Posted May 15, 2022 by Katie Campkin
New to interactive fiction? No problem! This guide should help you to get started.
Text parsers can only understand very simple phrases. It's best to keep things simple, or the game won't understand what you're trying to do - for example, if you're trying to examine a big red book, instead of typing "examine the big red book" try "examine book" or "x book".
When starting a game, it's often a good idea to take a good look at your surroundings and examine everything in the room to see what things you can interact with. You can even try typing x self to find out who you are (this is definitely worth doing in Zennor, as you will be playing as different characters throughout)!
Make sure you x self when a new scene begins (you'll see the name of the character appear at the top of the screen), it'll help you to get a better understanding of who you are.
Examine everything in a location before moving on - you might find something interesting!
ASK people ABOUT things - they might tell you something interesting!
Some of your actions will affect what happens in future scenes.
Try these general commands:
Look
Examine [a thing]
Inventory
Take [a thing]
Drop [a thing]
Put [a thing] on [a thing]
Ask [a person] about [a thing]
Exit
North, South, East, West
Cast [fishing rod]
Reel in [a thing
Jump
Sing
Panic
Swim
There are a number of sneaky shortcuts that can be used to save you from typing out lots of text to perform common tasks. Here is a list of the ones that you will find helpful when playing Zennor:
Command | Shortcut |
Inventory | i |
Directions (North, South, East, West) | n, s, e, w |
Look | l |
Examine [a thing] | x [the thing you would like to examine] |