Nirvana

Nirvana from 1989, by Wimsey Co., is a text adventure — worth knowing up front, since the title alone gives nothing away. The game takes you to the World of Wimsey, specifically to the village of Lostwithiel, which lives under a curse: at the end of every month the ice maiden Nirvana bewitches one young man, who is never seen again. Your task is to break the spell by finding the crystal bell, the one thing that can defeat her.

Play is classic parser fare: you type simple commands of two or three words, and the game understands them through a vocabulary of over a thousand words. You move with single-letter directions — U for up, W for west — and you speak to characters by putting your line in quotation marks, which was a rather civilised way of handling conversation for the late eighties.

Anyone who knows text adventures knows exactly what to expect: mapping rooms on paper, hunting for the right verb, getting stuck, and that particular satisfaction when the correct phrase finally moves the story forward. Nirvana stays inside those conventions — a typical representative of its genre rather than a revolution, and one that demands decent English besides, without which you will not get far.

An honest recommendation: by 1989 the bell was already tolling for the text adventure, and Nirvana is not one of the titles that pushed the form onward. But as a little-known piece with a pleasingly frosty fairy-tale premise, it will please anyone who loves interactive fiction and has already worked through the famous names. Everyone else can treat it as a taste of what adventuring looked like when it happened entirely in text and in the player's head.

You can play Nirvana at oldgame.cz directly in your browser, with nothing to install.