "Counterfeit Monkey" takes it to the next level with a great twist based on anagram-like magic:

> Anglophone Atlantis has been an independent nation since an April day in 1822, when a well-aimed shot from their depluralizing cannon reduced the British colonizing fleet to one ship.

> Since then, Atlantis has been the world's greatest center for linguistic manipulation, designing letter inserters, word synthesizers, the diminutive affixer, and a host of other tools for converting one thing to another. Inventors worldwide pay heavily for that technology, which is where a smuggler and industrial espionage agent such as yourself can really clean up.

> Unfortunately, the Bureau of Orthography has taken a serious interest in your activities lately. Your face has been recorded and your cover is blown.

> Your remaining assets: about eight more hours of a national holiday that's spreading the police thin; the most inconvenient damn disguise you've ever worn in your life; and one full-alphabet letter remover.

> Good luck getting off the island.

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl

https://github.com/i7/counterfeit-monkey

If you're new to the genre then "Lost Pig" is a good place to start, though technically it's licence (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0) is not open source.

This is a fun one I played recently about shopping in a grocery store, called Aisle. You only have a single command you can give for the whole game, but there's a looot of them you can provide, and it gives you a different ending for each. Part of the fun is trying to figure out what you can say to find another ending. You can play it directly at the link below.

Play: https://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2F...

Paste any of those URLs into https://iplayif.com for a modern web interpreter.

it's a mobile browser based on chrome and while I don't use it for this, I find it acceptable enough, actually better than the mobile chrome in my phone for some things, like https://iplayif.com/ which runs much better on it thanks to a generous virtual screen than on small screen sharing space with a virtual keyboard...

This article is interesting as it seems "the long way around": the Z-Machine is rather well documented, and already has VMs for the web [1] and going to the ZIL source to build a port of the ZIL itself rather than to interpret the Z-Machine binary is cool, I suppose, but ignores decades of insights into the Z-Machine.

While I'm being a downer, also need to point out that while the Internet Archive has archived the ZIL source code the Zork games are still under copyright and owned by Activision Blizzard (soon/now Microsoft). Using Zork itself as a deployment artifact is a possible way to get sued even if you think the game "abandonware".

[1] The best known/maintained is Parchment: https://github.com/curiousdannii/parchment

Are you using the latest version of Parchment? The version that ships with the official I7 packages is very old. Updating might address your issue, but I don't know.