What is talkamort?

Talkamort is a small text adventure game that runs inside your terminal. Each time you play, it generates a brand new science fiction story on the fly, starting from a setting that feels ordinary before revealing a hidden twist through the choices you make. The look and feel is intentionally retro: black and neon colors, text that types itself onto the screen, and short blip sounds like the ones from old text heavy games. To play, you need Node.js version 18 or newer and an account with Codex, the AI system that writes the story as you go. After signing into Codex, you install the project's dependencies and either run it directly or build a local talkamort command you can launch from anywhere. Once inside the game, typing a help command shows you what you can do, and Ctrl+C lets you quit at any time. The game keeps a single running transcript in your terminal window. Nothing gets cleared as you play, your commands and the story's replies simply keep appending to what came before, so your terminal's normal scrollback holds your entire adventure. While the game is generating the next bit of story or revealing text on screen, your keyboard input is held back so a stray keystroke cannot slip into the wrong moment. Every new game picks a familiar setting and pairs it with a hidden science fiction idea, such as time distortion, parallel worlds, contact with aliens, artificial minds, or strange physics, but you only discover which one through playing. The game remembers your five most recent combinations so you do not see the same setup twice in a row. You can also start in windowed mode to keep your terminal history intact, turn off sound entirely, or switch between a few different sound styles while playing. Behind the scenes, each game is a single ongoing conversation with an AI model, which is given the opening rules and setting once and then simply receives your typed actions for every turn after that. This keeps track of characters, objects, and consequences as the story continues. The model is only allowed to write the story text, it cannot use any outside tools while playing.