I’ve worked hard to make Parchment work well on mobiles. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s pretty useable.
The main remaining issues:
I can recommend playing the Draculaland game to get a feel for what it can do. Most people go to Detectiveland, but I think Draculaland gives a better idea.
Mobile Parchment works a lot better now than it did 14 years ago! Many of the problems I had back then have been resolved, I just don’t see it much since I don’t use mobile as often.
It’s great to see Frotz doing auto-complete as well. I’ve found this a boon for mobile operation. I can see also from the screenshot, it slims the side margins too. I had to do this as well. On desktops you can burn space, but not on mobiles. especially since being narrower than wider means line lengths are tight.
Annoyingly i have the opposite problem as well on laptops. They like to be 16:9 wide (or 16:10 a lot now), and this means height is in short supply but not width. 
Why do you say that? I’m checking Draculaland out and they seem pretty similar so far.
It may be worth noting that neither Draculaland nor Detectiveland (nor Zeppelin Adventure) were written with Gruescript but with @robinjohnson’s unreleased (afaik) system Versificator 2. He later created Gruescript to make games in a similar style.
The Party Line is a game that was rewritten in Gruescript.
Just the world building, I think. Something about the world building and the puzzles and the dialogue in Draculaland gave me a clearer picture of the possibilities of the interface.
Very true. But Party Line was originally written in Versificator too. All the Versificator games can be rewritten in Gruescript. That is to say, they all COULD have been written in Gruescript. Although you might need to apply some CSS changes to get them exact.
I do, mainly because it’s rare for me these days to be able to sit down in front of a computer just for pleasure. Usually I’m playing IF during my lunch break or before bed. Also, whenever I try and share my IF with friends and family they always try to play on their mobile devices because they’re not game players otherwise; computers to them are purely functional.
The interface of the Impossible Bottle might be even closer than Gruescript to what the OP is looking for, perhaps. It’s incredibly well designed for phone use. This interview lays it out well:
I see what you mean. For me, being shown a list of currently available options is inherently different from the way that parser games, and most other games, feel. Designing a more touch-friendly way to construct free-form input is going to maintain the parser feel more than skipping straight to curated lists of options.
So, I played Detectiveland for a bit, haven’t finished it yet. When I do, it’ll be on a computer.
I tried it on mobile and quickly got overwhelmed by the SCROLLING. This is something that the constant array of choices does on the screen: you’re reading header bars, scores, room descriptions, than a long list of objects and their accompaniment of actions. On a small screen, this is a ton of scrolling up and down constantly as I’m thinking about puzzles.
On no account do I criticize the author for the Gruescript engine or the game. Both are very well designed, competently implemented, and present an enjoyable interactive fiction experience. As an engine, functioning in a Web browser on a phone, everything works.
But the SCROLLING BWAAAA
I entirely agree. The screen becomes overcrowded very quickly. It’s something I’m trying to work on for my own games, redesigning the interface using CSS, and fiddling a bit with the JavaScript. It’s open source, so anything you imagine yourself can be changed.
But again, as I said, play Draculaland, not Detectiveland, if your purpose is evaluating the interface. I’m confused why you’re stubbornly persevering with Detectiveland for that purpose. It’s not the best test-case example of the interface.