Milliways: the Restaurant at the End of the Universe

For context on why this game is what it is: (Spoiler - click to show)first effort by a 13 year old in time span of one year using ZIL (undocumented and unused since Infocom times), with multiple changes to the parser on a level that had truly never been documented or properly tinkered with before, also having to learn C++ in the process to rewrite the compiler. There's countless more things. Oh, yes it was larger than the original H2G2 game, and also trying to follow in the footsteps of 1) Infocom, the greatest IF company of all time, no doubt, and 2) in the footsteps of Douglas Adams, possibly one of the clever and funny writers of all time.

A bit much for a first, no?

(Some more ranting below...)
(Spoiler - click to show)Of course it wasn't going to be perfect. It was a cruel game (though purposefully), and many puzzles were obscure. The writing wasn't great. And worst of all: the bugs. Oh, the bugs scuttled across the floor in huge quantities, but that was during the competition, where it place 48th out of 75. Now the bugs are swept away, the writing has been fixed, and the reviews have not been updated. I, for one, would certainly give it five stars because that is likely the most ambitious game in the history of IF. But I don't want to be annoying or boastful or whiny, which this probably seems. So 4 is good!

This is my first IFDB review, and I don't consider myself gifted at writing reviews in an insightful way. But, as a new author myself, I just want to do my part towards giving authors more feedback on how their hard work was received.

I have only beta tested this game, so am perhaps not aware of all the features and content of the game in its presently downloadable form. My first and only game was written for a rather specific audience, and I feel that this one is as well. But if you fall within that audience, I think that you will find this is a strong work worthy of recognition.

I will start with a few provisos: this game is "cruel" on the player difficulty scale, and I believe that that is intentional. But it may also mean that if you're not looking to relive a certain period of the IF past, you will find aspects of the game frustrating. If you love a challenge and want to prove your mettle, you may find it that much more rewarding.
The other proviso: if you have no conversance with the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy universe, you may find yourself at an utter loss. It was unfortunate for me that I had not previously played H2G2 when I tested this game, and I knew nothing of the Douglas Adams ethos. Many places and people were mentioned which seemed to carry implication of the player's understanding, but without background, I often felt at a loss for what I was trying to accomplish.

But with those provisos out of the way, I will say that there is a lot of good work in this game. I *think* we are also supposed to understand that this game is not trying to resurrect the voice of Douglas Adams, per se, and should not be measured by whether the game seems like it could have been written by him. But the game is quite witty and perky in its own right. Many of the puzzles are wacky and amusing in a way that I believe is representative of the original H2G2 world. There is a great deal of technical intricacy behind the curtains, and it is very impressive what the author was able to accomplish with the dated ZIL language and at such a young age.

Go ahead and unwind, and let your imagination have a heyday in the wacky world of Milliways!

In some ways, the author of Milliways has put themself into a bind. The original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy might be the most popular and cherished of the Infocom canon, and so any sequel has a lot to live up to. On the other hand, so much time has passed since the first game’s release—and expectations of an official sequel all but dashed decades ago—no one really expects this new effort to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a video game legend. (Starship Titanic, the closest we’ll see to a Douglas Adams sequel, paled in comparison to Hitchhiker’s, and it had graphics, a music score, and a full development team.)

Up front, I’ll say this: Having some familiarity with the source material is a basic requirement to play Milliways, be it the Hitchhiker’s books or radio shows or the 2005 movie. Neophytes will probably find themselves rather confused as they’re thrust into situations that Douglas Adams fans are all too familiar with.

The game opens on Magrathea, the planet-building planet. As with the first game, you’re there with the usual gang—Ford, Zaphod, Trillian—but they’ve left you alone with Marvin while they stay busy elsewhere. You start with a copy of the Guide, your dressing gown, and a Babel fish implanted in your ear while standing before a giant crater filled with whale guts. (Again, this all makes perfect sense if you’ve read the books.)

The game is organized in spoke-wheel fashion. You’re transported from scene to scene (each opening in darkness that gradually fades to a blur) where you must solve a puzzle or six to move on. The game gleefully self-declares as old-school Cruel on the Zarfian scale, and you do have die several times in several places before the shape of certain puzzles begin to make sense. Fortunately, UNDO is available. Saving the game periodically is a must.

What’s working here? Hitchhiker’s fans will find most boxes checked. The game touches on the major elements of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Marvin is your recurring companion, as is the Guide, although I wish the repertoire of responses for both was a bit larger. The scenes move briskly enough. If I found myself jammed up on a puzzle, the in-game Invisiclues-style hints pointed me on my way.

