The Coles are experimenting with making visual novels-- see Summer Daze: Tilly's Tale. Mostly because it's well suited to their artist's art style and (in theory) quicker and simpler to produce. Long Live The Queen, Dream Daddy, and Loren Amazon Princess were inspirations.

Not sure how much crossover the VN community has with adventure games in general.

Heroine's Quest is a great free adventure/RPG.

So many, but:

Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness by Aubrey Hodges

Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within by Robert Holmes

Not quite an adventure game soundtrack, but also all of Swan Lake.

Huge Ink fangirl here for narrative design; works great for CYOAs.

I've weirdly managed to build a sustainable career doing contract programming for Sierra alums, mostly in Unity. My studio is Cat and Witch Games based out of New York City.

Projects I've worked on:

The Owl Consults -- parser-based text adventure where you play a villainous consultant helping out hapless clients, way back in 2023. me and two other programmers from the Boston area.

Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption -- joined the team as a Unity developer around the second round of crowdfunding in 2015, got the game shipped in 2018 rather than languishing in development hell.

Colossal Cave 3D Adventure - did a 6-month contract for Ken and Roberta back in 2021 figuring out if doing the VR port was feasible, back before the project was announced.

Summer Daze: Tilly's Tale -- new game in the world of Quest for Glory by the Coles, shipped in 2023.

Have also done some solo indie dev for gamejams but nothing on the same quality level (since for those I do the art/programming myself).

So glad this exists! Thanks for doing the work of setting it up.

Wadjet Eye Games's The Shivah (old enough to be a classic at this point! But still pretty obscure and underrated.)