A Weird Weekend Dive Into Counterfeit Monkey
Counterfeit Monkey is a cult classic PC text adventure that shows just how powerful words can be when they become your main tool for solving puzzles. Instead of swinging swords or firing guns, you are armed with a device that can literally remove or alter letters in the names of objects, transforming them into something completely different.
This parser based game asks you to type commands like GO NORTH or TAKE CHARD, and then rewards you for thinking laterally about language. It feels a bit like playing with a reality bending console command prompt. You are not just exploring a world. You are rewriting it one word at a time.
The story is set on the island nation of Atlantis, a place where word based technology has been weaponised and strictly controlled. You play someone on the run who needs to escape the island, and your letter manipulation gadget is your best shot at survival.
Wordplay As Game Mechanics
The genius of Counterfeit Monkey lies in how it turns wordplay into real gameplay systems. Almost every puzzle is solved by looking at the name of an object and asking yourself what it could become if you removed or changed a letter.
For example, you might:
- Turn a chard into a card by removing the letter h
- Then change card into car by stripping out the letter d
- Transform garbage into a garage and suddenly have a building appear around you
- Convert sage into gas using a mirror to reverse the letters and then manipulate the result
The result is a constant stream of little eureka moments. The game practically invites you to overengineer solutions just because the system is so fun to play with. You may go through several complex transformations to reach an item or solve a problem, only to realise later that a much simpler word was sitting right there unused. That sense of playful experimentation is a huge part of the charm.
What makes this so impressive on PC is how tightly the whole system is implemented. Parser games live and die on how well they understand your typed commands. Counterfeit Monkey feels surprisingly responsive and fair. The game often recognises clever ideas you come up with and rewards them, making the world feel reactive and intelligent rather than rigid.
A Darkly Funny World Built On Language
Underneath the clever word mechanics there is a surprisingly sharp bit of worldbuilding. In Atlantis, language has become a kind of strategic resource and a tool of control. The government maintains a Bureau of Orthography that regulates names, pets and devices that alter words.
Some of the highlights of this setting include:
- Only English is allowed, to limit what people can do with other languages and word forms
- Immigrants are assigned new Atlantean names by the state, stripping away part of their identity
- Dangerous devices like letter inserters and depluralisation cannons are locked down by the authorities
- The depluralisation cannon has a grim history: it once turned an entire British fleet into a single ship, winning Atlantis its independence
- Protests are literally reduced to a single person, making mass action impossible
The game also throws moral and philosophical questions at you. There is talk of replacing capital punishment with turning criminals into inanimate objects. Their consciousness supposedly remains locked inside, ready to be restored if they are found innocent later. It is chilling but fits perfectly in a world where changing a word can rewrite a life.
The danger of this power is not just theoretical either. At one point you can turn a man named Mark into an ark. In practice that means creating a massive boat in a bar and immediately being crushed under it. The game never lets you forget that messing with reality through language can have messy consequences.
Character, Narrative and Interactive Fiction Legacy
Counterfeit Monkey does not rely only on clever puns and word puzzles. It layers them on top of a strong narrative with emotional stakes and interesting characters. You start the game having already undergone a strange science fiction process: your body and mind are fused with another person.
Before the fusion there was Alex. Afterward, you are Alexandra, a single being with two histories merged together. The narrator voice that describes your actions is not an anonymous text box. It is that second person sharing your head, with their own memories, feelings and perspective.
This twist works beautifully with the parser format. In traditional text adventures there has always been a mysterious narrator silently reporting what you do. Counterfeit Monkey simply makes that presence explicit, giving it a name, a background and a relationship to you. It turns a structural quirk of the genre into a story device.
On top of that, the writing is packed with memorable personal moments. There are scenes with your mother that carry real emotional weight, touching on family distance, ambition and the pain of being seen as an afterthought. These grounded human beats balance out the political satire and puzzle solving, making the whole adventure feel more than just a clever toy.
The game was written by Emily Short, one of the best known names in interactive fiction. She later contributed to Fallen London, the long running browser based narrative game, and directed Mask of the Rose, a visual novel set in the same universe. Those projects continue the theme of treating writing almost like programming: you slot together characters, motives and actions the way a coder might assemble functions.
Even so, Counterfeit Monkey still feels like the purest expression of that design philosophy. Released for free on New Years Eve in 2012, it remains a standout example of what PC text adventures can do when they fully embrace the strengths of the medium. For anyone interested in narrative driven games, parser design or just weird and brilliant PC oddities, it is absolutely worth tracking down and playing today.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/puzzle/counterfeit-monkey-is-so-magnificent-a-text-adventure-that-im-convinced-the-puzzle-genre-went-wrong-when-it-added-graphics/
