This is accurate gameplay from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure that INFOCOM made with the help of Douglas Adams in 1984.

I thought people would find it interesting to see the way a game would creatively do a demo in print in the 1980s since doing it other ways was either too expensive or not very useful from a marketing perspective.

More info on the game- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(video_game)

It was very challenging. I never got all the way through it. Amazingly, it only covers a small portion of the first book despite taking hours and hours to play.

  • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
    16·
    10 months ago

    Try for yourself. Long story short: The devs would anticipate a lot of stuff you might try, and given that this is Douglas Adams the game can be quite snarky, but if not then you’ll see “I don’t know the word ‘foo’” or similar.

    That particular game is notoriously hard and confusing and meant to be attempted several times before you’re able to get through it without triggering some dead-end in the beginning that will only become apparent in the end. It’s from another era. You might want to try Starship Titanic, also Douglas Adams, pretty much the pinnacle of text adventures (though it’s not a pure text adventure). All in all I’m just a tad too young to really have gotten into the genre, regarding point+click adventures I can recommend anything Terry Pratchett (multiple Discworld adventures) and pretty much anything Lucasarts, though the very early stuff (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken) is quite rough around the edges. All the LucasArts and Discworld stuff is supported by ScummVM, you only have to get your hands on the game files.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I wouldn’t call Starship Titanic a text adventure. It’s point-and-click overall with some text elements in terms of things like certain descriptions. Sort of like a more advanced version of a Sierra On-Line game.

      • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        10 months ago

        Fair enough but it’s definitely giving you the “throw random stuff at the parser and have the game be snarky” experience. It’s from the point-and-click era, the tail end even, but does a throwback to introduce those elements again.

        Definitely another experience than Fallout 4 reducing dialogue to “yeah, nah, question, bail”.