I had decided that I wanted to learn the "curses" system, so I picked an old simple LCD game I had of Dungeons and Dragons, and re-implemented it as a curses-based game. There's a 10 by 10 grid of
rooms. The dragon is in one of them. You have to find the arrow, find the dragon, then shoot the dragon. If you fall into a pit, you need to use your grappling hook to get out. You then could find another grappling hook somewhere in the game.
With a simple compile-time switch, you could instead be Ash from the film "Evil Dead" and have to kill the Deadite with a chainsaw.