Windows-Inform7 VS inform7-ide

Anyways, back to your original question, by "use user prompts" do you mean having the player typing in "use silver key on old door" and the like? If so, Twine isn't really designed for that. You could do it in Twine, but you'd be better off using something like Inform 7 (Wikipedia), which is actually built to create games like that. However, I should note that Inform 7 is not well supported, at least not currently, with the last release of the engine being from late 2015. If you do decide to develop with it, I'd recommend using an Inform 7 IDE (Windows, MacOS, Gnome) to help you write your code.

For those looking for Linux packages instead of compiling themselves, there's a github build project of an earlier version this year https://github.com/ptomato/inform7-ide/actions/runs/19915523...

Inform 7 is a domain-specific language for creating parser-based works of interactive fiction (i.e. old-school "text adventure games"). It does the heavy lifting of parsing and maintaining the consistency of the world model for the programmer.

Inform 7 takes this to the extreme, allowing code such as "A distance is a kind of value. 5 miles specifies a distance."

Pure parser-based games have become niche, but they are still out there and, like others mentioned, have continued to evolve (see Inform 7). You no longer have to "guess the verb".

Neat. Have you ever seen Inform? http://inform7.com/ Might offer some inspiration on future features. It's a pretty cool language that's been around for a long time and has the same use case.