A Mind Forever Voyaging

A Mind Forever Voyaging is a 1985 work of interactive fiction from Infocom, written by Steve Meretzky, and it stands apart from almost everything else the company produced. Where Infocom's catalogue was built on intricate puzzles, this is a story-driven, deliberately literary piece that uses the text adventure form to make a serious political argument, something quite radical for a commercial game of its time.

You play as PRISM, a sentient computer who discovers that its entire life has been a simulation, and who is then tasked with exploring simulated futures of an American city to test the long-term consequences of a proposed set of hardline social policies. Much of the game is spent observing and recording rather than solving traditional puzzles, wandering a richly imagined future and watching an initially rosy society decay across the decades. Thoughtful, melancholic and unusually ambitious in its themes, it is remembered as one of the medium's early attempts to be genuinely about something, and it holds up as a landmark of narrative game design.