The Interactive Adventurer's Tutorial Adventure (TALP)

Welcome to this short tutorial adventure — an opportunity to familiarise yourself with navigating a small virtual world and using items to solve simple problems.

If you are playing this game on a device with a small screen, you can use the HELP FULLSCREEN command to maximise the view of the game window during play (the same command toggles back to the normal view).

The first part of the tutorial is a simple introduction to using commands to move around and use objects. Highlighting is used to draw your attention to things of note — directions in which you can travel are highlighted in green, commands in cyan, and items in yellow. As you go through the tutorial, you'll also discover magenta highlighting for special objects that don't move from their current location but may still be interesting or useful in the game.

If you're already comfortable with the basics, you can use the SKIP command to move straight to the second part of this tutorial, which sets you off on a little adventure as a burglar looking for trinkets to steal in an empty cottage. Or you can issue the QUIT command to restart the game.

The idea of this tutorial isn't to trip you up with complex problems or fiendish puzzles but to get you used to the interface and the style of interactive text adventures — I hope after this tutorial, your curiosity is piqued enough to have a go at some of the more challenging adventures on the Interactive Adventures website and elsewhere on the Internet. A great place to start to find more interactive adventures like these is the Interactive Fiction Database.

As a text-based game that requires typed text input, you are strongly encouraged to play this game on a desktop PC or laptop — or equivalent device with a large clear screen and an external keyboard.

Technical Stats (for nerds like me)

• Number of locations: 27 (plus 6 meta-locations)
• Number of unique objects: 68 (10 inventory objects and 58 scenery objects)
• Number of unique verbs: 40 (31 game verbs and 9 meta-verbs)
• Lines of code: 1,659 (excluding CSS, which adds 125 lines)
• Database size: 68.3KB (excluding game log)
• Word count: ~8,500 — only includes room descriptions and EXAMINE responses, not all command responses.