Go! Go! GOTY! '15 ~Day Fourteen~ (Technobabylon)

Day Fourteen

• Game: Technobabylon (Technocrat Games/Wadjet Eye).
• Release Month: May.
• Source: The Steam Explorer Sale.
• Quick Look: Here. (Vinny/Alex)
• Started: 09/12.
• Finished: 11/12.

Well, plans sort of fell through yesterday to complete this within two days instead of three and with the GBEast Life is Strange and UPF streams today there wasn't a whole lot of time left to start a new game, or at least see a significant amount of progress necessary for an impressions blog. So let's talk about Technobabylon a little more, shall we? Specifically, I want to talk about its structure and its theme, since I've only scratched at the surface of both so far.

With regards to structure, I mentioned that the game has a number of chapters - I won't provide a specific number, in case you're trying to avoid such information in your playthrough, but let's say it's a decent amount. I also mentioned that the playable character will often alternate: the player's usually in control of the aforementioned Latha Sesame, an assertive poverty-stricken Trance-addict (Trance being the far more sensory-intensive variant of the internet of the near-future), and Dr. Charlie Regis, a lonely middle-aged agent of the city's governing AI and essentially the classic police detective with a tragic backstory realized in a cyberpunk setting. There's also Dr. Regis's partner Dr. Max Lao, who is a younger but far more tech-savvy operative foil to her ornery fellow agent, and a flashback-only fourth character who I'll leave a secret.

However, the structure of each chapter of the game is where things get a little more involved. With each chapter there's a central objective to attain, and the goal is to figure out how to make it happen via the few rooms and hotspots provided. It can be as straightforward as "escape" or "acquire this key item" or even "solve a murder". The goal is always revealed very early in the chapter, and it gives the player the focus they need to solve it and move the story along. Yet, the game doesn't feel as episodic as this set-up might suggest: the character has their reasons for being in the scene, and then circumstances intervene to make life a little harder for them. Each new chapter is set somewhere new, with puzzles to solve and incidental details to observe, and thus the game maintains a sense of variety without ever letting its plot get too confusing to follow. If you switch over to a character in an unexpected place after spending an hour solving puzzles as someone else, the game quickly fills you in and reminds you of what end-goal that character is chasing. It's easy to appreciate how content-rich the game is, especially with the knowledge of how time-consuming it is to program an adventure game with minimal asset recycling. I believe the original Technocrat-solo freeware version was the same: three distinct scenarios linked by an overarching plot.

With regards to themes, I spoke last time briefly about how it didn't go all-in on the transhumanism and AI becoming people themes that have been in the zeitgeist - or zeitgeist in the machine, you could say - of late, but there's still a higher than significant portion of the plot that concerns Newton city's AI superintendent Central and its origins. The civilized world is envious of Newton - which, I finally discovered, is located on the Horn of Africa - and how low its crime rates are due to the overseeing AI that practically runs every division of the city, with its CEL agents as its ears and eyes on the ground. The game does a fine job of establishing a lot of the world outside this AI-run city, however, and as said in previous entries it's careful to reveal small amounts of information gradually to lore-hungry souls like myself rather than drop a huge info-dump codex on you at the outset and risk derailing the pacing and providing too much information pertinent to the story that it would rather reveal at the relevant time. You learn what mindjacking is when you're shown as being in pursuit of one specific serial-killer mindjacker, not earlier when you're controlling Latha stuck in her apartment. You learn about the Greater Han Republic - a united region that comprises most of Southeast Asia - and its dubious factory recruitment practices, bringing mind-slaves through infecting their Trance connections with Malware as early as the first chapter, but the game gives you additional tidbits as it moves forward: you see what happens when someone's in the thrall of this malware, and eventually meet someone who has gotten rich off the misery its economy has engendered, who admits that he spends all his time in Newton because the Greater Han Republic is practically a wasteland with poisonous air due to its vast industry.

While the core plot concerns the legitimacy of AIs as people, especially ones as sophisticated as Central, it also looks into the ethics of eugenics, bio-engineering embryos and cloning. It also explores the horror of the constant threat of nuclear war between major countries, city states and republics with ideological differences, future versions of substance abuse which now also includes the internet as something you can get addicted to; and the continued march of widespread acceptance of alternate lifestyles (something I believe Read Only Memories delves into too, which is probably going to be the next cyberpunk game on the chopping block unless Deus Ex shows up first). It's a grim future, but there are aspects of progression and hope as well, as if to suggest that while the human race is a little too collectively fucked up to be jumping straight to starships and currency-free utopias we're not so bad that we've doomed ourselves completely. (Even in the Star Trek universe, it's worth pointing out, humanity was on the brink of destruction before the Vulcans and the discovery of warp speed saved us.) Technobabylon skirts the line between utopian and dystopian, hovering a bit more towards the latter, presenting its vision of 2087 as a dangerous but optimistic time to live. So, pretty much like now, then.

At any rate, the game has been completed and I'm ready to move on. Do I still recommend this one? Absolutely. Whether it was the addition of Technocrat Games or if Wadjet Eye growing more confident with each new project, but Technobabylon might be their best adventure game yet. Just know going in that it's not going in for visual spectacle like TheBUTT or a parade of emotional gutpunches like Life is Strange; it's just a solid, old-school graphic adventure game with a rad story and setting.

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