akeybl/ferrytale

Ferrytale is a tool that lets you play classic text adventure games out loud, using AI narration and voice instead of typing exact commands into an old-style parser. Traditional interactive fiction games are famous for requiring precise phrasing, so a lot of the friction in playing them today comes from guessing the right verb rather than enjoying the story. Ferrytale removes that friction by letting you simply say or type what you want your character to do in plain language, and an AI model figures out how that maps onto the current scene. Importantly, Ferrytale is not a traditional game interpreter that runs an original game file directly. Instead, it reads a full written transcript of someone else actually playing through the game from beginning to end, and treats that transcript as the true version of the story. An AI model, Gemini, narrates on top of this transcript, adding scene description and character voices, but the real plot points, puzzles, and pacing come from the human playthrough, not from the AI inventing the story as it goes. Optional spoken input and text-to-speech narration, with each character getting a distinct voice, are meant to make an old text game feel more like an audiobook you can talk back to. To use it, a player needs a free API key from Google's Gemini service, and optionally a key from ElevenLabs for higher quality generated voices. After cloning the project and adding those keys to a settings file, a single command downloads what it needs and starts playing a chosen game, or a game can be loaded directly from a transcript page online. A lighter, voice-free mode is available for a faster first run. The project currently requires Python 3.12 and has mainly been tested on modern Mac computers. The library of playable games is opt-in only: after feedback from authors and a related policy change from a well known interactive fiction competition, the project now only includes games whose original authors have given explicit permission, and it encourages players to support those authors directly. The full README is longer than what was shown.