Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter (VGA)
It’s been a long time since I played anything in the point-and-click genre. A remake of SQ1 — about Roger Wilco, the space janitor — was probably not the smartest choice for getting back into it. The game is hard, and the difficulty comes almost entirely from the fact that it doesn’t warn you when you’ve done something wrong. You can softlock yourself by forgetting to pick up an item and stepping into the next zone with no way back, and the game will happily let you keep playing for another hour before the dead end becomes obvious.
A fun bit of context — this is how the developers handled piracy back then. The game shipped with a paper sheet of codes (coordinates) inside the box. You had to type those codes in to fly the ship in the right direction, and there was no way to discover them in-game. If you got the game off a friend’s floppy without the booklet, you simply couldn’t finish it.
After getting stuck at the very beginning for the second time, I decided I didn’t want to spend hours hunting for solutions — I just wanted to move through the story. Pulled up a detailed walkthrough and finished the whole thing in a couple of hours. No regrets; refreshed some childhood memories, which was the point.
A spaceship shows up in one scene (screenshot 4) — the camera lingers on it, but the game never explains what it is. As it turns out, that’s Roger Wilco from the future, a nod to a later entry in the series that involves time travel.
In the bar (screenshot 2) there’s a large anthropomorphic cat. That’s a reference to Larry Niven’s Ringworld and the Kzin race. I happened to finish the first Niven book in that series a couple of months ago, so the wink landed.
And one more thing — this is the VGA edition, essentially a remake. The original was almost a text adventure: everything was driven by typed keyboard commands.