Sci-fi

"A trip into virtual reality: all begins with debugging a VR system, but then things get out of hand. Who is Morrodox, what has he to do with your colleagues, and what is going on?"

"Homecoming" is a short, twisted comedy about a newly awakened Artificial Intelligence.

It's been almost a month since your parents disappeared.

One Tuesday, they just didn't come home, and there's been no sign of them since. For the University and the rest of the town, the mystery is beginning to pall. To those people, it's as if Claire and Scott Colborn suddenly stopped existing -- strange and inexplicable, to be sure, but forgettable in the long run.

Fail-safe is a very short SF adventure, containing one big puzzle, some less than stellar (but by no means bad) implementation, and a very brief story. That may not sound like much, and it isn't much. But what makes the piece is how it experiments with the relation between the player and the narrator.

A vacation in our lovely country! See the ethnic charms of the countryside, the historic grandeur of the capital city. Taste our traditional cuisine; smell the flowers of the Old Tree. And all without leaving your own armchair! But all is not as it seems...

The Second American Civil War has passed, and you're picking through the rubble for loot, via satellite link to your trusty robot.

Don't Panic! Relax, because everything you need to know about playing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is contained in the pages of this manual. In this story, you will be Arthur Dent, a rather ordinary earth creature who gets swept up in a whirlwind of interstellar adventures almost beyond comprehension.

Your planet has been colonized and your fellow inhabitants massacred; you're supposed to be accompanying the ambassador of the colonizing planet, but something goes wrong and you're stranded on the (apparently) empty planet. Good large-scale puzzles and nicely done atmosphere--the underlying plot is a little familiar, but everything hangs together well. The REMEMBER verb fills in a lot of useful background detail. Solid, difficult in places.

You and your brother’s job — scouring the city’s highest spots for a rare building material in the year 2040 — is already hard enough. Now Anton’s gone and gotten you trapped on a rooftop. Your acrobat bloodline will help you with the deadly heights, and your brain will figure out the genmodded plants — but will you be able to cope with having the most annoying big brother alive?

This game is exactly one puzzle--but what a puzzle. If you like your puzzles logical, requiring in principle no more than strict deduction from a complex set of premisses, then you will love this game. Once you've found out how the game world works, there is nothing arbitrary anymore; there are no intuitive leaps, no bizarre associations; you just need to think carefully. The effect is a little like a chess puzzle, where'll you try out some moves, notice what goes wrong, think deep and hard, and finally arrive at the solution.