Seventeen complete games written in Zaytun. All of them are finished, all of them are free
software, and all of them are played entirely by reading and typing.
The Sundered Dawnstone
Genre: hand-authored adventure ·
Length: 38 rooms across six regions ·
Ending: one, with optional secrets
Eleven years ago a man called Malachar the Hollow walked up out of the sea caves, took
the Dawnstone out of the altar on the south shore, and broke it into three pieces over
his knee. Then he hid the pieces, climbed his tower, and sat down. He did not curse
anyone or raise an army. He simply removed the thing that made the mornings, and waited
for a whole country to get tired.
It has very nearly worked. You are not a knight, you have no sword and no plan, and you
hold the specific and dangerous conviction — shared by exactly one person in Emberfall —
that eleven years is long enough.
What is in it
Six regions: a village, woods, a coast, a barrow, a peak, and a tower.
Three dungeons and four bosses, each guarding one of the broken shards.
Six optional secrets that reward exploring rather than rushing.
Equipment, combat, and characters who react to what you are carrying.
A single canonical ending, earned by reforging what was broken.
Genre: roguelike ·
Length: ten floors, generated fresh each run ·
Ending: permadeath, and a score
Nobody sentences anyone to the Undergaol any more. There is no need. The doors have not
opened in four hundred years, and whatever is down there has had four hundred years to
sort itself into an order. You are going down anyway, for the Heart of the Gaol, which is
on floor ten.
This one is the counterweight to the others: no fixed map, no authored plot, and no way
back up. It exists to prove the language can generate a world at runtime rather than only
describe one written in advance — floors, chambers, monsters and loot are all rolled as
you go.
What is in it
Ten procedurally generated floors — every run is laid out differently.
Permadeath. Dying ends the run; restarting builds a new dungeon.
A bestiary whose monsters get harder as you descend, placed at runtime.
Loot, equipment and a limited healing flask — the pack is a resource.
Health that regenerates slowly, so retreating into cleared ground is a real tactic.
A score at the end, which is the whole point of going deeper.
Genre: story game ·
Length: 43 rooms, 24 scenes, 20 speaking characters ·
Endings: six
A retelling of the tale from Tolkien's Silmarillion. It starts before the love
story does: twelve outlaws on a moor in Dorthonion, an errand west that is the only
reason you survive the night, and an orc-company at Rivil's Well carrying your father's
ring on a cord. Then a mortal man crosses an enchanted border he should not have been
able to cross, falls in love with the daughter of a king, and is sent to fetch a jewel
out of the iron crown of the first and greatest of all evils — a price named by a father who thought he had found a way to say no that
cost him nothing, and who has in fact just doomed his kingdom.
The unusual thing mechanically is that singing is the weapon. Three times in the
story, a fight is not winnable and the only move on the board is to sing: against Sauron
on his island, in the pit afterwards, and in front of Morgoth's throne. It is one
author-defined verb whose meaning depends entirely on who is standing next to you.
What is in it
Eight parts, one source file each, from a moor in Dorthonion to the Halls of the Dead.
One act you fight your way through, and seven where a weapon is no use at all.
Hard, with no setting for it — a run that takes no interest in anything finishes on
two hit points. What it has instead is four hidden things, none required and none
announced, which are found by attention rather than by puzzle-solving. Finding all four
roughly quadruples the room you have to be unlucky in, and the ending tells you how many
you missed.
Eighteen characters with real conversations — ask Huan about the prophecy.
Rooms written twice, for the road out and the road back.
A final fight you cannot win alone, and are not meant to.
Six endings. The tale cannot change — Finrod dies, the hand is taken — so what
varies is the verdict: how much of the road you understood, whether you reached for a
second jewel, and whether you got on the horse at the end.
Songs with names, learned from the people who know them, and a hint system
(remember) instead of the game telling you what to type.
topics tells you what a character will discuss — except for
the two subjects that exist to reward asking a good question unprompted.
Genre: story game ·
Length: 30 rooms across six worlds, 17 scenes, 10 speaking characters ·
Endings: two
The Norse end of the world, played as Víðarr, the silent son of Odin — one of the few who
is still standing when it is over. The gods know exactly what is coming and have known
for an age; nobody in this story is surprised, and they intend to be there anyway.
