zlacker

In the ‘90s (?), LucasArts and Sierra both developed VMs for graphical adventure games (SCUMM and AGI); you can look into languages targetting those.

Inform is a more modern language for text adventures.

Ink is an open-source embeddable language for dialog trees and story puzzles. You’ll need to bring your own game engine, but there’s a Unity3d plugin to help.

>>kd5bjo+(OP)
Inform is the most direct descendant of Zork. It was inspired by the work of Infocom, a company founded by most of the authors of the MIT Zork. Folks especially enamored of Zork should start there. Inform has some support for displaying images.

>>kevinm+D
Inform is not a descendant of Zork, it has no connection to it besides producing output files in ZMachine / Z-Code format, which is well-specified so that anyone can write a generator.

As far as programming the actual story goes, it's an independent implementation based on entirely different principles (Zork was written in MDL which was a Lisp).