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I finished Infocom's Planetfall, the first Infocom game I've ever finished! I would post pictures of gameplay like usual, but since it's a text-adventure, it wouldn't be very nice looking.

In it you play as a lowly space janitor who takes refuge in an escape pod when explosions start happening on the ship. You land on some mysterious planet, have to figure out the mystery of what happened there, and get home. The story wasn't particularly interesting to me, it's a sci-fi comedy, but I rarely laughed. What I did enjoy was the gameplay, which is rare for me.

I don't know if it's just that the few text-adventures I've played are generally like this, but I usually like to actually engage in the gameplay whereas I usually don't with graphic adventures. I think it helps that there are resources to help you when you get stuck that aren't just a walkthrough like this hint guide I used: https://www.uhs-hints.com/uhsweb/planet.php (I recommend using it!) Also the design of text-adventures work for me in a way I feel that early graphic adventures latch onto even when they don't work as well (maybe I'll be proven wrong the more early graphic adventures I play).

One is that while puzzles are a major part of the game, even if you were to solve all of them, there's still value in playing through making maps and figuring out the order you want to solve puzzles in. I really enjoy getting a pencil and paper out and drawing a map one room at a time, spread across multiple pages, worrying about where to place the first room on a page to not have it flow into a new one. In graphic adventures I don't feel the need as much since the graphics can serve as an aid. As you fill out the map you discover puzzles, writing them down, and once you fill out as much of the map as you can at that point, you start to figure out which puzzle you can solve. It was nice when I could figure a puzzle out on my own, but that was very rare. I used the hints a lot, but along with inventory management, the time system, and the hunger/tiredness/illness stats to keep in mind, there's still enough that I was managing on my own. I made some mistakes this way, but this is the fun of text-adventures.

Spoiler to illustrate my point

There's a point where you get access to a shuttle that takes you to the second major area of the game. You have to manually control the acceleration and deceleration to not crash when stopping at the station, but this also takes a lot of time. I made it to the other side, explored for a while, then realized I needed to go back to the first area. I make it to the shuttle only to realize that you can't use it at night. I'll starve waiting it out, so I reload and drive back immediately to the first area, also using the shuttle to drop items I don't need currently but can grab again when I need them since the shuttle will always be in the area I'm in. I sleep in the first area(the only place you can sleep), then in the morning go back to the second area with all the items I need in the shuttle. I just needed to keep in mind the time so I can make it back to sleep in time. Little did I know that in the second area I would find a card that would unlock a teleportation room that can easily transport you between the two areas...

Dead ends also don't bother me here since it's so quick and easy to get back to where you are, and on that retry you can do it more efficiently. Usually in the "treasure hunt"-style text-adventures(Colossal Cave Adventure, etc.) this is absolutely necessary and is where those games are at their best. In Planetfall not as necessary, though still helpful. On the first day I played I got through about 30% of the game, but on the second day I made a plan on how I would do everything in less turns, started over and executed that plan which left me in a better spot stat-wise.

Also having just played two Japanese parser-based adventure games from 1983 and having also translated a Japanese parser from 1983, you really can feel the difference in parser complexity. While most Japanese parsers (whether they are in English or Japanese) usually take only two words or set phrases, in Planetfall I was combining commands and putting in what felt more like actual sentences. Funnily enough, when I tried to put in a two word command, it specifically pointed out how Infocom games don't take such basic commands lol. I know there's some Japanese Infocom ports in the 90s, so I wonder how the parsers work there and if they improved from the ones from the 80s, might play it just to see. (EDIT: I did check it out! Here's the link)

The effort I put here may sound like a lot of game time, but not really. The game took me about ~5 hours even with my mistakes, failing to solve puzzles, and dying. If I just used a walkthrough, probably about 30-60 minutes, but it was a better time using hints instead.

I really had a good time with Planetfall and by extension text-adventures in a way I usually don't with other kinds of adventure games, and I hope this at least explained why I think it's worth playing them and how to make it a little easier to get into.