Interactive fiction — the choose-your-own-adventure descendant of Zork — has never really needed much hardware: a terminal was always enough. Developer t0mg built it a home anyway, with eenk, open-source firmware that turns Xteink e-ink readers into dedicated interactive-fiction players.
Ink, running on a budget gadget
Xteink readers are cheap, hackable ESP32-powered e-ink devices — palm-sized screens in a protective case, sold as budget e-readers but built on hardware anyone can reflash. eenk replaces the stock firmware with a runtime for ink, inkle studios’ well-established open-source narrative scripting language (the same engine behind numerous commercial and indie interactive-fiction games), built on inkcpp, a C++ implementation of the ink runtime. The project supports both ESP32-C3 (X3/X4) and ESP32-S3 (X4 Pro) variants, which matters more than it sounds: the C3 boards lack PSRAM, forcing real engineering work to fit full story files into flash memory rather than RAM. t0mg also built eenky, an Electron-based companion editor for authoring and previewing stories on desktop before pushing them to the device, plus a desktop SDL2 simulator so writers don’t need physical hardware just to test a branch. It’s MIT-licensed and built with PlatformIO, with four separate build targets covering both hardware variants and a native simulation mode.
Why it fits here
Interactive fiction has largely lived on phone and desktop screens, which is a strange place for a genre this text-forward and slow-paced to end up. Putting it on e-ink — a display technology built for exactly that kind of reading, at a fraction of the power draw of an LCD — is a genuinely good match of format to content, and building a real authoring toolchain (not just a player) around it is what turns a fun hack into something other writers can actually use.