Play interactive fiction on your Mac

Interactive Fiction, the genre of text-based adventures that has existed pretty much since the beginning of home computing, is a little obscure. That’s a shame as while it lacks graphics or sound, it can be an incredibly immersive game.

To play Interactice Fiction, you need a special reader, and Zoom is the primary one for Mac. Zoom works as both a reader and a library for your games. You can store and organize interactive fiction here as well as find new games with the inbuilt browser.

When you click a game to highlight it, hit the play button and it will start. Depending on the game, you may be able to open saved games directly, or from within the game. Either way, you can also store your saved games in Zoom. As Interactive Fiction sometimes gets pretty complex, you may need to take note – and Zoom happily features a notepad, a really simple text editor, for you to save your thoughts on.

There isn’t much competition for Zoom, but thankfully it’s still a neat little application. The interface is clean and clear, the reader itself is very comfortable to look at, and being able to store and manage your Interactive Fiction in on place is very convenient.

Zoom is an excellent reader an library for Interactive Fiction.