[bluGill]

Infocom wasn't that punishing, but back in the day a lot of other IF was. It was very common for a while to have some random "guard" who would kill you - this was entirely a random number generator that you would be killed when walking into the room. Players hated it: the only thing you could do is save often and restore and try again, which was a big waste of time (really bad if you were loading from floppy on an 8 bit computer and so had to insert disk A again).

[demondemidi]

Except for Spellbreaker, which had an early path in the game that seemed like an easy solution but would break the game until the very end and you had NO idea what went wrong. (Incorrectly using Girgol to solve the ragweed problem, when you need it for the VERY LAST PUZZLE in the game to freeze shadow you before he jumps into the tesseract). I think Starcross had a path like this too, but I don't recall. And Infidel never allowed you to get the full score because you were ... an infidel. But that irony was lost on 15 year old me.

[thaumasiotes]

OK, but the question is, since Infocom's text adventures weren't particularly punishing, why the sudden change of philosophy in RTZ?

Lucasfilm was already doing very well with no-failure-state graphical adventure games in 1992.