I highly recommend Blue Lacuna by Aaron Reed. It’s a wonderful IF game with a well-rendered world, an interesting premise, and a very reactive and strongly characterized NPC. It also allows you choice of gender and orientation for your character, like CoG games do.
You won’t have to fight with the text parser to play it – it’s newbie-friendly (but also accepts traditional commands) and has both story and puzzle modes.
It’s long and totally worth the time commitment.
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