You walk out of Asgard into a Midgard three winters deep, down a nine-night road to the
shore of the dead, and onto a field a hundred leagues wide where every duel is a draw.
Then your father is swallowed by a wolf, and it is your turn.
The central mechanic comes straight out of the myth. Snorri writes that Víðarr's shoe is
made from every strip of leather anyone has ever trimmed off a shoe and thrown away — and
that this is why you should throw yours away, to help the gods. So the game scatters ten
such strips across the nine worlds, and you need seven of them worked into the shoe
by the time you are standing in front of Fenrir. Sword blows do effectively nothing to
him; the shoe is the answer, and a shoe that folds is a real ending.
What is in it
Six worlds, one source file each, from Asgard to the world that comes after.
A collection mechanic taken from the source material rather than invented.
A final enemy that cannot be beaten with a weapon, and says so.
Conversations with Odin, Loki, Hel, Heimdall and Frigg, among others.
Two endings: the one the myth has, and the one where you did not gather enough.
Elias Vale, seventy-one, parish historian, is found on the floor of his own archive with
one wound to the left temple and a brass candlestick beside his hand. A fall, says the
doctor. A threatening letter, says the drawer. Too tidy, says the only policeman in
Ashcombe, who sent for you.
Every major witness tells a different version of that night, and four of them are lying.
Two are lying about something that has nothing to do with the killing, and the game gives
you the means to prove it — because a mystery that punishes you for suspecting a liar is
not a mystery, it is a trick.
Underneath the murder is a mine that flooded in 1887, nineteen dead men, and a verdict
that blamed one of them because he could not answer back.
What is in it
An evidence system where clues break specific statements: present the day book
to the doctor and watch his account come apart.
A notebook and a timeline that contain only what you have established — the
game will not ask you a question you have not earned.
A nine-question final deduction, scored twice: was the answer right, and can you
support it?
Seven endings, including two that are wrong in instructive ways.
No combat. Observation, memory and argument are the whole of the game.
Genre: science fiction, ability-gated descent ·
Length: 40 locations across seven zones, 67 objects, eight creatures ·
Endings: three
Forty years ago the Threnody Combine drilled eleven kilometres into a hollow moon looking
for sylph-iron, and hit something that had been hollowing it out since before anything on
your homeworld had a spine. They radioed up that they had found a lattice. Then, for
thirty-nine years, nothing.
You are Sela Vaur. You reclaim things. The contract is four lines long, your lander is on
the ice with a cracked drive coil, and your suit came down with none of its modules on it.
It is a Metroid in the structural sense rather than the decorative one. There are no
levels: one map, connected from the first minute, and what stops you is not distance but
capability. Every wall you cannot pass is a wall you will pass later with something you do
not have yet.
What is in it
Six suit modules, each opening a class of obstacle rather than a single door — the
compaction harness, the breach charge, the grapple line, the thermal weave, the pressure
seal and the resonance cutter.
A countdown you can lose to, which turns the last act into a route problem rather than
a puzzle problem.
Backtracking that pays: passages you noted on the way down open on the way back up.
Three endings — you came back up, you did not come back up, and the moon kept you.
Genre: shop simulation ·
Length: three locations, four goods, twelve days ·
Endings: four
You keep a general store you do not own. The guild holds a bond for a hundred and twenty
coins with your name on it in somebody else's handwriting, and it falls due on the twelfth
day. Rent is eight a day and the landlord does not wait.
There is nothing to fight and nothing to unlock. Hesper's cart is in the yard each morning
with four things on it at prices that moved overnight; you buy by the crate, mark your
goods up, and open the door. The game is what you stock, what you charge, and what the town
comes to think of you for it.
It is the smallest game here and the least like the others: three rooms, one other person,
and a great deal of arithmetic that you are doing rather than the engine.
What is in it
Three forces that pull against each other: bread is wanted by four customers in ten and
physic by one, but what a thing is worth scales with what it costs — so the volume is in
the cheap goods and the margin is in the dear ones.
A reputation that decides how many people come through the door at all, and how
generously they read your prices.
