12/27/2023 0 Comments Technobabylon 2 steam![]() Each AI encountered in the game had personality, memory and function mind modules which could be extracted and mixed and matched in other AI minds. ![]() My favourite puzzle was a delightful reoccuring one where you had to rearrange elements of AI minds. Technobabylon adds another dimension to this – it uses the puzzles as a way to explore the game’s rich sci-fi setting, mostly through messing around with cool technology, and usually in a way that forces you to think about the puzzle on its own terms rather than trying any of the previously mentioned tedious metagames. ![]() I praised another Wadjet Eye game for featuring puzzles which tied into its story well and made the player feel like they were actually doing what the character would do, rather than playing the adventure game metagames of “pick up everything”, “try to read the designer’s mind” and “rub every item on every other item until something happens”. The game swaps between the three as appropriate, but the story mostly focuses on the first two, who are the more interesting characters anyway. There’s Lathe Sesame, a Trance-addicted young orphan raised by the city Charlie Regis, a stubborn luddite police detective with a lot of emotional baggage and Max Lao, Charlie’s easy-going younger partner. The game’s actual storyline follows three different characters embroiled in a hunt for a criminal “mindjacker” – basically a futuristic serial killer who steals their victims’ minds while murdering them. People also anachronistically use the 80s idea of futuristic cellphones. Technology has evolved past VR helmets and onto biological brain implants called “wetware” which allow people to connect to a Snow Crash-style MMO internet called “Trance”. They have been multiple nuclear bombings around the world, but the first and third world are still largely in tact, if shuffled around a bit – notably, the entire game takes place in a city-state situated on the horn of Africa. In Technobabylon’s 2087, most of the world’s nations have joined up in various US-style federations (though some nations, including the US itself, have split up). Instead, Technobabylon’s setting feels like a reasonable vision of the future, extrapolated from current trends, and then painted over with a slightly dated but still stylish 80s cyberpunk aesthetic. Abnormally for this kind of story, no great disruptive event (worldwide nuclear war, plague, alien invasion) has occurred in the recent past to make the entire world a dystopian hellhole, and nothing of the opposite character has happened to make the world a utopia either. We find many of those same things in Technobabylon, but all of them with a very different spin. While trying to escape, he encounters many expected tropes of the setting: robots, city-controlling computer systems, genetic engineering and a version of the internet you can plug your brain into and walk around in. 1 StoryĪmong the first adventure games I ever encountered was Revolution Software’s Beneath a Steel Sky ( free on GOG!), which has you playing Robert Foster, adopted son of a desert tribe in post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk Australia, who finds himself trapped far from home in a dirty, hostile city. only let it languish in my Steam library for a brief spell of six months. Obviously I pretty much got right on that as soon as it was released, i.e. I figured the Technobabylon series had been abandoned, so imagine my surprise when it was announced that the whole series is being rolled into one big commercial game with Ben Chandler pixel art and Wadjet Eye-standard voice acting. My interest was further piqued by its longer, better followups, The Weight of the World and In Nuntias Veritas, both of which followed it in fairly short order – always encouraging with episodic freeware games.Īnd then nothing, for years. Being both an escape-the-room game and a part-1-of-10 game, it was pretty short, but what was there piqued my interest. I first encountered Technobabylon in 2010, in the form of an escape-the-room game called Technobablyon Part I: Prisoner of Consciousness.
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