Frotz: Interactive Fiction for KOReader
Play classic and modern text adventure games directly on your e-reader. Interactive fiction is text-heavy, redraws rarely, and runs beautifully on e-ink.
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What is Interactive Fiction?
Interactive fiction was a major game genre at the dawn of the PC era in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It began with Colossal Cave Adventure and exploded with the Zork trilogy, which offered a richer parser, deeper puzzles, and larger worlds than anything else at the time. By the late 80s, point-and-click adventure games displaced it from the mainstream.
The genre never died. A dedicated community kept developing IF games with increasingly sophisticated parsers and mechanics no other genre can match. Counterfeit Monkey lets you manipulate words instead of objects. Coloratura shows the world through an alien that perceives emotions and energies rather than light. Almost all of it is completely free.
E-readers are arguably the ideal IF platform: the text-heavy content is easy on e-ink, screen redraws are minimal, and reading enthusiasts already appreciate good prose.
Features
- Plays Z-machine games (.z3, .z4, .z5, .z6, .z8, .zblorb, .zlb) — the most common IF format
- Per-game save slots with autosave on close
- Game history with auto-restore on reopen
- Hides the on-screen keyboard when an external keyboard is connected
- Adjustable font size
- Word lookup in dictionaries or Wikipedia, just like in KOReader
Installation
- Download the plugin from the GitHub releases page
- Unzip and copy the contents into your
koreader/plugins/folder - Launch KOReader, go to Tools > Interactive Fiction
You may need to swap in the correct dfrotz binary for your device. Check the readme for which binary matches your architecture.
| Binary | Architecture | Devices |
|---|---|---|
| armhf/dfrotz | ARM-HF | Most e-readers, recent Kindles and Kobos |
| armel/dfrotz | ARM-EL | Older Kindles (firmware < 5.16.2) |
| x86_64/dfrotz | x86-64 | Linux desktop |
Finding Games
- IFDB — searchable database with reviews, recommendation lists, and contest results
- IFWiki — encyclopedia and game directory
Also on Kindle: Gargoyle
If you want graphics, advanced text formatting, and broader format support, Gargoyle is a more polished IF interpreter available for Kindle. Frotz is lighter and integrates directly into KOReader; Gargoyle is a standalone app.
Further Reading
Barna's Interactive Fiction Recommendations — curated list of IF games worth playing, from the plugin author himself.
Credits
Plugin by kbarni — GPL v3. Underlying interpreter: Frotz by David Griffith.