Asking a game whose source material deals in Improbability Drives to have “logical” puzzles sounds like a failure on my part to get the point of the joke, but a few of the set-ups and solutions left me scratching my head.

More decisively, I found the game lacking in tone and humor. The Infocom game wasn’t a substitute for reading the book, but it gave you the chance for a few hours to be Arthur Dent, Douglas Adams’ walking, talking dunk tank.

Milliways is more business-like in tone, mostly concerned with giving you enough information to move around and play through the puzzles. There are a couple of moments that gave me a laugh, such as when carrying a towel granted access to higher class areas…because it made me look like a waiter. (Again, it helps to have read the books to fully appreciate the joke.)

Other details came off as missed opportunities, such as the menu of the eponymous restaurant:

>EXAMINE MENU
MENU
… There is nothing left on it. Hmm.

So much could have been done here! After all, this game was inspired by the same books that laid out bistromathics, the number-bending relativity found only in gastro-pubs. The menu response in Milliways could likewise have been a great chance to riff.

I’m not expecting the author (or any author) to match Douglas Adams’ wit. But I did expect a fuller nod toward Adams’ acerbic satire of our status-obsessed, techno-laden culture (which today, if you think about it, makes the early 1980s look like The Flintstones).

There were a few polish problems, mostly typos and disambiguation problems:

>EXAMINE CAR
It leads to the car.

In particular, it appeared that if I could not carry any additional items, it would botch a convoluted puzzle concerning kitchen cupboards. (I didn’t fully diagnose the problem, but had to resort to using a save point to get past it.)

It was wistful to hang out with Marvin again. It’s been so long since I’ve read the books, I’d all but forgotten about the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, one of those Adamsian devices that is of the ages. He built a rather colorful universe. Milliways offers a nice peek back into Adams’ creation, but is shy of actually living within it.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

One thing I’ve noticed when thinking back to my tween years, three decades on, is that things are either seared into my memory or complete blanks. I can still hear what it sounded like, for example, when we got back from a summer vacation to find that a brood of cicadas had hatched while we were gone and had decided to fill the night with a beautiful and threatening cacophony of chirping. And I can instantly recall the squirming, excited embarrassment I felt when the girl I had a crush on me called me one evening because I’d messed with her little brother the day before, telling him I’d found a long out-of-print Dragonlance gamebook that she coveted. On the other hand, I know I must have played months of basketball in eighth grade – I went to a tiny school, everybody was on every team – but I can’t summon up one reminiscence of anything that happened at a single game or practice.

So too it is with Douglas Adams: I was obsessed with him the summer I was 11, blazing through the then-four-part Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy just as school ended and then chasing down the Dirk Gently books before embarking on a campaign of rereading those six books over and over until I got thoroughly sick of them, which took a while. The first book I remember pretty well, because it’s got most of the iconic moments; the third was my favorite so I reread it like once a week, and as a result I can still run down most of its cricket-based MacGuffin quest. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, though, didn’t make much of an impression all these years on – the ending sticks, not so much the rest. And the second book, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe mentioned so prominently in this game’s subtitle? Um. I remember the gag about it being stuck in a manufactured time bubble so patrons can swig their martinis as they watch the heat death of all things, but I’m pretty sure that’s actually introduced in the first book. Like I said above: complete blank.

My other relevant Douglas Adams lacuna I can’t blame on advancing age: I’ve also never played Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with any degree of assiduity (I think I poked at the BBC illustrated remake long enough to give up halfway into the babel fish puzzle). I suppose I should get around it one of these days, but its reputation as an unforgiving puzzle-gauntlet doesn’t do much to recommend it to my sensibilities. Sure, I remember liking Adams’ writing, but if I wanted to revisit it I’d much prefer to go back to the books than struggle through a style of IF that doesn’t do much for me.

All of this is to say that I am entirely the wrong audience for an impressively-robust fan-made sequel that appears to pick up immediately after the first game left off, and doesn’t provide anything by way of context or motivation. I wouldn’t say Milliways is explicitly nostalgia-bait; from my very vague understanding, it primarily visits situations and characters not covered in the first game (though I think some pieces may be part of the book plots that I’ve forgotten?), and while the troupe of familiar characters are present, they’re off getting hammered so are almost completely noninteractive. But it’s clearly the product of deep affection for the original – so much so that it’s written in the modern incarnation of the language the Infocom Imps used to make their games – and shorn of the pleasant sheen of remembrance, the game often just left me baffled.

