Open world with no automap. All text with a few cases of simple ASCII art (like main menu title, a sign frame, or a game over grave).
Sadly, I've discovered this stuff too late and it seems now only Otchłań/Abyss is still around (plus one of the earlier versions of Ancient Reality via archive.org, but all stuff relating to other/smaller projects seems to be gone from the internet).
Otchłań has two starting cities depending on race choice on character creation (which is gender + 4 races + 8 classes), and you can go wherever you want from the start (there is an optional guide NPC that can walk you around the starting location and explain mechanics). Reportedly there are about 9000 nodes/locations (though that includes "boring" stuff like roads). Not sure if there are any heavily-scripted encounters.
This map is from one of the older versions and is incomplete (but not sure to what degree - at least, the hobbit/dwarf starting city is not there, and the golden-yellow icon like the one at the end of "5w" in the southwestern corner + the pyramid icon symbolize elevation change and there are areas behind them).
There's some managing of hunger/thirst/sleep, going around killing stuff for loot and xp, training and learning new skills, doing quests, finding secrets, buying houses in cities,
training your spatial memory or drawing your own map getting lost (there are partial maps made by players, like the one linked above, if someone wants to deprive themselves of exploration fun + someone made an automapping tool for it), talking in form of both "ask + keyword" and the NPC offering you a few numbered answer options after initiating the conversation... During the day, different types of screen info are color-coded, and during the night everything is grey and you can't see stuff on the ground nor location exits.
Highlights from the interview and game's forum:
- written in turbo pascal and later switched to free pascal
- initially it was developed by two guys but the other one quit after a few years
- works well with reading software for blind people
- at the time of the interview (2015) only like 5 people paid the completely optional registration fee (so it's competing with winrar in that regard)
- the game is considered feature-complete since 2015 but the dev is still slowly working on adding content.
Just launched Ancient Reality to check what it's like, and I went into the starting town, joined warriors' guild, got a quest to kill someone in the graveyard, couldn't find the person so I instead attacked and killed some poor granny taking care of the graves. Then I got into some dark crypt, got beaten to near-death by a rat, and had another granny track me down there but I killed her too. So it seems fairly similar to Otchłań freedom-wise.
Fake edit: found the English
Zelda SUD thingy, feels like a mix of a text game and a roguelike (maybe because of the ASCII minimap).
____
I guess you could consider it a genre that hardly got anywhere, or a synonym for a single-player, text-only RPG (or for a text adventure with levels and stats and other RPG stuff).
And there are probably
some codexers who could offer more insight into it.