[ianbicking]

Yes, I think the lucid dreaming analogy is apt. That said, these games aren't just puzzles, they are also imaginary worlds. AI Dungeon might be approaching the sense of being in another world from another direction. Text adventures generally start with a small set of unforgiving rules, and AI Dungeon starts with inferred and easily broken rules.

But another part of games is the meta-game where you get into the game designers head, try to figure out how they would have setup the puzzle, knowing that challenges are designed to be solvable. In AI Dungeon this is also true in a sense, except you are getting in the head of an alien intelligence that has read human writing extensively.