Customers who each arrive with a private idea of what a thing is worth, and tell the
street when you are wrong about it.
Four endings: clear the bond on the day, clear it early, miss it, or lose the shop
before the twelfth — by greed, or by stocking only what is expensive.
April, 1912. The band is still playing, if you listen for it. You do not know yet what the
rest of tonight is going to cost, and nobody on this ship does. Your goal is to survive it
and, against every reasonable expectation, to find your way home.
What is under the ocean turns out to be under the ice, and under that is something that
was never meant to be found by anyone from 1912. The way home runs through it.
This is a port of Scott Miller's Beyond the Titanic — Apogee Software, 1984,
shareware in 1986, released under the GPL in 2009. The original is a Turbo Pascal program
with its own 750-word parser and a room-and-message engine driven by flat binary files.
The room graph, the puzzles, the creature, the time chair and the 1933 ending were traced
out of that source and rebuilt; the parser is Zaytun's, because the two verb sets do not
correspond.
What is in it
The largest map here: 73 locations, from the starboard deck through the caves and the
saucer to a wasteland that is a one-way epilogue rather than a detour.
A year dial that takes any year you can think of — turn year dial to 1933
— and mostly disagrees with you.
A creature that follows you through time if you leave it alive, carrying the wounds
you gave it.
Hunger, a reactor with two distinct ways to kill you, and a score out of 400.
Genre: survival horror ·
Length: 40 rooms over four floors, 15 creatures, 19 objects ·
Endings: five
You are in a shut-down asylum on a headland in bad weather. The gate closed behind you. The
boat is at the bottom of the cliff, on the far side of forty rooms and everything still
living in them.
It is difficult on purpose. The ammunition is finite and countable, most fights are not worth
having, and the things in the house move whether you do or not — they hear you, they walk
toward you a room at a time, and they do not stop at the door you came through.
What is in it
Fifteen creatures that hunt. Each one measures how far it is from you every turn and
takes a step down that gradient. Patients are slow and hear you from two rooms off; hounds
move twice a turn and hear from five; ward sisters do not move at all and are the reason
some corridors are simply closed to you.
A house that listens. Every gunshot, prised door and lit generator raises an alarm level,
and the alarm widens how far the creatures can hear. Quiet play is a strategy and a slow
one; loud play is faster and wakes the warden, who then walks toward you through the whole
map for the rest of the game.
Ammunition worth counting. Six rounds when you find the pistol, and a few boxes in the
building. A pistol with an empty magazine is a club.
LISTEN tells you how many things are in the rooms next door, and
KIT what you are carrying and how loud the house has become. Both are free.
A gramophone. Wind it and every roaming thing within eight rooms goes to the day room
instead of coming to you — about a dozen turns, at the cost of the day room.
Five endings, decided by what you did and who you left.
Genre: war ·
Length: 16 rooms, 16 attackers in four pushes, 10 objects ·
Endings: two
The section held this farm since Tuesday and there is one of you left. The column is coming
out of the valley behind you and it needs until dark. That is the whole of the order, and
there is nobody to give you another one.
You are not trying to kill sixteen men. You are trying to still be on this hill at
nightfall, and then to get off it.
What is in it
A firing solution that goes stale. Ten numbers go into a shot and eight are yours to
move — the range because he is walking, the wind when it feels like it, the barrel because
you have been shooting, your hands because somebody is shooting back. SCAN
gives you the range, the wind and what the position shoots high by, and no arithmetic.
Nothing works it out for you.
Fourteen places, and no position covers both ways. They come up the gully on the west
and the cart track on the east; the ridge sees everything and everything sees the ridge,
the cellar sees nothing at all and nothing can reach you there.
They do not walk up the hill. They come on in rushes and go flat between them, stop at
banks and walls to shoot, pull back when they have had enough, and cover the last hundred
metres at a run. Shooting at a man is a way of stopping him and not only of killing
him.
Eight kinds of man. A marksman who outranges most of the farm, a bomber who takes the
position rather than the man, an officer who gets the wounded back on their feet — which
is what he is worth two hundred points for.
