A good one is one called "Excel". You make up numbers and put them in boxes, with the goal of getting "impression" points. The fancier your graphs, the more points you get. You can build up your points to get "promotions". The best feature of this game is that your points can make you IRL money!

Some people find the game boring, but I think that's only because they're not creative enough with making up numbers, and get bogged down in "truth" and "accuracy."

Rogue or Nethack are great.

In terms of adventure games, there is of course Adventure. And The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

I grew up playing a mud called discworldmud, it's an entire multiplayer world that's still really active and entirely text based and entirely free. You should check that out. Plus Tintin++ to connect from your terminal ;)

You should look into MUDs, its been like 20 years since I played any, but there's probably a couple active ones still around

Check out Type Help, text-based murder mystery.

Why on earth did you submit this with that gif??

This might not be exactly what you're looking for, but its worth giving a shot. A collection of TUI based games

I haven't invested too much time into it, but you should try Pokete! It's Pokemon, but with ASCII visuals on a terminal window :)

terminal /esc is good. its a game where you try to exit out of a fake computer system.

also there are some BBS's still online you can telnet to and play their games.

Roadwarden

Citizen Sleeper

Mentioned this in a thread, but will comment at a top-level:

ProsperousUniverse.com - You’ll end up wanting to use spreadsheets for the game. It’s EVE Online production/trading without the combat.

It’s a very slow paced game so don’t go into it expecting a current-era gaming experience. And yes, super viable to play the game without paying anything for at least 9months.

Erion is a really nice community. Quick commands for moving around and combat encounters are fully automatic with some key presses if you want to change the type of attack etc.