[curiousdannii]

Various levels of NLP do get applied in IF, but it doesn't necessarily help much. Being able to parse input is an important step, but the game/story needs to be able to do something with those verbs and nouns. For a good player experience the author needs to communicate clearly what range of input will be acceptable, making sure all nouns mentioned in text can be interacted, any actions implied in the text or by the nouns themselves are recognised, etc. If you do that well then you can have a good player experience with a purely handcoded parser.