The earliest example is maybe the most telling: the game doesn’t tell you who you are. I feel it’s safe to assume that you’re once again inhabiting British everyman Arthur Dent – the clearest clue is that you can find your dressing gown, which the game tells you you must have dropped in the previous game. But I don’t think ABOUT spells it out, there isn’t actually any intro text, and X ME just tells you “you see nothing special about you” (ouch). It also doesn’t tell you what you’re doing. You start out having just exited your spaceship and reached the surface of a planet called Magrathea (the name’s dimly familiar, no recall of the details); presumably you’re meant to explore, but there’s no narrative telling you that you’re there to look for anything in particular, and the cryptic stuff you find doesn’t retroactively explain why you might have come here in the first place, or what you think you’re doing. By the time I stopped my playthrough, about three hours in, I’d finally encountered the first indications of something like a plot, but it took a lot of unmotivated bumbling to get to that point.

Of course, not every game needs to be Photopia and unmotivated bumbling can make for solidly entertaining gameplay, so long as solid writing and enjoyable puzzles are pulling the player along. Milliways gets mixed marks from me on this front. There are solidly Adams-aping gags sprinkled through the text, like this bit where you look up the eponymous eatery in the Hitchhiker’s Guide:

"It goes on to explain, in extremely vague then suddenly extremely detailed (and obviously copyrighted) paragraphs how Milliways, better known as the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, is the best restaurant you can ever visit."

There are also some good jokes embedded in the parser, like this exchange prompted by examining a painting:

"You look at the painting, which could have been done by yours truly (and I’m not even AI yet). It is of an old mouse wearing a monocle. At the bottom of the painting is a plaque, which reads:

"Reginald Markenplatt
Founder of Magrathea Corps.
86 standard yrs.

“Oh, you like it?” says Percy.

"> no
“Well that’s not very nice.”

While for much of my time with the game, I was basically keying in the walkthrough (more on that later, of course), I had a reasonable time doing so based on the charm of the prose and the efficiently-drawn situations. It’s certainly not laugh-a-minute funny the way that I recall Adams being (…probably best not to revisit and find out whether that impression holds up), but this all makes for an entertaining way to pass several hours.

I found the gameplay often made things much less entertaining, unfortunately. There are some quite good puzzles here, like camouflaging a drink to knock out someone whose keycard you need to steal and figuring out how to deal with a shape-changing alien, but many of them rely on frustrating mechanics – there’s a strict inventory limit, many instant-death timers that end the game if you don’t solve things fast enough, the mechanics for travelling between different areas appears to be largely random, and at least one place that will lock you out of victory if you don’t somehow know which objects will be plot-critical and which are red herrings. Compounding the challenge, I came across some notable bugs in the game; twice, an event was supposed to trigger after waiting for a reasonable number of turns, but both times 150-200 turns of waiting didn’t do the trick (the walkthrough offered a workaround for one, and I had a save that allowed me to replay and eventually get past the other, at least). And there’s a recurring puzzle that appears to quite literally involve guessing a verb at random (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m thinking of the different ways you can escape the Dark; trying to use the “missing” sense is nicely clued, but having learned that my sense of touch is going to be important, I’m was at a loss for how I was meant to go from TOUCH LUMP, learning only that it’s “warmish”, to PUSH LUMP other than just running through all the possible interactions). From inadequate clueing to disambiguation issues, it really feels like the game just needed a little more time in the oven.

With that said, as I hit what seems to be the halfway mark I was starting to get into more of a groove, though this could have been as much my increased readiness to consult the hints as anything else. And I did appreciate the moment when an NPC finally started explaining a bit of what was going on and why it was important. Sadly, almost immediately after that sequence a combination of those frustrating mechanics I mentioned above seem to have killed me – I needed to pick up an object, but I didn’t have the spare carrying capacity to do so, and as I futzed around with inventory a timer ended the game – and, facing the quickly-impending Comp deadline and realizing that a post-Comp, less buggy version, is likely to come out soon, I decided to bring my playthrough to an end.

I’ll repeat that Milliways doesn’t seem to me to be purely banking on nostalgia; there are novel ideas here, and the classic ethos seems to be a matter of intention rather than ignorance. And I can’t help but feel affection for something that’s so clearly the product of unbridled enthusiasm. But without much enthusiasm of my own for its antecedents, the game lives and dies by what it’s able to bring to the table on its own – which is currently a bit wonky and sometimes willfully obtuse. With that said, the experience was anything but forgettable; hopefully I’ll eventually get to finish Milliways, but in the meantime I definitely have a few fun new memories to rattle around in my increasingly-empty head.