8/31/2023 0 Comments Technobabylon reveiwTechnobabylon is exceedingly retro, and I don’t just mean in terms of its gorgeous pixel art. What do I mean by that? Well, if you’ve read any of my other point-and-click reviews you’ve seen me harp on puzzle design before. That being said, this is definitely a point-and-click adventure game. It’s a clever conceit that helps make each character feel functionally distinct even within the limited mechanics of a point-and-click adventure game. Not every puzzle has the same wealth of approaches, but in general things adhere to each character’s skills-low-fi investigation from Regis, high-tech hacking from Latha, and a bit of both from Lao. Or you could “play by the book” and have Central give you the apartment’s access code. Or you could take a more subtle approach and have Lao hack the lock open. You could, of course, have Regis simply bust the lock with a stun gun. Take an early puzzle involving a locked door. It translates to the puzzle side of things, too. In Trance she can be what she wants, she can do what she wants, she can build. Latha’s attitude towards Trance, for instance, is one of optimism and embracing opportunities. But rarely do we get to see the same ideas through different perspectives within a single story, and that’s where I think Technobabylon has a lot to offer. Anyone who’s read Neuromancer or Snow Crash or seen Blade Runner will recognize quite a bit that’s familiar. These are not new questions for cyberpunk, of course. She’s in between the two, with some amount of reverence for real life tempered by extraordinary hacking skills, deference to Central, and her own set of cybernetic hardware. Only her apartment’s exploding drives her into the distasteful realm she not-so-fondly calls “meatspace.” She’s wired head-to-toe and spends more time in Trance-basically the Matrix-than the real world. Surveillance cameras, computers, phones, cyborg-style implants-Regis hates the whole lot, and most of all he hates the city’s overzealous artificial intelligence, Central.Ĭontrast that with the twenty-something Latha, an unemployed woman living in the city’s slums. Assuming people remember Rage Against the Machine in post-nuclear 2087. If Regis could wear a Rage Against the Machine shirt to work, he would. He’s the “too-old-for-this cop” I mentioned earlier, and boy is he too old for this. But where Technobabylon succeeds is in manipulating perspective-in framing the same ideas through different lenses.
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