Text Adventures in Simplified and Traditional Mandarin with Annotation

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

Dear All,

 

I wrote a text adventure for people to practice reading Chinese. My Taiwanese wife proofread and beta tested it. Please have a look,

 

http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/kwmrhwcbxuksomgl8o2vra/the-beast-nian-a-chinese-text-adventure

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

Here is a text adventure or Interactive Fiction game that was recently written by Kevin Bullaughey. You must sign up for a free account to play. It's very well done and quite a lot of fun. It also has a levelled reader function, allowing you to make the vocabulary easier or more difficult as you need.

 

https://wordswing.com/cards/text-game/escape/play

 

Ok, I lied. There is no levelled reader function.

Edited June 8, 2017 at 11:57 PM by Wei-Ming 魏明
False Info

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

You can now find a short list of text-based games in Mandarin at the Interactive Fiction Database. Type "language:zh" in the search box.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

Hugo Award winner, Hao Jingfang has written a choice-based interactive fiction about 刘邦 (Liu Bang, the first Han Dynasty emperor).

 

http://www.qiaobooks.com/read/1368.html

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

Here's a new text-based adventure by the same people as Escape. It's called Into the Haze.

 

https://wordswing.com/cards/text-game/city/intro

[Balthazar]

Has anyone else been playing Into the Haze?

 

I quite liked Escape, so I didn't have to think twice about subscribing to get access to Into the Haze. I've only played it for a few hours, but one thing I am noticing is that it seems to be quite a bit harder than Escape. Here I am not thinking about the language level (which is also higher than Escape's, but seems to be just about perfect for where I currently am, I've only had to look up only a few words here and there), but the difficulty of actually finding one's way in the game itself. I made it to a first checkpoint yesterday, but upon resuming the game today and playing for about two hours, I haven't been able to progress. So far I've lost the game (read: died) four times, and I seem to be going in circles down in the sewer. The haze is turning out to be a maze.

 

Perhaps I should be motivated by this, but as I rarely have more than 1-2 hours to spend I'm a bit discouraged. Oh well, I'll give it another go tomorrow.

 

In terms of the storyline and the atmosphere I am definitely a fan.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

Thanks Balthazar,

 

Interactive Fiction geeks would would agree with you that Into the Haze has a lower "forgiveness rating." In your opinion, is Haze a "Tough," "Nasty" or "Cruel" game, as defined here?

• Tough - You can get stuck or die, but it's immediately obvious when you're about to do something irrevocable. (You might not be able to anticipate that a particular action will make the game unwinnable, though - only that it will be irreversible.)

• Nasty - You can get stuck or die, but it's immediately obvious after the fact when you've done something irrevocable. (Again, though, you might not realize that an action made the game unwinnable - just that the action was irrevocable.)
• Cruel - You can get stuck or die, and you can do so by an action that you didn't even realize was irrevocable after doing it.

Thank you!

 

If you do end up finishing, it would be helpful if you would be so kind as to write a review at: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=z8ns7a938cgh8r

 

魏明

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

The online historical fiction novel, 汉初, isn't a Text Adventure, but more like the Choose Your Own Adventure series of my childhood. It's written by a team of five award-winning authors, primarily 郝景芳, the 2016 Hugo Award winner. The reading level is pretty high, but the Mandarin Spot bookmarklet works well on the site. I'm enjoying it thoroughly, even though I'm much more comfortable with Traditional script.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

It would be nice to have more people writing text-based adventures and interactive fiction in Mandarin. It's great writing practice, and it's fun to think up text-based puzzles and/or branching plots. If you're interested, Squiffy and Inkle are two really easy interactive fiction development systems. I prefer Squiffy, because 1) the learning curve is well scaffolded, 2) the documentation explains how to gradually add complexity (e.g. variable attributes, points, if statements, etc.) to your game/story, and 3) the people at the forum are friendly and helpful.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

Another Mandarin Interactive Fiction website is http://www.iwzyx.com. The quality of writing is typically much lower than http://www.qiaobooks.com, but it has greater potential for creating text-based games. It makes score keeping and variable attributes easy.

[roddy]

Bumping this, as I happened across an ad for Wordswing and thought it looked intriguing so checked if it'd been mentioned previously. It has.

 

 

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

侦探故事 by Tao Chen is a detective text adventure with several good and bad endings. If, like me,  you prefer Traditional characters Bing Translator can convert it in some browsers. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well with Mandarin Spot.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

Here's one more. 虎姑婆：文字冒險遊戲 | Grandaunt Tigress: A Chinese Text Adventure

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

This may be the first and only parser-based text adventure game ever written in Chinese.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

http://bassavg.com has lots of Chinese browser-playable visual novels. Mandarinspot works great on this site. Some of the visual novels are more puzzly and gamelike. Others are more story-driven. All are free to play/read.  Monochrome Impact is a good example and also uses a fairly easy vocabulary most of the time.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

I reviewed the parser-based text adventure Prison of Word. 

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

If you have a readmoo.com account, you can read 黑洞 for a limited time for free. After that you'll have to pay for it. It's a CYOA gamebook.