Wychwood is a 1985 text-parser interactive fiction game for ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro by Geoffrey Hans Larsen.
It was originally written in The Quill, a seminal british text adventure writing engine.
Wychwood is on the IFDB, which includes links to play the BBC Micro version and a walkthrough.
Wychwood was written by an enthusiast -- the core user base for The Quill, and the main user of Inform.
With some interesting plot threads, a few solid puzzles, a timer-based game loop, and some design choices worth debating and talking about, I personally found Wychwood extremely compelling not only as a period study, but as a parser game design example.
Other games by Larsoft, especially Hex, are somewhat well-remembered, but Geoffrey H. Larsen doesn't seem to be well-documented as a writer, even though he wrote 6 games over 4 years at the very beginning of The Quill.
Given that it's an enthusiast's second project in a new engine that required a simple setup, I figured that it'd be a simple project to learn Inform 7 and document that learning process.
I also want more folks to play this game! It's a great example of an early project made in The Quill, and I wanted to keep almost everything the same.
Once I've fully released the game on itch.io, I'll return to it to create a more modern version of the game.
The core of the game is solid, but doesn't match with the expectations of 2022's parser game players. I'd love to update everything while still telling the same core story and using the same core puzzles.
The game was coded live on Twitch over 6 sessions by ferkung. Those videos are saved as highlights there, and will be uploaded as time-stamped versions on my YouTube.
We typically play text adventures, FMV games, and narrative games! You should come hang out!
Yes! Please make any and all pull requests! I'm just learning Inform, and I'd love to have ugly structures solved.