The player acts the part of a human that goes onboard to help fix the ship, and must solve puzzles to collect the parts of the onboard computer, Titania. Once all the parts are collected and placed in the correct place, Titania comes alive and talks.
One of the most facinating parts of the game is the conversation engine used to talk with the robot staff onboard the ship. Players type what they wish to say into the Personal Electronic Thingy (PET) at the bottom of the screen. The robot's response appears as text in the PET and is also spoken. The conversation engine works by combining relevant pre-recorded speech.
A book entitled Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic has been written by Terry Jones based on the game.