Rediscovering Text Adventures with the Ink Console
A new handheld gaming system, Ink Console, aims to bring back the magic of '80s text adventures. Developed by Daniel “Dana” Puchau from Shanghai, this device features a 7.5-inch e-ink screen capable of displaying an 800 x 480 black & white resolution.
Specifications:*
- Microprocessor: ESP32-D0WDQ6 (dual-core 32-bit)
- Flash Memory: 4MB
- PSRAM: 8 MB
- SRAM: 520 KB
- Connectivity: Bluetooth 4.2 and Wi-Fi 4
- Built-in SD card reader for additional games
Three initial titles are in development:
- Toto Umbrella
- The Visit
- Breath
With the potential to develop more through its SDK in future. The developer says they intend to release the SDK and open-source the project upon completion of crowd-funding campaign.
Puchau remarks:
The idea for Ink Console came from a desire to bring the magic of text adventures, like the 1980s classic Zork I, to a new audience unfamiliar with these games. We also were very inspired by the beloved Choose Your Own Adventure series of books. Our hope is that this interactive format makes reading feel like an adventure and helps instill a love for books in young readers.
There’s a link in the original article to the Crowdsupply campaign.
What are your favourite text adventure memories?
I’m excited to see what weird and archaic form of DRM the creator decides to bake into this device, just like their gameboy games
Couldn’t you just develop these games on phones/tablets, with full color and a keyboard?
Yes, but there’s definitely some appeal to playing text based games on an e-ink screen. As for colour, sometimes less is more - the Playdate is also B&W and has built a terrific community.
Sure. I prefer reading books on an e-ink screen as well. But that’s for books, not a game genre that peaked 45 years ago.
I just can’t see a product like this having enough demand. Hopefully they find a way to make it work, because I totally get wanting to own a specialized object like this.
Just like the rabbit r1, this could have been an
emailapp
Yay more e-waste.
More interactive than CYOA, more restrictive than traditional text adventures. Kind of point-and-clicky. IDK. I’m intrigued and will keep an eye on it. I hope they release the SDK well in advance of launch at least.
Can you not do a choose your own adventure book on a standard eReader with anchor links?
There are plenty of Android-based eReaders available too, so you can just do a CYOA app geared directly (or having a specific mode) for such e-Ink devices’ particular graphics.
Yes but that won’t allow the game to track stats, inventory, etc, or to dynamically change the text based on game state, so you’d be strictly limited to traditional CYOA book conversions.
This looks to be aiming for something more advanced.
That sounds like a software issue more than anything. You can “run” Doom entirely in a PDF document (by PDF supporting embedded javascript). Any ebook reader supporting that feature set of PDFs would be able to handle “full fledged” games.
I was just thinking about texting adventures and if there were any with like trained llm backends
Sadly, I doubt it will get much traction, a portable device for text adventures, without a keyboard?
Ok, you can use suggestions, but that can spoil the gameplay…
I could live without the “guess which commands even work right now”, aspect of the original gameplay.
I don’t have the game patience I had back then.
I remember playing one of the Zork games. It may even have been the first one. I felt like I knew what I had to do. There were a bunch of crows blocking my path. And there was a field with a scarecrow in it. And I could not figure out any command to take the scarecrow or take its clothes or do anything with it. And I was totally stuck and stopped playing the game. Not fun.
Without a keyboard, that sounds terrible. Or just a glorified e-reader.
Looks good
It’s absurd that this doesn’t have a keyboard.
Didn’t Tom Hanks invent this in “Big”?
