Before I had my Macintosh Performa, I had a tiny Sharp IBM-compatible laptop with two 720K floppy drives and no hard drive. Believe it or not, this was the development platform for Archetype, which ended up being about 6400 lines of Turbo Pascal.
Archetype was something of a language experiment, and has a certain minimalism that you may find either elegant or annoying. You can look at some sample code from "The Gorreven Papers", one of the adventures included with Archetype, to see what I mean.
It can be used for more than just adventure games. Here is the complete listing for the Animal program in Archetype (included in the distribution).
I still use Archetype on my Macintosh, with the help of Virtual PC from Connectix, an excellent program. I'm afraid that with the responsibilities of my day job, I haven't spent any time converting the program to run on any platform besides IBM-compatibile DOS.
Archetype, its source code, and the source code of the games that come with it, are all free. I only ask that you redistribute them in the same form as you found them, so that my authorship is not lost.
The main Archetype package
and the Archetype source code
are both ZIP files. Enjoy the games!