1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

>Then there were the puzzles, and it’s impossible to talk about Hitchhiker’s without talking about the Babel Fish puzzle.

Going through that part again and trying to remember it and figure it all out was a bit of a challenge.

But I don't think the puzzle itself is really all that hard, it's the whole beginning on the vogon ship, all of it, that makes it so hard. You've got a hidden time limit, then the poetry section, then you're thrown back in the room with an active time limit and you're supposed to remember to do the other puzzle quickly that you hopefully noticed while figuring out the Babel fish stuff, or you get a delayed game over that'll leave you wandering aimlessly around the heart of gold scratching your head.

On a related note, if you like Douglas Adams and quirky adventure games, I highly recommend his later game Starship Titanic. I played the hell out of that game when I was young, I don't know if I ever beat it. It's not the classic that hitchhiker's guide is, but if you enjoy Adams and frustrating obtuse adventure games with a strange sense of humour and somehow missed this game, I recommend checking it out.

Q: About three-quarters the way through the Illustrated Hitchhikers Guide there is a strange illustration of 42 multi-coloured balls lined up in columns 6x7. I can only assume this is the famed "42 Puzzle". My question is, how do you play? What's the puzzle?

DNA: The point of the puzzle was this: Everybody was looking for hidden meanings and puzzles and significances in what I had written (like 'is it significant that 6 * 9 is 42 in base 13?'. As if.) So I thought that just for a change I would actually construct a puzzle and see how many people solved. Of course, nobody paid it any attention. I think that's terribly significant.

Some mainstream studios you might want to check out are Dontnod Entertainment (Life is Strange, Tell Me Why), Red Thread Games (Draugen, Dreamfall Chapters), The Chinese Room (Everybody's Gone to the Rapture), Campo Santo (Firewatch) and Fullbright (Tacoma, Gone Home). There is tons of quirkier experimental stuff on Steam and Itch too. Note that some walking sims are more about exploring the environment and there isn't much dialog, while other ones feature more conversations. Dontnod tend to be more on the conversation-y end if that's what you're after.

You could also check out point-and-click adventures, which are a direct descendent of IF. They require a bit more puzzle-solving, but the pacing is often very good in modern (post-2005) games and it's a nice way to experience dialog-heavy stories. A good place to start might be older releases from Daedalic Entertainment or Wadjet Eye Games, perhaps.

Douglas once told me he got sent a very detailed PhD thesis that described how The Hitchhikers Guide was an elaborate parody of John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" (1678). The main evidence was that "Pilgrim's Progress" is known to be partly inspired by a pamphlet called, "The Plain Man's Path to Heaven", written by, get this, a puritan named Arthur Dent.

Douglas was embarrassed to reply that he'd never read "Pilgrim's Progress", or heard of that puritan, and the Arthur Dent name was a complete coincidence.

Things like that happened to him all the time.