My respect for finishing it. I couldn’t get close
I admit to using a small parser trick: first, you can issue more than one command at a time (to be executed consecutively) by separating them with periods. This is often really useful for traversing well-traveled rooms: "n. n. n. e. n. w. d. open door. up." rather than typing them all in consecutively. And second, up-arrow scrolls back through your previous history.
Which means that I could up-arrow to something like "look. examine vase. examine flowers. smell flowers. etc. etc. etc." and have it do all the relevant room-examining things at once. Made things much easier.