SUDOS — Illustrated Text Adventure Engine & World Builder

SUDOS is a complete illustrated text-adventure player and visual adventure builder. It is free—no ads, trial, subscription, account, payment details or expiry.

Play using natural typed commands, clickable controls or speech recognition. Explore illustrated locations, talk to characters, solve interconnected puzzles, fight authored encounters and make decisions that persist. Local narration can read the world and story aloud without sending the adventure to an online service.

Then switch to the integrated World Builder and create an adventure of your own without writing story-specific code.

The Orb Cycle — included

You awaken on an unfamiliar shore with no memory of how you arrived. Beyond it waits the Orb Chamber: six silent roads leading to six isolated realms, each guarding a fragment of an ancient mechanism—and a different account of why the worlds were divided.

The Orb Cycle is SUDOS's flagship original adventure: an illustrated, multi-realm epic about connection, memory, consent and the danger of turning protection into control.

• Six distinct realms: Greyfen, Helios, Verdant, Aeralis, Namaris and Vespera
• 46 areas and 280 authored locations
• 692 directed routes and exits
• 57 characters with 457 dialogue topics
• 68 creature types across 91 encounters
• 24 authored puzzles and 36 barrier definitions
• 76 story events connecting exploration, dialogue, discovery and combat
• Peaceful, investigative and combat solutions in key situations
• Optional testimony, lore and alternate paths throughout the six realms
• A finale with four genuinely distinct endings, shaped by what the player learned and chose

The adventure has been exercised through a 700-step complete route, with separate full-route verification of all four endings.

Three more complete adventures are included

• The Cartographer's Lantern — a compact mystery built to demonstrate authored clues, conversations and consequence.
• Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Blackwood Cipher — investigation, evidence and deduction in an original Holmes case.
• The Bell Beyond the Briar — a folkloric adventure with multiple resolutions and persistent choices.

Additional free editable adventures—including illustrated adaptations, science fiction, cyberpunk and builder examples—are available from the SUDOS adventure library.

Build your own adventures

The World Builder is part of the same application. Arrange connected areas and locations on a visual map, then select anything to edit it in a focused inspector.

Create and combine:

• Illustrated or text-only locations, areas and directed routes
• Detailed scenery with aliases, examination responses and hidden discoveries
• Objects, containers, equipment, currencies and resources
• Characters, conditional dialogue, shops and services
• Creatures, encounters, patrols, attacks, spells, loot and respawning groups
• Doors, barriers, keys, pressure plates and sequence puzzles
• Story events with triggers, conditions and ordered actions
• Multiple currencies, gathering, learnable designs, crafting and persistent production
• Environmental ambience, music, narration and adventure colour themes
• Random encounter generators and changing location layouts

Validate your work, playtest from a selected location, inspect how sample commands will be interpreted, and audit location vocabulary before sharing.

Export an editable designer package for collaboration, a protected player package containing its world and managed assets, or a standalone game build for the platform on which SUDOS is running.

Authors can learn the builder through The Lantern Trial, a free 42-lesson video course with editable checkpoints.

Authors can learn the builder through The Lantern Trial, a free 42-lesson step-by-step video course on YouTube with editable checkpoints.

Player features

• Natural-language command parser with forgiving aliases and contextual references
• Mouse-friendly controls and speech recognition
• Fully local narration and audio support
• Save slots and persistent world state
• Illustrated exploration and multi-creature combat presentation
• Inventory, equipment, spells, dialogue, shops, crafting and journals
• Importable adventures with managed artwork
• Windows, Linux and macOS builds

Completely free

The full player, World Builder and included adventures are unlocked. There are no advertisements, subscriptions, accounts, payment prompts or time limits.

If SUDOS gives you a good adventure—or helps you create one—follow development or optionally support future work on Patreon.

Downloads

Choose the package for your platform. Each download is self-contained and includes the offline narration and audio components.

• Windows x64: installer supplied in a ZIP archive—extract it, then run the installer
• Linux x64: portable ZIP
• macOS Apple Silicon: portable ZIP
• macOS Intel: portable ZIP

The macOS builds are currently unsigned and not notarized. On first launch, Control-click the application, choose Open, then confirm Open.

Documentation, more adventures and the complete free World Builder course are available at sudosadventure.com.

Works completely offline after download. No account, activation or internet connection required.

AI disclosure: Generative AI was used during development, including assistance with code and the illustrations supplied with the bundled adventures. SUDOS itself does not generate images, stories or gameplay content while running. (My drawing skills stop at poor stick figures.)