A tribute to Anchorhead.

You take a deep breath of salty air as the first raindrops begin to spatter the pavement, and the swollen, slate-colored clouds that blanket the sky mutter ominous portents amongst themselves over the little coastal town of Anchorhead.

Travel to the haunted coastal town of Anchorhead, Massachusetts and uncover the roots of a horrific conspiracy inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Search through musty archives and tomes of esoteric lore; dodge hostile townsfolk; combat a generation-spanning evil that threatens your family and the entire world.

The original version was and remains freely available.
To mark the twentieth anniversary of its initial publication, Anchorhead is now available in a special Illustrated Edition. Every aspect of the game has been rebuilt and redesigned from the ground up:

• The code has been rewritten in Inform 7 and compiled to the glulx format, allowing far more detail and interactivity than before.
• The prose has been revised and polished to reflect 20 years of accumulated writing experience.
• Additional puzzles, scenes, and background information to explore.
• Decorated with over 50 gorgeous illustrations by Carlos Cara Àlvarez.

Anchorhead: the Illustrated Edition is a commercial game. See the itch.io page for purchasing information.
(The website, no longer active, allowed ordering feelies.)

Stolen away by apathetic Blind Ones, your only desire is to return to your Cellarium and the Song of the Universe. They should understand. You shall make them to understand.

Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving… Come home to Goldengrove, a beautiful old house haunted by a lost soul. Uncover the secrets of your tormented past in a tale of unrequited love, jealousy, violence, betrayal, and vengeance. What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed is a puzzle-driven, parser-based gothic horror story with a unique command set.

THIS GAME CONTAINS SCENES OF IMPLICIT VIOLENCE AND GORE. * * * (A text-only survival horror.)

A winter night at the G.U.E. tech campus with most students away on vacation serves as the backdrop for this tale of Lovecraftian horror.

On the night of August 14th, 1799, eight days off St. Stellio, the sloop Meleagris was smashed apart by a storm. Most of the crew and passengers alike were crushed by fallen rigging, or drowned, or eaten by sharks. One passenger was not so lucky.

Lord Rupert Hansom has been uncharacteristically silent and pensive all evening. At the prod of his fellows, he unfolds a tale of the supernatural horror that vexes him.

You've always fancied yourself an outdoorsman and are quick to tell anyone who asks that your hobby is hiking. Now, you've spotted a dessicated deer's corpse and something dropped from the trees to attack you... and you ran, but straight into a giant spider's web. You are wearing your jacket and carrying nothing.

"... but he has the element of surprise and a bonesaw, and you do not." You are your decapitated head standing on a metal tray in a mad doctor's laboratory. The doctor's four-armed assistant blocks your escape. NOTES Please play with Adrift 4 Runner or Scare terp (e.g. Gargoyle) as playing with Adrift 5 interpreters will probably make the game appear bugged.

Travel down into an abandoned Antarctic Base and unveil the mysteries within. A game made in the paper-telephone style, with each person only having access to the section before, with a co-ordinated ending that ties everything beautifully together.

. . . this game was updated, expanded and released in 2017 as A Fly on the Wall, or An Appositional Eye. . . The Harrison Mansion is closing after 45 years of delighting its visitors with collections of the weird and recreations of the macabre. The night before, the Fortean Society of New England gathers in the haunt to celebrate its history and investigate its reputation as a real house of horrors. You volunteer to take a shift in the Fly eye, a room with five monitors that watch the most haunted corners within the house. You can't watch all five simultaneously, though, so what exactly will you see?

You are awake and alone. Unable to move. Unable to fight against the thing slowly rising from within you. Is there any part of you that can resist? Any part that you can still move? (Based on a true event in my life when I was fourteen) * An EctoComp2018 Game

It is the fifteenth corpse. Among those they found. More than twenty people have disappeared in the last few months. Some say it's a wild animal, stalking the outskirts of town. Some say it's a killer, a new kind of deviated christian, hunting his own kind. But there's more to it. This town is no normal town. We have a history unlike any other. It's November the seventh, in Elmville. And we sleep under the Wolfsmoon. --- An old-style experience, with all the comforts of 2019. Unravel the mysteries of Elmville, while you bathe in a pixel panorama!

