The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish

LLMs can enhance text adventures.

I'm not saying having LLMs narrate the entire situation. I'm saying have the LLM sit between gamestate and the player. The LLM is the UI.

Essentially the LLM can see the current game state and possible moves and it's the LLMs job to change the game state and report the current game state to the user (via a well written narrative).

That keeps the world consistent and structured, but the LLM adds enough dynamism to keep it flowing well. You can even make the underlying game state complex as well. Like you can have enemy AI's that actually move through the world too (independent of the LLM).

There have been attempts, the results were not promising:

https://intfiction.org/t/first-full-game-available-on-new-ll...

It looks as if the problem for this one was a game design issue. They had the LLM be sarcastic and ignore well known adventure game prompts on purpose. It's an easy fix to make the LLM more obedient and polite.

The biggest issue is attempts to hack the LLM, to get at hidden gamestate. But I feel this can be easily remedied by just not providing the LLM with hidden game state.

The LLM could use a different session to respond to each command.

That would keep its behavior passive and restricted to simply the current state, since it would retain no memory of previous actions.