Technobabylon lao12/11/2023 ![]() The Trance reminded me of the net in Shadowrun, with people’s avatar and special skills that translate to net commands. The world they built for the game was instantly attractive to me as a Shadowrun, Blade Runner and Deus Ex fan. ![]() Terms like Trance and Wetware are thrown around casually and as you play with them, you understand more about their function than the few infodumps can ever tell you. On the Sci-Fi side, the terms are easy to pick up and don’t require hours of exposition. This is a well-developed and masterfully written cyberpunk thriller, and it remains human, understandable and most importantly relatable even in this futuristic environment. It’s about growth and understanding, about overcoming your limitations and even about how to find peace and letting go of the past. Technobabylon’s story isn’t just about a conspiracy to disrupt and perhaps derail Newton’s city status quo (a dystopian utopia I find beautifully executed), but also about family, about the lengths someone will go to protect their children or siblings. Cheffie is there to annoy you into stabbing yourself with a plastic fork! We meet her early in the plot, to help her escape from her apartment before it explodes and while the game mostly focuses on Regis’ point of view, her segments are instrumental in understanding the story, as well as help us connect with the entire cast. If it weren’t for food and water she wouldn’t ever disconnect. Then there’s Latha, a Trance-addict, someone spending much more time in the virtual reality than in meat-space. She’ll laugh most things off but she’ll also be stern when she thinks her partner is crossing a line. She provides Regis with the technical expertise they need as well as boundless patience at Regis’ somewhat unorthodox and mostly blunt approaches to any given situation. She’s wired and much like the rest of the city she works in and out of the Trance. Max Lao on the other hand is the technical and mechanical expert of the pair. Regis has a bit of a shady past, involving using his Genengineering (genetic engineering) skills for unsavoury purposes before he left what once was the USA. For everyone else this is the norm, the way to be, but Regis prefers things old school, and doesn’t approve of the city’s ruler and its lack of respect for privacy-something he fixes by covering his office’s camera with tape. With it, people have access to the net instantly with just their minds. Everyone else in the city is ‘wired’, hooked up to the Trance, the augmented & virtual reality iteration of the internet. Max Lao are two of its agents and two of the playable characters in the game, with Regis being the closest to a protagonist, even though Technobabylon makes most of its characters central as their stories are perhaps equally important in terms of the plot. ![]() Central is both overseer and caring mother, though it views everything from a logic point of view and in numbers and statistics.Ĭentral’s law-enforcement arm is CEL, the city’s police. All of this and more you’ll find in Technocrat’s Technobabylon, a point & click adventure game.Īlt-tab or using the Steam overlay causes the game to bug out.Ĭentral, the AI manager, controls every aspect of Newton city down to sending personalised emails to the population, advising them on anything from their diet to taking extra under certain weather due to underlying medical conditions. A conspiracy to topple the status quo and the people caught in the middle. A city controlled by an AI, the police and other services working for it.
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