> I'm working on a Text Adventure (Adventure Game/Interactive Fiction).

Terrific!

> I see under the Smash Tutorial in "Developing Your Own Adventure Game" that it is recommended not to make your game too sparse with the recommended density of significant locations to all locations be between 50% and 100%.
>
> I'm wondering if you have a maze, do the locations in the maze count as "significant" just by being part of the maze?
>
> Also, is it better to have a sparer game and have some significant locations have a more than one reason they are significant or would it be better to have a denser game with most locations having only one reason they are significant?

My 50-100% recommendation is only that, a recommendation. It stems from my earliest attempts to write these kinds of games (most of which are recreated in The Early Years and More Early Years here on the site), and I would draw out an elaborate map, populate it with items and puzzles, then code it up and only realize then that the resulting game feels very spare. For example, if it takes three hops to get from one important place to another and the intervening places don't have anything interesting in them, it's likely that the game world will feel richer by pruning out those useless intermediate locations.

But when it comes to creativity, there are exceptions to everything. A maze is a perfectly good reason to break the rule of thumb, because as you say, the player is actively doing something in those locations (trying to navigate a maze) rather than exploring a place where there is nothing to explore.

On the second question, I have even less to advise. It kind of depends on the kind of game you're making and the kind of world you're building. Probably the trade-off is between clarity and richness. If you isolate each element of a puzzle to its own location, it's probably clearer what is happening and what the player might have to accomplish. On the other hand if there's a place where you can do all kinds of different things and the game provides those choices, it perhaps feels like you're in a more fully realized world where you have more freedom to act.

The latter is harder, both in terms of how much you have to write (the more things you have going on in a location, the more stuff you potentially have to write concerning the interaction of those things) and the coding challenge (a single location needing to support multiple logical flows is probably harder to write than separate ones). But I don't think there's a right answer from a creative perspective.

Best of luck!