TEXT-BASED RPG GAMES: THE COMPLETE GUIDE

I keep going back to text-based RPGs. Not because I hate graphics. I spent last weekend sinking hours into a game where the most impressive visual was a slightly animated cursor, and I had a better time than I did with most of this year's big-budget releases. There's something about reading a sentence like "the lighthouse keeper refuses to meet your eyes, and the lantern trembles in his grip" that no motion-captured cutscene can match.

Text-based RPGs never died. They went through a weird period where everyone assumed they were a relic, a thing your uncle played on a PDP-11, and then they came back with better writing, smarter systems, and genuine commercial success. Sunless Sea sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Disco Elysium won Game of the Year at basically every awards show that mattered. Roadwarden got a 90+ on Steam from players who expected nothing and got slapped in the face by quality.

So here's the full tour. The legacy stuff still worth playing, the modern masterpieces, the weird experimental stuff, and a few games that stretch the definition of "text-based" in interesting ways.

MUDs still exist and they are still good

Multi-User Dungeons are the oldest multiplayer RPGs on the planet. They predate World of Warcraft by about two decades. The first one, MUD1, launched in 1978 on a university mainframe in the UK. You telnet in, you type commands, you fight monsters, you meet other players. It's MMORPG minus the rendering.

Here's the thing nobody talks about. MUDs are still running. Right now. There are active servers with hundreds of players logging in every night. Aardwolf has been online since 1996. Achaea has been online since 1997 and it's one of the most narratively sophisticated MMOs ever made. The combat system in Achaea is so deep that competitive PvP players study it like a martial art, memorizing affliction chains and cure priorities the way fighting game players memorize frame data.

The barrier to entry is the interface. You need a MUD client. Mudlet is the current standard. You need to get used to typing commands and reading a scrolling wall of text. Once you're past that, you find communities that have been playing together for twenty years, storylines that span decades, and economies that operate with more complexity than most modern MMOs can manage.

If you've never tried one, start with Discworld MUD. It's free, it's based on Terry Pratchett's books, and it has one of the most approachable new player experiences of any MUD. You can spend an hour learning to be a thief and getting booted out of the Thieves' Guild for failing your apprenticeship exam, which is exactly as funny as it sounds.

Choice of Games is a whole catalog worth knowing about

Choice of Games is a publisher and platform that's been putting out text-based interactive novels since 2009. No graphics, no music, just branching narrative where every chapter has meaningful choices. They've built a catalog of over a hundred titles covering every genre imaginable.

The writing quality is the selling point. Choice of Games pays its authors, which means the people writing for them are actual working writers, not hobbyists. Choice of Robots by Kevin Gold is widely considered one of the best pieces of interactive fiction ever published. You play an AI researcher across decades, and your choices genuinely shape a branching story that can end in dozens of dramatically different ways. I've played it three times and gotten three completely different games.

Tin Star is a Western set in frontier Montana. Creatures Such As We is a philosophical science fiction story set on the moon. Slammed! is about professional wrestling. The range is the point. Whatever genre you want, Choice of Games probably has a good version of it.

The related Hosted Games label is the user-submitted stuff. Quality varies wildly. The best Hosted Games titles like Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven are on par with anything Choice publishes. The worst are fanfic-tier. Read reviews before you buy.

Failbetter Games and the Fallen London universe

Failbetter is the British studio that built Fallen London, a free browser-based text RPG set in a version of Victorian London that fell into the underworld and is now ruled by bats. I'm not making that up. That's the actual premise.

Fallen London has been running since 2009. It's a slow-burn text game where you manage a handful of stats, pick story options, and slowly reveal an absurd, gothic, genuinely witty world. It's free to play, and the writing is so consistently good that people who started playing in 2010 are still checking in for new content. The setting is so rich that Failbetter has built entire games on top of it.

Sunless Sea is the one everyone talks about. You captain a steamship across a subterranean ocean called the Unterzee, which is full of crab-obsessed monks, chess-playing islands, sentient icebergs, and existential horrors. The gameplay loop is sailing, reading, trading, and dying. Your captains die frequently and permanently. Each death reveals more of the world. Most of the game is text. The writing is among the best in any video game I've played, full stop.

Sunless Skies is the sequel, set in an alternate timeline where the British Empire conquered space using locomotives that run on the bones of dead stars. The writing might be even better than Sunless Sea. The gameplay is more refined. If you only play one Failbetter game, make it this one.

Roadwarden is a masterpiece

Roadwarden came out of nowhere in 2022. It's a text-heavy RPG with pixel-art illustrations, set in a medieval fantasy world where you play a roadwarden, a kind of itinerant peacekeeper and messenger, sent to survey and protect a dangerous peninsula on behalf of a distant guild.

