You can definitely make a creative nice nice-looking text-based game! If you want to use art, you could try getting into pixel art because it's simpler. Also, if you want to make it more creative, maybe you could add some genre shift or some sort of twist on the formula? That's what ddlc did for the dating sim genre, which had gotten rather stale by then. If you don't want to make art at all, you can still make it look nice by adding nice UI! :)