Inform

My personal favorite when it comes to writing text-adventures. It tries to stick to conventional English rules, so you won’t have to be doing a lot of coding to get a game started. It also has many examples and codes and full documentation, so you’re not lost as soon as you download it!

TADS

TADS is another program for writing text-adventures, and although it’s less intuitive than Inform some would say it’s better. It does involve more coding, though, so choose it if you don’t mind that.

Quest

Quest doesn’t have the extensive complexity of Inform, nor the heavy coding of TADS, and as a result is much easier to learn quickly. Despite this you do lose some features that more advanced writers might want to employ.

Adrift

Adrift probably requires the least amount of coding, and gives you a nice GUI (graphical user interface) to lay out the world. Its added simplicity means you can do the basic stuff pretty easily, but it's harder to add in complex features.