This is a great point! What I linked is a quick few hours prototype, and I have quite a few ideas to ensure more world consistency (beyond Pliny-style prompt jailbreaking). I didn't have the time yet to prove they would work well, though.
Re:The Greatness of Text Adventures
by bongodongobob on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @01:51PM
(#45659083)
I ended up giving up. It's incredibly hard to keep it on track but also let the user be creative. At any time I could just say things like "I jump into the lake" or "I open the chest" even though neither one was mentioned, and it would happily continue on. I found myself pretty far down the generate a JSON scene full of JSON objects to interact with and quit - because at that point, you're just writing a game engine.
Yeah. One of the first things I try with language models is ask them to play Zork. Tends to work ok for a couple of rooms and then falls apart hard. There just aren't any guardrails in place and so I usually end up in a room full of busty catgirls or something with an inventory that makes no sense.
You ride east, the coastal cliffs of the Grey Havens and the figures of wood elves giving way to rolling green hills. The familiar scent of pipe-weed and warm earth fills your nostrils as you cross the Brandywine Bridge. Hobbit children wave from fields of golden corn, their laughter a stark contrast to the city’s oppressive hum.
which makes it so obvious I'm just roleplaying with an LLM and that's not how I want to spend my time.
(LLM output edited and abbridged for your reading pleasure. It was more verbose in the original.)
((Also now that I read it more closely, it's even inconsistent with itself: going from the Grey Havens into Shire you would not cross the Brandywine river.))