Some of these games (eg, SQ) essentially little post-modernist satires of their own genre, in that they make save/restore part of the game mechanic, and when yo

Some of these games (eg, SQ) essentially little post-modernist satires of their own genre, in that they make save/restore part of the game mechanic, and when you hit an obstacle, the search space isn't just the four screens you can walk to now, but the game thus far. Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy played this up in a very fast and funny way -- where there's about eight things you need to do in quick succession to get the Babel Fish from the vending machine, and it keeps coming up with outlandish ways to thwart you, and you need to have brought the junk mail from your doorstep. Most of the best Fighting Fantasy books in the 1980s did the same thing -- turning down the wrong corridor would result in an imaginative and gruesome death, knowing full-well that the reader has their fingers and thumbs in the three previous pages. Essentially, you're solving a maze through the game state -- you are supposed to hit several dead-ends before you find the right path. I did also find it rather daft that the author of the article devotes a paragraph to complaining about being insulted -- when that's clearly the humour of it (that the designer is pouring out mock insults on you for him making that screen overtly pernicious). There was a hacking adventure game I remember from the 1980s, where if I recall they didn't put the code you needed for one of the puzzles anywhere in the game -- because you solve that one by dumping the game code and finding it (so you get to feel like you've hacked the hacking game). Part of the point of 1980s adventures was imaginatively breaking the conventions of how games are "supposed" to work, and being "unfair" so you have to find a tricky way to make it easy.