Not to put too fine a point on it, I wrote this when I was about fifteen. In BASIC. Inhumane is shoddy and I will make no apologies.

Furthermore, the game abounds with in-jokes so obscure that even I probably don't recognize all of them any more. Some of them are publically accessible; some less so. (Let's just say that a certain friend of mine was deeply, er, moved by eighth-grade geometry class.)

In doing this Inform port, I have manfully resisted the urge to improve the game. Spelling and punctuation errors have been fixed, but no descriptive text has been added. I didn't quite have the nerve to cripple Graham's Inform library, so the parser does not suck, but just about everything else you could want in a game is lacking here. Just about every movable object has no description. Synonyms are sparse. Variety of text is a lost cause. Get the idea?

Enough castigation.

Surprisingly, this game is almost merciful by the Zarfian Interactive Fiction Rating System. It is possible to get stuck, but only in one place, very early in the game. However, for reasons which will become clear, I can't promise that you'll never die....


This game is copyright 1985(-ish), 1995 by Andrew Plotkin. As for other responsible parties...

Well, there's Graham Nelson. You've probably heard of him by now.

There's the IF Archive. You've probably heard of that too.

There's Richard Merryman, who found me the Apple II disk image of this game years after I lost my original, and also dug the source code and data out and into a sensible format.

And finally: Inhumane vaulted me to an early and ego-heightening level of fame when Kim R. Schuette included it in his Book of Adventure Games II. Thank you, sir; you helped make me the whatever-it-is I am today.


Play Inhumane now.