I remember working that one out with my brothers. Every step you take just leads to further problems getting the fish. It was easy to figure out to put the towel over the perfectly towel-sized grate and hang your robe on the hook. Blocking the cleaning robot access panel with Ford's satchel also seemed to make sense as well. But when we put the stack of junk mail on the satchel and it actually worked? Well holy shit, were we ecstatic. It opens up some of the best parts of the game, though I would argue not as much as figuring out how to get the spare improbability drive to work. I think one of my brothers bought that same guide book long after we retired the C64, so though he knew how to finish it, I don't think any of us ever did. I remember getting to Magrathea and not ever being able to figure out the proper tool bit. Tried taking the proper tool, and storing another tool in the thing your aunt gave you, but never seemed to work.

Hmm... I definitely had at least one of those for an Infocom game... Maybe I had that one? But I don't remember getting to the end of the game. It was so long ago, I don't remember. I just remember it was basically a FAQ where you had to use a special marker to reveal the answer.

I got so frustrated getting killed over and over that I typed:

 Fuck Ford

into the prompt. The game responded with:

 This is a family entertainment game, not a video nasty.

Which is how I found out that was British slang for ~~porn.~~ graphic horror films, apparently.

the only harder text based adventure game of that era was Steven Kings' The Mist. That game was fucked! I cannot tell you how many times my friend and I tried to survive the god dam grocery store!

There were at least five Zork games I can think of that were purely text (graphical ones came later): Zork, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork and Zork Zero.

I didn't even get out the house

Or:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-game-30th-anniversary-edition

In the era of arcade games, finishing it wasn't intended

Honestly, if you like text adventures, despite the difficulty, it's one of the most entertaining ever. Douglas Adams himself wrote most of the text, so even if you don't get very far, it's all funny.

Adams wrote most of the text of the game. He also created another INFOCOM game, Bureaucracy, which was basically impossible. And if you don't believe me, check out a walkthrough sometime. There are multiple points where you'll say, "well how would anyone ever think of that?" Especially when it gets to the airplane.

Maybe an unofficial sequel?

I love that 'no tea' was listed as one of the things included in the box.

Here it is on the BBC's website:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-game-30th-anniversary-edition

I spent days on it. I did finally get the Babel Fish. I think with help by talking about it with friends who had solved other parts of the puzzle... but it got even harder after that!

I prefer a bottle of that old Janx Spirit.

You finished it?!

Try for yourself. Long story short: The devs would anticipate a lot of stuff you might try, and given that this is Douglas Adams the game can be quite snarky, but if not then you'll see "I don't know the word 'foo'" or similar.

That particular game is notoriously hard and confusing and meant to be attempted several times before you're able to get through it without triggering some dead-end in the beginning that will only become apparent in the end. It's from another era. You might want to try Starship Titanic, also Douglas Adams, pretty much the pinnacle of text adventures (though it's not a pure text adventure). All in all I'm just a tad too young to really have gotten into the genre, regarding point+click adventures I can recommend anything Terry Pratchett (multiple Discworld adventures) and pretty much anything Lucasarts, though the very early stuff (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken) is quite rough around the edges. All the LucasArts and Discworld stuff is supported by ScummVM, you only have to get your hands on the game files.

Not any action, but they had a pretty large vocabulary. There were some basic commands they all shared like LOOK and EAST and INVENTORY. They would tell you if they didn't understand.