Weather, dusk, lulls, a mortar, a jamming bolt, and a man who reaches the wall, where
cover is no use at all.
Genre: teaching game ·
Length: 19 rooms across 17 stations, 98 drills, 18 objects ·
Ending: one, and a score out of 98
You have come off a boat with no English in you at all. Seventeen stations stand along the
road inland and a city is at the end of it. At each one somebody wants one thing said
properly before they will let you past, and nobody on this road speaks a word of anything
else.
It is a game rather than a worksheet. The board at each station teaches one thing — the
little words a and an, more than one, who he and they stand for,
what happened yesterday — and the gatekeeper, the baker, the ferryman and the rest will not
let you past until you can say it. The road is walked in order, and you may walk back down
it whenever you want to read a board again.
What is in it
Seventeen lessons in order, from hello and goodbye to can,
must and should. READ the board to be taught,
PRACTISE to be asked.
The door is the lesson. A station stays shut until a run of its drills goes through
without you being told an answer, so the only way past is to learn it.
A first miss gets a hint and another go; a second gets the answer and moves on. The
score counts only the ones you answered without a hint.
Nobody is marked on the shift key or a full stop — Good morning. and
good morning are the same answer. Except twice, and that is the point of
both: I is always a capital.
An examination at the city gate: twelve questions drawn from the whole road, in a
different order each time. Ten right and the gate opens.
Genre: puzzle game ·
Length: eight rooms, five locked doors, 21 objects ·
Ending: one, and every door has to be opened to reach it
Eight rooms, five locked doors, and nothing behind any of them but a problem that has to
actually be solved. No combat, no inventory to manage, nothing random.
The doors open in a fixed order, and each one wants a different kind of thinking: weighing,
deduction, a cipher, a graph, and then a pair of problems that have been catching people out
for a century. Nothing is hidden and nothing is a guess — everything you need is written on
the walls of the room you are standing in.
What is in it
The twelve-coin problem: one counterfeit among twelve, heavier or lighter and you
are not told which, found and characterised in three weighings.
A four-by-four logic grid — name, metal, hour, word — whose answer is not a lock but the
key the next room needs.
A Vigenère cipher, keyed by the word that grid gives up.
A Königsberg-style Euler path across eleven bridges and six islands.
Knights and knaves, with a statement about the group's own truth-count, and then the
cryptarithm SEND + MORE = MONEY on the vault door itself.
Genre: quiz ·
Length: three subjects, three thousand questions, twelve a night ·
Endings: two
Three subjects, a thousand questions in each, and twelve of them are yours. Answer twelve in
a row and you have won the night. Answer one of them wrongly and you have not.
Pick a subject and the questions come one at a time, drawn at random and never repeating
inside a night. There is nothing to carry, nowhere to walk and nothing to lose but the run
you are on, which makes it the shortest game here and the one most likely to be played twice.
What is in it
TECHNICAL — computing, networks, and the machines underneath. SCIENCE — physics,
chemistry, biology, the sky. HISTORY — empires, wars, treaties, and the people in
them.
Four choices each. Answer with the letter or with the words, whichever is easier:
b and Augustus are the same answer.
No question repeats inside a run, and the twelve are different every time you play.
One wrong answer ends the night — and the game tells you what the answer was.
Genre: naval warfare and trade ·
Length: 81 rooms, and a sea of fifty-six squares ·
Ending: two, and one of them needs none of the plot
You are the eleventh name on a list of nineteen being carried to Gallows Reach to hang.
Four hours ago the wind died. A quarter of an hour ago something came alongside.
The weather gauge is the ship to windward: she chooses the range, and the other one takes
what she is given. Everything else is downstream of that — what you dare attack, what you
can outrun, how long a passage costs in salt beef, and whether the men who have not been
paid since Candlemas are still calling you captain at the end of it.
What is in it
A sea of fifty-six squares in six waters, with twelve ports and four islands.
Your ship is a vehicle you are inside, so LOOK shows you her deck and then the water
she is standing in.
Wind and weather that decide the cost of a passage: a square is one watch or seven.
Fights settled by two questions — who holds the gauge, and what the range is.
Prizes to take, man or burn; six goods to trade; a crew who eat, are owed a share,
and vote.
