I loved the old text adventures, partly because my earlier computers were not exactly the "popular" models so there was no getting more popular games on them (plus, growing up in Northern California, well, there simply were no stores that sold computer games and only one record store even carried computer magazines). I had a Color Computer (third hand because some guy owed my dad money on some car repairs) but being impatient, I was not ordering something through the mail in my pre-teen years. That left me with the occasional type-in program in magazines (wasn't something I could rely on).

My brother had a Commodore 64 around 1985 and occasionally I got to play it. That is where I played a few Infocom titles - they had one about being a wizard or something - I could never get far in it as it was cryptic as hell if I remember correctly.

My interest in text adventures came from reading Choose Your Own Adventure books I bought at a local church run thrift store.

I agree with you about there not being much replay value with them. Once you beat it, it is kind of a game of memory to complete later. Still, I find myself downloading them off of itch.io regularly.

Graphics adventures were never really my cup of tea, so to speak. Especially early ones that often required oddball text combinations to do anything. Maybe it was crappy graphics that made them more cryptic than developers intended but I remember the text parsor ones being harder than text adventures by a country mile.