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

Day Twelve

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Yep, time for another adventure game. I adore this genre and it's been far too long since I let myself get immersed in a properly-told interactive story with properly-thought-out inventory and dialogue puzzles, at least prior to the three adventure games I've written about so far for this feature. This is the last one for this year's Go! Go! GOTY!, however, so I intend to make it last. Though not wholly a Wadjet Eye game - they contacted the original developers, Technocrat Games, and offered to lend their resources and technical prowess to update and ship their AGS-developed freeware title as a more professional-looking release - it still shares Wadjet Eye's trademark attention to detail and its capacity to create a sense of place.

Obvious shades of Blade Runner, of course, but the game's a veritable gumbo of science-fiction tropes.
Obvious shades of Blade Runner, of course, but the game's a veritable gumbo of science-fiction tropes.

Though the finished game presently available on Steam looks more like a commercial product originally created in the mid-90s, that particular style has been Wadjet Eye's specialty since the studio's inception. I reviewed their 2012 sci-fi thriller Resonance (here) and have written pieces on their earlier and similarly science-fiction focused projects Gemini Rue and Primordia (here and here, respectively) prior to now - it's safe to say I'm a fan, after covering this many games - and they're very set in their ways with regards to ensuring their output appears for all the world to have been preserved in amber just before the time when adventure games lost their way: the risible and overreaching FMV era, where games traded puzzle cohesion and sharp writing for eventful spectacle and slumming digitized actors. Looking at Wadjet Eye's past work of exploring sci-fi conventions and the themes they embody, it's only natural that something like Technobabylon would catch their... well, eye.

The biggest strength of Wadjet Eye's games has always been their elaborately-built settings and their history, and the game drip-feeds just enough of what this future is like and how easy it is to live there to give the player enough of a window but without swamping them with a database of optional exposition. Players quickly learn what the Trance is, what wetware is and does and its importance in modern computer systems out of plot necessity, gradually also gleaning the reshaped geography, socio-political climate, the increased disparity in living conditions between the haves and have-nots and snippets of the events, often calamitous, that occurred between our present day and theirs. Even if you aren't invested in the game's conspiracy-rich story, which once again sees multiple protagonists in the principled but mournful future-cop Dr. Charles Regis and the irreverent and pessimistic Trance-addicted hacker Latha Sesame, playing the game continually reveals new facts about this fascinating cyberpunk setting. Likewise, the puzzles are as on-point as ever: the initial puzzle in the Quick Look as Vinny hacks the annoying chirpy food replicator AI is one example of using both physical and cybernetic objects to produce solutions, which in turn affects the personalities of synthetic lifeforms and changes the dialogue to match. The puzzle that immediately follows the Quick Look takes the concept even further. I'd assume the whole game isn't like this, but given that one of the playable characters is a resourceful hacker and the other is no slouch in that department either - partly thanks to his wetware-enhanced partner Max Lao, (minor spoiler) the first transgendered video game character I've seen in a while - I have to imagine there'll be more Gibson-esque scenarios moving forward.

I hope this isn't the end we've seen of the Trance. I can't imagine it is, given it's built directly into Latha/Mandala's brain.
I hope this isn't the end we've seen of the Trance. I can't imagine it is, given it's built directly into Latha/Mandala's brain.

It's been a good few years recently for cyberpunk fans. Between Harebrained Schemes's successful reboot of Shadowrun and action games like Dex and Syndicate, not to mention upcoming games Cyberpunk 2077 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, we won't be hurting for jacked-in deckers and grimy neon cities anytime soon. Even so, I'd recommend genre fans check out Technobabylon, even though I'm not even halfway through it. As with TheBUTT and Life is Strange before it, the hooks are firmly in and I'm dedicated to seeing this story to its end.

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