I’ve been excited about Technobabylon since first hearing about it several months ago. Wadjet Eye Games has a brief but stellar track record in the point and click genre, which remains one of my favorite genres since first discovering it in the early ’90s with Lucasarts. It wasn’t all that long ago that I enjoyed A Golden Wake, also published by Wadjet Eye, and you may also recognize the name from other hits like Gemini Rue and The Blackwell series. So, suffice it to say that anything with the Wadjet Eye name on it already gets my attention.
Technobabylon also drew interest from me with its cool futuristic, cyberpunk setting and premise. I’m also a sucker for SCUMM-style artwork when it comes to this genre. Anyway, set in the fictional city of Newton in the year 2087, Technobabylon has a strong story that features three playable protagonists. As the story unfolds, you take control of each of these characters to learn more about them and their place in this interwoven tale. There are several exciting and surprising plot twists that I will not spoil for you, and pretty much all of these took me by surprise, so kudos to skillful story-telling. I appreciated Technocrat’s effort to keep the story’s details accessible and coherent even as it spanned some twenty years (although most of it takes place over a few days in June of 2087). At no point in my fifteen hour play-through did I not understand where things were at in the story thus far. This was due in large part to the story being interesting enough to thoroughly hold my attention. But even failing that, there are enough “reminders” or “tie-ins” to the plot provided by the different playable characters and NPCs and so forth to keep you well in tune.
Before moving on from the story discussion, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least elaborate on it a bit more, but again this will be spoiler free. So, you have Latha, a young woman who spends as much (if not considerably more) time in the Trance as she does in ‘meatspace,’ aka the real world. She loves the security and impersonal nature of her simple government-provided apartment building. In Trance, your physical body is motionless while your mind is on a neural network in which typical laws and limitations of the real world, such as physics, simply do not apply. It’s kind of like being in the Matrix, except the user can control when they’re ‘logged in’ to the Trance and when they aren’t. Trancing can be habit forming, but it’s also a gateway to a completely different plane of perspective. When controlling Latha, players will spend a lot of time in the Trance and solve real-world puzzles with aid from the Trance.
On the opposite end of the connected/high tech spectrum is Regis, a middle-aged man who works for CEL, the local government’s law enforcement group. He reports and works with Central, the hyper-advanced AI that runs all civic duties of Newton, although begrudgingly. Regis has been “getting it done” his way for years and has avoided many of the technological tricks and gear and things that most everyone else in Newton uses. He’s got a sharp detective mind and a very justice-centric view of the world, but he resorts to violence only when necessary.
Working with him is Max Laos, a much younger, trans-gender officer who is a tech wiz, too. She Trances a lot, but not to the degree of Latha. With Max, you often apply something called Wetware to a connected device to interact with it. One really cool (and used-more-than-once) example of this is working with Synths, which are essentially sentient, highly advanced AI robots. With her Wetware, she can engage these and other connected devices (as can Latha), leading to some neat techy/hacking situations.
Anyway, Regis and Max make a very competent CEL agent duo. At the outset of the story, it is revealed that these two were assigned by Central to investigate a series of violent mindjackings. For the past three months, seemingly random citizens have been murdered, but the MO is that the content of their brains are dumped (neurologically speaking) before death. Latha seems destined to be the mindjacker’s next target. These story elements and others I’m choosing to avoid mentioning all come together beautifully and patiently.
A good story and deep, interesting characters will take any game far, but these are two aspects that a great point and click must have. The other major part of the gameplay has to be puzzles; together, these are the core gameplay mechanics of the genre. And as with any such game I have ever played over the years, I got stuck on many occasions in Technobabylon, but usually not for long, and never too long. To this end I thought Technobabylon did a good job of not giving the player too large of a scope at any one time to have to manage. Usually, you have one playable character, maybe a few NPCs, and anywhere from say one to five “rooms” that are ‘in play’ during a puzzle sequence. Within these rooms are of course several objects and then your inventory might have a half dozen or ten more. With Latha and Max, you also have Trance and/or Wetware that will likely come into play, too. Most of the tasks (puzzles) make logical sense, and you can on occasion predict end results before you quite know how to get to there. Tasks can be as basic as escaping a room to as strange as recombining DNA samples from various plants to reconstruct a hidden audio message. You’ll get a nice, creative spread of head-scratchers with Technobabylon, but even the toughest ones are nothing that’s so obtuse or asinine that you can’t work your way through it in a reasonable amount of time. I will say that on a couple of occasions at least, if I had the option to bring up indicators showing all objects on the screen, that would have helped me out a bit. As is, you do have to pixel hunt, but pixel-hunting on the AGS engine and with this type of artwork is actually a bit more intuitive than in a say a 3D adventure game.
Speaking of artwork and presentation, Ben Chandler is behind the pixel art and it’s great. If you look up Technobabylon on Youtube by the way you will see an old version of early parts of the game, and wow, the visual difference from then to now is practically night and day. Complimenting the art is a really nice instrumental soundtrack that is due to be sold separately on Steam (and is part of the Deluxe version on GOG). My favorite tune is from the apartment scene which plays at least one more time later on, too, but the whole soundtrack is quite impressive. I can say the same for the voiceovers; each character is fully voiced and I often found myself listening to the dialog instead of just reading it and clicking through. The pacing of what is spoken and what is put on screen is such that it often was just as convenient to listen as it was to read and click, I can’t say that for all adventure games, but somehow Technobabylon achieved a good balance here.
You know, as I look over my notes from my playthrough, I can’t find a lot wrong with Technobabylon. The story is interesting, well told, complete, satisfying, and memorable. You experience this through the eyes and minds of three interesting characters and there are lots of great set pieces and puzzles that will challenge, but rarely frustrate you. The visuals and sounds are great. The bugs I experienced were patched-out today, and at $15 for the Deluxe Edition on GOG, you really can’t go wrong.
To the summary…
