My First Dunnet Adventure

I may have heard about Dunnet before, but I first noticed it in some dark corner of the Random slack channel at the office. It’s a text-based adventure game, meaning it’s played on the Terminal (yea, you heard that right) with commands.

The poster said:

Who wants to play a game on their terminal? You do? Try this command on your terminal: `emacs -batch -l dunnet`

Well, it’s me, I love me a good game, and I’ve never played on on the terminal, so, I fire up my Terminal (on Mac), and enter the emacs -batch -l dunnet command.

Instantly, I get the message:

Dead end

You are at a dead end of a dirt road.  The road goes to the east.
In the distance you can see that it will eventually fork off.  The trees here are very tall royal palms, and they are spaced equidistant from each other.

There is a shovel here.

Okay, seems like some old western country kinda setup. Awesome!

Now, I don’t know how to move, so I go back to the thread ready to ask directions, when I see a helpful soul has provided them:

(Some basics: 

to pick up an object, use the word "get," as in
`get shovel` 

to move, type the direction, as in
`east`

to examine an object, use the word "examine," as in
`examine shovel`

I later find out I could have just used the help command.

My Move

So, I proceed to obtain the shovel, because why not?

> get shovel
Taken

I then go East, cos that’s where the road leads, and no use waiting ehn?

“Only the dead wait at a dead end” — first rule of survival in old country.

The Boring Boulder

E/W Dirt road
You are on the continuation of a dirt road.  There are more trees on both sides of you.  The road continues to the east and west.
There is a large boulder here.

Oh, nice!

Let’s exerciser our knowledge of the game’s commands and see what kinda boulder this is.

> examine boulder
It is just a boulder.  It cannot be moved.

Oh, well … we tried … we move:

>east
Fork
You are at a fork of two passages, one to the northeast, and one to the southeast.  The ground here seems very soft. You can also go back west.

The Fork

Now, we’re at the fork, and can go either northeast or southeast.

We go North-East!

When in doubt, always go north

> northeast
NE/SW road
You are on a northeast/southwest road.

Just a road? Let’s move further!

> northeast
Building front
You are at the end of the road.  There is a building in front of you to the northeast, and the road leads back to the southwest.

Yaaay, A Building!

> examine building
I don't know what that is

What do you mean? You just told me there was a building. Maybe we haven’t gotten there yet!

Move further?

> northeast
You don't have a key that can open this door.

Guess we should have taken the other fork, eh?

Let’s turn around

Opposite of North-East is South-West, and that’s where we’ll head if we want to turn around.

> southwest
NE/SW road
> southwest
Fork

Now, we’re at the fork again … Let’s go South-East this time.

What lies yonder?

> southeast
SE/NW road
You are on a southeast/northwest road.
There is some food here.

Food!!!

> get food
Taken.

We move?

> southeast
Bear hangout
You are standing at the end of a road.  A passage leads back to the northwest.
There is a ferocious bear here!

It’s a game, so of course I underestimate the bear

> southeast
The bear is very annoyed that you would be so presumptuous as to try and walk right by it.  He tells you so by tearing your head off.

You are dead.

You have scored 0 out of a possible 90 points.

What???

Lol, imagine how I felt when that happened. In hindsight, I can’t think, “what was I thinking?”.

That the bear would just let me walk past?

That maybe it was a test of my courage?

Pfft!

Whatever it was or wasn’t doesn’t matter.

I’ll play this game again as soon as I can.