The Laura Bow games were also from the era of games where your choices actually matter, but what really made Colonel's Bequest so great (and it's ten 5-1/2 floppy disks for the B-drive, which used to take an hour to install on those old IBMs) is that it took place in real time.

Characters would go about their business while you played and depending on where you were would depend on how things turned out. I can't remember if you could save them, but you had so many different endings you could unlock based on what you did and when you did it. Not many games included that kind of variety, and sadly not even the Laura Bow sequel had that kind of versatility.