The brilliance is in the restraint. You have forty in-game days. Every action costs time. You can't do everything. You can't save everyone. You have to prioritize, compromise, and accept that some problems will remain unsolved when your contract ends. The game is built around the honest truth that a single person can't fix a broken world, only make small choices that add up to something.

The writing is beautiful. The world feels lived in. NPCs remember what you said to them three days ago. Rumors spread. Reputations solidify. I finished it in about fifteen hours and immediately started over to see how different a second playthrough could be. The answer was "extremely different." This is one of my favorite RPGs of the last decade, and it's mostly text.

80 Days is still the best

Inkle's 80 Days came out in 2014 and nothing has replaced it. You're Passepartout, valet to Phileas Fogg, and you have eighty days to get him around the world. You choose the route. You choose the transportation. You choose what to pack and what to trade and whether to help the stranger on the train who asks for your assistance with a mysterious package.

The world is steampunk-alt-Victorian, where airships exist and automata roam the streets and the Ottoman Empire never fell. Every city has its own writers, its own voice, its own branching storylines. There are hundreds of cities. You will never see them all in one playthrough. You will never see them all in ten playthroughs.

The game won Time's Game of the Year in 2014, beating out actual AAA releases. It deserved it. It still deserves it. If you've never played 80 Days, stop reading this and go play it. It's on basically every platform at this point.

Alter Ego is a genuine curiosity

Alter Ego is a text-based life simulator originally released in 1986. You start as a fetus. You literally get to choose whether to be born. You progress through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, making decisions at every stage that shape your personality and life outcomes.

It's weird. It's dated. Some of the cultural assumptions are wildly of their time. But there's also genuine insight baked into the design. The game knows that childhood trauma shapes adult behavior. It knows that the friends you make in school affect who you marry. It simulates a human life with more honesty than most modern narrative games manage.

You can play it in your browser for free. I recommend trying it once, just to see what interactive fiction looked like in 1986 when someone decided to be genuinely ambitious with it.

Disco Elysium stretches the definition

Is Disco Elysium a text-based RPG? Sort of. It has graphics, voice acting in the Final Cut version, and an isometric perspective. But the core gameplay is reading. You walk your broken detective around Revachol, you click on things, and you read. Hundreds of thousands of words of dialog, internal monologue, skill checks, and environmental description.

What makes it a text RPG in spirit is that the mechanics are built around words. Your skills aren't "strength" and "dexterity." They're "Inland Empire" (your imagination), "Shivers" (your connection to the city itself), "Electrochemistry" (your drug-addled impulses). These skills talk to you. They argue with each other. They offer opinions and make bad suggestions. The dialog system is the game.

If you've somehow avoided Disco Elysium until now, the short version is this. It's the best-written RPG ever made. It's funny, it's tragic, it's politically angry, and it respects the player's intelligence in a way almost no modern game does. The Final Cut is the version to play.

Citizen Sleeper is text with vibes

Citizen Sleeper is the spiritual successor to Sunless Sea in some ways. You're an android refugee on a decaying space station, and most of the gameplay is reading about people, making choices, and managing a dwindling set of resources. There are visuals, portraits of characters, atmospheric station graphics, but the meat of the experience is text.

The writing is sharp and genuinely empathetic. The station is full of workers, outcasts, hackers, and runaways, and the game treats all of them with dignity. The dice-based action system adds just enough friction to make choices feel weighty without getting in the way of the storytelling.

Citizen Sleeper 2 came out in 2025 and it's even better than the original. It's mechanically richer, the crew dynamics are stronger, and the writing deepens the universe in satisfying ways. Both games are short, maybe ten hours each, and both are worth your time.

Why text-based still matters

Graphics are a bottleneck. You can only see what the artists modeled. You can only go where the designers built geometry. Every dollar spent on polygons is a dollar not spent on writing, design, or simulation. Text-based games don't have that constraint. They can describe a city in a sentence. They can introduce a new character with a paragraph. They can render a sunset in ways that no shader can match, because your imagination is doing the work.

Text also scales in ways that graphics can't. A writer can produce a thousand words of dialog in a day. A 3D artist can't produce a thousand polygons of character in a day, let alone a thousand polygons of nuance. This is why text-heavy games tend to have dramatically more content than their graphical counterparts. Sunless Sea has hundreds of thousands of words. That would be an impossibly expensive amount of VO or cutscene work. As pure text, it's tractable.

And honestly, reading is good for you. Games that make you read are games that engage your brain differently than games that just show you things. There's a reason the best narrative experiences in the medium are heavily text-based. Words force you to participate. You have to build the image, construct the voice, imagine the room. That participation is why a good text RPG sticks with you for years after you finish it.

If you want more in this direction, I've written about text-based adventure games which covers the parser-era stuff and the modern interactive fiction scene. There's also overlap with choose-your-own-adventure games and the best branching narrative games if you want to go deeper into the storytelling mechanics side of things.

Go read some games. Your imagination is better at graphics than any GPU.