Favorite free iPhone app of the moment: Frotz

While the iPhone can play some pretty sophisticated games, and makes better use of it’s touch screen than the Nintendo DS, one of the best free apps is a very old school genre: interactive fiction.

I’m a huge role-playing nerd and used to love the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, but somehow never played interactive fiction, the original “sandbox” games that let you decide how you proceeded through a text-based adventure. I knew of its legacy on RPGs, but wasn’t aware that new Interactive Fiction was still being created.

Well, with Frotz, available for free in Apple’s iPhone apps store, a whole world of Interactive Fiction is opened up to a new generation. It comes with over 20 titles, covering a wide variety of story genres and levels of interaction. You give simple commands, like “talk to x about y,” examine,” “open door” and so on, to navigate your way through the stories, with each one having its own game-specific details.

For example, “An Act of Murder” places you as a detective, with a mansion to explore and witnesses to question. You have a time limit based on commands given, and depending on what evidence from asking the right questions of the right people, you might be able to determine who the culprit is and put them away.

Frotz also contains a link to the IFDB, Interactive Fiction Database, to find classics such as “Zork” as well as brand new titles, though not all are free. According to Frotz’s info, it can play most stories written in the Z-Machine format.

Frotz is great to play while waiting in lines or in a reception area, if you don’t mind looking like an obsessive texter, and has almost endless play value. Of all the free apps the iPhone has, Frotz is the game that has by far been getting the most use.

-Aaron Burkhart