The best place to look for cool and innovative (and free!) IF games is the Interactive Fiction Competition [0].

Anything by Andrew Plotkin [1] (aka Zarf) is guaranteed to be interesting. Other indie authors of renown to look for are Emily Short and Adam Cadre. But also look for new authors! Mind you, modern IF focuses less in puzzles and more in narrative or exploring the boundaries of the medium.

One of my personal favorites is "Spider and Web" by Zarf, because I love its Cold War-esque setting. Mind you, it can be difficult! The best IF games also explore the console interface itself, such as in "Fail Safe".

An example of a particularly innovative game is "Rematch" [2]: it's a single move game (i.e. you win or fail in a single input, which can be quite complicated and shows off what modern parsers can do). It's sort of a "Groundhog Day" where you must prevent a disaster in a single move, and if you lose you replay it again, and again, and again, till you get it right.

Many of these games can be played in a browser, without installing anything.

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[0] https://ifcomp.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Plotkin

[2] http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=22oqimzgf8snv002

For anyone else interested, I'll save you five minutes:

        sudo apt-get install gargoyle-free;
        wget http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/Rematch.gam;
        gargoyle Rematch.gam

Thanks so much!

Zork is one of the first games in this genre and it's surprisingly good at parsing commands.

You can play it at https://classicreload.com/zork-i.html or http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/5zyoqrsugeopel3ffhz_v...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork

The Infocom games were actually after a lot of earlier games like Colossal Cave (aka "Adventure") and the Scott Adams (not the Dilbert guy) adventures. As such, their parser was actually pretty advanced compared to the 1970s games and understood whole sentences rather than the traditional two words.