Counterfeit Monkey

You wake in a hotel room on the island nation of Anglophone Atlantis. You have a letter-remover in your pocket — a device that can remove a single letter from any object, transforming it into something else. An apple becomes an aple (useless), or you remove the P and get an ale. This isn’t wordplay for its own sake. This is how you survive.

Emily Short’s Counterfeit Monkey is the most ambitious wordplay game ever created. It’s also a thriller about identity, authoritarianism, and the violence inherent in controlling language. That it manages to be both — a gleeful puzzle playground and a serious work of political fiction — is a small miracle.

The Premise

Anglophone Atlantis is a nation where linguistic manipulation is real technology. Letter-removers delete characters from objects. Homophone paddles swap words for their sound-alikes. More advanced devices can anagram entire objects, or restore letters, or synthesize new words entirely. The Bureau of Orthography controls what transformations are legal, and you’re on the run.

Linguistic Determinism

The hypothesis that language shapes thought and perception. In Counterfeit Monkey, this is literal: changing a word changes reality.

You play as Alex/Andra — two people fused into one body through an illegal synthesis procedure. You share thoughts, memories, skills. The game uses this fusion brilliantly, letting you draw on two perspectives as you navigate a world that wants you dead.

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What Stands Out

The puzzle design is extraordinary. Short built a world where nearly every object can be transformed, and she accounted for thousands of possible manipulations. Remove the S from a ROSE and get ROE. Remove the U from a CLOUD and get CLOD. The game handles edge cases, jokes, and unintended solutions with remarkable grace.

The core loop is addictive: see an obstacle, inventory your objects, consider what transformations might help. Locked door? Maybe you have something that could become a KEY. Need to distract a guard? What animals could you create from nearby objects?

The world-building elevates the game onto another level. Atlantis feels lived-in: a tourist economy, a surveillance state, a history of linguistic colonialism. You’ll find pamphlets about approved terminology, memorials to banned words, underground resistance cells. The language manipulation isn’t magic — it’s technology with political implications.

The Tools

You’ll acquire new devices as the game progresses, each opening new puzzle possibilities:

Device	Function	Example
Letter-remover	Removes one letter	PLANE → LANE
Homophone paddle	Swaps for sound-alike	SALE → SAIL
Anagramming gun	Rearranges all letters	SENATOR → TREASON
Synthesizer	Combines two words	ASS + WORD → PASSWORD

The escalation is paced well. Just when you’ve mastered letter-removal, the game introduces homophones. Just when you’re comfortable with those, anagrams arrive. Each tool recontextualizes the puzzles you’ve already solved — you’ll realize there were alternate solutions everywhere.

The Identity

Alex and Andra’s fusion creates fascinating narrative tension. You have access to two sets of memories, two skill sets, two perspectives on Atlantis. The game explores what identity means when two people share one body — and what happens when that body might need to be separated.

The dual identity isn’t just narrative flavor — it’s thematically essential. In a world where language shapes reality, where words can be literally weaponized, who you are is a matter of what names you claim.

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What To Be Aware Off

The vocabulary demands can be steep. Solutions sometimes require knowing words that aren’t in common use — you might need to know that removing a letter from INCUBATOR gives you something useful. The game includes a hint system and is fair about providing context clues, but occasionally you’ll hit a wall that’s really a vocabulary wall.

The pacing sags in the middle act. The opening and closing sequences are tightly designed, but the midgame opens into a larger city that can feel aimless. You’re free to explore, which is wonderful, but the urgency of the thriller plot dissipates temporarily.

Playing Today

Counterfeit Monkey is freely available on IFDB and runs in any Glulx interpreter. The parser is robust, and the game includes extensive help systems.

Feature	Notes
Hint system	Built-in, context-sensitive
Tutorial mode	Guides new players through mechanics
Easy mode	Reduces some puzzle difficulty
Full game	8-15 hours depending on exploration

Commands you’ll use constantly:

• WAVE [letter]-REMOVER AT [object] — core mechanic
• PUT [object] ON T-INSERTER — later tool usage
• EXAMINE [object] — descriptions often hint at transformations
• INVENTORY — you’ll check this constantly

The Verdict

Counterfeit Monkey is the rare puzzle game that’s also a serious work of fiction. It makes you think about language — how words shape reality, who controls naming, what identity means when it can be literally rewritten. And it does all this while being fun, a sprawling playground of wordplay that rewards curiosity and lateral thinking.

Pack a dictionary. Trust the hint system. And remember: every object is a word waiting to become something else.

Counterfeit Monkey won the 2012 XYZZY Awards for Best Game, Best Writing, Best Setting, Best Puzzles, and Best Implementation — a near-total sweep that reflected the IF community's recognition of a landmark achievement.