Technobabbleyawn

"Mr. Kamikaze, Mr. DNA
He's an altruistic pervert
Mr. DNA, Mr. Kamikaze
Here to spread some genes now"

 

DEVO - Smart Patrol / Mr. DNA

 

 

How far had I gotten in Wadjet Eye's stock? Let's see... Technobabylon!

Okay, so we've got a cyberpunk dystopia goin' 'ere, I likes me sum o' dat. Dingy public housing, physical surroundings going to pot in favor of virtualia, classic stuff. The wetware's obviously gonna be a recurring gimmick. The "stronger tool" puzzle obviously has a winning solution, but coming back to the game I nonetheless get stumped because after a few days' break I'd forgotten about the virused e-mail. Cheatsheet that detail and I'm home free. Eh, alright, thinks I, cute enough, the repeated meatspace/cyberspace scene transitions make puzzle solving a bit tedious but I can live with that. So far so good.

 

Moving on to Chapter 2. Switch protagonists, maybe for a sort of Resonance set-up where they double up for puzzles, that'd be nice... except... Oh ye gods ... No, no, no, don't do it, don't do it...

New duo, two detectives, one oriental female, one caucasian male. Investigating a lead. White guy says it's a waste of time. Obviously the chapter won't consist of them saying "okay, screw it, let's just go grab some donuts and call it a day" so we're really reaching for some pretext for the SWM to be wrong right off the bat. Then we proceed with the chick needing to lecture him on an overdose of "as you doubtless already know" crap. Plus line after line like this:

or this:

 

How 'bout "emotional invasion" instead?

 

At this point I almost uninstalled, not in the mood to sit through yet another pile of incoherent bigotry which, had it been directed against black lesbians, would not be published even in a niche genre by a minor publisher.

But I did go on. Not a complete waste, as should turn out. Last chapter suffers from some bugged interaction icons even nine years after release, but otherwise Technobabylon's far less of a chore to play than even some of the field's classics like TLJ, Syberia or GK. Voicing and decor are nothing to write home about, but palatable enough. Some good puzzles, decent main plot, and the politically correct gibberish was overall less absolute in 2015 than it is now.

 

So what're we working with here? Adventure games have well earned their infamy for obtuse puzzles and pixel hunting.

Polar bear in a snowstorm? Try mottled bar in a giblet storm.

Technobabylon's worse problem, however, is making you randomly click every piece of scenery for off-the-wall clues and tools to randomly jump out at you. Half the time you're just spamming clicks. Activating a console at first sight without knowing what it does? Sticking your hand in furniture in a random opium den? What? And my character just knows to take a random decoration's magnetic coil... just in case I might need to magnetize something today and that's worth committing a misdemeanor right in front of a security camera while on police duty... WHAT?! Other times (like the post-mortem) the sequence of events makes no sense, or clues you might need appear on screens you think you've cleared (the preacher).

Nevertheless, the puzzles hit a nice stride around mid-game. The jail cell, the botany lab, the abandoned building were all good fun, even if I got stumped a few times by the toolbox thing or the name spelling or the picture emotional blackmail, or any other social manipulation crap. Technobabylon turned out to be a rare example of a relatively hard SciFi video game reaping much of its charm from technobabble (oh, NOW I get it!) sometimes forced but often interesting. Where the core ideas are a bit technical or the puzzles finicky (like the coat hanger above) you do get the occasional hint through dialogue or descriptions. Even the inexplicably empty drawers at the start are meant as a suggestion for much later. On the flip-side it also took the odd decision to try fleshing out its world with a wealth of detail. In a forty or eighty-hour RPG campaign where you're coming down off combat sequences and taking breaks from the action to do some light reading, that amount of flavor text is quite welcome. In an old-timey detective adventure where the action consists of reading clues and piecing together the core plot in the first place, that amount of filler plays like a massive barrelfull of red herrings, or more appropriately to the setting, static.

 

Then you hit the issue of that filler's rather runny consistency.

 

For one thing, the writing sounds... modestly competent. I have to wonder for example why exactly everyone insists on mispronouncing "corps" as "corpse" unless it's supposed to be a joke about them being redshirts... in which case it still falls flat. Where games like Gabriel Knight or The Longest Journey managed to charm by their protagonists' endless snarking, here you get the likes of "advertising, it's all the same wherever you are" and being told it's more interesting if your brain's wired up. I doubt even Tim Curry could've made such material sound clever or cute. And if the "men need emotional openness" line above wasn't enough of a clue, you'll be tripping over gratuitous politically correct posturing all throughout. If you don't mind some light

 

\/SPOILERS\/

 

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Two plot-central characters never get any development beyond "blond villain" and "arabic heroine" and yes of course your male protagonist has to justify his existence by service to women and be redeemed by pining for a lost Lenore of dusky hue and sacrificing himself for his daughter. Not that it was much of a surprise. Guy's got a grand total of two character traits, not much room for a dramatic twist. A grand reveal of transsexualism comes out of nowhere, goes nowhere and serves absolutely no purpose. But even on a character by character basis, the game features some heavy-handed racial/sexual profiling.

- white guy on the subway: exploding religious fanatic from Texas

- black rookie at the station: helpful and polite and gives you free food tokens

- old gay couple in organized crime: black guy wants to go straight (criminally, not sexually) while the white guy's a drug addict who wants to do more crime, 'cuz evil

- arabic woman comes to your rescue

- blond guy in your cell might be technically good, but he's also a fuckup

- Dr. Vargas, hispanic but light-skinned, well mannered, what are the odds he'll be on the right side?

- African woman: tough, no-nonsense hypercompetent martyr being kept down by The Man

- her dark-skinned male underling: annoying but helpful (get it? black good, man bad, he evens out)

- white guy head in the trance club's a jerk

- pong gamer dude's a disgusting fat jerk

- nuke fan dude's a jerk

- preacher in the street, no reason you couldn't get your drugs from the tainted water supply, one more excuse to stick a stupid, crazy, evil white man in the game - never mind Jinsil spouting "insh'allah" and the like, idiotic superstition's only bad when straight white men do it

- then we immediately jump to two women arguing about a woman taking a man's name on marriage

- if a black politician's crooked, it's only because he was being blackmailed for his past crookedness, so totally not his fault! and you should definitely take him at his word that he's a good guy - incidentally, black trumps asian... good to know?

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/\END SPOILERS/\

Aside from all the pwecious little snowflakes littering the story, the high quotient of window dressing also renders some rooms almost useless, with one or two clicks required before you move on. I suppose it's at least refreshing to run across woke propaganda that's more racist than it is sexist, and it's not quite as fanatical as some other examples, offering a couple of surprise sex/race twists.

 

Overall, I expected better from Wadjet Eye (they didn't develop in-house) but Technobabylon's worth playing even if you'll grit your teeth at the forced stupidity at times. It even shows a remarkable amount of extra work in some spots, like re-recording all the AI personality mixes' lines. And that forcing, weirdly, leads me to a conclusion I rarely if ever draw for any video game: for once, the developers might've just been trying too hard, in multiple aspects.