This screen combined with the somber music used to give me such an uneasy feeling. I'd close my eyes and spam A as fast as I could whenever I got a game over as a kid.
I have a living room PC - a mini pc plugged into my TV that I control with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse or game controller. It's so comfortable just sitting back into a sofa to game. You could also get a laptop stand/lap tray for the keyboard for more comfortable typing on your lap.
Basically it doesn't need to be either a desk or a handheld. You can have a halfway of a PC on your TV. I also dock my steam deck and play on my TV, which you could also use for IF if you have one.
OK, I'm a big text adventure fan too, as well as a programmer and hobbyist electronics tinkerer, and you gave me a great idea.
I want to take this cheap wireless home theater keyboard and see if I can replace the touchscreen with a tiny OLED display and power it all with a simple board running Linux for text adventure games. The biggest challenge might be getting everything to fit properly in the case, but if I can make it work I'd have a portable text "game boy"!
Will do! If I can get it all working (and that's a big if) I'll definitely post about it and create a guide. Total project will be like less than $35 so worst-case scenario I'm not out too much, heh.
Maybe this is overly simplistic, but I'm a couch gamer, and text based games on the TV with a wireless keyboard work great. Relax on the couch and otherwise it's just like you're physically at the terminal.
I know few people have a PC on the living room TV, but there are ways to stream it over there -- e.g. with a Steam Link.
I don't know if there are any existing implementations that work well enough yet for it to actually be relaxing, but it might be possible to set up a hands-free IF experience by hooking up speech-to-text and text-to-speech tools to the game.
A smartphone's virtual keyboard would be worse (smaller) than the Kindle's, wouldn't it? Maybe I should try it though. I mean, I'm pecking this message on my smartphone's virtual keyboard so...
Lol. That's my thought. We use the virtual keyboards a lot already. Like the other poster said there are some drawbacks but I find it much easier than any physical mini keyboard (far less strain).
Smartphone software like messaging or notes is built with imprecision in mind. I don't know about you, but I use the swype method (moving a finger continuously from key to key and lifting at the end of the word) and when writing a message I still spend like 50% of the time correcting mistakes from the virtual keyboard.
Because these are usually short messages, you'd instead likely be hunting and pecking the virtual keys, but without the tactile feedback of a real keyboard. For games that are all about text, it's a preference thing.
Plus a phone comes with a ton of distractions that a dedicated device without notifications doesn't. Sure, you could turn on do not disturb while playing a text game but that feels a little intense. Don't bother me, it's Zork time!!
And if you really think about it, your question is basically like asking why anyone would need a Nintendo Switch when mobile games have virtual controls.
I wasn't trying to be dismissive. You bring up several good points. I asked because what seems to me the most obvious small form factor answer hadn't been considered at all.
There's not many good options. It's a genre that was built specifically for a keyboard, after all. Everything that isn't a laptop or desktop is gonna be a frustrating downgrade.
Maybe the answer is getting into adjacent genres of games. They aren't the same, obviously, but there's a lot of overlap with the adventure game genre, especially, and the visual novel genre is more distant but a lot more accessible away from a pc
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