Need a link to a game, but I don't know what it is.

Text-based adventure games is mostly all i’ve ever heard them called. For really bare bones text only stuff the first thing that comes to mind is the Zork series.

If you’re looking for the ones with art but is still command driven, then many of the games made by Sierra software fit the bill. Kings Quest, Space Quest, and the more racier Leisure Suit Larry series are popular picks.

Zork i believe is freeware, and the Sierra stuff isn’t exactly free but it’s not hard to find. Also, google for Abandonware. There are plenty of sites like ‘Home of the Underdogs’ dedicated to archiving and offering old abandoned games for download

Are you talking about a MOO?

Nethack!

I played one back in the late 1970’s as a kid on a mainframe running GCOS and would love to find something like it.
Here is a link of some older ones including MUD versions

Try this Brass Lantern on for size. Software for Mac, and probably dozens of “interactive fiction” titles to play.

They’re called Text Adventures. Infocom made some good ones, and I’m sure there were Mac versions, but for the old OS. Anyway, there are sure to be many ports and even new games available. See if someone’s built Colossal Cave, for example, for a recent Mac OS. MOOs and MUDs are real-time multiplayer versions.

Here you can get Zork 1 – 3 for Windows and Mac.

@Zaku maybe @jellyfish3232 is asking not necessarily text adventures, which are purely textual, but graphical adventure games where text input is used for interaction. Some of the ones I grew up playing were “Hugo’s House of Horrors” 1–3, and the original Sierra games, like Quest for glory (Hero’s Quest originally), Police Quest, EcoQuest and the like. I used to have a link but lost it (sorry) – you can try Abandonia.com though, and you’ll need a DOS emulator, I recommend DosBox.

EDIT: Doh! didn’t read the first post lol

Part of the problem is that the question is mind bogglingly vague. To start, text adventures and graphic adventures aren’t really video games. But besides that, the OP doesn’t give any detail other than typing to control a character. This could include text-only (Zork, Enchanter), text and graphics (like Thieve’s Guild or Blade of Blackpool), or more video and graphic orientated that pre-date ‘point-and-click’ (Maniac Mansion, Space Quest 1, Leisure Suit Larry 1).

Then, as @crisw points out, there are the TTY RPGs, such as Nethack, Rogue, Angband, and Mines of Moria. Those don’t rely on typing ‘commands’ to a character, though. And nowadays they include tile graphics.

Until @jellyfish3232 decides to come back and maybe fill in a few details the best the rest of us can do is toss out whatever sounds good to us.