For me, and this has been articulated very well by others, the original attraction of adventure games was the feeling of freedom that you could do (or at least try) anything you wanted to. Unlike other games, where your options are limited to "go left, go right, go forward, shoot," adventure games allowed you to tackle problems using a much broader range of actions and objects. The really good games actually made you feel like you could do literally anything (even though this was obviously an illusion).
The beginning of the end of freedom in adventure games started when the genre went graphical, and every new generation of adventure seems to offer the player fewer and fewer opportunities to attempt ideas that occur during the game. Everything we're talking about here applies.
Designer: "No, you can't reach into that puddle of mud, because I have decided that the only way you can extract the key is to disperse the mud with a heavy pot dropped from thirty feet above."
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