in a previous ask you were mentioning admitting that things like choice and gameplay are fake & focusing on telling the story well. I've always struggled with this in making text based games- how do you walk the line of being open about "there's a specific story i want to tell" and still making something that feels like a game?
Well personally—I think that it's fine for a game to not have any 'real' gameplay, or any gameplay at all! People play games because they want to experience 'something' and if you can make them believe they are experiencing it, you have succeeded. People read and enjoy visual novels with no choices all the time, so why would it be any different in your case?
If you're thinking "oh, I really want to tell a story, but I've got to make it feel like a game too I guess" it sounds like you might be feeling pressured to focus on an aspect of the experience you don't really care about. Now, I wouldn't say that means you should ditch the "gaminess" entirely if you actually do feel like they would make your story better, but I would instead focus on what gameplay could do to help YOU tell the story you're personally interested in.
For instance, a majority of RPGmaker games are often almost entirely linear with turn-based battles that can be mostly perfunctory. The real strength of the JRPG formula is that it is fantastic for creating the narrative arc of a journey, the capacity to create interesting spaces to explore and inhabit, and a way of interacting with a large cast of characters. Gameplay isn't central; gameplay facilitates the structure of the story. Don't tell any "gameplay is king" people or most gamers who leave reviews on steam this though! To me that's what Narrative Design actually is.
Look, all games are fake. It's just spreadsheets of assets that math serves up to the user. Nothing in them is real. Everything you do, you do to trick the player, like offering them freedom of choice when they already live in a meaningless universe! There are a lot of ways to trick the player into thinking the world is big. You could make an open world full of "content" with simulated physics, or you could write a detailed history of the world so real and intimate that players spend decades speculating about the place as if it was real. Which is more successful? So much of combat design isn't the mechanics, but the sound and visual design of what makes the combat feel real and satisfying; those theatrics are as real or more than "game balance".
Of course I say all that but I am also a big crunchy gameplay systems enjoyer, and recently I've been spending all of my creative work time outside my day job learning coding and game design. Primarily, though, I'm a mood, setting, character, and story enjoyer. I'm learning these skills because I think they will let me trick players in new and exciting ways.
I want to echo this as hard as I can. I make both pure text games and extremely crunchy, systems heavy things. Design is ultimately about giving players a particular kind of experience. Text, design, systems, they are all tools for that and can be used to set moods, emphasize themes, build characters. They each have their strengths and weaknesses and can all work together. This is why it irks me when "narrative games" are limited to text heavy or only experiences. There are so many ways to tell a story and so many ways to do interaction, experiment and be free!