Infocom games are full of dead ends. Best to save separate files often or you could find yourself missing an important item with nothing to do but start over (and it's often the case that you don't realize you're missing something until much later in the game.)

Yea I guess I should have specified that Infocom had them, but they weren't stupid mostly. They aren't as common in modern IF.

I have plenty of bad memories of being stuck on the Vogon ship with no way that I could figure out to get the Babel Fish. I hadn't realized that I needed the junk mail from the second room in the game.

If you have all the items with you and put them in place one at a time as you discover they're needed, the Babel Fish dispenser runs out of fish right on the attempt when you've finally got them all in place and are ready to collect it for real. Evil little game.

[SPOILER]

It gets worse -- there are a bunch of tools you go by throughout the game. If you fail to pick up any of them, that one will be the one you need to open one of the final doors.

In theory, I know the solution to every puzzle in the Hitchhiker's game. In practice, I've solved every one of them that you can solve while missing others (there's a gate right at the end of the game you have to have all of the items you can possibly get to get past)... but I have never strung all these solutions together into one winning game, despite several attempts.

It's a nasty little game, really.

I guess if I were doing it again nowadays I'd be going for a tool-assisted... umm... speedrun isn't really right here, so win-at-all-run.

I feel like Hitchhiker's is meant to be an exception to the rule.

Typically they made sense in the infocom games. If you needed matches for something but had already struck and burned them all, you were stuck.

Getting rid of dead ends makes some of these games feel like they are on rails. If you try enough combos of everything, eventually you'll progress.

There is a difference between always reaching a winning state or getting stuck without any resolution.

I think its important that there is no state were you just get stuck, you should at least have a game over sequence, so that you know you have done something wrong.

Andrew Plotkin (aka "Zarf"), Emily Short, Adam Cadre and many others are great and have written awesome pieces of work for modern IF that can rightfully claim to be art, but...

...classic Infocom games had plenty of dead-ends :)

Even the great modern authors have issues dealing with dead ends (both in trying to prevent them and finding surprise dead ends they didn't anticipate in their own games). Emily Short has many blog posts on the subject. Zarf put a lot of effort into the state-space solver/prover in his most recent game Hadean Lands. (There was some very interesting Kickstarter posts on that subject.)

Wow, a new game by Zarf! Awesome, thanks for letting me know. Instant buy for me.

You can drown in monkey island. Not exactly text only but close enough. Wouldn't say it was poorly written

I thought the rare occasions in monkey island games where you could 'die' it basically rewound to an acceptable state before that? (IIRC the second one even made a joke out of this with a falling off a cliff and bouncing back up thing)

The drowning ending is more of an easter egg than something you're likely to find in normal play. There's only one item you can interact with, so even if you can't think of the solution, it's easy to brute force it before the 10 minute timer runs out.