What makes you believe people haven't tried? I have yet to find an example that actually works.

The language models have a tendency to not stick to the script (inventing world state that does not exist), be too helpul (provide spoilers), or get stuck on the same confusions as a human would.

The risk, I imagine, is that they open up unintended avenues of gameplay as they generously interpret options

Inform7 targeting the Z8 machine or Glulx it's far superior to any LLM crap.

> Someone please disrupt this genre with small local language model parsers already.

Do you mean something like: the LLM gets the input from the player, then interprets it to mean something built out of the available verbs? I guess the risk here is that the LLM would be overly generous with its interpretation and help the player too much (e.g. "the player wrote 'slice the tapestry' but there's only a rope in the description of the room, let's assume they meant 'pull the rope'").