Lost Beyond the Xanthor Gates

Lost Beyond the Xanthor Gates

Lost Beyond the Xanthor Gates is a browser-playable science fiction interactive fiction and classic text adventure. You play by typing commands, the story answers, and the station keeps score of what you repair, what you break, and what you are forced to abandon.

You wake in a room with no light, the air cold and stale, the floor vibrating with a tired machinery hum. There is a sense of distance beyond the walls, a scale you cannot see yet. Somewhere in the dark, systems are failing quietly, one by one.

Above a strange world named Xanthor, a gate system once linked distant places through three anchor points. One anchor is gone. The rest are damaged, drifting, and full of old decisions. The gate cannot be repaired. It can only be understood, endured, and outlived.

progress saves automatically play in your browser

Teleport room

What it feels like

Cold metal, rationed power, and the slow dread of a timer you cannot see. Early play rewards careful sensing and simple, practical choices. Later play becomes sharper, riskier, and more expensive.

Darkness presses close. The air tastes old. > listen The machinery hum is uneven, like power being rationed. > feel Cold floor plates. A seam in the wall. A latch you can find by touch.

About the story

This is a survival story after purpose is gone. The station still expects routines that no one is there to perform. Safety protocols still exist, but they are incomplete, and you are missing context. Each hour reveals a little more of what happened here, and why the planet below matters.

Mechanically, it is a classic Infocom-style text adventure, rebuilt for the web. You explore by typing natural commands, combining tools, learning systems, and making choices that persist. Some puzzles become turn-limited and lethal later on, but the game is designed to be learnable. If you die, you are not punished with long walks back to the problem. You are expected to adapt.

Under it all is the shadow of the gate: three anchors, two surviving points, and one that was destroyed in the middle of use. There is no way to rebuild what was lost. There is only what you can salvage, and what you decide you are willing to wake up.

Quick facts

For readers, streamers, and anyone searching for this kind of sci-fi interactive fiction.

genre: interactive fiction / text adventure / parser game / science fiction play style: exploration + systems + puzzles + escalating pressure platform: web browser (no install) tone: cold metal, darkness, distant planetlight saving: automatic progress, optional manual save best first commands: look, examine, inventory, listen, feel

If you like slow, believable sci-fi and games that respect careful thinking, this one will keep you busy.