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Counterfeit Monkey

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Outdoor Café

Metal tables and chairs cluster beneath a striped awning. A single patron nurses an espresso, watching the street.

examine patron

A tired-looking woman in business attire. She hasn't noticed you.

use letter-remover on patron

What letter do you want to remove?

The woman shimmers and reforms into... a large parrot, which squawks indignantly and flaps away.

[Wait, no. PATRON - P = ATRON, which isn't a word. Let me try again.]

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?

Keep a mental (or physical) list of your objects and their possible transformations. The game rewards lateral thinking — sometimes the solution involves an object you picked up hours ago.

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.

What works

Brilliant, innovative core mechanic
Thousands of valid transformations
Rich world-building
Multiple solutions to most puzzles

What doesn't

Can be overwhelming for new players
Some obscure vocabulary required
Pacing drags in middle sections

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 anagramming gun can create unexpected (and sometimes dangerous) results. Save before experimenting with it, especially on living creatures.

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.

Safe House — Night

A cramped apartment above a repair shop. Maps cover the walls. Your contact has left supplies on the table.

think about andra

Her memories surface: growing up on the mainland, learning to hate Atlantean control, the first time she saw the ocean. You're not sure where her thoughts end and yours begin anymore.

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.

Short spent years developing the linguistic engine that powers Counterfeit Monkey. The game tracks thousands of nouns and their possible transformations, including many that players never discover.

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.

The endgame forces a choice: remain fused as Alex/Andra or separate back into two people. The synthesis procedure can't be perfectly undone — one of you may not survive the separation. The game tracks your choices throughout to determine who emerges.

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.

Anchorhead

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There's a moment in Anchorhead when you realize the town has been watching you all along. Not the people — the town itself. The streets that loop back on themselves. The windows that seem darker from inside than out. The way the fog rolls in precisely when you'd rather it didn't.

Michael Gentry's 1998 classic remains the gold standard for horror in interactive fiction. You play a woman who's just moved to the decrepit New England town of Anchorhead with her husband, who's inherited a mysterious estate. What begins as unpacking boxes and exploring a new home spirals into cosmic horror that would make Lovecraft proud.

The Weight of Place

Anchorhead itself is the real antagonist. Gentry builds the town through accumulation — each location adding another layer of wrongness. The real estate office with its too-friendly clerk. The church with its locked basement. The pub where conversations stop when you enter. None of these are overtly threatening on day one, but they lodge in your mind like splinters.

Town Square

Gray flagstones, slick with rain and mist, stretch away to the north and south. The dismal streets of Anchorhead crowd close on every side. An old, moss-eaten fountain stands in the center of the square.

examine fountain

The fountain has been dry for years. Lichen and sickly moss have colonized the basin. The statue in the center depicts some sort of cherub, but its features have been worn away by time and weather.

The Verlac mansion anchors everything. Its rooms unfold like a puzzle box, each discovery raising more questions. The architecture doesn't quite make sense. Hallways seem longer than they should be. You'll find yourself mapping the house obsessively, not because the game demands it, but because you need to understand.

What Works

The pacing is impeccable. Gentry understands that horror lives in the space between discoveries. Day one feels almost mundane — you're finding keys, meeting locals, getting your bearings. By day three, you're questioning reality itself. The game trusts you to notice the wrongness accumulating rather than announcing it.

The parser implementation rewards thorough exploration without punishing reasonable assumptions. Examine everything. Read everything. The game trusts you to be curious and pays that curiosity back with layers of worldbuilding that most modern games can't match.

Key verbs you'll use constantly:

EXAMINE (or X) — your most important tool
READ — books, papers, and inscriptions hide crucial lore
SEARCH — sometimes more thorough than examine
ASK [person] ABOUT [topic] — NPCs know more than they let on

The writing threads a needle between purple prose and clinical detachment. Gentry knows when to describe the texture of decay on a wall and when to simply state what you find. The restraint makes the vivid moments land harder.

What works

Masterful slow-burn atmosphere
Puzzles serve the story
Deep, explorable world
Fair parser implementation

What doesn't

Some timing-dependent puzzles
Possible soft-locks on day three
A few obscure object interactions

The Puzzle Design

Anchorhead's puzzles serve the story rather than blocking it. You're never solving a sliding tile puzzle for its own sake — you're figuring out how to access the next piece of the mystery. Many solutions feel less like adventure game logic and more like the desperate improvisation of someone in genuine danger.

