Avalon Station

Avalon Station is a sci-fi text adventure set on a failing space station in orbit. You wake from frozen sleep into darkness and alarm sirens. The crew is dead. An alien infestation has overrun most of the decks. The station's orbit is decaying. Your goal is to reach the courier ship in the secure hangar and get out. But how much you accomplish before you leave decides which of three victory endings you reach.

The station has about 43 locations: crew quarters, a science wing, engineering, a garden dome, cargo bays, EVA hull sections, and a locked command zone. Oxygen drains in depressurized areas like the cargo bays and EVA hull. Running out of air is a failure state. Radiation builds up in engineering and the power room. The alien Chitinids are weak to cold. Fire extinguishers, liquid nitrogen, and the ventilation system can all be turned against them.

The best ending needs three things: alien specimen data, an SOS sent from the comms room, and escape in the courier ship. You can escape with much less effort than that, but other ships won't know what's out there. The game tracks achievements for speedruns, pacifist runs, fixing both damaged robots, and reading every crew log.

Sci-fi text adventures grew up alongside the gothic and fantasy IF tradition in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Infocom's Starcross (1982) and Suspended (1983) set the pattern: a damaged spacecraft, systems to fix, and a mystery pieced together from logs and clues. The "last survivor wakes up" setup has roots in both text adventures and film. Alien (1979) and its sequels are the clearest touchstone for the stranded-in-space-with-hostile-creatures structure Avalon Station uses.

The modern IF community holds the Interactive Fiction Competition every year since 1995 and gives out the XYZZY Awards. Together they've produced hundreds of sci-fi works. These build on and twist the early ideas in many directions. The resource layer in Avalon Station (oxygen, radiation, limited inventory) connects to survival IF games from the 1990s. Those games grew more common in the 2000s as the format moved toward more mechanical designs.

Avalon Station uses the classic parser format but layers in ticking-clock pressure. Even without the creatures, the decaying orbit is always counting down.