Counterfeit Monkey is so magnificent a text adventure that I'm convinced the puzzle genre went wrong when it added graphics

One measure of how hard you've fallen for a game is the extent to which you'll overengineer solutions to its puzzles, out of sheer giddiness. So it was with Counterfeit Monkey's letter remover—a sort of linguistic edition of the sonic screwdriver. First I pulled a "chard" from its roots in a garden, and removed its "h", transforming the vegetable into a "card". Then I deleted the "r", causing a sputtering, ramshackle yet functioning "car" to spring into being in its place.

From a piece of "garbage", I magicked an entire "garage" out of nowhere, replete with a somewhat bemused mechanic—who pointed out that my vehicle needed fuel. And with a sprig of "sage" and the use of a mirror, I eventually managed to reverse the nature of an object and wind up with "gas" for the car. I was a wizard of words, disrupting the fabric of reality with my mastery of language.

Except, of course, that the garden had plenty of "soil", which I could have simply turned into "oil", and used that as fuel to smooth my onward journey. Somehow, the simplest option doesn't present itself when you're high on your own genius. And car fumes.

Counterfeit Monkey is a text adventure. To be specific, it's a parser game—one of those where you type in commands to tell your character to GO NORTH or PICK UP CHARD.

While it's just about feasible to imagine Counterfeit Monkey as a point-and-click puzzler—and there's a certain amount of LucasArts spirit powering its absurdist conundrums—adding graphics would rather miss the point. This unique game is an exploration of the meaning we attach to words. It respects the symbolic weight of writing on a page. In many ways, Counterfeit Monkey celebrates the power of our brains to interpret a series of jumbled letters as vivid images, to assemble scenes and action and plot-twists from white squiggles on a black background.

It might all sound a bit lofty and unapproachable. But Counterfeit Monkey is composed with the immediacy and electricity of an espionage thriller. It casts you out onto the street as a wanted individual, and tasks you with finding your way off the island of Atlantis. Which, in a strange way, is a pretty oppressive place. In a world where words can be weaponised, the Atlanteans have established their dominance by stranglehold: banning the use of any language that isn't English, in an effort to reduce the public's ability to transform objects.

The Bureau of Orthography assigns Atlantean names to all immigrants and neutralises foreign-language pets. It hoards letter inserters and depluralisation cannons—the latter apparently used to reduce a British fleet to a single ship in 1822, winning the country its independence. More recently, the cannon has been used to decisively end mass protests.

This is a land in which you might hear the argument for turning people into things, as a replacement for capital punishment: "The personality of a man made inanimate stays behind in the changed object, ready to be retrieved should new evidence come to light; and until that date he is harmless to society, and costs almost nothing to store, as compared to the costs of prison guardianship and maintenance."

I wouldn't recommend experimenting with such ideas yourself, though. At one point, I met a bloke called Mark in a bar, and turned him into an 'ark'—an enormous boat under which I was crushed instantly. The Atlanteans may be authoritarian, but they're right that word manipulation has the capacity to be dangerous if not properly thought through.

It's the rigour of this worldbuilding that elevates Counterfeit Monkey from a novelty puzzler to a truly memorable adventure. Its writer, Emily Short, infused her game not only with smart puzzles but a clear-eyed perspective on what humanity would do with the discovery of a new form of magic, socially and politically. Then she laced what could have been a dense, dry adventure with sexual tension, danger, and unexpected family drama.

"Suddenly it is borne in on me that this may be the last I see of my mother in a lifetime," she writes, in one disarming encounter. "And I'm trying to memorise the exact cut of her hair and the way her expensive Italian heels tap on the floor, and meanwhile she is completely indifferent to the moment."

There's one last element to Counterfeit Monkey's magic. A science fiction conceit, that has you fusing with another personality right at the beginning. Call it a depluralisation. The game's narrator is, in fact, a second human being with whom you share a body. "We're Alexandra now," they say. "Before the synthesis, I was Alex. We're meant to be one person now, unrecognizable to anyone who knew us before."

It's a fascinating way to bring humanity to the odd yet fundamental mechanics of the parser genre, in which we've always shared our head with a stranger. Namely, the voice that describes our actions back to us. They've just rarely had a name before now, or a background, or feelings and a gender to consider.

It's no wonder that Short became a luminary of the interactive fiction movement. She went on to write for my beloved Fallen London, best described as an ever-expending choose-your-own adventure novel. And in 2023 she directed Mask of the Rose, a visual novel set in the Fallen London universe. The latter featured a central mechanic in which you composed stories by slotting in characters, motivations and actions to fulfil a prompt. It was a system that treated writing as if it were programming—rooted in the same mode of thinking that brought about Counterfeit Monkey more than a decade ago.

To me, though, Counterfeit Monkey feels like the purest and most personal expression of Short's narrative brilliance. I notice that she uploaded the game for free on New Year's Eve in 2012, and can only imagine how she felt, setting off that particular firework. Releasing a project so fizzing with intellect and literary flair. One that could only be the product of a very particular mind, unblinkered yet hopeful. Perhaps I'm merely projecting, but relinquishing control of such a game must be like letting go of a part of yourself and handing it over to the public. An act of grand pluralisation.