On inventory limits

I doubt Kerkerkruip will have an inventory limit. Given that almost all games which feature inventory also feature an inventory limit (the big exception being modern IF), it may be interesting to look at the phenomenon in a bit more detail.

Inventory limits come in several forms.

1. You can have a straight-up maximum amount of items which the player can have in his inventory. Common in early IF, but pretty unusual in graphical games and even non-graphical rogue-likes, which generally go for the second option, or a combined second/third option. It is used for weapon possession in some shooters, like Borderlands, Left 4 Dead, Crysis 2 and Duke Nukem Forever. (Some of these claims based on reading reviews.)
2. You have a limited amount of types of items you can carry, but can stack multiple tokens of the same type in one inventory slot. There may be a maximum amount of tokens such a slot can hold, and you may or may not be allowed to dedicate multiple slots to a single type of item. Examples are most rogue-likes and the classic Black Isle RPGs (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment).
3. You have a maximum amount of X you can carry, and different items (or item stacks) come with a different amount of X. This X is commonly either weight (many rogue-likes, The Witcher 2) or space (Diablo 2). This allows the designer to make some items easier to keep in your possession than others, which can be used for interesting tactical design. Most often, however, such a system seems to be designed for 'realism': as far as I can see there are no deep game design reasons why a suit of armour takes up more X than a ring in Diablo 2 and Dungeon Crawl. It just does because that is 'realistic'. (In case it wasn't clear, I have a deep disdain for any design argument that invokes realism. When I see someone complain that it isn't realistic if you can just shoot a bow without having to buy or find more arrows all the time, I want to punch that person.)
4. Finally, there is a system where you can carry just a few kinds of items, and each kind has a specific maximum. This is almost universally used for ammunition in shooters, where you might be able to carry (say) up to 200 pistol bullets, 50 shotgun shell, 12 rockets, and 4 grenades. You cannot take more grenades by taking less shells.

Given that many games have inventory limits, what good do they do? Let's look at some of the bad reasons first. (I don't want to categorically claim that these reasons could never be good for any game, but it would have to be a rather special game.)

1. Inventory limit puzzles! Right up there with mazes, everyone hates the kind of old IF puzzle where you can take only 3 items with you through the portal, and you get stuck if you take the wrong ones. Or if you can return through the portal, it just adds tedium as you move back and forth to get new items. You'd have to think of a brilliant puzzle to make this kind of thing work again.
2. Realism. See above.
3. Giving the player decisions, and then punishing unwise decisions through boredom. If the player can stash her loot away, can go get it when she needs it, and the only (or major) associated cost is player boredom -- you have done something wrong as a designer. To a certain extent, a game like Dungeon Crawl suffers from this: you can't escape to get to your stash at every point, and there is an objective cost (hunger), but in general dropping stuff in a stash and retrieving it when you need it works. And is boring.
4. Making the optimal strategy really boring. In almost every game with shops that buy items, the optimal strategy is to pick up absolutely everything until your inventory is full, then returning to the shop and selling all items. Generally, this would mean that you are spending half the game travelling between the action and the shop. Nobody does this, instead only picking up the most valuable items; but the game does in fact reward you for doing the really boring thing. Not a good design idea.
5. Getting people to buy another copy of your game. You can artificially increase your inventory limit when you play Diablo 2 on Battle.net if you own a second copy of the game -- it allows you to log in as two players at once and swap items between characters. Really. Try getting a full set of set items without this trick.

 Now for some good reasons for having inventory limits.

1. Adding interesting tactical/strategic decisions. Do you take the scroll of teleportation for an easy escape, or the axe of fire for when you meet a hydra? Is that ring of poison resistance really more important than the boots of stealthiness? And so on. In order for there to be real choice, it is essential that items you do not take become unavailable: they either disappear or the in-game cost of retrieving them becomes too great. (If this fails, you get option 3 above.) It is also essential that you have enough non-hierarchically related items to make the decisions interesting: if one item is always clearly better than another, there is no decision.
2. Saving the player from becoming overwhelmed by choice. While having options is fun, having 328 options is not fun. If my inventory in Borderlands contains more than ten weapons, I'm starting to lose sight of what they all do, and I'll just stop using them -- there's no way I could go through all of them and choose the right one during combat. So thank god for an inventory limit that at least forces me to get rid of my weapons when I hit the 20 weapon mark. Otherwise, I would at some point face the daunting prospect of having to look through 1000 weapons and finding the best one...
3. Making the player use items. In general, if you are not risking permanent death, it is strategically best to save your best items for later. So the player who is implementing the best strategy might be saving up all the cool stuff, never using any of it. But if she hits an inventory limit, using it suddenly becomes the best choice -- and this often adds to the fun of the game. For instance, the best 'normal' weapon in Half-life 2 is the Overwatch machine gun. This gun has a ridiculously low ammo limit of 90 bullets. This means that once you hit 90 bullets, and you see some Overwatch guys (who will drop ammo for it), you ought to use this highly satisfying gun. If there were no inventory limit, you might try to do everything with your pistol, stockpiling thousands of machine gun bullets for who knows what bad-ass enemies the rest of the game might bring.

All of these good reasons, especially the latter two, are more applicable to long games than to very short games. In Desktop Dungeons or Kerkerkruip, there is no temptation to save your items for a later threat, because the final threat is right there, in your face. There is no possibility of being overwhelmed by choice, because you'll never have more than ten items. And given the small world of the game, it is not easy to see how you could implement a system where items become permanently unavailable if you don't pick them up. All right, I can think of some systems. But they wouldn't be very natural, and you'd only want to implement them if you were certain they would result in good tactical choices. In a game with few items, it is doubtful whether further restricting the amount of items you can use is the best source of more tactical decisions.

It should also be obvious that none of the three reasons applies to either puzzle-based or puzzleless modern IF. They only apply to games with repeatable actions and underlying game mechanisms. So it is clear why modern IF has moved away from the inventory limit.