Inquisitive Dave is a typical adventure game where the player collects items and uses them with other items and objects in the game to advance in it. The character is moved with the WASD keys where W makes him jump and SPACE being the main key to interact with the environment.

The main task of the player is to explore the environment. His first task for instance is to escape from the prison which opens up several new levels for him.

It’s easy to die in the game, one misstep and it’s game over which is fortunately not a big problem because the player can restart the game in the exact same position. The game gets autosaved at various points in the game from where the game can be continued.

Inquisitive Dave has some elements of a jump and run mixed into the adventure, especially jumping is needed quite often to reach higher areas of the game map.

It’s definitely not a bad game but it could use some polish.

Oh sweet memories. I’m saying that although I was not really into text adventures back then when they were highly popular. I used to play them nevertheless but it was rather difficulty back then. Infocom was one of the major game makers back in the days and since most of their games were text adventures they had to excel in story telling. And that they did. This changed a bit when graphics were added to the adventures, not animated graphics if you mind, just some background images that would fit the setting.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is a classic text adventure. I’m writing this because the game is currently playable as a browser game over at the BBC4’s website. To be precise, the 20th anniversary edition is playable that contains background images. If you want to take a look a the original version of the game without images you can do so at the website of Douglas Adams.

The major problem that I always had with these types of games was to discover the known vocabulary. The AI can obviously only react if it knows the words that you write. If you write pickup toothbrush and the word pickup is not in the vocabulary guess where that’s leaving you ?

Right, you need to find the appropriate known word for the task. Get Toothbrush or maybe Take Toothbrush. This was really frustrating and it still is, hehe. Plain simply commands work best most of the time.

The BBC was nice enough to include a link to the original game hints by Douglas Adams which is a series of questions and answers. They are not helpful all the time and do contain some red herrings. I just discovered that the original game contained a verb list and I thought it would be great to include the list in this article. Makes it a lot easier, don’t you think ?

ANSWER, APPROACH, ASK, BLOCK, BUY, CARVE, CLIMB, CLOSE, CONNECT, CONSULT, COVER, DANGLE, DESTROY, DRINK, DROP, ENJOY, ENTER, ESCAPE, EXAMINE, EXIT, FILL, FIND, FOLLOW, GIVE, HANG, HIDE, JUMP, KILL, KNOCK, LIE, LIGHT, LISTEN, LOOK, MOVE, PANIC, PULL, PICK, PLUG, POINT, PUSH, PUT, OPEN, READ, RELAX, REMOVE, SAY, SHOOT, SHOW, SIT, SLEEP, SMELL, STAND, TAKE, TASTE, THROW, TOUCH, TURN, TYPE, WAKE, WALK

The story is excellent and if suggest you give it a try if you have some time at hand. Oh, you can die in this game. Pretty fast actually. It took me 19 turns to die the first time, can you beat that ?