Theater People by Michael Kielstra
In this game, you’re a theater worker who has to solve a problem with the curtain so it can rise and a play can begin. There are a number of NPCs and a full theater layout; I get the feeling that the author probably based a lot of this on personal experience. While the rooms don’t have as much going on as I’d like to see (many of them are functionally empty corridors) the implementation is more than just bare-bones; the NPCs can be asked many different things, including each other, and there’s at least two endings. (I finished the main objective successfully, but couldn’t quite work out how to help the actress.)
A significant drawback is that the game depends heavily on actions such as ASKing characters things which aren’t always obvious, or examining objects that aren’t prominent in the room description, a design decision that necessitates a lot of experimentation and poking around, and this has a tendency to emphasize the visible seams in the world model. (ASK is very tricky to use because you have to program in a whole butt-ton of stuff if you don’t your NPCs to be unresponsive lumps.) Overall, the game seemed to be about half polished; a lot of rough stuff and defaults left in (I’m as good-looking as ever!) and a lot of other stuff implemented to a high degree of detail.