Dwarf Fortress

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Adventure mode
In Adventurer mode (also called "Adventure mode" or simply "Adventure") you create a single adventurer, be they dwarf, human, elf, goblin, or one of the varieties of animal people, who start out somewhere in one of your generated worlds. You can learn about what ails the world, and go on quests to end those troubles (or get brutally murdered trying), and you can venture into the wilderness to find caves, shrines, lairs, abandoned towers, and other towns and settlements. You can even visit your previously abandoned/retired fortresses and take all the precious items you yourself once created. Unlike fortress mode, Adventurer mode is a sort of advanced open world RPG version of Rogue or Nethack taking place in the same procedurally-generated worlds used for fortress mode. Whereas in fortress mode, you are in charge of a large group of people in real-time, restricted to a small parcel of land, in adventurer mode you control a single character in a turn-based manner, roaming the entire world freely.
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50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron A. Reed
What makes the game so memorable is the incredible depth of its simulation and the deliciously vivid stories it inspires using nothing but words and a simple palette of symbols.
[...]
Before playing this game, you had to first give it time to create the world. ASCII rivers wore down mountains; rain shadows and elevation shaped the formation of lakes; hundreds of years of history were logged, sketching tens of thousands of historical figures and events: wars, the foundation of cities, the creation of notable artifacts.
[...]
One week at a time, the game simulates centuries of history, with civilizations that rise and fall, build roads, found settlements, and make decisions about warfare and trade based on the personalities of their leaders. Game scholars Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux call each generated history “a book of sand” which “no human could ever exhaust”: exports of a single world’s backstory can exceed a gigabyte of text.
Thousands of these stories lie buried in each history generated by Dwarf Fortress, stock templates and random events interacting in often surprising ways. The human compulsion to read between the lines helps bring these chronicles to life, supplying motivation and character that may or may not have actually been present in the simulation.
[...]
“Dwarf Fortress begins and ends with stories,” Boluk and LeMieux have noted, referring to the way written stories both inspire the game’s mechanics and act as its primary output. First, the game’s design is deeply informed by a practice its creators have carried out since before its first release: writing short stories set in its world, then analyzing them to see what kinds of narrative situations the game’s simulation cannot yet handle.
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