When I was growing up there was a wonderfully made interactive “novel” game on early Macintosh called Sherlock Holmes. I’ve always wondered when we’ll get to a point where this can be done ad-hoc with any potential crime thriller. LA Noir introduced nuanced facial movements and dialog chains but I keep going back to that 1990s era Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.

This one? https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3485-sherlock-holmes-con...

People are definitely doing "free form" interactive fiction now, though I think the one that really interests me is classic style but with an LLM interface that makes the interaction less rigid, eg

https://intfiction.org/t/glulxe-with-llm-based-user-input-pa...