#counterfeit monkey

[bakedfuckingpotato]

Trying to convince people to play my favorite games like "Yeah it's a text adventure where you remove letters from objects to turn them into other things and also do espionage" "Yeah it's a game about translating an alien language and you can theoretically get to the end game without knowing if the majority of your translations are correct" "You're a god solving the murder of other gods on a beautiful and strange synthwave heaven island" "I'm doing a bad job of explaining these" "It's Hollow Knight: Silksong"

[gdevan]

I love this fucking game

[cavedraconem]

Just finished Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short - if you like text adventures/interactive fiction and word puzzles even a little (me), I thoroughly recommend you play this game. You play a linguistics academic/industrial espionage agent trying to escape Anglophone Atlantis - with nothing but your wits and your handy Letter Remover. Turn pears into peas (or ears, if you prefer). Turn a crate into a rate into a rat. The dictionary is the limit!

Image is from https://tass.neocities.org/Atlantida.png

Bonus:

[prokopetz]

I know you've recommended Counterfeit Monkey as a work of Parser Fiction, but given how you've also talked about Parser Fiction's reputation for being... occasionally trollishly difficult, is Counterfeit Monkey a good first game for Parser Fiction or is it better handled with some experience?

Counterfeit Monkey has a very good tutorial section and (mostly) reserves its troll logic for some of the more obscure achievements. I wouldn't necessarily recommend parser fic of any description as someone's first experience with interactive fiction – hypertext fic is usually a better entry point – but if you're determined to dive into the deep end on your first go, Counterfeit Monkey isn't a bad choice.

(With the caveat that you really do need to be good with anagrams going into it. That’s a skill its tutorial won’t teach you!)

[inarticulatehour]

i may be 10 years late, but boy is counterfeit monkey a strange and wonderful beast

[oldgamedebris]

By pure luck, Counterfeit Monkey was in the background of that last screenshot.  It is an excellent work of interactive fiction.  You have to escape an island nation, Anglophone Atlantis, that is literally made out of words.  You start with a single letter remover and find more word/world altering tools along the way.  Make carrying a set of tomes easy by removing the ‘s’ and reducing them to a single tome.  Need oil?  Take a fossil, remove s, get a foil, remove f, and now you have a can of oil!  Need a car?  Start with a leafy vegetable and a pile of garbage.  Be warned though: you might end up with an inventory full of severed body parts (removing the p from pear for example).

And it’s more than a gimmick.  There is a bunch of solid world building along the way.

You will need an IF interpreter to play it.

[prokopetz]

Real monkey lol

As opposed to counterfeit monkey, yes.

[prokopetz]

When folks post about funny software changelogs it’s usually, like, Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress, but some of the best examples I’ve ever seen have come from Counterfeit Monkey.

In a nutshell, it’s a piece of interactive fiction (or a text adventure, if you’re old school) whose gimmick revolves around using various magic devices to add, delete, or rearrange letters in the names of objects in the game world, thus transforming them into the object(s) so named. As you can image, the possible outcomes get pretty esoteric, especially once you figure out how to disable the safeties and anagram intangibles and abstractions.

A few personal favourites include:

The bartender will no longer paddle the musical piece.

Gelling the tub is now allowed.

Adds a WINNER LOGO CHOCOLATE to be the singular of the same object, and a HOOTING OWL CONCEALER as its anagram.

Makes children cry when you break the hanging figure with the severed arm.

Adds BROKEN COMPONENT and CEMENT PORNO KNOB as products of the BROKEN COMPONENTS.

Always describe new letter-transformed creations when we haven't seen them before. Previously, the player would sometimes never get to see the descriptions of things that instantly killed them.