Posted on: September 17, 2015
wvpr
Games: Reviews: 47
Douglas Adams does Myst
Reviewing from memory, not GOG's release. This is a first-person puzzle adventure in the tradition of Myst, set aboard a starship mentioned in a throwaway line in one of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker novels. The player attempts to figure out what's gone wrong with the ship and repair it. Like Myst, most of the game is experienced as pre-rendered images with animated transitions where appropriate. Unlike Adams' novels, the game is not stuffed full of jokes and wit. It's a relatively serious attempt to portray an impossibly luxurious passenger spaceship. The game's atmosphere is one of peaceful emptiness, with the humor coming from encounters with the ship's eccentric robots as well as Adams' trademark absurdities, like a passenger cabin too small to hold even half of its furniture at once. The conversation system isn't anything special. Older text adventures were more sophisticated at interpreting language. But by the time of Titanic, few games were trying at all. It works well enough. I remember finding some of the puzzles rather non-intuitive and frustrating. Some of them require frequent backtracking until you figure out what to do. Some lateral thinking is needed in a couple of spots. But compared to Adams' famously difficult Hitchhiker game, Starship is a breeze. Fans of Adams and fans of Myst-style puzzle games will find enough here to keep them happy. It's not my favorite adventure game but it's by no means a bad one. You'll remember the unique setting for a long time.
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