Four powers and a fifth thing coming up out of the south-east.
Two endings: trade and take prizes and buy a pardon, or go past the Grey Verge.
Genre: air combat ·
Length: sixteen sorties, each its own sky and its own aeroplane ·
Ending: survive the nine weeks
You are twenty, you have sixty hours on Spitfires, and eleven days ago you had never seen
a German aeroplane that was not in a recognition book. Sixteen times up, between the last
week of August and the end of October, and no two of them the same sky or the same
aeroplane.
You are not a better shot than the man in front of you and your aeroplane is not better
than his. It is better at one thing and worse at another, and so is his, and the whole of
the game is knowing which is which before he does.
What is in it
Nothing decided by reflexes: a fight turns on angles, energy, range and sight, and
SITREP reads all four back to you in a pilot's words, for free.
Sixteen sorties in order, from a convoy off Dover to a yellow-nosed 109 up-sun who has
been watching you since August — each with weather of its own and its own way of
killing you quite apart from anybody shooting.
Twelve aeroplanes that are twelve different problems: the 109 goes vertical because it
cannot stay with you in a turn, the 110 cannot
turn with a bicycle, the Dornier presses on at nought feet, the Junkers 88 gets away
downhill and cannot be caught flat, the Henschel spotter turns inside everything you can
do, the Jabo will not fight until its bomb is gone, and the ace remembers what you did
last time.
One day in late October where everything the other fifteen taught you is the wrong
answer. The Italians came to Belgium that month and flew against Kent in Fiat CR.42
biplanes — open cockpits, fabric, eighty miles an hour slower than you, and they will
out-turn you all afternoon.
A white floatplane with red crosses on it, mid-Channel, and an order saying it is a
target. The game will not decide that one for you. It will make you say it twice, and
the last screen remembers which way you said it.
Two people who are not you: Sergeant Vane, who is nineteen and flies on your wing from
the first day, and Flight Lieutenant Marsh, who runs A Flight. What happens to Vane on
the ninth day is not scripted — it turns on whether you were shooting or watching.
Petrol, which is the other clock.
A float carburettor: push the nose down without rolling first and the engine floods and
stops. His is fuel-injected, which is exactly how he escapes that way.
Genre: life simulation ·
Length: about eighty years, twelve months each ·
Ending: one, and it is the one everybody gets
You are handed a body, a family, a house with or without heating, and about eighty years.
Nobody says anything else at all. The one thing the game asks before any of it happens is
whose life this is: a girl's or a boy's.
Every year is twelve months and you decide what to do with them, and they do not all cost
the same. There are never enough, and what you leave out is as much of the answer as what
you put in — that is the whole design.
What is in it
Months spent on study, a hobby, work, training, the people you have, or finding
somebody. A visit is a month; a qualification is three. Twelve months buys about four
serious undertakings or a great many small ones, and you cannot have both.
Thirty-seven vignettes, chosen by your stage, your people, your money, your habits and
what you have already lived through, so the same age twice is not the same year twice.
Every answer moves several things at once.
Relationships with a stage that moves both ways: seeing each other, steady, engaged,
married, over. They can propose. You can say no. People stay in your life after it ends.
Five capacities, five traits that move a point at a time, health and spirit and stress,
habits that are easy to start, and a body with a shape made of what you have been doing.
A table of who gets on with whom, which is a fact about a pair rather than about either
of them.
A pregnancy lived a month at a time, and — if there is no marriage behind it — a family
that does not have one reaction but several, in the same kitchen. Everyone you tell gets
their own answer out of what that family is, what you two have been to each other, and
the facts: with you, frightened for you, yes-on-condition-of-a-wedding, cold, or a word
neither of you gets to take back. The community is a separate animal. And nothing is
final — after the birth, some of them come to the door and do not mention any of it.
A place to be born in — a village, a town, a city, or out on the land — and it reaches
almost everything: whether there is work, whether there is work for somebody with nothing
on paper, how far the doctor is before any question of affording one, what is on the
table, how many people a life can hold, and whether the street minds what you do. It is
in the person, too: the land leaves a body that can do things and a bus that was an hour
away when there was homework. And you can leave — what it costs is the
house, two months, and most of your bonds.
