Well, basically in the 90's fans of the ZMachine interpreter from Zork/Infocom created games with amateur tools and a really easy OOP lang called Inform, which the latest OOP iteration it's Inform 6 and they made jewels such as Curses!, Jigsaw, Anchorhead... surpassing the quality of the infocom games, even creating an eigth (v8) version of the Zmachine, surpassing v3 and v5 editions from Infocom. One of the games features even time travelling puzzles having to fight with yourself and your previous steps you did in the game. That could make an LLM parser explode. Yet, you have the Inform6 source code at https//jxself.org/git/devours and you can compile and run it with inform6 on systems as small as a 486 or a Pentium with the inform6 compiler.

Later with Inform 7 they created an English like language, describing the game by just using English like sentences. Emily Short created Galatea with Inform6 which is more a conversation experiment than a game, think of Eliza but with stereoids, having even "feelings" and "topics" on the conversation. Depending on how you chat with a statue and what topics you uncover, after a long chat you will reach one ending or another. OFC the topic and the feelings, previous chat... it's dynamic and not pre-generated like a graphical adventure menu.

Then there is Counterfeit Monkey, where you can turn an object into anagrams of others in order to solve clever puzzles, and the object count it's really big. That could be really hard to implement with an LLM.