Questions and answers

Interactive fiction, or a text adventure, is a story you play by typing. The game describes where you are; you type what to do, such as open the mailbox or go north, and the story answers. Infocom's Zork made the form famous in the 1980s, and people have written thousands of these parser games since, many of them free.

Yes. It plays every Z-machine version, 1 to 8, so it plays all of Infocom's games: Zork I–III, Planetfall, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Trinity and the rest, including the graphical Zork Zero, Shogun, Journey and Arthur, and the sound in The Lurking Horror and Sherlock. It also opens original disk images from the Amiga, Macintosh, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64 and PC. See what it plays.

No. It's a player, and you bring your own game files. Thousands of games are free on IFDB and the IF Archive, and you can search IFDB and download free games from inside the app. Some Infocom games are still sold, such as the Zork Anthology. The free demo comes with the whole of Zork I. Here's where to find games.

Z-machine (including Inform 6 and Inform 7 games), Glulx, Blorb and Scott Adams adventures. It doesn't play TADS, Hugo, ADRIFT or choice-based Twine games.

Lanthorn is free and open source, and runs in a terminal as a TUI. The Golden Lanthorn is built on the same engine, maps and hints, but it's an app for your computer or Android device: games set in real book typefaces, graphics drawn at full quality, a library of covers, a clickable map and a command tray. The two share saves and settings, so you can move between them. Buying it helps keep Lanthorn's development going.

Mac, Windows, Linux and Android, on itch.io now, with a free demo, and a Docker image for a home server or NAS. Any other phone or tablet on your home network, an iPhone or iPad included, can play your library through the desktop app's built-in web server. An app for iPhone and iPad is planned for later.

The apps aren't signed by Apple or Microsoft yet, so your computer asks before opening them the first time. On a Mac, open the app once and close the warning, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway next to The Golden Lanthorn. On Windows, if SmartScreen says “Windows protected your PC”, click More info, then Run anyway. On Linux, mark the AppImage as executable first (right-click, Properties, or chmod +x), or use the .deb. After that, it opens normally.

Delete the app: on a Mac, drag it to the Trash; on Windows, delete its folder; on Linux, delete the AppImage or remove the package. Your saves, settings, the narrator's voice and speech recognition are kept, so a reinstall picks up where you left off. To remove those too, delete the lanthorn folders:

• Mac and Linux: ~/.config/lanthorn, ~/.local/share/lanthorn, ~/.cache/lanthorn and ~/.local/state/lanthorn (or ~/.lanthorn, on older installs)
• Windows: %APPDATA%\lanthorn and %LOCALAPPDATA%\lanthorn

The free Lanthorn TUI uses the same folders, so keep them if you use it too.

Yes. It runs on your computer and plays game files from your own disk, with no account. It needs a connection only when you ask it to search IFDB, look up covers, details or documents there, or download a game, and once for the narrator's voice and speech recognition, the first time you switch each on.

In Settings, the cog at the top of the window:

• The narrator: switch on Read the game aloud in Settings → Narrator.
• Voice commands: set Speak commands to Push to talk or Hands-free in Settings → Voice commands.
• The Babel Lamp: choose a language for the Babel Lamp in Settings → Language learning.

Each asks before its one-time download, then works offline. Voice and languages shows each step, with pictures.

Yes. The narrator's voice needs a one-time download of about 330 MB the first time you switch it on in Settings → Narrator, and voice commands need speech recognition, about 660 MB more, the first time you turn them on. After that both work offline. You can remove either at any time in Settings → Narrator. Here's how to set up the narrator, voice commands and the Babel Lamp.

Yes. The map draws itself as you explore, room by room, and you can click a passage to follow it. Hints, both a game's own hint menus and InvisiClues-style hint files, open in a side panel so you never lose your place. Manuals, feelies, solutions and maps from IFDB open in the Documents tab.

No. On Android, the Zork I demo (The Golden Lanthorn Demo) and the full app are separate apps, and each keeps its own copy of the models for the narrator's voice, voice commands and the Babel Lamp in its own app folder. If you play the demo and then buy the full app, you download the models again in the full app.

Each app's models are removed when that app is uninstalled, so uninstalling the demo frees the space its models take. Here's how to set them up.

On Mac, Windows and Linux, the demo and the full app share downloaded models and settings.

Saved games don't carry over on any platform. The demo's Zork I is built from Microsoft's released source code, a different version from the Zork I you would play in the full app, and a saved game only restores in the version that made it.

If you're the author, yes. Your game can become its own app, with your title, cover and icon, ready to sell on itch.io, Steam, the App Store or Google Play. It's something we'd build with you, and there's no ready-made kit. See our page for authors.