Anglophone Atlantis has been an independent nation since an April day in 1822, when a well-aimed shot from their depluralizing cannon reduced the British colonizing fleet to one ship.

Since then, Atlantis has been the world’s greatest center for linguistic manipulation, designing letter inserters, word synthesizers, the diminutive affixer, and a host of other tools for converting one thing to another. Inventors worldwide pay heavily for that technology, which is where a smuggler and industrial espionage agent such as yourself can really clean up.

Unfortunately, the Bureau of Orthography has taken a serious interest in your activities lately. Your face has been recorded and your cover is blown.

Your remaining assets: about eight more hours of a national holiday that’s spreading the police thin; the most inconvenient damn disguise you’ve ever worn in your life; and one full-alphabet letter remover.

Good luck getting off the island.

Counterfeit Monkey is a full-length wordplay puzzle game. It started out as a code sketch intended to be an Inform 7 example — using indexed text to implement a T-remover machine like in Leather Goddesses of Phobos — but the scenario was so much fun to extend that it quickly grew far too large to use in the manual. Once I realized I was writing a proper game, I sat down to ask myself what kind of world we’d be living in if it really were possible to T-remove a rabbit into a rabbi, and what kind of story belonged in that world. The bulk of the game was completed by 2010 and I did another chunk of work in 2011, to the point where it was almost release-ready when Pressing Real Life Things took over. It needed just a bit of light cleanup this holiday season.

If we were listing back of the box features, the list would look a little like this:

tutorial, merciful design, and multiple solutions for those who like their puzzles gentle

achievements for esoteric solutions and an optional hard mode, for those who want more challenge

friendly navigation: built-in graphical map, compass rose, and GO TO ROOM features

Alabaster-style conversation engine for conversing with assorted NPCs

extensively developed world with roughly a hundred locations to explore

estimated 8-10 hours for an experienced IF player to play once on easy mode

cameo appearances from three IF community members

Because it’s computationally demanding, Monkey behaves differently on different interpreters. The ideal way to run it is with the Git engine for speed.

At the moment playing with Gargoyle using Git is difficult because it’s compiled with settings that make UNDO non-functional with such a large game. Gargoyle maintainers have very kindly offered to work on this; that’s likely to take a little time to complete.

To boil down the terp suggestions:

Browser: Monkey loads under Quixe, but is unplayably slow. No alternate recommendations here.

MacOS X: Mac Zoom runs Monkey at good speed. UNDO works for me, but I gather it doesn’t work for everyone. Spatterlight runs unacceptably slowly.

Windows: UNDO fails on Windows Git, but works on Windows Glulxe. (The tradeoff is that Glulxe will be a bit slower.)

Linux: Gargoyle is the best option here.

Whichever you pick, unless you’re sure UNDO is working, save often. While it should be hard to get stuck, it is possible to die in various ways.