Technobabylon

High points Deep and engrossing – Technobabylon is a well-written cyberpunk adventure game with a knack for fleshing out its world via descriptive storytelling. For a game that looks like it was made in the early 90’s, it comes to life with witty dialogue, interesting characters, and believable explanations of technology that would impress William Gibson. It easily articulates the impact of humans allowing technological advances to get out of control and effectively rule them. It paints a picture of a future full of genetic-manipulation, synthetic love, curable diseases, news outlets corrupted by corporations, and wars that are waged not just on the ground but also in the mind. If this were a novel, it could easily be a best seller among the Science-Fiction crowd. Fun characters and puzzles – Charlie and the gang, will interact with some interesting programs and synthetics in the city. I thought I had accidently turned on Discworld or Monkey Island after interacting with the various wacky programs in and out of the Trance. Most of the characters can be outright hilarious amongst an otherwise grim world. The interactions are only highlighted by intelligent puzzle design that refuses to force us into spamming random objects. The title gives plenty of hints to allow us to look at a situation logically, understand it, and complete the puzzle. Latha can interact with terminals and drift into the Trance to use programs and manipulation to hack the internet. Charlie and Max will find reasonable ways to discover clues, and hack into the brains of synthetics to twist their personalities to something more helpful. As much as I love The Walking Dead, I think this game properly demonstrates how to create meaningful gameplay, while also providing us with a stimulating tale. Hard Choices & Cold Outcomes – While it’s nothing like Mass Effect in terms of sheer volume of decision making, each of the available choices are not to be selected on a whim. No matter how well intentioned a choice may be, it is always countered by a consequence. You may not feel the immediate sting of what you’ve done, but eventually the game will let you understand the weight of it. This game doesn’t mind making you feel like a terrible person after your judgment calls. Average Points Technobabylon 3 Visual Discrepancy – In the early build that I’ve played, I’ve noticed that the visuals take a jarring leap between clean 16-bit graphics in the trance, and grimy looking pixels in the “real” world. I’m sure this is a stylistic choice by the development team, and I respect them for it, but it comes off as a bit jarring. I also noticed that characters are always speaking in the Trance, but in the real world their lips will only move in special sequences. It’s a small issue that dilutes the atmosphere of this otherwise immersive world. Low Points Technical Issues – There are a few bugs in the build I played but nothing that negatively affected gameplay. I did notice that the game crashes trying to Alt-Tab, or refuses to even start if you have a multi-monitor setup. I did notice that the game stopped Auto-saving on some levels, so be sure to manually save when you can. Hopefully all these issues will be ironed out by the time the game releases. Conclusion Technobabylon may not be a visual and technical marvel, but the story and immersive dialogue creates a believable Science Fiction world. If you’re a fan of cyberpunk books or the classic Blade Runner film, you’ll absolutely adore the detailed and brutal storyline of Technobabylon. I recommend that you buy this game at full price if you’re an adventure fan, or even if you’re a person that just loves great storytelling. Technocrat and Wadjet Eye Games did a fantastic job, and I still can’t believe these are the same people that made a game called “Nancy: The Happy Whore.”

This is a well crafted game and an enjoyable story with a few twists in it. The city is controlled by an organic AI - Central - and you are experiencing what it means to be a CEL agent and a person whose unrivaled affinity for the trance makes her a unique target. An interesting take on cyberspace and the physical world in a dystopian future - it is cyberpunk as you would expect it and thus there are, sadly, no surprises. Although the animations are good, the voice acting is great and the story is immersive and well told it is just a typical adventure game with decent riddles. None of them actually posed any difficulty and are solveable within seconds without having to go through a lot of informaiton. I would have rated this game higher if it had a deeper story with much more philosophical debate about the various endings. This game just scraches the surface of the possible implications that are mentioned in the game - I am staying vague as not to spoil anything for potential players. This is where the game hits and misses at the same time. Taking such an interesting subject - artificial intelligence, networking, manipulation of systems - and mixing it with politics/greed and idealism. One might knows this mix from works of Masamune Shirow. But again, there is much to be desired considering the scope of these subjects. You will very much enjoy it if you like cyberpunk. You will not be satisfied if the above mentioned subjects are of interest to you and you even work in those fields.

With the exception of an obscure Japanese game - Wonder Project J2, this is the first point and click adventure I've ever played. I found it challenging. Some of the puzzles were very annoying but every time I got stuck it was because I had overlooked some interactive item on one of the screens. I imagine that says more about me as a n00b to point-and-cick than the design of the game itself. The voice acting was top-notch and really stood out. The story was interesting, but a little preachy and sort of fell apart at the end. There were a lot of compelling lead-ins but considerably fewer satisfying payoffs. Possible spoilers ahead. The whole Christian terrorist backstory seemed a little contrived and didn't really add anything to the narrative except maybe to illustrate the writer's own anti-theism. There were one or two fun twists, and some outright hilarious comic relief. The trouble I had trying to run the game in full-screen without distorting the aspect ratio is inexcusable for a game released in 2015. I'm now much more intimately familiar with the game engine and it's proclivities than any player should reasonably need to be. Making me screw with my video drivers and create custom modes was pretty amateurish. The retro look is sufficient to evoke the proper amount of nostalgia - the retro troubleshooting did not need to come along for the ride. All in all I had fun. Took off one star for the BS of not supporting 1080x1920, and one star for the problems with the narrative. Otherwise this was a really fun game. Took me probably 8 hours total to complete and was something that was easy to fire up and play around with between other tasks.

TL;DR - If you like cyberpunk and/or adventure games, and especially if you enjoyed Resonance/Gemini Rue/Primordia, I can't see why you wouldn't dig this as well. I suppose I have to consider myself a Wadjet Eye fanboy now. It's a natural thing for those of us who grew up on LucasArts/Sierra games, after all. It's easiest to compare Technobabylon to Gemini Rue, Resonance and Primordia because of the cyberpunk/techie theme. I think Technobabylon stands up pretty well to all of those games. The puzzles felt easier to me than those in Primordia (as another reviewer mentioned). I played the other games too long ago, so I can't accurately recall their puzzle difficulty relative to this game. I thought the story and voice acting were pretty well done, on par with what I've come to expect from Wadjet Eye. Resonance gets an edge in that department for me - I really liked the way that game handled multiple playable characters from the story side. In Technobabylon, the coolest story/gameplay moments for me were switching between meatspace/trance and the unique puzzle mechanics behind working with AI characters (being intentionally vague here just to be safe).