Portugues
The Bean Stalker
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About the game
Times are hard in the kingdom. Ever since a magical wall went up around it, the helpers from the enchanted forest and the fairy prairie can no longer come over to work, and farm labour costs a fortune. You and your mother were getting by until she fell ill, and you have been selling off the farm piece by piece to pay for it. Now there is nothing left but a tumbledown shack, an empty stable and Bessy, a cow so underfed she is about the size of a chihuahua.
Town is just to the west, and you know how this story starts: a cow, a trade and a handful of beans. What happens after that is where the game has its fun, with a greedy pawnbroker, a modern take on the giant's castle and plenty of jokes at the expense of the original tale.
Jack Welch wrote it over a weekend in 2017 to learn ZIL, the language Infocom used for Zork and its other classics, which the ZILF compiler brought back to life. It is small, with a handful of locations, and can be finished in well under an hour.
Playing it here
Click Play now and the story starts in the player. Everything is typed: write a
command after the > prompt and press Enter. The game is in English and
understands the classic Infocom style of command.
Commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
north, south, east, west, up, down (or n, s, e, w, u, d) |
walk |
look (l), examine (x) something |
look around, or look closer |
inventory (i) |
list what you are carrying |
take / drop something |
pick something up or put it down |
give (or sell, trade) something to someone |
offer something in a deal |
plant, dig, climb |
the verbs a beanstalk story calls for |
talk to someone |
speak to a character |
about (or help, credits) |
the author's note and the credits |
save / restore |
keep your progress in this browser and load it back |
A few things worth knowing
There are no hints. help only shows the author's note, so explore and
try things: the game is small enough that nothing stays hidden for long.
Read the signs. Shop windows and descriptions tell you what people are willing to buy.
Think about the fairy tale, then think again. The story follows the familiar beats, but rarely in the familiar way.
Watch the score. It goes up when you make real progress.
Credits and licence
The Bean Stalker was written by Jack Welch, with beta testing by Lara Welch, and compiled with ZILF 0.8 by Jesse McGrew. Release 2 came out in January 2018. It is released under the MIT licence, and the source code is in the game's repository on GitHub. The story file served here is the one the author published with the repository's v1.0 release, unmodified. The licence text is linked from this page.