JACL Interactive Fiction

Text adventures by Stuart Allen, written in JACL

Interactive fiction is a genre of text-based computer games where you read a description of a scene and type simple commands (for example go north, take lamp, or examine desk) to move through a story and solve its puzzles.

It is a direct descendant of the text adventures of the 1970s and 80s — titles like Zork, Adventure, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — and has a thriving modern community of authors and players.

The interpreter source code — for running JACL locally or contributing — is on GitHub.

Play a game

Click a game to play it right here in your browser — nothing to install.

iPad games

Download a game on your iPad and choose Open in JACL to play it in the app — offline, with graphics. Each download is a single .jaclgame file. (Don’t have the app yet? Get it under Software.)

Get the app

Native apps — offline play with graphics, sound, and a live map window.

Android beta — two quick steps. First join the jacl-testers group (Google Play grants beta access through this group), then opt in and install from Google Play.

Debian & Ubuntu — install and auto-update with apt:

curl -fsSL https://apt.dangarmarine.com.au/jacl.gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/jacl.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/jacl.gpg] https://apt.dangarmarine.com.au stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jacl.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install jacl-desktop

The JACL Author’s Guide

Read the full Guide right here, or open it in its own tab · also in print as the Lulu paperback.