Portugues
Calypso
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About the game
Darkness, then a burning white light and a scream that takes a moment to find its voice. When it fades you are standing at the top of a lighthouse. Rain hammers the glass, lightning shows a lifeless horizon and an empty sea, and you have no idea who you are or how you got here.
Below the lamp room lies the rest of the lighthouse, and beyond its iron door an island to explore: a small village with its shops and its pub, a boating lake, a cave and other places that seem to have been abandoned for a long time. Piecing together where you are, and why, is the whole point of the game, so the less you know in advance the better.
Dave Footitt first released Calypso in 2014 as "a simple, complete text adventure" and has kept refining it since; the version here is Release 9, from September 2025, built with the PunyInform library so that it also runs on 8-bit computers. It is a traditional treasure-and-puzzle game with a score, a gentle difficulty curve and a mystery to tie it together.
Playing it here
Click Play now and the story starts in the player. Type a command after the >
prompt and press Enter. The game is in English and understands short sentences
that start with a verb, such as examine lamp or go down. The status line
shows your score out of 15.
Commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
north, south, east, west, up, down (or n, s, e, w, u, d) |
walk |
look (l) |
describe where you are again |
examine (x) something |
look closer |
take, open, search, push something |
the actions the island relies on |
inventory (i) |
list what you are carrying |
score |
your progress, out of 15 |
save / restore |
keep your progress in this browser and load it back |
A few things worth knowing
Explore before you solve. The island is small, and seeing all of it first makes it easier to spot which object belongs where.
Careful what you eat. Not everything that looks edible is good for you, so save before you try.
Small details count. Things like a mouse hole or a rug are mentioned for a reason.
Draw a map. The village, the lake and the cave connect in ways that are easy to forget.
Credits and licence
Calypso was written by Dave Footitt (Papa's Gong). The version served here is Release 9 (serial 250916), the file published in the author's repository on GitHub. The game is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3, and it is built with the PunyInform library by Fredrik Ramsberg and Johan Berntsson, under the MIT licence. The licence texts, the source code of this release and the matching PunyInform version are linked from this page.