Counterfeit Monkey

Counterfeit Monkey is an interactive fiction game by genre veteran Emily Short, which focuses on clever wordplay and uses the genre's text-based nature for great effect. The player assumes the role of a corporate spy in the nation of Anglophone Atlantis, a country which has invented several machines that can change reality by manipulating language.

The gameplay is that of a classic text adventure, where the player has to solve puzzles in order to progress. Counterfeit Monkey's clever twist is that the player starts out with an item that can remove letters from words to change them into something else, a mechanic which many of the game's puzzles employ.

Emily Short says that the game started out as a thought experiment based on one particular puzzle from the game Leather Goddesses of Phobos, where the player can use a t-remover. She took the idea of the puzzle and expanded it into a fully fledged setting where changing reality by language manipulation is commonplace, and turned it into a game where almost every puzzle is based on the idea.