A survival text adventure that lives in a terminal: you define the world, then manage health, hunger, thirst, gear, money and property turn by turn — a concept with real modularity, whose survival meters did not recover for us when we fed them.

Terminal Adventures is a survival-based, procedural text adventure that plays entirely inside a terminal-style screen. It is built by Anthony Muro, a software developer from the Bay Area, who has worked on it for about three years. There is no app to install and no logo: the page is the game. You type a username (or “register” to create one), define the setting you want to play in, and begin.

What sets it apart is how much it tracks. The game keeps your health, hunger and thirst, your currency, an inventory with weight and containers, equipment and weapons, and, according to the developer, vehicles, properties, party members and creature collection. Undo is deliberately scarce: you can undo twice, and the allowance recharges after two turns, so you live with what you did. Settings include text-to-speech voices, radio stations, sound effects, keyboard sounds, font, theme colour and a response-length control. The modularity is the charm — you can feel a lot of game under the text.

It is also an early game, and the developer says so himself: he describes it as not perfect and lacking some “sauce,” and he is not promoting it. We played as an ordinary free player. Two things stood out, and each has its own section in our first look:

Survival works as a system, but recovery did not. Hunger and thirst fall with the time your actions take, which is right. When we ran them to zero and then bought and ate and drank everything an inn would sell us, hunger barely rose and thirst did not move. Our best was 80, and a short journey took us back to 0.
The people remember, but they are thin. NPCs recalled what we had done and did their jobs, but there are no character pages and little individuality yet.

Because it is listed here now, some curious players will arrive. The developer will probably want to make the first hour friendlier for them.

Models

The game’s public pages do not say which AI model is behind the narration, so we cannot name one. We will add it if the developer publishes it.

Pricing

Terminal Adventures is free to play at the moment, and the developer describes the free period as “for now.” No price page is published. In an email to us, the developer said he expects it to be very cheap, which he put at roughly a dollar for a hundred messages at most; that is his estimate, not a published rate, and we have not verified it. The login screen lists terms, privacy, acceptable-use and refund pages and a contact option. We will add a pricing table if a paid plan appears.

We haven’t rated Terminal Adventures, and won’t while it is a concept. See our first look for what we found. (Terminal Adventures is an independent game by Anthony Muro; Arcanum is unaffiliated with it. The cover card is an Arcanum-made placeholder, because the game has no logo.)