I first played this at PAX 2 years ago, and I thought it was amazing; I didn’t want to play very far at the convention because I could see it was something that you would want to experience in a quieter setting. The player is SGT. Abraham Burden who is a strong leader, the story follows him as the planet is on the brink of war with the terroritst group Exolifer.

The game harkens back to the era of text adventures, where very few visuals are needed, the pixel-art used in the game allows the player to have a visual representation of various status elements during the current chapter. The game genre I would say is most akin to a strategy or puzzle game, each puzzle has a series of traumatic situations with tightly controlled human resources that the player has to manage so they can work together to solve a problem.

The game is entirely driven by the mouse, the player hovers over different people and objects and its name appears, clicking the name brings up a submenu with possible options. The game is tuned to be very challenging, requiring multipe attempts to succeed. This mechanic works well because the reload screen is fairly quick, the game allows for skipping dialogue sequences and it works well with the narrative of the story.

Puzzle sequences are broken up by brief interludes of dialog, the art may look visually simple but the choreography of the text boxes, special effects and camera controls offer a polished experience. The game’s narrative reminds me of early science fiction novels so the art style also works really well for that effect.