To the City of the Clouds: Text-Based Choices in a Search for a Lost Incan City

An Adventure Told Entirely in Text

To the City of the Clouds presents its adventure entirely through text, with neither graphics nor sound effects. Playing means reading the narrative and making choices that control the story, rather than watching the expedition unfold on screen. The interactive novel format puts both the account of events and your means of directing them into words: the prose tells the adventure, while your decisions guide it.

Imagination supplies the sights and sounds that the game deliberately leaves out. Colombia’s mountains and the lost Incan city are settings to picture from the writing, not scenery rendered alongside it. That distinction defines the presentation: the search has a concrete place and purpose, but its depiction remains verbal. The reader supplies a mental image of the expedition while participating through the story’s choices.

Choose Your Persona, Then Direct the Story

Character creation gives you three explicit ways to define the archaeologist: choose a persona, select a sexual orientation, and decide on a preference for wearing khaki indigenous tunics. These options put personal identity and clothing alongside the expedition’s archaeological purpose. You are choosing who undertakes the search, not simply accepting a fixed protagonist; the advertised setup includes both how that person identifies and what they like to wear.

Once that persona is established, your role shifts from defining the protagonist to directing the story through choices. The two kinds of participation give the adventure its structure: select the person who will undertake it, then make decisions that guide its narrative. Persona, sexual orientation, and clothing preference belong to the character setup, while control over the unfolding story comes through the choices you make during the adventure.

Search Colombia's Mountains for a Lost City—and Tenure

Your destination is the City of the Clouds, a lost Incan city in the mountains of Colombia. You undertake the search as a fledgling archaeologist, placing an early-career researcher at the centre of the expedition rather than an established academic. The premise gives the journey a specific geographical and archaeological focus: Colombia’s mountains are the setting, and a named lost city is the object of the search. That pairing anchors the adventure in the pursuit of a particular discovery, not exploration for its own sake.

The ambitions attached to that search extend beyond locating the city: the archaeologist seeks fame, fortune, and tenure at a prestigious university. Recognition, wealth, and an academic appointment are presented together, giving the expedition a professional purpose as well as a financial one. Tenure is the especially pointed detail in that combination, connecting the lost-city premise to a fledgling scholar’s university career. The advertised goal is therefore both archaeological and personal: pursue the City of the Clouds while seeking the rewards that could establish the researcher’s standing.

Face Pit Vipers, Tropical Diseases, and FARC Guerrillas

Venomous pit vipers and tropical diseases put both wildlife and illness among the expedition’s hazards. The archaeologist’s search is not concerned solely with locating an archaeological site: it also involves confronting snakes and sickness along the way. These are the two natural threats named in the official description, which identifies the dangers without specifying particular diseases or explaining how either hazard is handled in play.

The FARC guerrilla army supplies the expedition’s explicitly named human opposition. Alongside the pit vipers and tropical diseases, it makes the archaeologist’s obstacles broader than the natural dangers of the journey. The official description says the fledgling researcher will battle this armed force, but does not detail encounters or methods of confrontation. The supported picture is therefore a search threatened by guerrillas as well as wildlife and illness, rather than a documented account of combat mechanics.

First published Nov 6, 2026.