As someone who's spent countless hours lost in the paranoid, twisting realities of Philip K. Dick's novels, I’ve always thought it would be fascinating to bring that sense of dislocation and uncertainty into a playable form. At the same time, I have a deep love for the classic text adventure games of the 1980s, especially Infocom’s masterpieces like Zork, where every room, every object, and every line of text contributes to an immersive narrative. It occurred to me that blending these two interests could produce something truly engaging: a text adventure where nothing is quite what it seems, and every discovery feels like piecing together fragments of a memory.
I decided to code this game in Python, keeping a few core design goals in mind. First, I wanted the game to feel like an Infocom adventure, so I structured it around a series of interconnected rooms, each with its own description, items, and NPCs. The player moves through these spaces using simple two-word commands like "go north" or "take wallet," much like the old parser systems that made classic interactive fiction so approachable and fun.
The game engine itself is data-driven. Rooms, items, and NPCs are all stored in dictionaries with unique identifiers, which makes it straightforward to expand the world later. Each room defines its exits, items present, and NPCs in place. Items can have clues associated with them, and NPCs can offer dialogue that hints at larger mysteries. Using Python’s dataclasses made it easy to encapsulate these properties while keeping the code readable and maintainable.
Player actions are handled through simple functions tied to verbs: go, take, use, talk, and so on. For instance, when the player uses the take command, the code checks whether the item is present and portable, adds it to the inventory, and collects any associated clues. Use commands allow the player to interact with objects or room features to trigger additional story events, like unlocking a door or revealing hidden information. There's also a clue and memory system that monitors the player’s discoveries; once enough clues are collected, the player recovers a key memory, which acts as a milestone in uncovering their identity.
Save and load functionality was also important, reflecting the classic adventure game experience where progress mattered. The game can save the current room, inventory, NPC states, and collected clues to a JSON file, and restore everything from that file later.
The narrative logic is built around the idea of memory recovery in a dystopian world—a theme central to Dick's work. The player starts with no memory and must piece together their identity by exploring the environment, interacting with NPCs, and collecting items. Clues are scattered across the world, and certain items or interactions trigger additional revelations. The balance between exploration, discovery, and narrative progression aims to capture the same unsettling tension found in Dick's novels, where reality is mutable and perception is unreliable.
This project was a perfect pairing for my interests: the procedural, logic-driven structure of a text adventure married to the thought-provoking themes and disorienting world-building of Philip K. Dick. It's designed to be extensible, so I can easily add more rooms, items, and puzzles in the future. For fans of either classic interactive fiction or Philip K. Dick's writing, this game represents a small but enjoyable intersection of those worlds—a place where the past, memory, and reality are constantly up for interpretation.
The code can be downloaded here if you want to try it out.
Now to see if ChatGPT can pass the Voight-Kampff test...