That said, some puzzles rely on timing that can lock you out of victory if you've missed earlier steps. The game spans three days with a soft time limit, and certain actions must happen in sequence.

Save in multiple slots at the start of each day. Some puzzles have narrow windows, and you may need to replay sections.

Day three has a hard time limit. If you haven't completed certain preparations by then, the game becomes unwinnable. Keep a save from early day three.

The Horror

Without spoiling specifics: Anchorhead earns its horror through patience. The Lovecraft influence is obvious but not derivative. Gentry understands that cosmic horror isn't about tentacles — it's about the slow realization that human concerns are irrelevant to forces that predate and will outlast us.

Cosmic Horror: A genre emphasizing humanity's insignificance against vast, incomprehensible forces. Terror comes from knowledge, not violence.

The body horror, when it comes, is effective precisely because the game has spent hours establishing normalcy. You've made tea. You've browsed a bookshop. You've had awkward conversations with your husband about the move. When the wrongness finally manifests physically, it violates a world you've come to inhabit.

The Verlac family line has been breeding with something inhuman for generations. Your husband Michael is part of this bloodline — and by the end, you'll discover the ritual that's been centuries in the making. The baby isn't what it seems.

Playing Today

The 2018 commercial release on Steam and itch.io includes quality-of-life improvements and expanded content, but the original 1998 version remains freely available and perfectly playable. Either version rewards patience and attention.

Version	Price	Notes
Original (1998)	Free	Available on IFDB, requires interpreter
Commercial (2018)	$9.99	Steam/itch.io, built-in hints, expanded content

Modern players may find the parser interface initially frustrating, but Anchorhead is more forgiving than many games of its era. The verb set is reasonable, synonyms are handled well, and the game rarely requires guess-the-noun precision.

Here's a typical interaction that shows the parser at its best:

examine desk

The desk is old and worn, its surface covered with scattered papers and a fine layer of dust. One drawer hangs slightly open.

search drawer

Pushing aside old receipts and broken pencils, you find a tarnished brass key.

take key

Taken.

[Your score has increased by 5 points.]

Gentry released the source code for the original version, making Anchorhead a valuable learning resource for aspiring IF authors working in Inform 6.

The Verdict

Anchorhead isn't just a great horror game — it's a great game, period. Twenty-five years later, its fog still creeps under the door. The town still watches. And somewhere in the Verlac mansion, something is waiting.

Play it with the lights on. Or don't. The darkness knows you're there either way.

The 2018 commercial release adds approximately 25% more content, including expanded endings and additional locations in the town.

80 Days

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

You are Passepartout, valet to the unflappable Phileas Fogg, and you have eighty days to circumnavigate the globe. How you do it — and who you become along the way — is entirely up to you.

Inkle's 80 Days takes Verne's novel and cracks it open, filling the spaces between chapters with a steampunk world of walking cities, submersible trains, and political revolution. This isn't adaptation; it's reinvention. The source material provides a skeleton; the game builds an entire world around it.

The World

The map spans 150 cities across every continent. Each is hand-written, distinct, and connected to its neighbors through routes that range from conventional (steamship, train) to fantastical (mechanical camels, airborne hotels, a tunnel through the Earth's core). The joy is in the discovery — you'll finish your first playthrough having seen perhaps thirty cities, knowing there are a hundred more waiting.

Steampunk: A genre blending Victorian aesthetics with advanced steam-powered technology. In 80 Days, this extends to automata, airships, and mechanical megafauna.

Inkle's steampunk isn't Victorian cosplay. It's a political reimagining where colonial powers are destabilizing, where revolution simmers in India and Haiti, where the Ottoman Empire fields mechanical armies. The technology isn't decorative — it's transforming societies, and you'll witness the human cost alongside the wonder.

What Works

The writing is extraordinary. Meg Jayanth's prose finds Passepartout's voice — curious, occasionally naive, ultimately capable of real growth — and sustains it across thousands of possible encounters. Your valet might begin as a dutiful servant and end as a revolutionary sympathizer, a published author, or a man questioning everything he believed about loyalty and empire.

