The idea was inspired by ZORK — a text-based adventure game from the 70s where as a player you explore the underground empire in search for treasures. This is a much simpler game that offers a bit of a holiday-themed adventure while focusing on exploring MCP as the interface.

MCP being the protocol of choice isn’t that important, but it allows for the interesting mechanic where you can pretty easily add the game to your code assistant of choice and have the actual LLM be a player, or just help you a bit throughout the play through. It’s also goofy and I like it.

I have created a simpler way of playing the game in the browser as I recognize that adding a full on MCP server to your private workspace can be a bit much (sandbox people!). You can check it out here. There an LLM sits in between you and the MCP server and tries to coerce your request into the right shape. It’s simpler, it can’t just go on it’s own, but it works.

The observation I had was that unless stopped, Claude Code or Codex would rush to finish the game without my input. I had to stop it and tell it that I’m the lead and the agent is my interpreter and interface.

The other thing you notice is that having an LLM as the interface to the game means some slop inside the game engine is more forgivable. The API doesn’t have to be that easy to use because the LLM doesn’t get frustrated if the command that feels like it should work, just doesn’t.

If you are too locked in and busy but would still like to see how the game plays out, fear not — just ask your LLM of choice to win the game for you and summarize the story!