Walpurgus Night, 1951: Duncan MacDevon's manor near Chillingham Castle has played host to numerous dilettantes and eccentrics over the years...but none quite like tonight. On this historic evening, the occultists Graves, Corely, and Clark have summoned up something...horrible...in the manor tower. An ancient evil has escaped! Now cooks and constables, occultists and heiresses, servants and sorcerers must band together to stop it before it leaves the manor grounds and consumes the planet. Will our heroes succeed, or will they succumb to gibbering terror and soul-rending madness? Honestly, you're hoping for the latter. In this game, you don't play the hero. You play the elder thing they've called up. ...happy hunting! (This game was made in ~16 hours for DazaKiwi's "Narrative Escape" themed Stay-at-Home Jam)

Bump In The Night: An Interactive Fiction Game by Tori Smith A young child awoken in the night by a shadowy presence at the end of your bed: Monty the Monster. Friend or foe? Perhaps he is just as scared as you. Speaking to Monty can give you information needed to help or hinder your goals. Try not to wake up your dad as you help each other overcome your fears. Content Warnings: There is some subject matter that may be sensitive to some players. Content includes, but may not be limited to: verbal abuse by a father, mild terror as experienced by a child, death of a loved one, and divorce. Cover Image by Tori Smith, referenced from original piece by Qube-Core

Lephrea the vampire has an unpleasant assignment. A puzzle for #EnigMarch 2026, written in about a week.

"Lydia's Heart" is a large, complex game with a serious tone and seven or eight NPCs you can converse with. The genre is low-key horror: There's almost no actual blood, but there are several ways to die in a very frightening way. Various bits of magical fantasy are included in a basically real-world setting. This game is version 2.0 of "Last Resort." The story is the same, but it's not simply a TADS port of the original -- there are more rooms and about 18 entirely new puzzles. The author recommends that you play "Lydia's Heart," not "Last Resort." You play the part of 14-year-old Diane Lindsay. You have been dragged off by your Aunt Caroline to a run-down motor court in rural Mississippi for reasons that are not initially clear. As you explore the motor court, you'll meet various creepy people and overhear a murder being committed. You'll meet a ghost named Lydia, who (if you can figure out how to make friends with her) will tell you why you've been brought here, and why you must get away before the afternoon is over.

Your job as a real estate agent brings you into contact with many old buildings, but none are quite like the old theatre that has stood deserted for almost thirty years. After visiting it with some prospective buyers, you discover that you have left your pager behind. You quickly stop off there, on your way out for the evening, to pick it up. However, at night, you soon learn, the theatre's denizens are more than just rats and spiders. Now you find yourself trapped in a world of secrets and of shadows, while a century-old evil awakens to hatch her nefarious plans. In order to survive the horror and insanity, you must use all your wits and cunning, and, to escape, you must solve the dark secret of the THEATRE!

Geist was used as a site-wide adventure for Board Game Geek in January of 2014. During the week of the event, nearly 700 players worked their way through this game. The community rallied around the players in the form of providing hints and clues as people were stuck on puzzles. Geist was written by Dave Bernazzani, Dean Svendsen, Jonna Hind and Steven Robert. It was designed/coded by Dave Bernazzani. Geist is decidedly old-school IF. It's not likely to be the kind of game well regarded by the inner sanctum of the Interactive Fiction community. It's a treasure hunt. A puzzle fest. In other words: it's a Text Adventure. Further, it has a number of in-jokes, breaks mimesis and targets and rewards a subset of players (those who are members on BGG). It is still playable and can be enjoyed outside that sphere... but you have been warned. *GEIST* You were celebrating the arrival of the not-quite-second-half of the 21st century with your buddies in your gaming basement when the bad news arrived: Crazy Uncle Scott had finally given up the good fight and passed off into gaming nirvana. He was an unusual man, with a firm belief that the world went to hell in a hand-basket with the arrival of text messages, always claiming that their phones were smarter than them! So he bought himself a huge mansion and spent his last days there pining for the glory days of yore, when websites were nothing more than acres of bright blue links thrown willy-nilly onto a computer screen. Somehow, though, he took a shine to you, and you were smart enough to hide your smartphone whenever he came calling. Nevertheless, it was quite a surprise to learn that he left you exactly half his will. And even more of a surprise to discover that the lawyer's language was precise: not half his massive fortune in Geekgold, but literally half his will. Along with a short note explaining that to collect your full inheritance, you must retrieve the second half of Crazy Uncle Scott's will from his old estate, Alden Manor. The very name brings chills to your spine: that place is haunted! But the true horror lay in the closing passage of the note: Leave your Smartphone at home!