Milliways: the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Max Fog)
What it is about: Welcome to the follow-up to the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. You arrive on a strange planet and do all sorts of wacky things, but you will sometimes be jumping around in the dark-literally, so it’s best not to deviate from the main path. Get ready for a very long ride.
I did explore the following stages: Magrathea, under Magrathea, the dark hub, Milliways, Morpher Ship, Detective Agency, Ark B, Design Workshop, Big Bang Burger Bar, all in separate playthroughs. I couldn’t get into the Fjord stage multiple times, until I realized I had missed out a certain step (see below). Saving often is highly recommended. After a long time, I finally managed to unravel more stuff, but still extremely difficult to trigger the final two areas for the endgame. Probably an error (see below).
The good: We start out with another reference to whales. And many a spaceship. There is a Wood Between the Worlds hub, but it’s in total darkness. We of course have the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide with us, and each area has some sort of puzzle. Like Little Match Girl, it’s another Metroidvania, but a lot more random. Plenty of puzzles, as expected. Plenty of weird locations and exotic items, as expected. Plenty of Hitchhiker’s Guide references, as expected. The stages themselves are not too huge. The humor is enough to be enjoyable but not overpowering. For something that was based on an officially published novel, it is really, given the constraints and the time limit, a job well done.
The bad: Plenty of ways you can go wrong: wrong turn action timing, wrong direction, etc. You’ll need to follow everything and every step very precisely. Tedious is really an understatement. Quite a bit of time is spent in the hub. Oh yes, there is an item limit like in The Witch. Some parts can be annoyingly buggy. The tray in the kitchen for the infamous gargle blaster puzzle stage for example. The game did not register that I had the tray, so the final two areas were impossible to access. There were also some minor ambiguities and typos. Some areas are bigger with more things to do and some were smaller. Granted that this game is on the extra large size category, this may sound harsh, but I would have preferred that every area was about the same size.
The Huh: Not very familiar with the source material, so hard to thoroughly comment. Why are Brian Rushton and Manon on the banned list?
Grade: 85.0%