Steam does have a Linux client, though with it being proprietary
software, I doubt it's available from the repositories on any major
distro... plus I doubt a developer making their game available on
Steam makes it any more likely they'll actually bother porting their
game to Linux... things have gotten better for gamers on Linux over
the last decade or so, but Linux is still treated as an after thought
to many mainstream devs... and of course, Linux compatibility aside,
there's still the accessibility side of things to consider... and most
video games don't lend themselves well to blind accessibility.
That said, at least some Visual Novels built on Renpy are self voiced
and smart enough to kill the TTS whenever there's voice acting, and
I'm pretty sure Renpy being Python based means they're all Linux
compatible. Only one I've actually played and can confirm has working
self-voicing is Arcade Spirits though.
And yeah, I think I tried Nethack or another text-only Rogue-like and
ran into the problem that the ASCII art maps are hard to parse with a
screen reader. Probably doesn't help that many text games use
whitespace to indicate blank parts of the board or might make heavy
use of punctuation or box drawing characters in a context where you'd
want those characters voiced when reading line-by-line or reading the
whole screen.
On a related note, I think I mentioned 2048, but didn't mentioned that
one thing that makes it a bit harder than it might otherwise be is
that, for incomplete rows, it's hard to tell wher the gaps are.
And while English is the only human language I know well enough to
actually use, I know the frustration of large swaths of media being
inaccessible(My Japanese is nowhere good enough to listen to raw
anime, and blindness and subtitles don't mix). Does make me wonder how
feasible a translation based on the Infocom sources would be.
And as much as I'd love to play versions of Zork that remove some of
the frustrations of old school parsers, add tab completion, force the
player to go out of their way to make the game unwinable, and other
quality of life improvements, I kind of agree that a large game file
feels like it goes against the spirit of the genre... though, I
wouldn't mind playing something truly epic in the genre... Something
where the descriptions of every game location, description of every
interactible object, all NPC dialogue, etc totals over a million
words. Something on a scale that storage media of Infocom's heyday
simply couldn't handle.
Makes me wonder, are there any modern text adventures that stand out
for sheer scale of their world or for having detailed narratives or
characters with rich dialogue trees akin to what you'd find in modern
RPG video games?
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