Fire Witch

John's Fire Witch is John T Baker's 1995 interactive fiction piece, a cold-weekend mystery set in Columbus, Ohio in December 1990. Built with the TADS parser, version 1.01 strands the player in a friend's locked apartment as a blizzard hits and a stranger story begins to surface.

Setup

You arrive in Columbus expecting to meet your friend John Baker at a bar, but he never shows. His apartment door is unlocked, so you let yourself in, drift off, and wake to find a heavy blizzard has sealed you inside with whatever else lives in the rooms.

Parser and Engine

The game runs on TADS, the text adventure system favored by independent IF authors of the early 1990s. Play is entirely text driven, so a TADS interpreter for classic Mac OS handles the prose, parsing, and save files.

Author and Release

John T Baker wrote and released John's Fire Witch in 1995, with the listed Macintosh build at version 1.01. The distributable archive FireWitch.sit weighs in at roughly 137 KB.