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The Later Years of Douglas Adams

If God exists, he must have a sense of humor, for why else would he have strewn so many practical jokes around his creation? Among them is the uncanny phenomenon of the talented writer who absolutely hates to write. Mind you, I don’t mean just the usual challenges which afflict all of us architects of sentences and paragraphs.

In a clear sign that Bookware 2.0 was already fading into history alongside its equally short-lived predecessor, Simon & Schuster published it first and only in paperback — the first time that had been the case in fifteen years for a Douglas Adams-associated book — and gave it virtually no promotion. Myst clones usually balance their intrinsic navigational challenges with puzzles that are quite rigorously logical, being most typically of the mechanical stripe: experiment with the machinery to deduce what each button and lever does, then apply the knowledge you gain to accomplish some task. In that spirit, I’ll note that Starship Titanic does look very nice, with an Art Deco aesthetic that reminds me slightly of a far superior adventure game set aboard a moving vehicle, Jordan Mechner’s The Last Express.

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