How To Play

New to interactive fiction? No problem! This guide should help you to get started. 

Overview 

Text parsers can only understand very simple phrases. It's best to keep things simple, or the game won't understand what you're trying to do - for example, if you're trying to examine a big red book, instead of typing "I want to look at the big red book to see what it's about", try "examine book" or "x book" or if there are lots of different books, "x big red book". 

When starting a game, it's often a good idea to take a good look at your surroundings and examine everything in the room to see what things you can interact with.  You can even try typing x self to find out who you are!

If you try something and it doesn't work but feels like it should have, double check your spelling. Text parsers can be picky and if a word is not spelled correctly, they will likely not understand what you want to do. 

General Commands 

Try these general commands: 

Look 

Examine [a thing] 

Inventory

Take [a thing]

Drop [a thing] 

Search [a thing] 

North, South, East, West 

Ask [a person] about [a thing] 

You can also try: 

Buy [a thing] 

Catch [a thing] in [a container] 

Smear [a thing] with [another thing]

Jump 

Sing 

Dance 

Xyzzy

Shortcuts 

There are a number of sneaky shortcuts that can be used to save you from typing out lots of text to perform common tasks. Here is a list of the ones that you will find helpful when playing The Phoenix: