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I'm not convinced that current generative AI is a good fit for this kind of game. IMO, the heart of the text adventure game is the world model, and LLMs are notably lacking here. It's hard to believe the game is simulating a real place when it doesn't even have object permanence.
That said, my favorite human-authored text adventure game (I prefer that name to "interactive fiction" because I'm primarily looking for entertainment, not literary value) is Lost Pig:
http://grunk.org/lostpig/
Playable online with a Javascript-based interpreter at:
https://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A//mirror.ifarchive.org/if-...
It's a comedy, and just as with graphical adventure games, I think the whole adventure game concept works best with comedy. Even human-authored world models are inevitably flawed, and the resulting absurdity best matches the tone of comedy. I also recommend another comedy, Brain Guzzlers From Beyond!:
https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=f55km4uutt2cqwwz
Both these are relatively modern games, written after the commercial collapse of the genre. They were the winners of the 2007 and 2015 Annual Interactive Fiction Competitions respectively. More information about this:
https://www.ifwiki.org/The_Annual_IF_Competition
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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Agreed about the importance of a world model.
It's not exactly a text-based adventure game (more text-based trading), but recently I spent some time messing around with integrating an LLM with a text-based world model. It's not 100% reliable, but I've had some pretty satisfying interactions with it: https://github.com/heyitsguay/trader
Basically, you're a trader traveling around a world buying and selling goods, but the economy is tuned such that you can only really get ahead by conning the NPCs >:D
