i'm having my own little text game resurgence (fully the fault of 50 Years of Text Games). I played a few different ones over the last week:
Achaea: The long-lived MUD. I've played maybe 10-20 hours before. I'm interested in it because of how much writing must exist in its many many rooms. I did the tutorial and walked around a pixie village and read all the room descriptions. I've never done that before, defaulting to running around murdering and such.
Achaea is clearly made for the masses. Boring ass class and race shit, each their own superhero. I decided to make a frog alchemist but still hated it
The politics seem interesting (cities and gods are ran by people) but getting to the point of interacting with them is grinding, it seems like.
Harshlands: I thought this was more my shit (hardcore roleplaying MUD, you must role-play and there's permadeath) but the realism of it (you walk slowly between rooms) and the slowness of my typing made my brief experience unbearable. I generated a farmer, walked to an empty forest outside of town, set up a cabin, and organized my inventory. This took maybe 2-3 hours of looking up commands and picking up and dropping items one-by-one.
I was looking for some actual role-play, and I guess I was, but I encountered no people. A little my fault for playing a nomad, I suppose.
The actual room descriptions were rather terse and boring, from what I saw.
Fallen London: My horrible truth is I skip text in games a lot. I skimmed 90% of Fallen London's text in the past but I am slowing down and actually reading and god, this is the shit. I played through an Exceptional Story (one you pay for) and had a great time. The writing was so good.
I do get a little hooked to games like this and I keep picking up my phone to do one more action.
Anyway, the quality of the writing is so high here, it's blown everything else out. Definitely going to continue playing.
Vagrus: The Riven Realms: I'm in a rare few who have beaten Vagrus and gave it another shot, just to examine the writing. It's colorful and the world is interesting and the mechanics are cool. I'm not sold by the moment to moment writing is only okay. Kind of ruined by Fallen London, honestly.
