I made another game

I thought about doing something for Manifesto Jam 2026, but I was having trouble coming up with video game opinions I felt strongly enough about to publish in manifesto form.

Then I had the idea, "what if I wrote my manifesto in text adventure form?" It seemed like a strong concept: I've wanted to make a proper text adventure for a long time. It's a format I've toyed with as long as I've been making games, even going so far as attempting to write my own very cruddy parser back in the Apple ][ days¹ (I didn't get very far.) It could be a fun game in its own right but also a meta-commentary on what I think makes for good interactive fiction.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the idea until a couple days before the deadline, and I had to learn how to make a text adventure, so I didn't even come close to finishing in time. But, I'm still pretty proud of it. I used Inform 7, a language I've tinkered with in the past but never went beyond the basics. I thought I might be able to finish a game in a couple days, because the basics are quite intuitive, but there's a lot of intermediate-level features that seem like they should be simple, but actually required a lot of scouring the documentation, googling for forum questions and trial-and-error. Now I feel like I have a pretty decent handle on it, and my next project should go a lot more smoothly.

I wasn't sure if I'd be able to use Inform 7 at all, since the Linux version of the IDE is borderline unusable, but there now exists the website borogove.app, which lets you make interactive fiction in your browser. I found it indispensable.

My game's called GET MANIFE$TO and it's on itch.io. You can play it by clicking the button below. It's a shorty—it's hard to estimate how long it'll take someone else to finish, but I figure an average of 20 minutes or so. But there's a lot of fun easter eggs to find if you try different things, so definitely play around if you feel so inclined.

If you've never played a text adventure, this is a pretty gentle one to start with: you can die, but you can always UNDO to continue playing without losing any progress. It shouldn't be possible to get into a state where the game is unsolvable; on the Zarfian Forgiveness Scale, it would be classified as "Polite". Hope you enjoy!