Google text adventure: How to play Google’s new Easter egg game

 

Easter eggs are generally fun features on the internet, messaging apps, and games. It’s often unknown how these came to be or even who was savvy enough to discover them. Google is notorious for programming these Easter eggs into its algorithms and when you find one, it feels like you’re part of a secret club. Whether you want to do something different in your downtime or show off to your friends, Google really hit the mark with this hidden game.

Known simply as Text Adventure, this hidden Google game is the latest in its web-based hijinks.

Google is no stranger to adding hidden secrets into its apps and services, from Mario Kart in Google Maps to Google Earth flight simulators. Its newest Easter egg is a text adventure hidden away in Chrome’s development console.

In it, your character is the big blue G of Google wandering around the Google campus in search of your letter family. You do so with simple text commands like ‘north’ or ‘use’ but, unlike many other text adventure games, you’re provided with a list of possible commands to make things a bit easier.

Google’s Text Adventure is certainly a fun little way to kill some time, although you may wonder how Google engineers find the time to create all these games. It’s reminiscent of classic text adventures like Zork, the likes of which are often hidden in video games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops and Fallout 4 due to their tiny size.

If you’re curious about how to play Google’s Text Adventure, we’ve guided you through the process below.

How to Access Google’s Text Adventure

The first thing you’ll need to know is how do you get to the game in the first place? As a hidden feature in Google’s framework, it isn’t as simple as Googling the game and pulling it up (well it is, but there’s an extra step).

To access Google’s Text Adventure, follow these steps:

Open Google Chrome and go to google.com. You can use Mozilla Firefox as well, but it’s a little different.

In Google’s search bar type Text Adventure

Next, you can use the keyboard shortcut to access the inspector tool (ctrl+shift+J on PC or cmd+option+I on Mac).

The Inspect Element page will open, type Yes to play.

If you want to play on Firefox you can by following the exact same steps, but when the Inspect page opens, you’ll need to click on the Console tab before typing yes.

Now that you’ve got the game going, let’s cover how to play!

How to Play Google Text Adventure

Google provides very little instruction when you begin playing.

Essentially, Google will layout a quest or a mission in front of you. Read the text and respond back with one-word commands in response.

For example, we played and the game started out a little strange. First, we’ve awoken as a big blue ‘G,’ but can’t find our friends.

Now, the object is to type one-word commands using the available options that Google provides. In this scenario, we are essentially walking around choosing which direction to go in. Using simple commands such as ‘grab’ to pick up helpful objects, moving North, East, South, West, up, and down, we navigate through this imaginary scene to find our colorful friends.

At one point, we even get a helpful map to which we must type ‘grab’ and hit enter. On the screen, our location appears.

We wander around finding our friends one by one.

How to Win

This game can take quite a bit of time as you navigate the plain text maze and collect clues. At times, you will run into dead ends and even monster-like villains. Of course, you could always Google the answers if you get stuck, but here are our tips if you want to win the game honestly:

• Use ‘grab’ often – The commands will offer you one-word directional options, but it doesn’t always give you the option to grab an object. Read the text, when it states that you see something (a map, a costume, etc) type ‘grab’ and hit enter. The item will appear in your inventory. Many times, this will give you clues or help you later.
• Keep a mental map of where you are – You don’t want to backtrack unless you run into something and you can no longer move forward. If you’ve previously typed ‘north,’ don’t type ‘south’ next, it’ll only put you back where you’ve been before.
• Understand the levels – at one point you reach a building and you can go up several floors. From there, you can use skyways to enter new buildings and travel up and down or choose a new skyway to enter another building.
• Look for clues – Once you’ve made a few moves you’ll begin to notice clues hidden within the game. Sometimes you’ll even need to use mathematical algorithms to reveal a helpful tip.
• Pay attention to the key on your map – To the left of your map, there is a key. Use it to guide you along, noticing doorways, when you can move up, etc is pertinent to your ability to navigate toward your missing friends.

Now that you know our tips it’s time to start playing. As mentioned above, the game can take a really long time if you don’t cheat. Based on our tests, we closed the game, went on to other things, then came back and we were able to pick up where we left off.  When you’re ready to quit, simply hit the ‘X’ icon in the upper right-hand corner to close the game.

Other Easter Eggs

We’d assume by now that everyone has heard of the Thanos easter egg, when you Googled Thanos and clicked on his gauntlet (located on the right-hand side where the share icon is located) the Google page would begin to disappear. We noticed that this no longer exists, but there are other fun options available in 2020.

• Type ‘do a barrel roll’ into Google’s search bar and your entire webpage will do, well, a barrel roll.
• Type ‘Pacman,’ solitaire,’ ‘snake game,’ or ‘tic tac toe’ into the search bar and you can play with Google.
• Type ‘fidget spinner’ and Google will give you a digital on-screen spinner

There are a lot more Easter eggs for you to find on Google. Some dating all the way back to the 1990s. If you stay on the lookout for them, you’re bound to find some new ones.