Ditch Day Drifter

The game's self-description

You're an undergraduate at Caltech, and you wake up to discover that it's Ditch Day, the traditional event when seniors flee the campus for the day and leave behind "stacks" to protect their rooms from envious underclassmen. Go on a whimsical treasure hunt all over - and under - the campus, and see if you can find everything you need to break the stack.

Ditch Day Drifter is the original TADS sample game, but it's also a fully fleshed-out adventure in the treasure-hunt tradition of the early text games. This is a fun and relatively easy game to play, and it's often recommended as a gentle introduction for novice adventurers.