Text-based games might seem like a “relic of the past,” but there are plenty of people who are still totally fine with using simple words and their imaginations to picture what’s happening while they “play,” and for teams like Failbetter Games, they are more than happy to keep the tradition going with titles like Fallen London.

If you haven’t tried it before, Fallen London is a unique Gothic text-based adventure where the city of London is taken one day by bats. Yes, really. The RPG revels in its hilarity as much as its Gothic tones, ensuring that players have unexpected experiences the more they type things in. To that effect, the team continually adds more content to be enjoy, including their “Estival” events. However, for 2026, the team is doing something different, as they revealed in a newsletter that they’re not doing a new Estival event this year, but instead, bringing back all past ones:

“Estival is our summer festival, and it’s different every year. This year in a departure from the usual level of change, we’re completely eschewing creating a new Estival. Instead, from the 27th of July until Monday the 17th of August, all players will have access to the Waswood: the part of Parabola where you can relive events from Fallen London’s past. We’re adding last year’s summer festival, Hell is Missing, for the first time. Last year, we borrowed a lot of writer time from Mandrake to make the amount of progress we wanted in Fallen London. But games, like reckonings, cannot be postponed indefinitely. In years long past, when our resources were more limited, Fallen London often had to be neglected when we were bringing another game (Sunless Skies, Sunless Sea) towards release.

Now we can do a good amount of work on both at the same time – but it does sometimes still require compromises. We hope you enjoy this summer of relative respite, and we look forward to returning with our regularly scheduled communal event next year.”

So, if you’ve missed out on the chance to do a past Estival event, now is the time to type to your heart’s content!