Henry Sotheran created a bookstore micro-RPG which I initially coded up in Python, but have rewritten it here in C for speed.
It should be pretty straightforward assuming you have a C compiler installed:
$ make
./bs
If you don't want the color output, you can remove or comment out the
#define COLOR 1
toward the top of the bs.c file.
It only uses standard C libraries,
so there are no dependencies,
nor is there any need to run
./configure
to deal with machine-specific quirks.