Terminal games

What are your favourite games playable in a terminal?

Here are a few I've loved and/or respected:

Interactive fiction / text adventure games, e.g. Spider & Web, Varicella, Worlds Apart, Galatea, Counterfeit Monkey, Hadean Lands

nethack, crawl, brogue

asciiportal

alienwave

hunt

mdg (sadly defunct multiplayer dungeon crawler on sdf)

spellbinding and other gemini games (if they should count)

Posted in: s/retrogaming

🚀 mbays

2023-06-22 · 11 months ago · 👍 freezr, Ruby_Witch

16 Comments ↓

🍄 Ruby_Witch · 2023-06-22 at 17:31:

I'm a sucker for MUDs myself! When I was a kid I used to play DikuMUD which I found through Veronica on Gopher. It was revolutionary back then to play a game with other people, and the appeal of MUDs has never worn off for me. They still work great on a terminal interface.

Also, of course I love text-based adventures including the whole Zork series, as well as nethack.

🕹️ skyjake [...] · 2023-06-22 at 18:43:

NetHack is the one terminal-based game that I've put some serious time into. Once I made it all the way to the Amulet of Yendor and managed to hold onto it for a while until the Horsemen got me...

🦋 teal · 2023-06-23 at 03:00:

Slashem has a nice text only mode that looks good in a terminal. I feel like it doesn't try to murder me in the same way NetHack does. Also a fan of muds. Eternal Fantasy and Achaea are two that I've been playing. Eternal Fantasy not as much lately, as I recently started playing Achaea and have been there instead. There was a text based diablo one that was also nice, but it was tough to get it to work on any of my systems and I haven't picked that back up since first playing.

👤 emilis · 2023-06-23 at 05:00:

Nuclear War MUD. Loved to explore it.

❄ freezr · 2023-06-23 at 06:01:

one of my favorites is greed

☕️ Morgan · 2023-06-23 at 15:52:

Nethack, and a MUD, Imperian, where I enjoyed the custom-client-code-assisted combat. I think Achaea is an Iron Realms game like Imperian? It's been over ten years since I played ... well ... either of these, though :)

🤖 kelbot [mod] · 2023-06-26 at 02:22:

A couple that I like quite a bit. A roguelike called Scrap, where you are a robot and can battle other robots and salvage parts from them after you defeat them to upgrade yourself. The other is a puzzle platformy type game called XORCurses. I also have a few others I like listed on my capsule.

— gemini.cyberbot.space/terminal/termgames.gmi

🚀 dani · 2023-07-06 at 15:42:

I remember playing Nethack when I was at uni. But nowadays, I think the one I enjoy the most is Cataclysm DDA. The athmosphere is fantastic.

🚀 mbays [OP] · 2023-07-10 at 16:09:

Another nice unusual roguelike is Kerkerkruip -- it has a text adventure UI, so in theory it would be playable over Gemini. That would take some hackery, maybe one day I'll try it...

Update: I did it!

— Gemkerkerkruip

🐶 lori · 2023-07-12 at 18:12:

csol (I think I got it off github) is a very nice pseudo-graphical solitaire suite I found. Ultimately I think I'm still desperately looking for the terminal games that scratch my particular itch. I really want stuff more in the Sumerian Game/Oregon Trail kind of family. There's bound to be ports of old games like that for modern terminals I just haven't found yet. I found a good one for Santa Paravia which is similar to Empire for Palm (not to be confused with Empire the terminal game, this is a Sumerian Game style game). I'd love to hear if anyone's found other similar ports of older text-based games for modern Linux terminals. I want more simulation.

☕️ Morgan · 2023-07-16 at 16:15:

@mbays that's really cool, thanks :)

🚀 ScotchSour · 2023-08-22 at 02:26:

well if we're talking BBS doors I could go on all day, they still host zillions of old dos games, muds, casino games and new stuff like Wordle. Locally it's probably frotz & brogue for me.

🚀 anthk_gem · 2023-10-10 at 06:47:

Slashem, which is Nethack but with nice new classes/roles and tons of new content; All Thing Devours as a crazy puzzle IF, Spiritwrak because it's a crazy Zorkian adventure with an odd blend of phantasy and some sparse tech here and there; cgames, and mstly csokoban; super-star-trek because it's like a mini-Elite. BSD games are fine, too, specially battlestar, trek and advent.

🚀 anthk_gem · 2023-10-10 at 06:54:

Also, I forgot. OFC, VMS Empire it's fine from time to time, but you need to launch it like this: "vms-empire -d 0" or "empire -d 0" to avoid the nasty delay on actions and feedback.

🚀 anthk_gem · 2023-10-10 at 07:36:

Slashem, which is Nethack but with nice new classes/roles and tons of new content; All Thing Devours as a crazy puzzle IF, Spiritwrak because it's a crazy Zorkian adventure with an odd blend of phantasy and some sparse tech here and there; cgames, and mstly csokoban; super-star-trek because it's like a mini-Elite. BSD games are fine, too, specially battlestar, trek and advent.

❄ freezr · Feb 09 at 14:25:

I really like a Terminal game called Greed =D