Highlights
- Text-based video games were popular even in the early days of computer gaming, with horror being a common genre due to its reliance on imagination.
- Colossal Cave Adventure, Amnesia, and Cutthroats were influential and successful early text-based horror games.
- Modern text-based horror games like Spider and Web, Dracula, A Dark Room, Lifeline, and Anchorhead continue to captivate players with their engaging narratives and immersive gameplay experience.
Even when computers were still mainframe machines that took up whole rooms, designers and programmers were making games for them. Some of the first video games were text-based games since that was all most computers could handle, and most of them were either adventure or horror-based.
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Horror was the perfect genre for these early video games. With little or nothing to rely on in the way of graphics or sound, the thrill and horror of the gamer's imagination fills the scary gaps in their place. Early text-based games were surprisingly creative given the resources available and included various categories of the horror genre, including survival, crime, and fantasy.
8 Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)
A horror-survival and adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure isn't just one of the first video games ever made as the general public now understands them. It's actually a really good game by any standard, and gamers can thank the early creators for giving the media some credibility.
Players might compare this game to something inspired by a D&D-style dungeon delve. The design of the creepy cave system was based on Crowther's real experiences exploring the subterranean caverns of Kentucky. It was a huge hit during its time and went on to inspire several rogue-like and adventure games.
7 Amnesia (1986)
The text part of this adventure was written by Thomas M. Disch, who was known for his science fiction writing as opposed to horror. Amnesia is more of a thriller than a straight-up horror game, but this scenario is the stuff of many worst nightmares.
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The protagonist awakens in midtown Manhattan with no memory of how they got there or even of their own identity. They have to piece together the mystery of their existence, starting with nothing, not even clothing, and evade a stranger trying to kill them while they figure it out.
6 Cutthroats (1984)
Hardscrabble Island was the video game world's hive of scum and villainy, and it's where the comedy-mystery-horror game Cutthroats is set. The main character is a diver, and like other denizens of the island, they've fallen on hard times.
The story begins when a friend drops by with a map to a nearby shipwreck, apparently with a treasure that's going to turn everything around for them. However, anyone who has seen or known of the map turns up dead, and the protagonist not only has to find the treasure and solve the murders, but they have to survive long enough to do it.
5 Spider And Web (1998)
Spider and Web was developed in 1998 to run on a platform that dated from the 1970s, making it a novelty for modern gamers and an essential addition to the library of any nostalgia fan. The Z-machine isn't a physical console or a hand-held, but a virtual machine that can translate games to other computer platforms, and modern games are also designed to use it.
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This chilling horror story starts with the character walking into a blind alley, but when they try to turn back, an ominous voice speaks to them, and they can't leave. Not until they "tell them the truth." As the mystery unravels, it's revealed that this is an interrogation scene involving government spies, and the subject is sensitive information.
4 Dracula (1986)
There were a lot of text-based games back in the day for the early models of home computers, and Draculawas one of the most popular. It's only fitting that one of the best and earliest text-based horror games would be inspired by a famous book that made equally big waves in the world of literature and the horror genre.
Dracula follows the basic narrative as taken from Bram Stoker's iconic novel by putting the player in the same position as either Renfield or Jonathan Harker. The video game begins when the protagonist arrives in the town near Dracula's castle and continues until the vampire is discovered, and the hunt is on.
3 A Dark Room (2013)
A Dark Room is a modern text-based game that integrates exploration, survival, and role-playing into the horror element, which improves as the game progresses. When the story first begins, however, there's nothing but a small, dark room, and the protagonist has no idea where they are or how they got there.
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The game seems to hint at an apocalyptic event that has reduced human civilization to ash, and this is symbolic of the whole human race trying to pick up the pieces. The game's resources also change as the story progresses, giving it a rogue-like quality.
2 Lifeline (2015)
A modern combination of old-school text-based storytelling and a harrowing tale of survival horror, Lifeline follows a protagonist named Taylor, who also happens to be an astronaut. Taylor has crashed on a planet with an inhospitable environment and a hostile alien race of aggressive parasites, and only the power of text-based gaming can save them.
Players can progress through the story by choosing between two options, and the wrong choice will result in Taylor's death. Luckily, every question is a save point, and the player can return to the previous option.
1 Anchorhead (1998)
For those who love horror, Anchorhead is one of the best choices among text-based games, and for fans of Lovecraft, this is an essential addition to the digital library. The setting is New England, as is the style with Lovecraft, and focuses on an unnamed protagonist whose husband has just inherited an impressive estate in Massachusetts.
The story progresses, and the main character eventually discovers the mystery of the estate along with a local conspiracy to call forth a Great Old One. The game fits into a four-day time period, in which the player has to solve a certain amount of puzzles or complete several tasks before progressing.