Games writer and writer of games Bruno Dias is no stranger to engaging interactive fiction. His collection of past works range from conducting a séance in an abandoned house on a sinking island to a text-parsing adventure on the last …
It’s perhaps a little scary to think of what it means when a press release includes the tagline, “Lose Your Mind. Eat Your Crew. Die,” and it causes excitement around the Gamezebo office (which isn’t even a real thing). It …
The world of Fallen London is as bleak and hopeless as it is captivating and humorous. Talking corpses and spiders that eat eyeballs are commonplace, and you’re a recent prison escapee just trying to get by. How you accomplish that …
When we first reviewed Fallen London, it was 2012 and the world was a very different place. Or at the very least, Gamezebo was. In addition to mobile games we looked at titles on a variety of platforms — including games …
The world of Fallen London has been captivating players for the past four years. The browser-based choose-your-own-adventure takes place in a Victorian-era version of London that has been stolen by a bat-run Bazaar near Hell, and now exists in a tremendous underground cavern known as the Neath. The immersive fiction weavers behind Fallen London, Failbetter Games, are planning to expand their richly bizarre steampunk world beyond words and still images with the upcoming survival-strategy game, Sunless Sea. Gamezebo spoke with Paul Arendt, co-founder and Director of Failbetter Games, about Fallen London, Sunless Sea, and why you should not feed the monkeys in either.
Never in a million years did I ever think the text adventure game genre would make a comeback. I mean, it's sort of ridiculous. While I have many fond memories of navigating my way through Zork, those games are by all accounts antiquated. They were a product of their time, certainly, but with desktop computers now more powerful than the shuttle that delivered men to the moon, why would we choose to play a text adventure game? Cabinet Noir and the StoryNexus system makes a compelling case.
When I was a young'un, the things we would consider video games or digital entertainment was wildly different than what we enjoy today. This isn't a "you kids today" talk, because I'm not saying it was better back then... it's just changed a lot. Text adventure game were a legitimate genre back then, and they were compelling, and decidely low-tech. Really more akin to a choose your own adventure book than what you might think of as a video game. There's not many around these days, but Fallen London does a good job of evoking the feelings of playing one while bringing those feelings to date.