A Text-Based Picture Game
Or, a picture-based text adventure
My favorite easter egg in any video game I’ve played is in Call of Duty: Black Ops, a 2010 first-person-shooter I sank countless hours into during my middle school years. I played online with my friends, talking to each other over cheap Bluetooth headsets about what guns were the best, or just what happened at school that day. It was the game to talk about around an eighth-grade lunch table in suburban New Jersey. And while I can’t say that BLOPS (as we referred to it back then) is the best game I’ve ever played, I have to admit that one of the easter eggs hidden in its main menu has stuck with me for over a decade.
Through a series of specific button-mashing maneuvers in the Black Ops main menu, one can access a whole different video game – Zork, a 1977 fantasy adventure game acquired in 1986 by Activision, the same company that publishes Call of Duty. Zork is expansive, and the gameplay revolves around exploring the vast underground world, fighting trolls, and collecting treasure. This all fits inside a main menu easter egg because Zork is a text adventure – there are no graphics, just text descriptions of everything in the world. The player controls their character by telling the game what to do based on those descriptions, from typing “walk south” to “hit the troll with the sword.” The game can parse a truly impressive range of various commands. It feels like you can do anything, and even when you reach the bounds of what is possible the game usually has a snarky response. I spent a whole afternoon exploring Zork inside of Black Ops when I first discovered it, seeing how far I could get in this 35-year-old game. In the end, not very far – after that one afternoon, I was back to the fast-paced high-definition death matches. Unsurprisingly, no one brought up Zork at the lunch table.
Despite never finishing Zork or revisiting text adventure games over the next several years, the idea of a video game without graphics stuck with me. My love for reading and books certainly played a part in this – at their core, text adventure games are like highly complex choose-your-own-adventure books, with countless different paths through the story and various (usually fatal) endings. The player only has the words of the creator to guide them through the fictional universe, and must use their own imagination to think of what is possible before typing it in. As I learned more about storytelling and narrative in high school and then college, Zork was always in the back of my mind.
Then in 2022, while I was walking around my neighborhood in Apache Junction, Arizona, I had the idea to make my own text adventure game. I had no idea how to go about doing this, but the idea was to make a game about walking around my neighborhood and taking pictures. The pictures would be the pictures I had been taking on my walks, and the player would get to see everything they captured at the end. I also thought that this would serve as the perfect third installment in my series of online picture mazes. I went home and after a night of furious internet research, I found Quest, an open-source platform for developing text adventure games. Quest has a relatively active user base and there are hundreds of games online that have been made with the software over the years. I jumped in and started my game immediately.
But much like my experience with Zork, I lost steam fast. You don’t need to know how to code to make a game in Quest, but you need to know how to use Quest and that learning curve seemed too steep at the time. I had other projects that needed attention and was soon moving across the country, starting a new job, and finding even newer projects to pour my time into. My game sat untouched for years, with only the slightest bits fleshed out.
Now it is 2025. I find myself about to move across the country again, but over the last several months I have made the time to work on my game. After finishing my book about Arizona, and not quite sure what to do with two years’ worth of pictures on the East Coast, I opened up Quest and started poking around. The setting would have to change from Apache Junction to West Philadelphia, but I started plugging away at the game a little each day. The hardest parts by far were figuring out the mechanics of the game, making things work the way I envisioned years before. But once I had the structure of a game where the player could take pictures of objects in a scene described to them, I was off to the races. At this point I have probably spent just as much time writing and troubleshooting this game as I did playing Black Ops back in eighth grade. But I am proud to say it is finished and ready for the world to enjoy now.
You can play it here. You can also check out all the other great text adventure games people are still making with Quest and other programs at textadventures.co.uk.
Maze #3 is not a puzzle game like a lot of text adventures – there is very little to figure out. You can walk around the neighborhood where Taylor and I have lived in West Philly, take pictures of the things you can see around you, and develop those pictures to see them at the end. If you want to block out some time to check it out, each playthrough takes about 20 minutes depending on how thorough you want to be. And it was made with the intention of being played more than once, if you so choose. There are over 150 different pictures to take, and even one or two little easter eggs to find. Just make sure to be observant.
I guess this is also to say that Taylor and I are moving to Atlanta in just over a month, where I will be starting grad school at Georgia State. I could not think of a better way to honor the beautiful neighborhood we have had the pleasure of living in here in West Philly than to allow others from all over to explore its small streets, blooming flowers, and joyful quirks. I hope I can do it justice before we have to leave.
The best game for the best neighborhood :)