The last thing you want to hear while hungover is that your friend is an alien and that Earth is being destroyed to make way for an intergalactic spaceway. That's the reality faced by one Arthur Dent, an extremely average Englishman whose house is coincidentally scheduled for demolition the same day. With the aid of some peanuts and a towel, Arthur is whisked aboard the spaceship Heart of Gold to embark on an interstellar adventure governed only by Improbability. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Adventure Game, a new mobile offering based on the upcoming film, is a terrific graphical adventure that, despite a clunky interface, makes excellent use of its source material.
While most adventure games ask you to think rationally, success in The Hitchhiker's Guide is contingent on your doing just the opposite. The game, much like the book, has a singular logic of its own, in which the answer to all the galaxy's most profound questions is apparently 42. After your friend, Ford Prefect (the alien), transmogrifies into a couch, and after you find out that you recognize the president of the galaxy from the previous weekend's house party (during which he stole your would-be amant), you'll learn to give up on conventional syllogism. This makes for a refreshing change from the usual straitlaced adventure fare you'll find on mobile phones.
The puzzles in the game are challenging, and the solutions are always humorous. Unfortunately, the only way to perform an action is by selecting it from a list of eight, after bringing up the actions menu. The Nokia 6620's cursor is perfectly adequate for navigation, so it would have been nice if the number keys had been bound to specific actions, with perhaps a legend at the bottom of the screen. A similar interface has been used in many PC games in the genre. Luckily, The Hitchhiker's Guide is entertaining enough to endure this tedium.
All these puzzles require the use of items in seemingly nonsensical ways. For example, in order to turn Ford Prefect back from couch form, you'll have to trap the Heart of Gold's passengers in a tanning room, then use the Improbability Drive to right things. Shortly thereafter, rats leap out from a backpack. These events may seem unrelated, but they actually make sense, within the context of the game. While it's possible to complete The Hitchhiker's Guide in a couple of hours, you'll likely struggle with certain puzzles for longer. You'll accumulate points as you solve these puzzles. You can request a puzzle's solution at any time, although you'll incur a point reduction.
The game looks quite good, and its characters bear resemblances to their cinematic counterparts from the upcoming movie. The game's background art is especially detailed and has obviously also benefited from the film, specifically in its set design. Hitchhiker's audio, however, consists only of a single introductory flourish of Star Trek-style symphonics.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an excellent adventure game by any standard. If you happen to be a fan of Douglas Adams' eponymous cult-classic novel, you'll enjoy it all the more.
