There's also a lively community of people who make modern text adventures. These tend to be shorter and more well designed than many of the cruel games of the past. My all-time favourite is The Wise-Woman's Dog[2], a passion project with a very high quality bar.
Text adventures are great[3], and no, as of yet, they are not improved by LLMs. Too inconsistent, too much hallucination. They can't even play text adventures well.
[1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=ddagftras22bnz8h
[2]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs
[3]: https://entropicthoughts.com/the-greatness-of-text-adventure...
> With the cantankerous Wizard of Wordplay evicted from his mansion, the worthless plot can now be redeveloped. The city regulations declare, however, that the rip-down job can't proceed until all the items within have been removed.
It's full of delightful wordplay and puzzles that play with the text-adventure medium, constraining what words you can use. Highly recommended.
I’ve played the old, text-only, Z-code version back in high school, around 1999, and the experience was so vivid and immersive that to this day I can draw a map of Anchorhead from memory and recite the lineage of the Verlac family. I think it’s still my favourite game of all time (although I spent much more time on some others).
These days, an illustrated version can be bought on Steam for something like $10. Highly recommended!
And even if you do know how unusual it is, you won't necessarily like it. I can't go into detail without spoilers, but I can compare it to an analogous situation with the Fighting Fantasy gamebook "Creature of Havoc", which is, depending on your point of view, either a work of genius or a broken mess. You opinion of "Spider and Web" will likely match that of "Creature of Havoc".