Jinxter

I stepped off the bus and immediately got run over by a car. That's how Jinxter begins — and when the game explains in the first few seconds that you have incredible bad luck, you know this won't be an ordinary text adventure.

Magnetic Scrolls released Jinxter in 1988 and set it in a fantasy world called Aquitania. The balance there depends on a magical bracelet whose power is kept in check by a dark sorceress. The main protagonist — a bumbler par excellence — stumbles into the whole story more or less by accident, and his survival throughout is more of a statistical anomaly than the result of his own ability. The humor is intentional and British, which wasn't a given for text adventures back in 1988.

It plays like a classic text adventure with a parser. You type commands, the game responds. Magnetic Scrolls always had a more sophisticated parser than much of the competition — it understood more natural sentence constructions and didn't make you feel stupid for every other phrasing. Jinxter also works with the motif of a guardian spirit who occasionally pulls you out of trouble if you have the bracelet with you. It's elegant game design that reinforces the feeling that your character is fatally incompetent, while the game doesn't kill you with every other command.

What Magnetic Scrolls did better than anyone except Infocom was write. Jinxter has text that's fun to read — it's not just functional room descriptions, but atmosphere and irony doled out with restraint. What's aged here is mainly what ages in all games of this genre: dead ends, puzzle logic that only makes sense to the authors, and endless save-scumming, because death comes silently and without warning. 1988 was harsh to players.

Today Jinxter appeals mainly to those who love text adventures for their literary quality, not for action. If you enjoy reading, thinking, and occasionally cursing at the screen with measured calm, this is exactly your category. You can run it in your browser without installation, without DOSBox, and without hunting for the right version on sketchy servers. Give it half an hour and find out if British humor about a catastrophically unlucky hero will grab you — or not. I knew from that bus moment.