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Forge Adventure: a playable teaser

Forge Adventure is a terminal text adventure that teaches the Forge curriculum by making you do it: a door only opens on evidence, never on an assertion. Knowledge checks are mechanics rather than quizzes, so you get past a room by producing the thing, not by picking C.

There is a playable cameo of the opening in your browser. It is the real game engine compiled to WebAssembly, not a scripted imitation, so the rooms behave exactly as they do in the terminal.

Play the teaser

Open Forge Adventure in your browser

Three rooms: the gate, the Cold Forge, and the workbench. About thirty seconds. Nothing to install.

You will be asked to sign in

The teaser is published to Liatrio members only, so GitHub will ask you to sign in before it loads. That is expected, not a broken link. The hostname looks arbitrary because GitHub assigns a random one to any site with access control, precisely so it cannot be found by guessing.

How to play it

It opens by asking your name. After that, look re-reads the room, inventory checks your kit, and you move by typing the name of a way out: each room lists its own, as in Ways out: bench, east. Anything it does not recognize gets you a nudge rather than an error.

Every exit that leads deeper into the game is closed on purpose. When you reach one, it says the same thing every time: to leave this room, open your terminal.

What this is, and is not

The teaser is a taste, not a trial. Three rooms of roughly a hundred, with no save, no progress tracking, and no account. It exists to answer "what is this thing?" in about thirty seconds, which a screenshot cannot do for a game whose whole argument is that you have to type.

The full game runs in your terminal, keeps a save file, and checks your real environment: whether the tool is installed, whether the fork exists, whether the skill you wrote actually validates. None of that is possible in a browser tab, which is why the teaser stops at the door instead of pretending.

Privacy and network

The page makes exactly one request, for the WebAssembly module itself. There is no analytics, no external URL, and no data collection of any kind. The name you type goes into the module's memory and nowhere else; reloading the page forgets it. Those properties are enforced by tests in the game's own repository rather than only promised here.

Playing the whole thing

The game and its install instructions live in liatrio-forge/forge-adventure, which like the teaser is open to Liatrio members. It runs on macOS and Linux, and prebuilt binaries for both are attached to the latest release.