Every city offers choices that feel consequential without paralyzing you:

Help a fugitive escape Russian authorities in Omsk
Invest in a struggling inventor's mechanical limbs in Vienna
Choose sides in a worker's revolt in Yokohama
Barter, beg, or bluff your way onto transport you can't afford

The resource management adds stakes without overwhelming the narrative. Money matters — you'll sell your luggage, haggle in markets, and occasionally make morally questionable deals to fund the journey. Time matters — miss a connection and you might wait three days or find a faster route. But these pressures serve the story rather than suffocating it.

Don't optimize your first playthrough. Get lost. Miss connections. The stories you find in the gaps are often better than the "efficient" path.

What works

Exceptional writing throughout
Massive, handcrafted world
Meaningful character development
Endless replayability

What doesn't

Map can overwhelm newcomers
Anticlimactic ending
Some UI friction on PC

Passepartout and Fogg

The relationship between valet and master is the game's emotional core. Fogg begins as an enigma — silent, demanding, unreadable. But across eighty days and countless conversations, you'll uncover what drives him. Why this bet? Why this obsession with schedule and control?

Your choices shape both characters. A Passepartout who pushes back on Fogg's demands will find a different man than one who anticipates every need. By journey's end, the circumnavigation matters less than what these two people have become to each other.

Aboard the Aurora — Day 34

The airship hums through the night sky. Fogg stands at the window, watching clouds pass below.

Ask about the wager

"Twenty thousand pounds," he says without turning. "But you understand, Passepartout, it was never about the money."

Press further

He is silent for a long moment. "I needed to know if the world still held surprises. If routine had not consumed everything."

The game handles service and class with surprising nuance. Passepartout is a servant, and the game doesn't pretend otherwise — but it also gives him interiority, agency, and moments where he must decide what loyalty actually means.

Routes and Replayability

The map can feel overwhelming on first playthrough. With 150+ cities and countless routes, analysis paralysis is real. Embrace the chaos — the game is designed for replay, and your first fumbling journey will be memorable precisely because you didn't optimize it.

Route	Time	Highlights
East via Suez	~65 days	Classic route, colonial tensions in India
North via Russia	~70 days	Trans-Siberian intrigue, political upheaval
West via America	~75 days	Frontier chaos, mechanical wilds
South via Africa	~80+ days	Riskiest, most adventurous

No two playthroughs are identical. The game tracks your choices across runs, and certain content only unlocks after specific experiences. I've completed the journey a dozen times and still discover new encounters.

Some routes through politically unstable regions can end your journey prematurely. The North African and Central Asian paths are particularly volatile. Save before entering unfamiliar territory.

Writer Meg Jayanth created over 500,000 words of content for 80 Days. Each city averages 3,000+ words of unique text, with major hubs containing significantly more.

What Doesn't

The UI takes adjustment. The map is beautiful but occasionally unclear about which routes are available. You'll sometimes miss connections because you didn't realize you could tap on a particular city. The mobile origins show in moments where precision clicking matters.

The endgame can feel anticlimactic after the journey. The eighty-day deadline generates tension, but "winning" — arriving in London on time — delivers a brief cutscene that can't match the accumulated weight of everything before it. The journey really is the destination here.

Multiple endings exist beyond simply winning or losing the bet. A Passepartout who's fallen in love might choose not to return. A Fogg who's transformed might forfeit deliberately. And there are darker endings — journeys that break both men — hidden in certain route combinations.

Playing Today

80 Days is available on iOS, Android, Steam, and Switch. The mobile version is the original and arguably the purest experience — the tap-and-swipe interface feels natural on touchscreens. The Steam version adds a few quality-of-life features but loses some tactile charm.

Platform	Price	Notes
iOS/Android	$4.99	Touch-optimized, original version
Steam	$9.99	Mouse controls, achievements
Switch	$14.99	Portable and docked modes

All versions include the same content. The game receives no further updates, but the existing scope is vast enough that completionists will spend dozens of hours finding every route.

The Verdict

80 Days proved that choice-based interactive fiction could stand alongside any narrative game in ambition and craft. It's romantic without being naive, political without being preachy, and genuinely fun even when it's breaking your heart.

The world awaits. You won't see all of it in one journey. That's the point.

Pack light. Travel hopefully. And remember — Phileas Fogg can wait while you chase a revolution across the rooftops of Agra.

80 Days won the TIME Magazine Game of the Year in 2014 and was nominated for four BAFTA awards, helping establish choice-based IF as a commercially viable format.