A Free Text Adventure

Goddard Withings:
The Not-Yet-Famous Explorer

A choose-your-own-adventure space comedy in the spirit of Hitchhiker's Guide and Space Quest. Bribery. Marshmallow people. Six wildly different ways this ends.

Plays in your browser. No download. No signup. No microtransactions. ~30 minutes per playthrough.

A galaxy of bad decisions awaits.

Goddard Withings is a slovenly, ill-mannered, and improbably good-looking man with a permanent scruff of stubble and a beloved space fedora. He wants to be a famous adventurer like his idol, Wyoming Jones. The galaxy has other plans.

You'll bribe Karl the Guild clerk with expired gift cards. You'll choose between a rust-bucket smuggler ship and an ultra-luxury carrier nobody's told you isn't yours. You'll get drunk in alien bars, threaten a passive-aggressive tree, lick a sacred crystal, and eventually — if you're very lucky and even more stupid — discover the lost planet of Undiscoveria and a few truths about the galaxy's adventuring elite that nobody ever bothered to print.

Six endings. None of them obvious, none of them tidy, none of them quite what you'd call winning. Goddard will say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time, and you'll be in charge of when.

What's in the box

164 branching passages

Across nine chapters. Every choice changes how the rest plays out — companions, ships, allies, and reveals.

Six distinct endings

Each spawns from a different final decision. The kind of decision that says more about you than about Goddard. None of them is the "right" one.

163 hand-prompted images

Cinematic painted illustrations for nearly every scene, in a sharp modern indie-game style.

Original soundtrack

Multiple chapter themes plus mood pieces for the laziest, drunkest, and most regrettable scenes.

Color-coded character voices

Brindles' rusty brown. BoB's robot cyan. Skink's dusty red. Karl's green visor. You'll know who's speaking at a glance.

Smarmy on purpose

Hitchhiker's Guide energy. Space Quest absurdity. Long parenthetical asides written specifically to annoy you in the best way.

A crew of questionable competence

Karl

The Guild clerk. Wears a green visor and the world's slowest patience.

Mr. Brindles

Bipedal tortoise mechanic. Welds at high temperatures, low IQ.

BoB HelperBot

Relentlessly cheerful. Moral compass has been "deleted."

The Countess

An imperious noblewoman who keeps turning up where she shouldn't. Probably nothing.

Skink the Lost

One-legged navigator. Cybernetic parrot. Reckless faith in random coordinates.

Wyoming Jones

The galaxy's most famous adventurer. Everything Goddard wants to be.

Glimpses from the galaxy

Goddard slumped on his couch in his cluttered Red Stamp 17 apartment. A tense exchange across a smoky bar table on the jungle planet Teree. A crashed ship on the alien red-crystal planet of Undiscoveria with shadowy floating Nothereians nearby. The surreal Marshmallow Dimension, populated by cheerful pastel marshmallow people. A neon-lit rooftop at night over the city of Adventure Prime. Skink the Lost grinning at the helm of a hyperspace-warping spaceship.

Made with love, jankily.

Built with Twine and the Harlowe story format — the same toolkit behind some of the best independent interactive fiction on the web. Illustrations generated and curated scene-by-scene. Soundtrack composed for the project. Hosted free, no ads, no tracking. Source code is on GitHub.

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