Years that come back. Thirty-seven of the vignettes happen once, which is what youth is
made of; fourteen return with a different person in them each time, because middle age is
not made of firsts.
A month aimed at one person — SEE ALICE rather than a month spread over
whoever needed it most, which is a choice against everybody else and is said so.
You name your own children, once each, at the moment somebody asks for the form.
And an afterwards: when you die, you may go on as a living child of any age, or as the
person you were married to — and the next life begins where that person actually is, so a
child of three plays from three and a widower of forty-six from forty-six. They get what
was left, the house, the place you ended up in, and the bonds you built with everybody
still there — including the values you were raised under, because you are the family
now.
Money you can actually see: what is in hand, what is put by, what is owed, what the
house is worth and how much of it is still the bank's. A shop with eleven things in it,
one a year, none of them a trophy — a bicycle holds your fitness up, a telephone holds a
friendship together, a washing machine is four hours a week back for ever.
And a house you choose rather than a rung on a ladder: a flat, a terrace or one with a
garden, a tenth down and the rest to the bank for twenty-five years. What it costs is
where it stands: the same terrace is £48,360 in a village and £128,700 in a city, on the
same wage, which is most of what anybody means when they say they cannot afford to live
where they grew up.
Nothing else here is a number the player is shown.
Genre: a transcription of a 1972 game ·
Length: thirty stardates, an eight-by-eight galaxy ·
Ending: destroy the fleet, or run out of time
A Klingon fleet is loose in Federation space and you have thirty stardates to destroy it.
The galaxy is eight quadrants by eight; each quadrant is eight sectors by eight; you can
see the one you are in, and the computer remembers whatever the long-range sensors caught
on the way past.
Mike Mayfield wrote it on a Sigma 7 in 1971 and rewrote it for HP BASIC in October 1972.
That rewrite went onto HP's program library tape, round the DECUS tapes, into David Ahl's
collections, and from there into every language anybody has ever been bored in. It is the
ancestor of the whole family.
What is in it
A transcription, not an adaptation: every constant, every formula, every message and
every branch is that program's, and the comments carry its line numbers so the two can be
read side by side.
Seven places where the original is wrong and this is wrong in the same way, on purpose,
with a comment at each one saying so.
Orders given the way a 1972 teletype took them — a number and whatever that number asks
for, on one line. Give one short and you get the tape's own prompt for what is missing.
Course and warp, phasers, photon torpedoes, shields, damage control and the library
computer's three reports.
Every game above has a Play link. It opens the game in the browser player and starts
it. There is nothing to download, nothing to compile and no account, and nothing is
uploaded: the page fetches the compiled game and runs it on your own machine, and keeps
working with the network off once it has loaded.
Use Export save to copy a save out, and Import save to bring one back. A save
string carries the state of the random number generator as well as the world, so a seeded
game resumes exactly where it left off — and the same string works in the terminal player.
In a terminal
You need the compiler and the terminal player. The
downloads page has both, ready built, for Linux, Windows and
FreeBSD on 64-bit and 32-bit x86 and ARM. Then clone a game and compile it:
Compiling a game and playing it in a terminal.
git clone https://codeberg.org/zaytun-project/ragnarok
cd ragnarok
make # compiles the game
make play # plays it in the terminal
If you would rather build the toolchain from source, both repositories build with
make and need a C compiler and nothing else — see
getting started.
The commands
A few work in every game: movement — directions such as north,
in and down — plus look, examine,
wait, status, save, restore and
help.
Everything else depends on the game, and help lists exactly what this one
supports. It is not a fixed menu: the compiler works out what a game contains, so a
game with no combat does not offer attack, and a game with nothing to open
does not offer open. In practice you will meet take,
drop, inventory, use, read,
search, open, talk,
ask someone about something, attack and equip —
in the games that have something to use them on.
Games add verbs of their own on top, and help lists those too:
sing in Beren and Lúthien; cobble, listen and
mourn in Ragnarök; notebook, timeline,
present and accuse in The Last Witness. You never have to guess
what a particular game has added.
Zaytun Project